Rahm just ousted Richard D. as the mayor of Chicago!
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May 14, 2011Infused mead
December 26, 2010A few months back, I took a gallon of the plain mead I made in the spring of 2009 and dumped in a package of frozen Berry Medley (a mixture of strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and blueberries.) This sat a couple of months, and turned out really nicely. I had about 2.5 gallons left, so I have tried more infusions:
- .25 oz whole peppercorns into 1/2 gallon
- .5 oz coriander and .5 oz orange zest into a gallon
- 1 tsp gunpowder green tea into .5 gallon
I’ll test them out in a couple of months to see how they are. The coriander and orange is the one I think will be the biggest hit, but the others should be interesting.
Google OpenID
December 15, 2010If you search for the title of this post on Google, the first link leads you to an AppEngine demo that, as far as I can tell, almost never works.
If you want to use your Google account as an OpenID provider, the provider URL to use is https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id.
Unlike the AppEngine demo, this has worked every time.
Thanks to the StackOverflow site for demonstrating this.
Parental Controls, old-school
December 12, 2010Lori was upstairs having a nap; I was in the living room on the desktop computer. Jasper was in the kitchen playing Minecraft on my laptop, and Millie was streaming shows off of Netflix, when I heard the word “crap” in a familiar voice.
A trip into the family room confirmed — Millie had stumbled on to the South Park Christmas special featuring Mr. Hankey. Yeah, I put a stop to that pretty quickly, and am keeping a sharper ear open.
Welcome to my Underground Lair.
November 2, 2010Well, I’ve gotten sucked into Minecrack, and have discovered that if you can set up an underground base near your mines, you spend a lot less time trying to get your diggins’ to a safe place.
Here’s the foyer:
The water elevator and the door between the lobby and the storage area.
Here’s the storage area with chests, workbench, and smelting furnace.
Finally, the castle that is far above:
Way to go, Pair.com!
November 2, 2010I wanted to put this where people can see it. As mentioned in the previous post, I moved this weblog to wordpress.com from pair.com.
Part of this involved canceling service with Pair, where I’d been hosted for nearly a decade. I am happy, but not really surprised, to report that this was handled with the same professionalism they’ve shown in hosting my sites.
It’s been my experience that when you cancel service with a company, they will often throw obstacles in your way, or send you to a “save” representative whose job is to talk you out of canceling completely. Pair did none of these. The “why do you want to cancel” questions came in the form of an e-mailed request to complete a survey. The “save” attempt was an offer to waive the setup fee if I ever needed to come back. Both came after the cancellation, not before.
If you add to this the near-flawless service, and the fact that my monthly bill went down while my disk and bandwidth quotas went up, I have a hard time seeing how I could have done any better elsewhere.
In other words, if you need professional web hosting, just go with Pair, unless you need something they just don’t do.
NOT Closing down
October 7, 2010I almost never post here any more; certainly not enough to justify even the small amount I spend monthly on hosting.
Soon, probably toward the end of the month, but maybe sooner, bigscary.com will not point here. I am sure it will point to at least a static page in the future, but I am not yet sure of my plans. E-mail if you’d like to be kept abreast.
EDIT: I’ve moved it to wordpress.com. I’m paying twelve bucks a year for the domain redirection, as opposed to $18 per month at Pair (which I do highly recommend, if you need heavier-duty or more general-purpose hosting.)
Facebook has killed this site.
June 17, 2010It’s been 13 months since my last post here; about 5 minutes since my last quip on Facebook.
Makes me wonder why I keep messing with it.
Brew Day: Epilogue
May 18, 2009Well, the brew day went pretty well, but it was long.
Pros
The new false bottom for the kettle worked pretty well, all told. Brewing ten gallons with twelve ounces of hops, including a half-pound of pellets, I got all but a quart of wort out before the pump just couldn’t pull any more out. The underlet space was jammed with pellet particles.
Also, the time I spent the night before thinking about what I was going to be doing paid off in fewer trips up and down the stairs, and more time off my feet. This left me a lot less worn out than on previous days.
Cons
My efficiency was terrible (65%.) I think my crush was not all that great, but even worse is that I suspect that I had dry spots throughout the mash. My tun volume is small compared to the amount of grain I was mashing, and I did a fairly stiff mash to boot. These conspired to make stirring difficult.
My burner is wimpy. It takes too long to get mash water heated, and to get the wort to a boil after the sparge.
Chilling took too long, although part of that was due to low flow rate at first — I wanted to catch some hot water for cleaning.
It took me from around 9:00 AM till 4:00 PM to make this batch of beer. A plate chiller would probably knock half an hour off that, and a higher-output burner would probably knock another half hour off. When I get the bucket heater on a timer, I will be waking up to a Gott cooler full of mash water on brew day, which will probably shorten my brew day by an hour.
Third Base IPA Pale Ale (UPDATED)
May 16, 2009An American IPA for when the “kiss of the hop” just ain’t enough. Think of it as a celebration of the easing of the hop shortage.
22.00 lb Brewers Malt 2-Row (Briess) (1.8 SRM)
2.00 lb Caramel Malt – 20L (Briess) (20.0 SRM)
2.00 oz Magnum (US) [12.28 %] (60 min) (First Wort Hop)
2.00 oz Cascade [4.05 %] (30 min)
2.00 oz Cascade [4.05 %] (15 min)
1.00 oz Williamette [3.44 %] (15 min)
1.00 oz Sterling [6.43 %] (15 min)
1.00 oz Williamette [3.44 %] (2 min)
1.00 oz Sterling [6.43 %] (2 min)
2.00 oz Cascade [4.05 %] (2 min)
0.55 tsp Irish Moss (Boil 10.0 min)
2 Pkgs SafBrew Ale (DCL Yeast #S-33)
Beer Profile
Estimated Original Gravity: 1.060 SG (1.056-1.075 SG)
Estimated Color: 5.8 SRM (6.0-15.0 SRM) Color [Color]
Bitterness: 68.4 IBU (40.0-70.0 IBU)
Mash as a stiff single infusion at 154 F.
UPDATE: Measured specific gravity was 1.052!
