Author: cdwan

I’ve been losing the support game for three straight days now, and it’s starting to piss me off. Thus, I shall now blow half an hour on LJ.

My sister is coming into town today to interview at Boston U.. I plan to meet her after the interview tomorrow and bring her back to Providence for Sushi and conversation. It’s such a trip to see how independent and successful both of my siblings are becoming. They’re both significantly younger than me, so it’s taken a while.

Going to see another concert in the Boston Early Music Festival series on Sat. This one is the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra performing Rameau and Vivaldi. Good to get a little culture from time to time. Plus, it’s at a church near Harvard Square … and there’s some sort of elevated and intellectual pre-concert lecture beforehand. I’m psyched. Been buried in stoopid filesystem stuff for long enough that to be really, really appealing.

It also occurred to me that Valentines Day is coming right up on us. If that matters to you, or to your significant whatsit … it’s a decent idea to not forget. If you hate it, or it irritates you, I encourage you to put it from your mind. Dan Savage of the Savage Love advice column has some nice thoughts on it. Namely:

I get letters every year from women who think Valentine’s Day is an empty exercise, but are ironically pretty exercised when their boyfriends neglect or forget it.

–UPDATE–: Forgot to mention, my sound canceling headphones rock. They have two volume knobs. One turns the music up, the other turns the outside world down. Plus, the bass is perfectly balanced and punchy all the way down to the bottom of the Underworld Evolution soundtrack.

The coffee monkey is strong today. My mojo is weak. The coffee monkey demands coffee … and I can only obey. More coffee for the monkey.

Freakin’ monkeys man.

[hits *reload* on cnn.com, livejournal, and fark.com]

My cat is being really annoyingly affectionate today.

She’s been circling the laptop. Circling and circling. Doing the face-rub on the corner of the monitor. Stopping in front of the keyboard for a hug or a nose-kiss. Back around to cheek-rub the corner of the screen. Back up front. Round and round. Circling and circling.

I’ve been moving my coffee mug at about 180 degrees from where she is, because it bugs me when she steps over it. She just stepped *in* my coffee. I think she needs to get off the desk now.

I’m reaching for the computer around a loudly purring cat, who has found that the best way to get a hug in the morning is to sit directly in front of the laptop. Irritating, but very cute. It’s hard to be angry at something that’s just expressing affection.

Spent yesterday fighting with the support ticket lines at work. I lost, meaning that the day ended with more support tix that were there in the morning. I know that in absolute terms, it was necessary … but I ended the day feeling “well THAT was useful” [stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp].

Made “Tea steamed fish” for dinner. I’ve been trying to replicate this meal that I had in Beijing. The English wasn’t so great, so the best I got was that it was “tea steamed fish.” I looked on the internet, and found a couple of recipes. The first involved marinating the fish (cod) in tea. The second involved making a teabag out of cheesecloth and steaming through it. The fish was tasty, but needed something more.

Been fighting with XSan, which is Apple’s SAN (Storage Area Network) software. It’s a filesystem thing: Supposedly you just plug in your hardware (of a particular size and shape) and XSan takes care of turning it into a nice high performance file server. Unfortunately, it appears that the failure mode of XSan is to reboot all the computers involved … and that the default suggestion to fix this is to throw hardware at the problem. It does, shall we say, *not* degrade gracefully.

Testing for another stripe on the brown belt at noon today. Wish me luck.

— UPDATE — Passed the test. Another band of electrical tape has been applied to my belt. Only two small injuries to show for it. Sensei is lettin’ me off easy.

Okay, back to the frickity-frack support tickets.

Stolen from jwz.

Racked the Red Storm this evening. This is going to be some scary, experimental stuff. It started off with a gravity of 1.12. That’s freakishly high. It’s fermented down to around 1.06, which means it’s nowhere NEAR complete. I may need to rack it again at this rate. Anyway, even though we’re at the edge of alcohol levels where the standard approximations don’t apply anymore, [(difference in gravities) * 129 = your alcohol by volume] indicates that this brew is ALREADY weighing in at 7.74%. Bud is around 5. Most microbrews clock in between 6 and 7. This batch … well … it’s going to have to age a very long time. If it eats the other half of that sugar, it’ll be in the 14% range … which is high for WINE. Even the mighty Sam Adams triple bock only managed 17%.

The neat part is that my 4oz of hops seem (based on the mandatory sample, for quality control) to have produced that “balanced” character that brewers talk about to impress each other. Yay!

I had two hypotheses about why fermentation stopped already (having consumed only about half of the available sugar. One was that the yeast ran out of oxygen. Another was that the amazingly high amounts of sugar may have actually acted as a bit of a preservative. Not sure what to do to re-kick start it without introducing all sorts of badness.

Good times at the a cappella competition last night. The surrounding events were a little surreal.

To get there, I googled up some directions. Said directions put me on a road named “Poverty Hollow.” Initially, the road was okay, but it kept getting narrower and more winding, heading into the back woods of CT. Night had fallen, it was raining, and I was on some dank-ass little country road. Suddenly, the road turned to gravel, and there was a chain across it. As I was turning the car around, I heard banjos.

I called up redmed who mapquested me in (after stopping giggling about “poverty hollow”). I love getting directions from someone who is online. Always makes me feel like Trinity from the Matrix, talking to Morpheus on the phone.

Anyway, the competition was fun. Since it was 10 by the time it ended, and I still hadn’t had a chance to catch up with my friend Mark, I decided to stay down there and come back in the morning. We found a nice restaurant with a hotel hovel attached, secured a room, stashed our bags, and ate and talked about stuff until late. Mark is engaged, his business is doing well, and he sounds genuinely happy.

So then, off to sleep. But not so much, because the heater in the room wouldn’t turn off. We brought in the night desk clerk who said “open a window” and shrugged out. The room was stable at around 85 degrees, all night. In a bitter twist of irony, however, there was no hot water in the shower. Hot water was available in the sink, mind you, just not in the shower. The two knobs in the shower produced “pretty cold” vs. “HOLY GOD THAT’S COLD!”

At that point I started investigating to see what else was screwed up. Drawers, for example. How would one mess up drawers? Mouse poo. It went on from there.

Drove back this morning. redmed is back and it’s sunny and beautiful out … so we walked down to the bike trail and got pizza for lunch.

–UPDATE–

The hotel, for those who wish to avoid it, is the “Hotel Hi Ho” in Reding, CT.

New essay is online Financial Planning. All the rest of them are here.

Driving 2.5 hours south to CT today to see my friend Mark and to judge a high school a cappella competition he’s organized. I’ve done this before, and the high school groups are actually much better than might be expected. Their enthusiasm for the art form brings a little smile to my face and memories of perhaps happier and more carefree days when my biggest worries revolved around audition schedules and group politics.

Also, I was extensively quoted in another trade rag about the Intel paper. If such things interest you, I have a bootleg copy.

Stout Maiden: A cherry stout from a northern brewer kit. One week each of primary and secondary fermentation and one week bottle conditioning. Nice cherry nose. Deep black color. Slightly watery mouth feel. Dark but not bitter. Slightly sweet. Almost no hop character. Underwhelming, but not offensive in any way. Not much head.

Nader an American West Coast Ale from the Northern Brewer “Tongue Splitter” kit. Powerful hop nose, even on the pour. Decent head, very small bubbles. Beautiful clarity on a light color. No haze whatsoever. Go Irish Moss. Strong hop bitterness not quite balanced by the malts. No idea on the malt feel, can barely feel my tongue for all the hops. Some might say it’s “overhopped.” I really like it.

Mission accomplished. Two entirely palatable beers in the cellar.

I just got around to exploring the goodie-bag that I got at the junket. it included a pair of headphones. Noise canceling headphones. These, specifically. Wow.

Not sure how I got into this particular club, but I think I want to stay here.

–UPDATE– *damn* these are some nice headphones. Clean, punchy bass all the way down. Crispy, fast upper range. Overtones readily heard on the good vocal music. I haven’t had good “sit and pay attention to the mix” headphones for years.