Saw this on one of the lists I read, found the Snopes page that confirms it. All I can say is wow.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp
Author Archives: Pat
Sowing More Seeds
More work in the garden today, got the seeds for the lettuce, beans, squash, chives, catnip, basil, and dill in the ground. The seedlings on the kitchen table are looking good and some of them are going to be ready for the dirt next weekend. Got to get the bird netting put up though…
Dread Empire’s Fall: The Praxis
| I picked up a couple books to read during the flight and got most of the way through this one on the way out. I finished it off tonight after class… I was intrigued by its premise, that humanity had been dominated, not really conquered, by an alien race who completely rewrote the belief system of any race that it encountered. Usually by bombarding the planet in question for a while. The book starts out with a little introduction to The Praxis and how humanity got to be where it is now, but the real action doesn’t start until the last member of that race dies. That one death set in motion what looks like the destruction of the empire that had been built over the last few thousand years. By the end of the book there’s a civil war going on and I’m really not sure where it’s going to go from here. It was a good read though and the other two volumes of the trilogy are definitely in my future… |
Kegged The Wheat
Getting ready to head out to San Jose in the morning for a week of training and one of my last tasks was to get the wheat from the fermenter into the keg. It went as painless as could be and tasting the dregs of the batch from my siphon hose seems to indicate that it’ll be a tasty brew. It’s under pressure now, in the fridge, aging and getting ready for Pascha.
A Round Of Planting
There are now 16 carrots, 32 peas (16 snow and 16 pod), and a couple catnip plants seeded in the soil. After the crazy week we had with snow, 80 degree temperatures, and then snow again, hopefully we’re past the last frost. If not, it really doesn’t matter for these seeds, they’re all frost hardy.
Plain Old Basic Wheat
I kicked off a batch of a plain old basic wheat beer today. It’s a simple recipe, and the first all-extract brew I’ve done in a while. It’s also the first one I’ve done since the Oxynator arrived and it was pretty impressive to watch. Lots of bubbles and I’m hoping that the yeast will be a little happier with all of that dissolved oxygen.
Here’s the basic recipe:
- 6.6 pounds wheat extract syrup
- 1.5 oz. Hallertauer hops
- 1.5 oz. Tettnang hops
- 1 pack Wyeast 1010 American Wheat yeast
The procedure is simple. Just get the water heated up, add the extract, and bring to a boil. At 15 minutes in to the boil, add the Tettnang hops. At 40 minutes in to the boil, add the Hallertauer hops. After it’s boiled for an hour, remove from the heat, chill, dilute to 5.25 gallons, hit it with the O2, and then pitch the yeast.
Marking Off The Squares And Onions
I got the garden’s squares marked off with some jute twine and then planted the onions. There are now 64 onion plants growing and it looks like we’re going to get a bunch of rain tonight and tomorrow so that ought to make them a little happier. It’s starting to look like a garden now. I’ve also uploaded some more pictures to the album…
Building A New Server
Well, I made a stupid programming mistake and messed up a monitoring script such that it was reporting that the drives were OK when they in fact weren’t. Between that and some flakiness that I’ve localized to the motherboard/power supply, and needing to upgrade the O/S, I’m putting a new machine together. It’ll be based off of an Athlon 64 X2 and will have a little more RAM than the old one did. As a side benefit it looks like the processor supports virtualization so I’m going to build a few VMWare virtual machines to play around with. Look for an outage later on this week while I build and move data.
Starting The Seeds
The paper pots have been made, filled with dirt, and the delicate plants which need to be seeded indoors for early planting have been seeded. Now it’s just a waiting game to see which seeds come up and which don’t. I’ve put a few extras in the pots just in case, so we’ll see…
Command Decision
| The fourth book in Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War series picks up pretty much where Engaging the Enemy left off. Ky’s trying to put together a fleet, Rafe is sorting out issues related to his family, and the situation with the pirates and the rebuild of Vatta Transport continue to develop. There’s a bit less battle and a lot more character and plot development in this book, and I’m not complaining. It was nice to see some parts of this universe get fleshed out a little more. Apparently the next book is going to be the end of the series and from the way this one ended it’s going to be a heck of a ride! |