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?)

User has been idle for (aleph-null) minutes

Yeah, I haven't blogged in a long time. I have a hard time accepting that anyone (including me) has much to care about what I write here. Kinda makes it hard to get motivated.

Oh, baby! I put a bottle of the Kansas City Pale Ale in the refrigerator earlier today, and we opened it for dinner. (Okay, with dinner.) It turned out better than I expected. The color is a deep amber, and it carried a thick, creamy head. (Not as much as a Guinness, but then again, what else does?) The hops have mellowed; it's still on the high side as far as I'm concerned, but not as assertively so as it was early on. As far as I'm concerned, this is ready to drink now.

Perhaps the highest praise came from our daughter: "Wow! It looks like real beer!"

We bottled the Kansas City Pale Ale yesterday, during the Chiefs-Raiders squeaker. The yield was only 44 bottles, but I cracked the mouth of one capping it (note to self: apply less pressure to the capper), so I had a sample for testing and tasting. I was surprised that the gravity hadn't come down any since racking to the secondary fermenter; then I remembered that the addition of priming sugar brought it up. It tastes a little sweet—again due to the priming sugar—and I think the hops have mellowed a little (though it's still pretty hoppy). I'm looking forward to opening a bottle in a week and seeing how it's carbonating.

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