Author: cdwan

This is the very, very near future. You ready?

Funny, topical, but kinda gross comic strip hidden here.

So tired.

Got back from the junket with Intel and Microsoft at about 10:30, making it a nice clean 12 hour commitment. Tired. Haven’t been sleeping well with redmed away. Maybe the regular beeping of the pager, and her quiet profanity as she answers it are soothing and help speed me into REM sleep. Still sore from sparring yesterday, ready for a quick check of the email and off to sleep.

How can I possibly have 80 unread messages after only 12 hours away? That doesn’t include the 173 spam that the spam filter caught and is holding for my manual rejection. How? Why? For what reason?

Junket was good. They fed us in the executive level restaurant, subjected us to 2 hours of powerpoint and an hour of discussion, and then opened the doors to the luxury box and let us watch the hockey game. Two laptops were given away by drawing names from a hat, but not to me. Parking under the arena cost THIRTY EIGHT DOLLARS, and the place did not take anything but cash. Grrrrrr. I’ll be reimbursed, but still … grrrrrr.

At least I got to catch up on the social phone calls while on the road. Todd, TJ, Mom: “Hi.” amnesiadust: Whenever you get a moment that you’re not all giggly with the new girlfriend, call me.

Oh, and jrtom, thanks for the link to this brilliant summary script for revenge of the sith.

Good times watching the state of the union address. The only really unfortunate bit was the part where Bush specifically mentioned “coal” forcing me to finish my drink on the spot. Earlier in the evening, I had gone off on one of my favorite energy rants: The short version is that it’s just freakishly pathetic for a species who can split the atom, put one of our number on the moon, and so on to be going BACK TO DIGGING COAL OUT OF THE GROUND AND BURNING IT to sustain our energy needs. I really don’t care if we’ve found ways to make the smoke from said burning less offensive. That the best we can come up with is “let’s go back to Bartleby the Scribner with his lump of coal for warmth” makes me deeply sad, angry, and vaguely irate. Anyway, we had agreed that any formal “drinking game” rules would be something of a death pact with the ‘ole liver … but if Bush mentioned coal … well … you get it.

The real high point though was muting the television, putting on some good tunes, and making fun of the people as they silently moved their lips. Much better than the real content.

redmed has been keeping winter at bay with her presence. She is off in Miami, and so it is snowing here. Actually it’s not even really snow … it’s more like very, very small hail.

Up in Boston at casa technolope for this evening’s imbolc party. Actually, we’re going to watch the state of the union address … but it seems really fitting to celebrate the fact that we’re turning the corner into Spring too. Imbolc appears to be the hot new holiday this year, and I for one welcome it. Imbolc, Imbolc, Imbolc.

Back to the salt mines.

Wikipedia has determined that congressional staffers are a bunch of lying twerps.

The short form is that they have observed that any edits to any articles coming from the IP range of the US senate or the US house should simply be deleted in the interest of accuracy.

They say goldfish have no memory
I guess their lives are much like mine
And the little plastic castle
Is a surprise every time
And it’s hard to say if they’re happy
But they don’t seem much to mind

Ani DiFranco “Little Plastic Castle”

So I’m playing Halo 2 and…

Bottled the brews that technolope and capital_l helped out with two weeks ago. The Tongue Splitter ran to 43 12oz bottles, and the Cherry Stout (dubbed “Stout Maiden” for lack of a better term) filled 48 12oz bottles. Setting aside the sampler pack that the two abovementioned helpers earned for their efforts, this brings the household total to 144 12oz bottles of homebrew. Woot.

Also brewed an experimental batch with 17.6lbs of “Vienna Red” liquid malt extract. What can I say, the brewing store owner let it go cheap. Original gravity was something like 1.12. I’m thinkin’ “Red Storm” or a similar appellation.

In celebration of a day of brewing, I went for a run. Using the stopwatch feature on the Nano, I timed the middle two miles out of six. I’m clocking 8:20 per mile pretty darn consistently. That’s really good for someone who almost never runs … however … we can do better.

Oopsie. **psssht, glug glug glug***. 143 bottles.

This one is for technolope, who asked “why would the wort boil over after the addition of hops?” In staring at my dangerously over-full boiI pot, I believe that I have found the answer: The hops foam up as they expand and dissolve. This foam covers the surface of the wort, and insulates it just a little bit. This prevents heat from escaping at the previous rate (without foam), which leads to a boil-over.

Maybe.

Also, the new Beck album rocks.