Racked The Dry Mead Today

The specific gravity on the dry mead is down to 1.022 so it’s been racked to a smaller carboy to start clarification. The yeast performed well, except that it’s not clarifying like the sweet mead is. I’ve had to agitate the sweet mead a few times to keep the yeast from settling out.

By my reckoning it’s at around 14% alcohol right now. It’s quite rough tasting, but it’s only a month and a half old. Aging will take care of that…

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

The latest installment of the summer of geek movies is the Fantastic Four sequel featuring another Marvel character, the Silver Surfer. The movie’s got a lot of the same good chemistry between the four team members and the supporting cast does their job well as well. We even get to see some old freinds…

Despite the criticism leveled at the portrayal of a certain character, I think they did a great job with the movie and left the door open for a spin-off Silver Surfer movie as well.

Meeting John Dobson

John Dobson spoke at tonight’s Texas Astronomical Society meeting. It was a great speech, convering a number of topics including the Big Bang theory, telescope making, global warming, and more. I’m really glad that I had the chance to meet and hear him, it’s definitely a high point of my life so far.

Replacing The Ignition System

I spent most of the day replacing the ingition system on the Sportster. I’ve been trying to cure the detonation problems caused by my 1200 conversion. Because of the increased compression I’ve been running 93 octane and have taken 2 degrees off of the static timing and still have bad pinging when the engine gets heat saturated.

Thanks to recommendations I picked up a Daytona Twin-Tec 1007 ingition module, a single-fire coil, and new plug wires. The replacement of the existing ignition system went well, with the only real hitch being the connection from the new ignition module to the tach. In the stock Harley configuration there’s a pink wire that runs from the module to the coil to the tach. In the new configuration that’s verboten, so what I did was cut the ring terminal connected to the two pink wires, connect the one running to the tach in to the dedicated tach output wire from the new module and the other to the new coil.

First impressions are favorable. It starts a lot better and the single-fire ignition has made it a lot smoother. I tried beating on it as best I could and it didn’t ping. Next step is to take it down to a dyno tuner and get it dialed in for real.

Reese’s First T-Ball Practice

Reese went to his first T-Ball practice today. It was a lot of fun to watch, especially if you like organized chaos. A bunch of 4 and 5 year olds does not an organized game make.

He did well on keeping his eye on the ball and fielding, but we need to work on his batting a little. But that’s what practices are for.

Shrek The Third

Reese and I went out to catch a showing of Shrek The Third today, and while he enjoyed it, I really couldn’t get in to it. It seemed to me that the jokes were just too predictable and it just didn’t have the magic of the previous two installments.

Reese enjoyed it, as did I, and it’s definitely good for a matinee or a rental.

The Field Museum

Reese and I drove up to Chicago this morning to spend some time at the Field Museum. He’s really gotten in to dinosaurs lately so getting to see Sue in person sounded like a great idea.

The museum is wonderful. There’s a lot more to it than a single T-Rex skeleton. They’ve got a lot of good exhibits, such as one about African life, another covering the last 4 billion years of the earth’s history and biodiversity.

It was time well spent, and if you’re in the Chicago area you really should take the time to visit it.