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“It may not F-ing work, but at least it’s F-ing pretty.”
– A nameless, yet fairly senior person at Apple

Bottling day. 43 12 oz bottles of American Cream Ale. A low yield (generally, you expect around 50 bottles from a 5 gallon batch) but it’s tasty already, even in its current warm and uncarbonated state. I dry hopped (tossed in to the secondary fermenter) an entire chopped vanilla bean. It’s unexpectedly fun. In my initial taste, you get the malt character (mellow, because of the flaked maize), then a straight ahead hop bitterness, and then a slowly emerging vanilla note which eclipses the hops as the flavor lingers. My mouth ended up tasting of vanilla for several minutes afterwards. Can’t wait to see how it ages.

Right now in the basement I’ve got:
* 43 Cream Ales (12oz)
* 16 imperial stout (12oz)
* 12 assorted ciders (16oz)
* 4 “tongue splitters” (16oz). This was my experiment with the extremes of hoppiness. Woot!
* 12 Belgian Triples (16oz), which should be aging nicely by now.
* 2 Nut Brown (16oz)
* An assortment of “birth announcement” ales and lagers from the Mighty Hammer Brewery.

Seems like it might be time for a tasting, or at least a party.

Not that this is news to anyone reading this, but wow.

So I fired Verizon and got a cablemodem instead. I therefore had to return the DSL modem that Verizon had given us. They sent a prepaid UPS label, so that I could just stick the device in a box and ship it out. Simultaneously, I ordered Vonage so as to be able to fire Verizon more completely. The vonage device arrived before I had a chance to ship the DSL modem.

In a fit of stupidity, I put the wrong piece of consumer electronics in the return box to Verizon. Sent them my VoIP machine instead. Dumb dumb dumb.

On the phone with their shipping people, we all had a good laugh about it. They’ll send it back when they receive it.

Gah.

I watched the Michael Moore movie last night (thanks for the DVD, mom!) and my reactions were mixed. On the one hand, it’s certainly a fine piece of political spin, in support of an aim with which I agree (remove Bush from office, ASAP). On the other hand, I found the film’s methods a bit tiresome. Documentary is a pretty strong word for it, in my opinion. It had a message, it conveyed that message. It was well put together. Certainly spin, rather than history though.

initial thoughts

Everyone, everyone, watch this video of Jon Stewart (comedian) all alone on “Crossfire” (a political debate show). If you’d like to read the transcript instead, that’s cool too…but the video is much better.

some transcript excepts

What a week.

I think that the large cluster may live, though it’s still not good. We’re actually writing a butt-covering letter that says “we tuned and configured your cluster. It’s still not a good architecture. We think that it will crash frequently, costing you lots of time and frustration. We’ve given you suggestions for improvements that you could make to change this, and you have decided against implementing those improvements. Therefore, we wash our hands of this nightmare, and walk away.” Yeah, it’s that bad. Beyond having a poor setup (a 240 node cluster whose network is a series of 48 port 10/100 NetGear switches daisy-chained through the uplink ports) they have insufficient cooling and power. They’ve already popped the main electrical into their building, twice. The temperature in the server room regularly exceeds 100 degrees.

Had a good meeting yesterday with my whole company, in which we discussed the fact that we’re running flat out with current commitments, and we’re about to open up a bunch of new markets. This is insanity. Summary: Communication is good.

The plan for the weekend is to clean, and then to possibly go see the Halloween display at the zoo, or cruise into Boston to see the Lord of the Rings exhibit at the Museum of Science.

This is what I’m looking for at the 20 year high school reunion. Who’s in?

Just got back from my exercise.

My karate instructor is pissed off because someone pirated Halo 2 and it’s all over the net now. He’s something of a Halo fanatic. He was going to have a 16-way Halo 2 party on Nov 9 (the putative release date, pre pirating). Now that’s pointless, or at least less cool.

In short, he was angry, and took it out on our abs.

In other news, here’s a picture of a really big pumpkin

Today marks the fourth straight day of nonstop “FUN!!!” this week. At least I got to work from home, but yeesh.

In theory, worked on the 240 node cluster all day. In reality, that was interrupted by (a) the guy from that famous place out East, (b) that other guy with a cluster at another big name university, (c) a presentation to Big Pharma number 2 (they bought my stuff on the spot. Go me!) and (d) vicious pummeling on the support lines.

The 240 node cluster people are screwed. It’s sad, but true. We’ll get them to functional, but they were sold the wrong pieces for their $500,000 machine. Bad. Network round trips of over a second sometimes.

Back to it, I suppose. Need to find a break in here sometime to bottle my beer.

Jen asked “why did someone leave a root password on our answering machine?”

Have to say, I was wondering about that myself.