December 2007 Archives

first, the ingredients:

next, the procedure:

the secret mash temperature:

i'm not making this up, it's straight from the:

careful lab analysis has revealed (okay, suggested) the nature and source of the contaminant that made bottles of Life's Trail Ale into gushers.

this, i think, is really, really cool.

we drank one last night, and it tasted different than the others. this is not entirely surprising, after all, if the bottles were contaminated, the contaminant would slowly grow and grow and grow and become more strong a contributor to flavor over time. and this is just what happened.

but now, because of my lab experiments, i think i can ID the contaminant. the flavor that is swinging into dominance in the LTA is the flavor equivalent of the smell that i cultured in my little 40ml starter of the Thingus I grew on the closeted petri dish! The yeast-like-stuff that i cultured off the petri dish, that i grew in a starter, that i dumped down teh sink when it began to smell like pee -- that's the same stuff, i think, that contaminated LTA.

our own house yeast.

and i'm able to ID it because i've gone overboard and done petri dish yeast experiments. cool!

python on snails officially reached version 0.milestone.A last weekend, where i got it to the point that i had blog posting ability. that wrapped up all the use cases i had planned. most of the code was frameworkized and not speicalized for my app, and most of the non-framework code had low complexity. some bells and whistles were absent but nothing that got in the way of creating a blog.

last night i decided to add calendar functionality to the website, and i was able to do so without adding additional code to the framework. what this means is that the code is mature enough to handle new use cases without updates to the core.

this morning, i decided that the calendar should read the data from my published ical calendar instead of the snails database. a couple updates to my pycal library (heh), three lines of code in a controller to read the events from pycal instead of snails, 1 search-and-replace in my view (the DB called it "name" and pycal calls it "summary") and i was done.

i'm somewhat impressed.

it's Frobuary 1, YOMHC 0x22. just a trim. i've taken to using gel now, and it works. i hates me the gel, but what am i to do? with the gel, the hawk scrapes the ceiling of my car. no room! i'm 6'2 with gel.

i managed to find the source of the nextel-like irritating beep/whistle thing that's been driving me nuts, day and night, for a couple of weeks. i thought it maybe was a dying smoke alarm, maybe somebody's phone, maybe a walkie-talkie, maybe a car alarm, maybe a heart monitor, maybe, maybe, maybe!

by coincidence, i happened to be in the garage while the gate was closing, and found... it's the gorram gate! at one point in the gate's closing route it grates the wheel against the track and makes a shuddering whistle. that explains the absence of a pattern in the noise, and the variation of the sound, and the fact that it happened at all times of day and night.

i applied copious amounts of WD-40 today, and haven't heard it since. i'd like to bill the apt. management, but i doubt there'd be any point.

later tonight, in the process of changing out an empty keg (so long tripel) i discovered, to my amazement, that my #2 CO2 tank was empty! shouldn't have been, it's brand-newish, hasn't even dispensed a whole keg. after a lot of worrying and plenty of soapy water spritzed all over, it turns out that the coupler between the regulators on my dual regulator had a leak. i tightened it until i had a headache -- which persists, more likely originating from oxygen deprivation than from exertion.

i transferred the date beer to a tertiary fermenter, for dry-hopping and some additional clearing-up (it's quite clear already, actually, but the hops will fog it up some i guess). it's already quite a tasty beer -- hop-o-rific but sweetly date-y (despite the conventional wisdom). not a lot of malt, but some roasty flavors that may be added by the chipotle more than the malts. the dregs had a mighty capsaicin burn, but not so much chili flavor in the beer itself.

next time... oh man!

it has been a long time since the last post of relevance, and, even though nobody reads this, i thought i should make an update. you know, for posterity.

i seem to have given up on nanowrimo. i said i would finish it but i have no motivation. this is because i am currently motivated by something else (see below). i may lose it all in a couple more days as my trial for Scrivener expires and I can no longer open the data file. oh wells.

i'm currently devoting much spare time to implementing python on snails. it is an ambitious problem to tackle, of course, and it's getting more ambitions. i'm currently stuck in a depth-first implementation of blog posting support -- which first involved implementing forms so i could do a login page, now i need to do sessions, which involved several refactorings (after all, shouldn't snails have snails-default sessions instead of app-specific? and if so, shouldn't you be able to plug your app-specific User class into the sessions? yes on both), and the daunting prospect of implementing foreign keys in my Pickle based DB abstraction. i keep fearing that my MVC separation is too harsh and brittle, but the upcoming work seems to fall neatly into the abstraction i've already got. at the end of it all, i'll be able to make stupid posts like this to my snails-powered brewing site, and i'll have a much more fleshed-out framework.

speaking of brewing, i kegged the tripel last weekend and it's sitting, inertly, in the warm closet to continue some fermentation. i took no gravity readings because the initial readings were bogus. this is a poor line of reasoning since the terminal reading could be used to see if fermentation is done. however, i did taste them, and they weren't what i wanted, so i'll let them sit a bit more before lagering.

the date beer is still bubbling a little, or at least, it looks like it's continuing to ferment. i'd really like to drink it some time soon but since the dates cost a huge pile of cash, i'd rather let them ferment. so more time for that, and then, some day, rack it one last time, add the hops, crash it, and serve it. yum.

on the topic of yum, i harvested wild maybe-yeast from the air in my beer closet. i plated it and it grew into something that really looked like yeast, so i dumped it into a 50ml 1040 starter. it's currently on its second day of incubation and though the starter appears to be more cloudy than when it started, it's not clear that it's reproducing. i took the cover off this morning to sniff it and could smell mostly just the wort. i suppose that's a neutral sign: it did not smell like beer, but it also did not smell like dirty socks or rotting meat.

i came up with a name for the beer i will brew with this yeast if it turns out to indeed be beer yeast. with a nod to whatsit up north from here, i'll call it San Mateo Queer Beer: Out of the Closet.

work proceeds as usual. there's a noise outside the apartment that resembles the stupid sound of nextel phones, occurs at random intervals, and is inaudible to hops. i do not think i am imagining it, but it's been happening for 2-3 weeks now and i've not been able to pin down its location, much less its origin. it may drive me batty. i hope not.

travel is coming up, hooray. and then, proabbly more travel. in the meantime, my new workout schedule is improving my climbing, somewhat, at least on mondays. at the same time, they've gotten some new route setters in the gym who seem bent on creating horrific routes.

gelled the hawk.

looks good.

no pics.

in a hysterical fit of NIH-insanity, in a desire to have a nice templating language for building my second vanity site, sullenbeaver.com, i decided that i was not going to go with any existing web frameworks, but instead, devise my own.

to that end, i have created python on snails, because i don't want to learn ruby and django has problems.

i use django extensively at work and find its template language to be horrendously clunky, and, now that i'm designing my own framework, i'm finding lots of other kludgy crap in django. mabye it's because they had to support an older python version, or maybe a million things, but i feel so far that my design is cleaner and more useable.

on the other hand, mine doesn't do much : initially i just wanted templates, those took a day to get working properly (and, i might add, more powerfully than django's). now i'm working on data models. perhaps if i had to interact with a database (i don't!) i'd better appreciate the workings of django.

the fact that i dont want db access is a large reason why i bothered with PoS (hah! i hadn't realized the abbreviation until just now, which makes my non-alliterative choice all the more appropriate).

still, since evidently i kind of know what i'm doing, it seems my api could easily have a db smooshed onto its backside.

after 2-3 years of python fixing my brain, i had to write some c code to escape some characters in a string.

now this is 1 line in python :

s = s.replace("'", "'").replace(..etc..)

in C it's about 50 lines. maybe that's because i'm an awful C programmer or maybe that's because i've let too many pythonisms creep into my C. in any case, python rools, C drools.

3k words today. if only they had the slightest relationship to the novel, i could have counted them toward the 50k. alas, they are entirely distinct, which is too bad, because 3k is rather prolific for the 50k effort.

the spock character is saving my arse. he rants and raves, and nothing fills up pages like a john-galt-style lecture about stuff. toss in the fact that spock has a foul mouth (especially when sober) and we've got extra capacity for filler.

i've made it to 41k words. i'm not going to make 50k by -- hey wait, holy crap, it's 12/1. i'm definitely not going to make 50k by the end of november, then. but i am going to make 50k. turns out that's 150-200 pages. a novella at best. but i'll have 50k words to distill into a decent short story, which, i think is the best i can hope for considering how loosely this stuff is all tied together.

it has been a fantastic exercise and a very trying experience. there's nothing more disheartening than laying out what i think is my best effort, 1600 words of difficulty, then reading 2 sentences of Vonnegut and realizing I've got nothing.

But Vonnegut says, in the last book he wrote, that we should write to entertain ourselves, tell us stories out of our imagination.

I agree. I wonder what Spock will say next?

It turns out Spock is a burger flipper by trade. Who knew?