I would like to welcome everyone to my first day free of coffee in too many years to count. I honestly have no idea as to the last time I went a day without my demon cup. I’ve been sucking down earl grey tea like you wouldn’t believe, to stave off the caffeine DTs, but things are going well.
This is not a permanent change. Just a little change of pace for the day. Tomorrow, we return to your regularly drug-addled F’dm ts
My last post appears to have overwritten the one about Jen and her miracle delivery, leaving the comments attached.
Bummer.
Overdue update on the beer making process.
Both the Lambic and the Wheat are in the bottles.
Wheat Ale had a run-out of 43 12oz and 5 Grolsch. It was totally standard in the bottling process. Initial tasting indicates that I got the style square on the nose. It has the distinctive citrus characteristic, and it’s hazy because of all the wheat. I’m not a huge fan of this style, but it’s quite popular. My theory is that it’s popular among people who don’t like beer, because they can put a lemon in it without shame. Like corona.
Lambic was, interesting. Run-out of 26 12oz and 6 Grolsh. I lost a lot of beer to the sludge at the bottom of the fermenter. I just couldn’t find a way to filter / siphon such that it stayed clear, so I left the bottom 4 inches in the carboy. A shame, but I guess that’s the price I pay. Despite my best intentions, there were fruit chunks in the bottling bucket and fruit chunks in the bottles. This will add that “homemade” character. Without some sort of more complex in-line filtering setup, I did the best I could. Just have to warn people. Folks get creeped out by chunks in their beer, unless I tell them ahead of time what to expect.
An unexpected wrinkle: The chunks of fruit would jam the bottling wand in the “open” position, making bottling even more sticky and messy than it usually is. Fruit beers definitely up the difficulty all through the process. There better be some serious accolades for this one if it’s to be made again.
So there it is. 80 bottles of beer on the wall. Plus the case (24) I have sitting, awaiting delivery to Pittsburgh for the bet that I lost on the election, plus a bunch of old stuff that will require another party for me to get it drunk.
The Lambic is dubbed “Sweetheart raspberry Lambic”
The Wheat is dubbed “Aestivum Ale”
I just slept, like, 11 hours. I feel awesome. Or at least, I feel less like poo. Here’s a long babble about my credit card company (MBNA):
Woo hoo! Another week down and gone forever. I got my purple belt, sold some training time (going to Duke, in NC), and learned some nifty things about SVN.
Red vs. Blue take on Thanksgiving. (19MB quicktime. You have been warned).
This would suck. Also of note is that you can apparently use other alphabets in livejournal. I had no idea.
Only the BBC would sponsor a web page for teenager with a section of animations entitled am I a freak?
Skeletal drawings of animated characters?
I think that I’ve shared this thought before. It applies today, so I’ll say it again:
Why, oh why, must my relationship with computers be some sort of hillbilly romance?
It swings from “Baby I love you” to “Baby, why you make me hit you?”
To summarize: *parsing* issues because freakin’ printf works differently from architecture to architecture.
It’s stupid when web developers design by explicit inclusion rather than exclusion. We’ve covered this.
I was invited to a “webex” presentation that I couldn’t watch, for love or money, from my Apple.
The truly infuriating bit was that the error message came from the Java client that the page wanted my browser to run. All four browsers I tried (IE, Netscape, Safari, and FireFox) loaded the java just fine. All four of them started up the JVM just fine. (For the non-technical folks, the JVM is (or ought to be) totally independent of the web browser) And on every single one of these browsers, their code happily displayed “Netscape on OS X is not supported by WebEx.”
Okay, morons. If you’re going to buy into the hype and use Java, at least have some goddamn faith that it’s going to work on some arbitrary platform. And at very least, say “your JVM isn’t updated,” not this bull-crap thing about “I don’t know what this browser is so it must be Netscape.”
Valhalla! I am coming! AAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!
