June 2007 Archives

|Oh wait, most Americans don't vote so, they got exactly what they put in. If you are that angry, get involved.
That is blatant nonsense. First, Americans can't vote on federal legislation. Second, Americans can't vote on supreme court members. Third, Americans can't control the political parties. Fourth, no person not a member of the two political parties and compliant with the two parties agenda can obtain power in congress. Fifth, almost no elected official even tries to do what they say they are going to do after they are elected (and they can't succeed unless that goal is in line with the goal of the two parties, anyway.) Sixth, the vast majority of power, specifically meaning control of legislation, in Washington is wielded by corporate and money-rich groups with specific interests that have nothing to do with the needs and wants of the average citizen.

However, you are right about one thing, even if only peripherally: The citizens do have the power to stop this bloody mess. As King George III of England found out.

It's Frobuary 2, YOMHC 0x16!

no comms trouble this time. #2 all around. simple as pie.

well, until they wanted a twenty for the job. that was my budget for cut+tip. i have a couple of rules about tipping, these are the things that balance out all my goodness with terrible-personness.

1) if the bill is 15 bucks and i give you a 20 and you give me back a 5, don't expect a tip. i ain't gonna tip you a fiver, and if i'd had an abundance of bills i wouldn't have parted with a 20. i figure this is basic ChangeMaking 101. if it's really decent service or quick i'll change the 5, but in most cases, the places that do this are the ones where it takes an hour just to get your check, so screw it.

2) if your charge is $OUTRAGEOUS dont expect $OUTRAGEOUS + tip. last time i got a more complicated cut at this same place they charged me 15 and i left 20. this time, for a simple buzz, they want 20? okay, 20 it is.

3) being "really sorry" for your own bad waiteringship doesn't cut it. i'm thinking of a specific meal at a particular place where the waiter was really bad. it's one thing if it's the kitchen making the waiter look bad, but this wasn't the case. at the end of it he apologized for being bad, or something like that. and that's sposed to resurrect the tip? meh.

there are others. i'm a hardass. but i make up for it.

in any case: the hair is again short and fuzzy.

another thing: i got hitched on Frobuary 19, YOMHC 0x15. because of the way the YOMHC calendar works, i could finagle things so that I never again have another anniversary. fortunately, i haven't got the memory for that kind of thing.

listening to a live recording of Dead Can Dance, and I recognize a song.

where the heck have i heard this song before?

the title is "Persian Love Song".

it's in a non-English language (my money's on Farsi) so I can't count on the lyrics, and the melody is only familiar in snatches, and it's a-cappeli or vocals only for themsofus that don't speakadelatin -- but it's been mixed and done by Delerium. aha!

the other day i came up with an idea for a beer, and, having read through 1/4 of mosher, 4/4 of brew like a monk, and 0/4 of designing great beers, i feel i'm qualified now to come up with a name and a vague flavor profile for my next beer.

if things go well, i'll brew it in about six weeks. if things don't go that well, i'll get to it later. the beer: Brother Toad's 400 Pound Singel.

it'll actually be more like a Tripel, I hope. The beer, that is.

strike that, i don't dance.

my feet are stone, my legs, sequoia. my back is a mountain, my mouth, a volcano.

the shen shakes the walls, but i am immovable.

i am rooted. i am Earth.

i just "aspirated" some fresh kenya. reading thru mosher's "radical brewing" i came across a description of something i thought i already knew how to do:

When tasting, you can concentrate the aromas by a technique called aspirating, in which you hold some of the liquid in the bottom of your mouth while gurgling air through it as you slowly inhale.

i've tried it before basically as written with little success. but this time: big results! not during the gurgling, but immediately after i'd stopped, i got a huge burst of aromatics that i'd not detected: all sorts of berries and licorice and stuff, without the astringency that puckers my tongue and makes me dislike kenya coffee.

so, what does this all mean? must i drink all coffee this way from now on? beer too? i'll surely try it with my 30L if i can remember, but geez... gurgle gurgle gurgle, all the time?

one month passed as of last night.

laphroiag 30 made the evening smokey and delicious.

pancho villa made the evening thunderous and cloudy.

aronofsky made the evening ponderous and enchanting.

a pansy hike made the evening sore and stiff.

but it was the company that made the evening.

the other night, i had a delirium tremens, and with the first sip, everything that i had been learning about belgian beer came into focus. beer enlightenment, it was : a moment of pure beer awakening.

and it kept on going the more i learned about it.

but with that first taste, i grokked :
- drinkability. belgian brewmasters kept going on about this in "brew like a monk" but i did not get it. i got it after the DT. >8% abv but i still wanted more.
- the use of sugar for extra high attenuation
- dextrins may help with body, but so does extra high carbonation
- the allure of a clear beer
- loving your yeast

later, i read that DT is brewed with three different yeasts. i believe it.

like any decent enlightenment, it opened my mind to new and exciting ideas. the next day while at hte beer store, i got a great deal on a pair of new 2.5G cornys, and as i thought about it, i thought of interesting, belgiany, non-english ways that i could use them. i thought about what it means to brew with different yeasts -- it doesn't necessarily mean spiking the beer throughout its life with more sugar and yeast (though someday i hope to try that!). one day i may split a wort in twain, ferment it with two separate yeasts, lager it (i can, now!) separately, and blend it for carbonation.

that is the destination, i think, of my brewing journey : to know so well the behavior of the living components of the process that I can work with them, and with their assistance, guide them in new and interesting journeys of their own to create something unique. along the way i have learned and will learn much about consistency, details, and "how it's done". the rules, in other words. the way the british and the germans do it. but my beer has always desired to be belgian, and the more i learn about "the rules", the more i understand their origins, the more i can bend them to the will of my beer, yearning to be free and delicious.

or something. in any case, i'm armed with expanding knowledge, some experience, decent equipment, and most importantly, creative imagination. i made a number of mistakes on my first truly "belgian" experiment.

mistakes, of course, are the universe's way of revealing new and hidden paths of travel.

IT department:
Your server is ready, we've named it fclabt01

me:
Thanks!

boss:
fclat01 please. (abt is reserved for auto build test - a different thing)

me :
crud, i just configured things to use fclabt.

boss:
I was actually thing of atf (automated test farmer) but at seems to match better with ab.

me:
Why not fclbatf01?

boss:
Why not fclqwerty01?

me:
because qwerty can't serve a no-knock warrant!

cheezy second-rate techno/trance song riffing on the terminator theme?

WANTZ MORE.

you can punch me or kiss me, but not both. you've made your choice!

my boss got it, my wife didn't.

it's a good thing she likes beer and laphroiag.

on the same website:

this

and

this.

Autie Ester's Gulden Chaach Keg Conditioned Father's Day Belgian Ale is now in the fermenter, as the harvested Gulden Draak yeast begin again with their lifecycle, chowing down on the O2 and trub i slurped into the carboy.

speaking of carboys, i'm now the proud owner of two 6.5gal carboys. i was planning to rack the Emperor Norton's 4.0 Belgian Imperialist into my 5gal carboy, making room in the 6.5 for the Auntie Ester, but the gorram Imperialist was still bubbling! I didn't want to disturb it, and even though we seriously don't have room for another carboy, i had little choice.

we're rather getting to know Phil down at Fermentation Frenzy^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmorebeer, and we may almost be to the point where he knows my real name and not just my email address.

for posterity, here is the mashbill:
1lb wheat malt (for head retention and body)
.5lb caravienne (for flavor, body)
.25lb special b (for flavor, body, color)
7.5lb belgian pale ale malt (for happy yeast)

and the rest:
1oz mittelfruh (60) (nearly freaked when i saw that he'd given me mittelwtf instead of the hallertau i'd asked for, but i caught myself, hypothesized, and confirmed that mitwtf is a varietal of hallertau)
.5oz saaz (5)
1/2oz coriander (5)
1/8oz cardamon (5)

and, of course, the harvested GD yeast.

things went well with only a few hiccups :
1 - lots of disturbing of the grainbed during sparge. my current sparger is just a wort aerator stuck on the end of a hose. it isn't meant to operate at low flow and so it makes big drops that disturb things.
2 - ran out of sparge water. 5 gallons wasn't enough. i really need to plan on sending N gallons of sparge water through, where N = the amount of wort i want to boil.
3 - still have a spigot leak in the brewpot. nothing major.
4 - boilovers! d'oh! got two or three of them when i put the lid on at the end. i have trouble turning down the heat enough that the boil isn't humungous and the gas doesn't go out.
5 - forgot to put the washers in the connectors of the wort chiller, and spilled a little wort
6 - didn't have the sink at full blast and took too long to cool some of the wort

still, i got the wort to 68F in about 20 minutes as it xferred to the carboy, and in fact, i was worried that it might get a little too cold for Auntie, so I slowed the sink again to keep the temp high. I reckon I pitched at about 75-80F. i dont have a fermwrap hookup for the second carboy. well, i have an unused fermwrap, i just dont have a temp probe -- it's still in the Imperialist! In any case, i think it's fucking hot enough around here lately that i dont need a heater on the Belgian.

The yeast smelled interesting as I pitched it. Not entirely great, either. This beer is a big bunch of experiments all in one.
1 - my first all-grain recipe that i done did made myself. nothing to it. i got a book tho for next time so i can be all edjumacated about my recipes. tragically, the book really doesn't have a lot on belgian beers which, let's be honest shall we, is where my brewer's heart wants to be.
2 - my first experiment with harvested yeast.
3 - i plan to keg-condition the beer after a couple of weeks in the primary. haven't done that before.
4 - first beer with spices
5 - first beer with so few hops (it *is* belgian, afters all)

and i'm sure there are a buncha other firsts in there some place. first time i used my wort chiller properly. that thing rocks. i'll use it even more properly next time and cool my beer in 10 minutes.

anyhow, this should be a very interesting beer, if not a good beer. i can't wait to see how it turns out.

where have all my linebreaks gone?!

testing line breaks

line 3

went for a short "hike" today with my old hiking buddy.

i'm flabulous on account of the bulking, and i haven't hiked in ages, and though i kept a steady pace without too much puffing and huffing, i'm clearly outa hiking shape (which isn't to say i won't outhike you and your grandma, because i will. even if i have to carry you and your grandma, unless your grandma is like really heavy and stuff and i'm not feeling well that day or haven't eaten yet and feel kinda woozy or something). now, one thing hasn't changed, we don't bring a map and we never really know how far we've hiked. i'd estimate 6 or 8 miles, but the hikeometer is uncalibrated these days and the bahiker description said 5 (we went for a weenie hike to avoid messing with my rest schedule. we'll see if it worked). afterwards, i were ahungered, and away we went to the chinese buffet. yum. kinda.

lost an entry, but i hardly blog anyways these days, and when i do, it's lame, so it's hardly missed.

haaaawdly, as bruce willis said in the most recent die hard movie, the one with snakes on a plane. you know, the good one.

anyhows: back. upgraded. not on a new machine. new setup tho. it's cool. i dont wanna say much else, but trust me: cool.

moved blog.sainttoad.com. that is why it is:
1) slower
2) uglier
3) slightly broken
4) incomplete

i can deal with it. so can you.

i don't like warm weather.

i don't like cold weather.

i like hot weather or cool weather. cold weather makes me put on too many clothes, and then if i get up and move around, i'm warm. if i stay where i am, i'm cold. warm weather brings me to the brink of sweating but stops short.

hot weather, now that, i like. ironically, too, because i hated it when i lived in it. hot weather, i'm bathed in sweat at all times, and it does its thing. none of this "ooh, it got cooler, stop sweating", or "oh noes, it got warmer, start sweating!" no, sir, when it's hot, it's hot even if it's hot-N or hot+M. it's hot and my poor dumb body doesn't have to worry about being confused.

so, mister weather man, either crank it up a notch or freakin cool the weather, i don't like this "warm" crap.

that bastard!

that is all.

that is all.

that is all.

that is all.

so this didn't really solve anything, i still had the problem.

so there i was, chugging away this morning, sorting files into folders with jumpy renaming themselvesishness all akimbo, when i decided i'd had enough and downloaded a finder replacement.

then i thought to myself, "self, this really sucks. why should i have to pay an extra 35 bucks for a finder replacement when i paid $BIGNUM for this mac in the first place? shouldn't it Just Work (TM)?"

i could not argue with myself, because i have too much admiration and respect for him.

while i was admiring and respecting myself, i happened to notice the current time on my file server. 4am. rest assured, dear reader, that the clock was incorrect: i was most certainly not awake and computing at 4am. and then, interrupting my admiration and respecting, i excitedly exclaimed to myself, "self! could it be that the folders are jumping around because the mac is getting confused about time stamps because the file server has the wrong clock!? could it be that when the mac creates a folder and expects its timestamp to be X but the timestamp is X-4hours, the mac freaks out?"

myself agreed with me, that this was indeed a possibility. not only was it a possibility, but evidently, i did not have ntpd running -- so of course the clock was askew!

i rectified the ntp problem, set the clock properly, and tried again. limited success! a new problem seemed to arise, but noticably, the dancing folders problem was absent! this, dear reader, is the most that one can hope for in the software world: the transformation of a Big Problem into a Littler Problem.

now, it seems that perhaps my aging file server has a bad clockus. i do not know if ntp can prop up my file server's cheap clock or whether the server will slowly die. but in any case, problem kinda solved.

... didn't really get to finish that last get-things-up-to-date post.

in summary:

i forgot what i was getting on about. the main point is, we're back to some of our good old habits, and have maintained the integration of new ones. in other words: we're bigger now than before, or, at least, i am and she's not complaining. so that's good i reckon.

i reckon that's good.

i've sadly gotten out of the joyful habit of daily blogging. by my beard and bones, it's not the output that matters, it's the input!

the joy of writing is in having your work read to you by those that love you. short of that, it's fun to actually put things down in words. i've done neither, of late, on account of i've been busy.

please, sir, mister saint toad, you ask, busy with what?

brewing
climbing
planning
wedding
lifting
working
light traveling
entertaining
listening to good music
laughing

i will go over these, narration style, with no adhesion to logical progressions of time, and no love for actually going over what i said i'd go over. you know the drill.

so i went and got hitched. that went well. hasn't been a month yet, for whatever that's worth. we're settling in to a new life, which is not, perhaps, what either of us really wanted. still, domestication has its benefits compared to wandering, as civilization has its benefits to the tribal alternative.

actually, the benefits are precisely the same: beer production. the production and consumption of beer has occupied a lot of our time lately. i've moved on to allgrain brewing, and i think that by my next batch (#12. incidentally, that means i've brewed 11 batches of 5 gallons of beer. that's 55 gallons of beer in less than 2 years. that sounds like a lot, don't it?) i'll have gotten it down to a routine. a manageable, relatively straightforward routine that makes sense and isn't all chaotic.

that's the supply side, but on the demand side, we have a wedded pair of light drinkers, one with an expanding waistline (tolerated only because of the expanding deadlift). so we're now getting into "entertaining", which consists of inviting people over to drink our beer in exchange for feeding them and giving them stuff to do while they do it. but i just ordered 2 more empty kegs, so i can really get a good backlog going before i need to dump it on friends.

climbing is meeting with slow progress. the wife and rictor/veg are progressing faster than me, now, in some regards. it's interesting to see how we diverge and specialize. we can all climb pretty well at the 5.9/10a level, but when we hit a 10b/c or a hard a, some of us can manage and some of us can't. i seem to be good at overhangs, the wife is good at smearing and routefinding, and rictor/veg is good at using naturals. combined, the three of us make a very well rounded climber.

in my case, though, i'm fighting an ever-increasing resistance due to gravity, an ever-increasing lack of climbing motivation due to heavy weight training, and an ever-increasing frustration at slowed progress due to the above. meh, it's temporary.

lots of busywork keeping busy, and lots to look forward to. it's a challenge to balance all interests and activities, to find time for everything, to keep the anchors in place that fasten my life to the Real but still allow me movement in the world of dreams. but i'm managing.

still: busy.

i need you back!

i promise not to install freebsd again. i screwed up! won't you forgive me?

she: can you move that barbell a little?
me: i can roll it this way.
she: no, just move it a little to the side. then we can put a chair here.
me: <boggle> that's 300 pounds
she: you can lift that!
me: yeah, i sure can, but it will take me 20 minutes to warm up.
she: we can move it together!
me: <boggle>

she must be visiting! l0lz!

of Saint Thomas Francis University.

I hope that some day you will be a proud graduate.

i like my climbs like i like my deadlift sets like i like my women:

short and difficult.

i realized that i have a purpose in life.

my purpose is threefold:
1) to culture the yeast from a bottle of gulden draak,
2) to brew a gulden draak clone therefrom,
3) to serve gulden draak on tap in my home.

so it is written, so it shall be done.

the other day on my way to work a thought occurred to me, as thoughts are wont to do. at the time, i was listening to infected mushroom's latest and greatest, and i had an onion tied around my waist, which was the fashion at the time. It was a white onion, because of the war. You couldn't get yellow onions at the time, because of the war, so I tied the white onion around my waist, which was the style at the time.

as i listened to "heavyweight" reach its crescendo, i thought to myself, as i tend to do when "heavyweight" reaches its crescendo: this is music in its purest form. of course, my assessment is ridiculously subjective, but in my experience, there are very few songs where the artist chooses to take the music precisely where i would have chosen to take it, had i been the artist, had i been given the preceding portion of the song. "heavyweight" delivers the music i would make, were i a musician, and picks the proper instrumentation.

so, i thought to myself, why is it that for the past week or two, i haven't been listening at work to IM, or shpongle, or (as i'd recall today) ozric tentacles, or pink floyd, or amon tobin, or any of the most excellent and favored artists in my collection? why was i listening to tracks-o-crap that were mostly relegated to the "delete" queue?

the answer: bureaucracy. i was "cleaning house", sifting through old mp3s that i'd found in my collection but which had not yet been screened, sorted, and filed away. in a more general sense, i was paying attention to my music collection, but not the music.

the observation came as a realization, as all the best observations do. i generalized to other areas of my life, taking the easy first step from the music collection to the music listening equipment: i was doing a similar thing there, obsessing about the various choices of gear instead of listening to the gear i've got.

it's easy to see where the generalization leads, of course. straight through a variety of detail-oriented obsessions to The Big Picture, where not only is it possible to do everything right and still fail (you know, like that episode of TNG where data does not win at strategema, where they tell him that it's possible to do everything right and still fail, heh) but it is also possible, and common, to have many outstanding suboptimal details and still have a pretty good time of things.

so that's what i figured, while i was driving to work the other day, that despite all my little side-obsessions and worries and problems and suboptimal compromises, i'm still doing all right, if not better than that.

as my skills as a climber and a brewer go to shite, as my ears clog up from allergies and i can no longer enjoy my k701s, as my tummy gurgles from too much cereal, as my pants continue to fail to fit, as i mourn the passing of the best and only window i've ever had into the mind of a black man, i can take some small solace in the fact that my deadlift is still going up.

. steve gilliard. the world is narrower without you.

but even a poor-man's infected mushroom gets the job done.

productivity, here i come!

okay, quittin time.