Well, my beer blew through its first stage of fermentation. This is the stage where the yeast eats sugar and puts out alcohol (and some other byproducts). At this point, the beer is ready to condition for a few weeks, giving the yeast time to consume their initial byproducts and flesh things out a bit.

At this exact moment the beer is 4.1% alcohol by volume, which is a bit better than I’d hoped. I was projecting 3.8% or something. (I started off a bit lighter than I had wanted, so a bit heavier is good.)

I’ve tasted it and compared with some of the unfermented stuff I saved and refrigerated. The beer tastes much less sweet now. It’s quite bitter actually. (I am not sure if that is going to be tempered by the aging process, but it is possible that I over-hopped the beer a bit.) It is certainly not undrinkable. The taste of it right now is sort of like a greenish cask-condition ale. Actually, it is a greenish cask-condition ale. Give it two weeks and you could serve it at the Arrow and Loon.

Anyway, it’s been transferred to a new container (a glass carboy) to get it off the dead yeast cells and brewing sludge that it was in when it was in the plastic bin. It looks mighty nice I have to say.

Next time I’ll stop a bit sooner in the transfer. As you can see, some of the sludge made it. But a lot more was removed, so I’m not going to get excited about that.

 › food     2005-09-30 01:41   ...1 comment

Hey- would you like to see some drawings I made? Thought so! Since you seldom, if ever, see anything I would ever try to draw.

Tree, House and Plane

Winged blob with dots

Actually, I can only take partial credit for these… I made them with the Scribbler a very cool graph program/game/toy that doodles after you draw something. Check it out.

Found it on heatherica’s journal

    2005-09-28 18:08   ...2 comments

As some of you may know, I have decided to try home brewing. I have got all the stuff. I have tried it. This is my brief report: I hate our stupid stove.

Making the beer was a challenge, but the biggest challenge was that our stove could not be bothered to heat things to the boiling point.

As you can imagine, you need to boil a lot of water to make a big batch of beer. Three to four gallons (roughly 11-15 liters) at a time, in fact. The biggest pot we owned had a capacity of about two gallons. So I went out to Zeller’s on Saturday night and bought a $29 stock pot. Got it home and found that it wouldn’t really boil water on the stove.

Why would a pot not boil water you may ask? Well, our #%@^%# stove has a flat ceramic surface. The pot does not have a flat bottom. If you were looking at this pot upside down, you’d see a depression like a bowl cut into the bottom. Almost like looking at the bottom of a frisbee, except not as deep and with a much larger rim. I assume the purpose of this is to sit right down over an electric stove burner, kind of hugging it or something.

Our stove has no damn burners except under a sheet of glass. This means that when the pot is on the stove it has a nice air gap between the bottom of the pot and the stove. In other words, the pot is incompatible with our stove. Who thought you were going to have to evaluate compatibility of cooking appliances.

Of course, by the time I convinced myself of this I had 3 gallons of not-boiling beer on my stove.

I threw out the batch of beer and went to the Bay and bought a proper pot. $179 on sale for $80. Grr. Then I went to a homebrewing store and bought more ingredients with which to start again. Grr.

Got the new pot home. It worked better, but not that much better. You see the stove element is probably 8” across, and these pots are like 14-15” across. The stove manual pompously explains that the stove will only work if the pots are “matched to the burner size”. I hate this stove. How likely do you think I am to find a 20 quart pot that is 8” across at the bottom. Grr. Anyway, the beer boiled a bit, so I am hoping that that will be sufficient.

I was prepared for problems with the beer, but I don’t think that it’s a stretch to suggest that a stove should be able to boil water in a stock pot. A stove that doesn’t cook: Who decided that this was going to be a good plan? (And you can’t cook with Aluminum. And you can’t cook with cast iron. And you can’t move the pots around while you’re cooking. And it can’t be cleaned except with expensive cream. And. And. And. Who are these people!)

I started at 9:30 am and finished at 9:30 pm. Phew. I am very tired now, and a bit surprised at what can go wrong in a recipe with only three steps: Boil grain sugars. Add pinecone bits. Add yeast.

Despite all this, I am hopeful that the beer will be good. I am working from Palmer’s How To Brew eBook which is excellent. I have read much of the book, including all the beginner stuff. I do like the idea of brewing my own beer, but I think it will take several batches before I get the hang of things. In particular I need to develop techniques to avoid dirtying sanitized things that I’ve used and will use again.

 › food     2005-09-26 01:10   ...2 comments

Well folks, here’s a meta-blog entry for you. And it’s related to Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science to boot!

I’ve been having problems with spammers. They come and leave comments like ‘Very nice blog. Why not check out my great Viagra site at www.badsiteyoudonotwanttovisit.com.’

I had a great scheme that diverted spammers to expensive downloads of Microsoft operating systems, but it depended on knowing their addresses. Now spammers come from so many addresses that I can’t keep up with making the list.

My new solution is to use a captcha. Like everything else in this crazy business, captcha is an acronym for ‘Completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart’. A mouthful for sure. A captcha basically asks you to answer a skill testing question.

Sites like Yahoo! and Google use them to stop robotic computer programs for signing up for free email accounts. Big sites have complicated captchas that are hard for computers to break. My little blog has an easy captcha: read the mathematical question and type the answer. I suspect that even the most math-phobic human could answer my captcha.

So, folks, I’m sorry to inconvenience you, but please type one character into a field to prove you’re human when you leave me a comment.

Oh, and here’s some more captcha tests to play with if you’re so inclined. I like Bongo and Pix.

 › technology     2005-09-25 23:48   ...7 comments

Went to nurd_grrl’s 29th tonight at Edoko on Queen St.

This place is a lot of fun. Teppanyaki is a Japanese tradition of cooking at the table. And in a restaurant it’s all about being an entertainer as well as a cook.

We were served by the head chef, and there must have been like 15 people around this giant grill. He juggled his utensils, shot food into the air, caught leftovers like shrimp tails in his basket-like hat, and created giant columns of flames before our eyes.

One of the best parts, highly anticipated by the guest of honour, was an Onion Volcano (see recipe for onion eruption here). Basically the chef takes an onion half, inverts some of the segments to stack them, then fills the onion with flammable liquid and water. Light it up and a huge column of flame erupts from the stack. Awesome.

My dinner was a teriyaki salmon/steak combo. Fantastic, and the chef provided complimentary shrimp appetizers as well as rice and grilled soba noodles to top it all off. Miso soup and salad too!

Jen enjoyed her red bean ice cream for dessert. A fun place to go — a little pricey — but well worth the price for 3 hours of good food and great entertainment.

I’m sure we will go again.

 › food     2005-09-24 21:54   ...0 comments

I was just talking with Andrew about this topic the other day.

You are a Social Liberal (70% permissive) and an… Economic Liberal (11% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness. Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

 › memes     2005-09-21 20:44   ...2 comments

I’ve notified those that asked, but if someone wants to download a taped version of my radio show I can send you the link. It’s 91 megs.

 › radio     2005-09-21 20:18   ...2 comments

So, my radio show was today, and I think it went off pretty well. I had a great time, actually, particularly during the first 3/4 of the show when the equipment was functioning smoothly.

I listened back to a taped copy of the show, and liked it just as much as a listener! It was good to be able to actually listen to the tracks as there was a fair amount of bustling associated with operating the station while I was in the studio.

I played twenty-one songs in 90 minutes or so, and things were going very well for about the first hour and ten minutes. That’s when the trouble began. The station has two CD players in the on-air studio. You mix from one CD player to the other (which lets you swap CDs in the one that’s idle).

So what happened? CD2 conked out just before the end of a track (Coope, Boyes and Simpson’s Polly on the Shore). I didn’t think too much about it. I just thought that someone had bumped the CD player or something. Anyway, I had a talking interlude, then played a track off of CD1, then went back to CD2 and it started halfway through the song I’d cued up. Strange. I faded that song and announced that I was going to start it over again. I leaned over to the CD player and hit stop. Then I tried to cue it up again but… nothing happened. Just strange spinning noises. Grrr. What was supposed to be a ‘quick’ cue it up again turned into a good 15-20 seconds of dead air. um. dead air.. Finally I did what I should have done at the start: I played a nice long ad while I figured out what went wrong.

I was able to recover by playing the rest of the show’s material off of CD1 and the CD-Rom drive in the studio computer.

The only other mishap came when I accidentally played a 4 minute song instead of the 9 minute song I meant to. But it was fine as the 4 minute song was in the right style, and I had a spare CD that I could fill the time with.

Anyway, I really enjoyed being in the station and pressing all of the buttons. I played stuff off of vinyl and CD. And I had a great pirate theme for part of the show. How can you complain about that. And everyone had to listen to whatever I wanted to play. And I get to do it again in three weeks.

Stay tuned folks… it’s just the beginning.

 › radio     2005-09-18 22:56   ...1 comment

How would you like to be the lucky winner of a great hippie holiday?

Cody, an extremely special individual, will pick you up and take you around america on his great hippie bus.

Do not miss all the great information about Cody’s plans for the great vacation by reading the page all the way to the bottom. It appears this is actually a serious offer (i.e. not a joke).

 › funny     2005-09-16 12:22   ...1 comment

I like Gayla’s Making Happy thoughts on back-to-school vs. the new year.

Also check out the great photo she’s paired the entry with.

 › blogging     2005-09-13 20:24   ...0 comments

Ok. For all you people who have been wondering when my first radio show will be… it is coming up!

The 18th is my show (although I’ll have a babysitter in the studio in case something goes drastically wrong) and then my turn will come around again on the 9th of October.

 › radio     2005-09-12 18:46   ...2 comments

… I learned from English Folk Songs? Yes says Jim MacDonald in his posting Folksongs are your friends.

Here’s a snippet off the front:

It goes on. It’s long but funny. It’s here.

 › music     2005-09-10 23:22   ...1 comment

To help improve your mood now that Canadian Content is roasting on an open fire, why not check out this American’s definition of blogging in the style of an English reference book sent back through time from the future. It’s funny.

 › cute     2005-09-10 00:56   ...1 comment

The federal cabinet has decided not to overturn the CRTC’s bad decision.

This is not a good thing. In the words of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting: “This is a black day. In effect, the Americans have won.”

 › music     2005-09-09 22:42   ...0 comments

Well, he’s such a bad speaker of english it almost feels politically incorrect to bash Bush for his stupid speeches.

 › funny     2005-09-09 15:40   ...0 comments

As if there weren’t enough reasons to quit smoking, studies have shown that smoking causes blindness.

Now a british eye disease association reports on a poll that says that about 70% of smokers would quit or cut back (41% quit, 28% cut back) if they knew it would blind them.

“Yet, the survey shows that fear of blindness is a powerful incentive to stop smoking or smoke less. Out of the respondents who had stated that they were current smokers 69 per cent would either stop smoking permanently (41 per cent) or smoke less (28 per cent). In the group of people aged 25-39 as many as 81 per cent would take this action with 46 per cent stating that they would stop smoking permanently and 35 per cent saying they would smoke less. These figures, as well as experiences in Australia and New Zealand, lend considerable support to the assertion that a focus on the link between smoking and blindness would considerably increase the effectiveness of anti-smoking campaigns.”

Time to get the word out.

 › health     2005-09-07 14:09   ...0 comments

Had a very nice and relaxing weekend in Halifax. We were down for Jay and Aimée’s wedding. That went super-well and we had a very nice evening. The next day was a special treat: sailing in the harbour on the Mar.

Halifax harbour is the second largest harbour in the world (behind Sydney) and a highly attractive one it’s true. As such, there are quite a few harbour cruises one can take, and on a variety of vessels too. As far as I’m concerned, though, sail’s the thing and we couldn’t have had a finer ship for a cruise.

I was particularly impressed by the captain’s manner with the children on board. They all got to steer the ship, but it was the crew’s warm and friendly manner that really made the day for them.

Here’s some photos from the trip. It’s hard to take pictures of a boat from on the boat, so I opted for vertical shots instead.

Read the Complete Entry

 › NovaScotia     2005-09-07 00:10   ...2 comments

Well after that great weekend away I’ve come home feeling more stressed than ever. About 4 hours after returning to the house I felt a weight settle onto me… school.

Things have been good with my current project, but I’ve realized over the last year of working on it that it is unlikely that my final thesis project will be along these lines. It’s just too hard to come up with hard cognitive evidence to back up my model, and I think that’s what the project will require.

Although it hasn’t been finalized yet, this tentative decision makes me feel good because it might lead to a more efficacious path to the finish. The short-term impact of it, though, is uncertainty due to the need to pick something to work on.

I wish I had the drive and organization of some of my colleagues who came to the program with such a clear sense of purpose. Seven years into the process and I still don’t have their sense of direction.

 › self     2005-09-07 00:09   ...0 comments