This may seem insignificant at first: I'm posting this from my basement.

"So what?" Well, I mentioned a few posts back that I'm finally running wires into my office. I'm plugged into the first one, and this means that the line works.

I transferred the Kansas City Pale Ale to the secondary fermenter today, and pulled a sample for testing and tasting. The specific gravity is still high—1.019, compared to a final gravity of 1.010-1.014 according to the recipe—but since I didn't take a starting gravity reading, I really don't know how far along it is.

As I suspected, it's very hoppy. When I was siphoning the hot wort into the primary fermenter, first the siphon broke, then the siphoning equipment broke. There's a long story behind that, but I'll summarize by saying that my lovely bride fixed it with a piece of thread and a twist tie. By the time we finished transferring into the fermenter, the hops had been sitting in the hot wort for an additional 15 minutes or so. You can definitely taste the result; it's not undrinkable, but I think it's hoppier than the style calls for.

Don't get me wrong—using tools to make stuff is fun. But what's really fun is using tools to make other tools.

Case in point. My office at home is a spare bedroom, and the builder (for reasons known only to him) ran no phone lines into it. As a result, I use my cell phone as an office phone (side effect: I never have to forward my phone when I leave the office) and I connect to the Internet via a cable TV cable that's stapled to the ceiling down our hallway.

I'm finally getting around to running some lines into the office; the idea is to drop down into the garage below, where I can staple them to the ceiling and walls and my wife won't complain. The problem is that the floor structure between the office and the garage is about 12" thick, which is the length of the longest drill bit I could find (short of one of those highly-flexible ones which are about 4' long). By the time you chuck it in the drill, it's not long enough to reach through the floor.

I dug out a piece of steel rod about 1/4" in diameter that I had lying around that's about 3' long. Using a bench grinder, I ground four faces into one end at about a 45° angle. Then, with the Dremel and a carbide cutter, I ground hollows out of two opposing faces. Presto—instant drill bit, minus the spiral cuts to remove waste. Still, it did the trick, and was a lot of fun to make.

I think my fermentation may be stuck. The fermenter is no longer bubbling, but it's been only 48 hours. The good news is, the beer smells like beer, and not like something that died. Good thing I'm going to the Lawrence Brewers Guild meeting tomorrow.

My wife gave me a homebrew starter kit for my birthday, and I fired up my first batch last night. My first impression is it's just like cooking, but messier. The whole house smells like Grape-Nuts. The fermenter is happily bubbling away.

It turns out that Everything to Everyone by Barenaked Ladies (a birthday present from my four-year-old daughter—she's a big fan of "If I Had $1,000,000") is good music by which to make beer, the way the soundtrack from The Big Chill is good music by which to cook pasta for a lot of people. I look forward to trying this with other albums.

Another busy week last week (and in to this one). I guess that's what happens when you get old.

How 'bout that. Amazon has posted its top 50 books for 2003, and I just finished reading #3 last weekend.

We had quite the multimedia weekend.

In print, I not only finished Jarhead by Anthony Swofford, but also Kim by Rudyard Kipling. On the nightstand now is Ring of Truth by Nancy Pickard.

On what NTK would call the "Red Book audio" front, I went to Half Price Books to get a Louis L'Amour paperback to put in a geocache (it's a long story; follow the links if you're really that interested) and came away with two CDs from the clearance rack. I remember hearing Amanda Marshall's Birmingham on the radio when it first came out, and I'm surprised and happy to say that it's not the strongest track on her first, self-titled album. I also got The Promise by T'Pau—I've only listened to it once, and so far I think it's not quite as strong as their first album, but I think it will grow on me.

At the other end of the 5" polycarbonate disc spectrum, we rented Jungle Book 2 (if it's possible for a performance by animated characters to be phoned in, this was it—but our daughter enjoyed it, which is really all that matters), Identity (I actually figured out the twist about a minute and a half before they revealed it, which was faster than for other movies, but on the other hand, like The Crying Game, the twist wasn't the whole story), and The Matrix Reloaded (which my wife claims to have enjoyed, at least until she fell asleep; she hasn't seen the first one, and apparently my thirty second synopsis wasn't good enough to keep her from still being confused).

Not much in the way of notable or creative costumes among the trick-or-treaters that came to our door last night. Then again, maybe it's just that my memory is failing.

I finished reading Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles by Anthony Swofford this morning. I've been reading a lot about the military lately—Breakout: The Chosin Reservoir Campaign by Martin Russ and Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden come to mind—but this account stands out for its, well, humanity. Other chronicles portray soldiers as somewhat no-nonsense; they don't necessarily like the job they're doing but they do it because it's their job to do it. Jarhead shows us that it's possible to intensely hate the service and intensely love it at the same time.

Here's an interesting discussion. Apparently, Mac OS X 10.3 defragments files as it reads them. (That's a simplistic synopsis, but there's only so much you can put in a hyperlink.)

For my part, I'm inspired to put ASCII graphics and sound effects in my source comments.

Hard to believe nothing worth blogging happened yesterday. It must be true, though; not only did I not blog anything, but I frankly can't remember much of yesterday at all.

Note that I haven't mentioned anything that happened today, either. That's okay; the interesting stuff comes later tonight.

Drive-by linking: The Roasterie

This seems like a big omission: the URL class in JDK 1.3 allows you to get the various pieces of a URL, but not to set them individually. So, if you want to add a query parameter to a URL, you have to do it manually, which means checking for existing parameters. Maybe I'm just missing something.

In case you didn't notice, I'm starting to rework the layout for my blog. Props to Jason Kottke for providing the inspiration.

I've been having all kinds of problems with my ISP lately. This time, DNS names aren't resolving, as if they've misconfigured a router and big chunks of the backbone are no longer accessable. Unfortunately, my upstream DNS servers are in one of those chunks, so I couldn't even get to the ISP's support website or Google.

("So, how are you blogging this now?" I hear you ask. I phoned a coworker in the Washington DC area, got the IP addresses for some DNS servers from him, and hacked them into my local DNS server config.)

("So, why aren't you using your ISP's DNS servers?" Full of questions today, aren't you? :-) I'd like to, but nowhere on their website do they give the IP addresses for those. I can't pick them up from the DHCP lease, because I've got a firewall between my computer and the ISP, and it has the DHCP lease.)

Add to this the fact that the activity lights on my cable modem are going nuts even when the firewall is powered down, and I'm starting to think that I need to start shopping for a new ISP.

8-0, baby!

I'm still reading Kim, but I worked in two other books this week. One was the calculus primer; the other is Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins. He's something of a guilty pleasure for me—I rarely end up caring much about the characters, but the prose is a hell of a lot of fun to read.

Mmm. Chinese food.

Drive-by linking: Bay View Farm

The new refrigerator just arrived. The compressor went out on the old one, and the cost to repair was going to be almost as much as a whole new fridge.

What's the first thing that comes to mind when I tell you that the new fridge has the freezer on the bottom? Everyone—and I mean that literally—so far has said, "My grandmother used to have one like that." I didn't realize our refrigerator was retro. :-)