Back in the brewery

I brewed today for the first time in four months or so. The time and effort required for all-grain brewing took its toll, and I got a little burned out. This time, I bought a kit from my local homebrew shop, and returned to my roots (so to speak).

I got turned off of extract brewing very quickly (I went all-grain on my second batch), due to the mess of dealing with liquid malt extract. This time, armed with that experience, I knew what to expect and wore disposable gloves whenever I was working with the extract. That, and working in the garage, made for a much more enjoyable experience. Being done in an hour or so instead of six hours was very nice, too.

Only one thing didn't go as planned. It had been so long since I'd used my big fermenter that I'd forgotten how much volume it contains, and I topped off the wort to six gallons instead of five. That brought the starting gravity quite a bit lower than it's supposed to be for this style (a doppelbock). I added a little more than a pound of dry malt extract (it was all I had to spare), which should help some. And even if the final result isn't exactly to style, as long as it's drinkable I'll be happy.

Week 5/Book 6: Shutter Island

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

Good quotes day

B.Greenway writes at Mac HTPC:

I want to preface this review by saying I’m a windows user, have been since 1992 when I bought a 200mhz Intel chip, a barebones case and had a co-worker build me a ‘windows machine’. It blew obviously, and had little of the geek appeal of my first computer an Atari 1200XL (1983’ish). But even back in those days of new wave and Reaganomics, I lusted for an Apple, but apparently St. Nick never got any of my letters pleading for a IIc. Well times have changed and I don’t rely on fat men in red suits for my toys anymore, err today it was a skinny man in a blue uniform, but never mind that. Luckily when I actually set out to buy my own Mac the stars aligned, or at a minimum Steve Job’s bent my reality to make them appear aligned.

From Fraser Speirs:

[T]he thing that keeps me Perl for life is this: if there's even the remotest possibility that someone will have thought of this problem before you, there's a 99% chance that there's a CPAN module to help you out.

In the short time I've been playing with Ruby, that's the only thing I've missed from Perl.

It's all been done before

Dion Almaer blogs about adding support for closures to Java iterators, a la Groovy. While it certainly is a neat idea, if he'd checked the documentation for Jakarta Common-Collections, he'd have discovered that it's already been done.