Author Archives: Pat

Another batch of beer

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I did another batch of beer today. It’s a modification of the last wheat along with a few new techniques. So here’s the recipe:

  • 6 pounds, United Canadian wheat extract (60% pale/40% wheat)
  • 1 pound, Briess 80L crystal malt
  • 1/2 pound, Paul’s roast barley
  • 1 pound cotton blossom honey
  • 1.5 ounces, Cascades hops (boil)
  • 1/2 ounce, Cascades hops (finish)
  • Wyeast #3942 Belgian Wheat Yeast

I also mixed things up a little, finally purchasing a hop bag instead of trying to strain the hops out after adding them directly to the wort.

Also, this was the first time I used a wort chiller and can’t believe I waited as long as I did. That thing was amazing. I had the wort down to about 75 degrees in a little over 5 minutes. Extremely impressive.

Picking Up Some More Brewing Supplies

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Since the honey’s in and I’m planning on starting on two batches of mead in a couple weeks I started picking up some more brewing supplies. I headed over to Foreman’s The Home Brewery since it’s close to work. After some really good conversation with the owner I picked up 2 6.5 gallon and 2 6 gallon carboys, some more Iodophor, airlocks, stoppers, and an immersion chiller. I’ve got some more stuff to pick up but it’s getting closer.

Going Postal

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After a late night finishing it off, and I seriously had trouble putting it down, I finished another one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. Going Postal is about a con man getting conned into being in charge of the revival of Ankh-Morpork’s post office. It’s definitely one of the better Discworld books and really does a good job of skewering current events.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

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I caught a matinée showing of TMNT this afternoon. It was a lot of fun to watch for a number of reasons. First of all the CG animation looked really good. Things have come a long way from Tron and The Last Starfighter. Also, the story line was a little darker than 1990’s live action version. It wasn’t quite to the comic book’s level, but it was a lot better.

No Shredder in this one, though the Foot clan does make an appearance, along with a good collection of bad guys to keep the action going.

It was a little on the short side, but considering the target audience, that’s not a bad thing.

Convergent Series

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One off of the guilty pleasures file. It’s a little reminiscent of Larry Niven’s Known Space series. I picked it up on a whim a while ago and finally got around to reading it. It’s a bit of hard sci-fi and a bit of space opera mixed together. The story revolves around a group of people trying to figure out what the artifacts left behind by a mysterious race known as The Builders are for. It eventually leads them to some stunning revelations and a trip outside the galaxy, but not before a number of close calls with death. The ending neatly sets up the next book in the series while answering the majority of the plot issues raised in the book.

60 Pounds Of Honey

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While I was at church tonight, Fr. Justin gave me the bucket of honey I’ve been waiting for. I’ve now got 60 pounds of native Texas cotton blossom honey waiting to be turned into mead. I’ve got a recipe that I’ve used before, from Gambrinus’ Mug. It’s technically a metheglin, a spiced mead, but still a mead. I’ve made it before and it’s turned out great. The plan for this one is to do two batches, one with a sweet yeast and one with a dry yeast.

The recipe is right here.

The Two-Space War

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I picked up this book because I’m a big fan of Leo Frankowski’s Cross-time Engineer series of books. Well, it didn’t disappoint me one bit. It’s the story of Lt. Thomas Melville, the captain of a ship sailing Two-Space, the two-dimensional “flatland” that has taken man to the stars. But in order to access it mankind had to give up almost all modern technology since Flatland tends to destroy it in minutes. What’s left is an interstellar civilization at approximately an Elizabethan/Edwardian level of technology. Against this backdrop Lt. Melville must fight his way through alien enemies in order to warn his allies of an impending attack.

It’s a good book with great character development, though I did think that the ending was a little rushed. There’s another book in the series coming out soon and I’ll be looking forward to reading it once I get the to-read stack a little lower.

iClip Review

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I’ve been running Inventive‘s iClip app for a while now and thought that it was time to rave about it. Sure, the version I’m running isn’t a universal binary, so it’s a little slower than it could be, but that doesn’t detract one bit from it’s usefulness.

I do a lot of scripting and editing of config files, PHP source, and HTML for my websites and server config. Having easy access to a number of copy/paste buffers has made my life a lot easier. I’ve got the clipboard stashed off the right hand side of my desktop so a quick mouse action will bring it out, keeping the clutter down.

I can honestly say that I don’t know what I’d do without it, except be a lot less productive in my coding and administration tasks.

300

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I went to a showing of Frank Miller’s 300 over at the Harkin’s tonight. I really liked it, despite what some of the so called critics have been saying. Sure, it’s not a historically accurate telling of the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, but it’s really good.

If you’re not interested in quite a bit of blood and gore or are expecting a happy ending, don’t bother going to see it. On the other hand, if you’re interested, you might want to read up on the actual historical events surrounding the battle.

Starting Some Container Gardening

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Since the soil around my area really stinks, being mostly clay, I decided to start some container gardening. It was definitely interesting getting everything put together, but I now have some jalapeños, red and green bell peppers, cucumbers, strawberries, mint, basil, dill, roma tomatoes, and rosemary planted and hopefully growing.

The next thing to do is get a trellis put together for the cucumbers to climb. I also think I’m going to put in another container with some pole beans which means a beanpole as well.

Hopefully they’ll grow and I’ll get some fruit and veggies out of them.