60/- Scottish Ale

I bottled the 60/- Scottish ale tonight. The gravity and ABV were right where they're supposed to be, at least according to the BJCP guidelines. It's hard to tell by taste at this point (since it's not carbonated, and warm) but it's malty rather than hoppy -- not a rich malty like an Oktoberfest, but a clean malty.

That reminds me... I need to check the keg of Oktoberfest to see if it's carbonated yet, or if (as I suspect) I have a slow leak in the keg that keeps it from holding pressure.

Frankenstein revisited

It wasn't the inverter board. Now I'm working on the assumption that it's the backlight. I found a replacement relatively cheap on the Internet; it was shipped as a working backlight attached to a shot display. (Given that the backlight is about 11 inches long and about 2mm in diameter, I suppose it was the only safe way to ship it.) Now I just have to make time to tear the laptop apart.

Paging Dr. Frankenstein

The display on my PowerBook failed this morning. From what I can tell, it's just the inverter for the backlight -- I can still sort of see the display, as long as there's lots of ambient light (or a flashlight) shining on it.

Fortunately, the PowerBook G3 FireWire (aka "Pismo") has a VGA connector on the back. I plugged in the monitor from my Linux box and, with a judicious amount of squinting, set up display mirroring. Now I can at least see what I'm typing.

I just picked up a new inverter board on eBay for about US$12 after shipping. (Note: I believe in supporting my local certified Apple repair shop, but I figure the minimum labor charge would be at least US$75, which is getting dangerously close to how much I'm willing to spend on this laptop.) One of these days I should try to find a new backlight; for some time this one has been exhibiting the dreaded "pink Pismo display" problem.

Drive-by linking

Nigritude Ultramarine

Drive-by linking

GeekDIY (like I need any more spare-time projects).

The dishwasher has attempted an illegal operation....

Last night, I did something I've never had to do before: I rebooted the dishwasher.

About 18 months ago, we bought a GE Triton dishwasher. Is verry nice; in a vast improvement over the old dishwasher, this one's quiet enough that you can talk on the phone while standing next to it when it's running.

Instead of having knobs and buttons that actually open and close electrical contacts (I can hear Scotty saying, "How quaint"), it has a set of momentary-contact touchpads. Just close the door, push the "Start" touchpad, and off it goes. An embedded microcontroller takes care of the rest.

I tried to start it last night, and it wouldn't. None of the LEDs for the options (like the pot scrubber cycle) would light, but it would beep like it's supposed to when the door closed, so I knew it was getting power. The most response I could get out of it was that every once in a while, the LED on the start button would flash momentarily.

I toyed with the idea of taking the door apart, to look for a loose connection, when I thought, if this were a PC, what would I do?

The answer was, of course, "reboot it". So I unplugged it, waited 5 seconds, then plugged it back in. Opened and closed the door, and it started right up.

There's a moral in here somewhere, but I'm not sure yet what it is.

My first homebrewing competition

I entered my first homebrewing competition... and didn't place.

The thing about the 1st Annual Austin ZEALOTS Homebrew Inquisition that appealed to me was that beers are judged on their own merits, not according to BJCP or AHA guidelines. I don't have a lot of experience with different styles, and right now I'm more interested in brewing beer that tastes good than in brewing "authentic" beer.

Unfortunately, as the Homebrew Inquisition claims that it is "based only on a homebrewer's ability to produce quality beer", the fact that I didn't place in either category in which I entered must mean that I failed to produce quality beer. :-) I'm looking forward to getting the scoresheets, to see what comments they have.

Drive-by linking

Top 10 Reasons to Not Shop On Line

Big Brew recap

Big Brew was a success. It also was two weeks ago. I really need to post more often. The only bad thing was that while unpacking all of my gear at home, I dropped my hydrometer and broke it.

Coming up in the brewery

The next few weeks in the home brewery are going to be busy. There are a lot of things to do, and keeping track of them all is going to be something of a juggling act.

• Batch #9, the first 5 gallons of Craig's 37 for Brewfest, is currently in the secondary fermenter. I had problems with the false bottom in the mash tun again, so apparently I didn't fix it properly last time. I have purchased more hardware and am planning to implement three separate measures:
  1. Add stainless steel hex head bolts as standoffs to support the false bottom
  2. Add a perforated piece of copper tubing below the outlet elbow in the false bottom to hold it up off the bottom (interestingly, another member of the Lawrence Brewers Guild independently recommended this in response to a query on the Homebrew Digest mailing list)
  3. As an "all-else-fails" measure, cut slots in the copper outlet tube from the false bottom to the bulkhead fitting
• We're having a mini block party Memorial Day weekend, and one of my neighbors asked if I'm bringing any homebrew. Since he's a Macrobrew drinker, I decided to brew a batch of something similar. To make my life easier, I decided to try one of the no-boil kits from Brew King. I chose the Canadian Pilsner as a trade-off between what I think my neighbors will drink and what I'm willing to make 5 gallons of. :-) It was very easy; the pre-hopped wort comes in a plastic bag, and you just pour it into the fermenter with about 3 gallons of water and pitch your yeast. I chose to pitch the yeast cake from Batch #9 (WLP029); the description for this strain mentions a "slight sulfur" production, which in this case is an understatement. Fortunately, it has dissipated three days after pitching.
• Big Brew is next Saturday. We're making the IPA recipe, and using a new oak barrel for secondary fermentation. Primary will probably take two weeks, so I think I'm going to need to purchase an additional fermenter.
• I need to start Batch #10, the second 5 gallons of Craig's 37 for Brewfest, sometime soon. I'm going to boost the hops just a little; Batch #9 tastes a little low.

Drive-by linking

The Memespread Project

Auto-summarizing for fun, if not profit

Jason Kottke has posted a 100-word summary of Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture, as produced by Microsoft Word's AutoSummary function. That got me to thinking, what would other books look like, condensed to 100 words?

I mentioned this in an IM conversation with a friend, who has Word installed on his computer. He supplied this 100-word summary of Moby Dick:

"WHALE. "WHALE. WHALE,               ICELANDIC. 
WHALE,               ENGLISH. 
WHALE. 
 
WHALE, 1839. 
 
--WHALE SONG. 
 
 
 
whale himself.  man.  whale-hunters.  men.  man!  man?  WHALE. 
 
Whale.  whales; bunched whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated whales, are 
Greenland whale.  whale-ship at sea.  whale yet.  white whale.  men.  men.  white whale, shirr! whaling.  the whale.  whale.  whales.  sperm whale.  Whaling Scenes. 
 
 
whale-line. 
 
the whale.  the whale.  whale." 
 
Whale's head.  Whale's head. 
 
Whale's case. 
 
the whale.  whale's head?  Whales.  this whale." 
 
"WHAT whale?" 
 
sick whale!  men. 
 
 
 
whale?  whales.  whale. 

 
 
 
men. 
 
Man, man! 
man.  hated whale.  "The whale!  "The whale, the whale!  grinning whale!  whale!   

I'm looking for a comparable function in OpenOffice, so I can start posting other summaries.

Still slacking

Yes, I promised some posts earlier. No, I haven't posted them yet. I will. Someday. Maybe.

Brewing update

The Munich lager turned out tasty. It's been in the bottle only about a week and a half, so it still needs some more carbonation time. I hope I still have a bottle of Bob's 47 sitting around to compare it to.

I bottled my seventh batch tonight. It's supposed to be a knockoff of Shiner Bock, but judging from the details I can glean from the website for the real thing, it's not very close. However, the important thing (as with all homebrew) is whether or not it tastes good.

Finally, there's another 5 gallon batch of pale ale in the primary fermenter. I finally figured out why I couldn't lauter out of my mash tun (I never blogged about that, did I?) and fixed it, though I had to remove all of the mash from the tun first. The starting gravity was a little low, but not as bad as the previous batch. (I never blogged about that, either.) I'll add details for posterity tomorrow (okay, later today).

Dragging myself, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my Linux workstation to Debian testing. Since something's been wrong with my install of WindowMaker for some time (the application menu does not get updated when I add or remove packages from Debian), I decided to give GNOME another try. (Yes, I know they're not the same thing, and that WindowMaker will work with GNOME.) Updates will follow as I get comfortable with the new setup.

Brewing update

The Munich lager is happily bubbling away in the garage, where the ambient temperature is currently more favorable to lager yeast. It sometimes swings a little higher than the recommended 50°-55°F, but seems to be averaging around 54°F. As temperatures outside warm up, I guess I'll have to move lager fermentation to the basement.

Brewing update

Gearing up for this year's BrewFest. One of the beers I'm trying to make is a Munich-style lager, similar to Bob's 47 from Boulevard. I cobbled together what I thought would be a reasonable starting recipe and brewed a 2½ gallon batch tonight, during the Oscars broadcast.

I'm still having problems getting decent efficiency from my mash. The temperature consistently read low, but for all I know that could be due to a faulty thermometer. Starch conversion was complete, but the starting gravity was a lot lower than it should of been, so I threw in a half pound of light DME to boost it. The color's a little lighter than I'd like, so next time I'll add more crystal malt.

How I spent a wasted evening

So much for the borrowed laptop running Windows XP. When I first got it, it was configured for dial-up networking only. I managed to get the built-in Ethernet adapter working on my home network, and was able to do some compatability testing.

Then I turned it off for a while.

Now, it refuses to recognize the wired network. (Yes, I've turned it back on.) Every time I try to access a site on the Internet in IE, I'm presented with the dial-up connection dialog. If I close that, IE switches to offline mode. When I turn that off, I'm presented with the dial-up connection dialog again.

I've been working with computers professionally for something like 18 years, and recreationally for some years before that. If I can't figure this out, how is the average user supposed to be able to do it?

Is it too much to ask?

I think this is a telling point; of what I'm not entirely sure. If you Google on "ie6 css", the first ten hits you get have to do with bugs in IE's handling of CSS. Note that I didn't search for "ie6 css bug", as was my first inclination.

For my current project at work, I decided to bring my HTML skills into the twenty-first century and start using the CSS box model for positioning elements on the screen instead of nesting tables. It took some getting used to at first, but before long I had it working the way I wanted.

Then I demoed it to one of our beta testers, who is running IE6. She couldn't see some of the elements, and others were presented with no formatting. (I should note that I develop against Mozilla Firebird, and spot-test with Opera 7 and Camino/OS X. I don't test IE6, because the only Windows machine I normally have access to only has IE5.) Naturally, the demo didn't go so well.

I was able to borrow a laptop with Windows XP and IE6, so I'm currently figuring out the problems IE6 has with standard CSS, and workarounds for them. Still, it's almost enough to drive me back to nested tables.

Things to do with a new laptop

Ad hoc supercomputing (how long before PowerBook users figure out they can do this with Xgrid?)