Where’s the peanut butter?!

my handy checklist of things to confirm before international travel:

• mail stop: check
• friends to watch the cat: check
• primary hard drive failure: check

this has never happened to me before and since it just hit cory who I think has parked his ass in front of a computer for far less time than I have I guess it was maybe due but boy oh boy does this suck. all my data was is scattered around other drives which is good but still, I am not looking forward to setting everything back up. anybody know anything about cheap or diy data recovery? it sounds more like the readwrite heads are failing than a physical crash.

I guess the old saw that you should keep your melee weapons under lock
and key holds true in Moss Bluff, Florida:

AP
Fla. Man Kills Roommate Over Toilet Paper
Crow told investigators that the men were fighting about the toilet
paper over the weekend when Matthews pulled out a rifle. Crow said he
then began beating Matthews with the sledgehammer and claw hammer,
according to an affidavit.

Today I started brewing my second batch of beer. A few notes for my own records:

• Bob says that the brew *should* come out clear and was curious that the Scottish Ale turned out so solidly cloudy, yet not solidly gross. I need to bring him a bottle.
• This batch went MUCH more smoothly. Using hot water to start the boil a definite speed improvement, also putting pennies in before the hot break and preventing the boil over definitely kept everything clean
• Electric stoves still take forever to brew. Ugh.
• The tettnager was all out so I substituted hallertau hops (at Bob’s suggestion)
• Wyeast changed their yeast packaging to a pretty annoying new thing that works sort of like a glow stick or a hot pad. The yeast gets activated before putting into the wort which How to Brew says is a good, but non-essential, idea, but it’s almost impossible to pop open the inner package with the activator. And you need to sterilize the pouch before opening.

Homebrewing is still loads of fun. I probably cut 2 hours off the brew time. First, by not using cold water. That was really a stupid idea - the practice I follow when brewing coffee is to use cold water since I’ve heard it’s less likely to pull impurities out of your piping, but when you’re trying to get a 2-3 gallons of water to boil on an electric stove, start hot! Second with the tip to put pennies in between the malt and hops. Last time I got to this stage, had a huge messy boil-over then read the clear note in both my sets of instructions to watch out because it’s likely to boil over at that point. Like our president says - fool me once, can’t get fooled again!

This batch *should* be ready just in time for us to bottle after getting back from Germany and then ready to take to Whistler in March and since it’s a Hefeweizen, I’m dubbing it the Whistlerweizen.

I’m flying to visit Tanya in Germany this week and wanted to brush up on the language — among my international faux pas include telling a French restauranteur “gracias” after being handed a menu and on another occasion replying to a question posed to me in German with: “You speak to German children” (to my credit, I think it communicated “I don’t speak German” which is what I was trying to say). Anyway, the BBC have a nice online language training site covering German and I have re-purposed it into something that works nicely online for me now and will almost work with my PocketPC. Check it out. “Almost” on the PocketPC because while AJAX is nifty, it really expects there to be a webserver at the other end of the transaction and does not work if there is not.

UPDATE 2006.02.19 Goodbye ajax, hello working pocket german!

I should have skipped the new trend and just done this the easy way to
begin with. I moved the langauge lessons to an array in the host page
and it doesn’t care that you don’t have a webserver behind the lesson
pages. Also, the Flash codebase attribute seems to be finicky and
won’t “just work” on a pocketpc the same way it will on the
desktop. I’ve tweaked this so it works both places now. I also put up
a *.zip of
everything in case you’d like to take this with you, too. Enjoy!

After almost a year and a half as the href="http://tcob.com/gallery/krispy">reigning champion and href="http://www.psoul.com/index.cgi/living/champion.html">defense of
my title, I concede defeat to the new krispy kreme eating
champion: Chris Callahan. The new time to beat when eating a dozen
donuts: 5 minutes, 1 second. Please do not leave small animals or
children unattended in Chris’ presence.

while boarding the bus today:

• [pasenger, rushing the front of the bus] can I get off the bus now mister?!
• [driver] you gettin harassed back there?
• [passenger, nearing tears] no - i don’t know how to tie my shoes and i want to steal that man’s computer!

According to Zillow, I made almost $100,000 last year just by living at home. At least that’s what their real estate appreciation stats say for my house - which starts from an estimate for 12 months ago which I already think is wildly optimistic and way above what I paid for it. Word from a few colleagues indicate wildly varying tales of over and under valuation for their homes, too. I’d love to believe the hype, but until somebody offers me over half a million dollars for my house, I’m going to find it hard to buy in.

Incidentally - Zillow launched last night at midnight and either massively miscalculated first-day interest in their site or were massively unprepared to scale to that demand. It’s basically unavailable right now.

awesome! stereolab are coming to town next month. for some stupid reason it’s taken me years to listen and get into them and i’d thought they had broken up but now i’m overjoyed to see they’ll be at the showbox in march. not many bands can turn lines like this into a hit single: “it’s alright cause the historical pattern has shown how the economical cycle tends to revolve in a round of decades. three stages tend to stand out in a loop.” and it just gets better. ok - that might not have fit the conventional definition of hit single, but i’m sure they’ll put on a great show!