Mmmmm….. Beer

So, tonight while Amy and Grace are hanging out with the fams in Mobile, I opened a bottle of Rogue Smoke Ale that I’ve had in the cabinet since probably 2004. This is a big-ish beer at 5.8 ABV, that should have withstood the extra lagering time in a cool, dark environment.

To my palate, it is a passible American interpretation of a German Rauch Bier (Smoke Beer). For the life of me, I can’t detect even a hint of smoke. Like most Rogue beers, I really want to like this beer but I don’t. And I think I know why. I believe (and have for some time) that it has to do with their yeast. According to the Rogue website:

Yeast: Rogues proprietary ale yeast is PacMan. “Pacman is really great yeast; everything about it is good. Pacman attenuates well, is alcohol tolerant, and it produces beers with no diacetyl if the beer is well made. Its very flocculent, which makes it a great choice for bottle conditioning. I ferment almost all my beers at 60deg.F; once in a while for certain styles Ill ferment as high as 70deg.F, but never higher. Use lots of oxygen, and a high pitch rate. I never repitch past the 6th generation, and I always use Wyeast Yeast Nutrient.”- John Maier, Brewmaster, Rogue Ales

Wha? Attenuation is good. It converts sugar into alcohol and CO2. Alcohol tolerant is good. That means that the yeasties can work their magic for longer before the alcohol puts them into stasis. NO diacetyl? I think we have a problem! Diacetyl is the chemical responsible for putting butter and butterscotch flavors into beer. Now, style guidelines say that the presence of diacetyl is verboten in Classic Rauch Bier. However, Classic Rauch Bier is a lager, and Rogue’s PacMan yeast is an ale yeast. According to the style guide they nailed it. But I like diacetyl in my most of my beers(dry stout is obviously the exception)! Perhaps what I really wanted was another Bass Ale, but it was all gone.

Rogue’s PacMan yeast just doesn’t work for me. From “Dead Guy Ale” to “Shakespeare Stout” I really WANT to like these beers, but I can’t. I just don’t like something in the flavor profile that I can’t yet define. It has been said that most breweries develop “house” flavors. These are flavor components that are common to all of the various styles any brewery makes. Young’s has theirs. Fuller’s has theirs. Give me a new beer from either brewery, and I can probably tell you which it was from (if either of these were more available in Alabama, I promise I’d have done enough research to be able to definitively tell you). Give me a Rogue beer and don’t tell me where it is from, and I will tell you “This is from Rogue!” Their house flavor is that distinct, and again I think it is because of that yeast.

What Rogue does right is that most (if not all) of their ales are bottle conditioned. This is quite important. It makes the beer taste better, and gives each beer a better texture. Essentially, this means that Rogue is kind enough to leave us live yeasties in the bottle. That is good for a number of reasons, not the least being that it makes the beer quite healthy for you to drink. It isn’t a beer for beginners, nor for lightweights because it ships in 22 oz bottles. It certainly has a flavor, and plenty of it. Almost enough for me to like, but not quite.

7/10

Bored as toast

I’m in Atlanta for SAP training this week. Amy came down with me on Sunday, but she went home this morning. The end result is that I’m bored and uninspired. I’ve exhausted my ration of Cadbury’s Royal Dark for the week, and I’m down to orange juice and Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA to stave-off dehydration. As our Mr. Jerome noted, thirst is a dangerous thing. Now, the 90 Minute IPA is quite tasty, but the amazing hops presence and slightly elevated ethanol content means that one has to take it easy with this stuff.

The SAP training is going well. I’ve seen a lot of the material we’re covering before in the real world, but I haven’t usually understood what I was doing or why. This class has done a good job of filling in the gaps in my understanding. I know that I still have a long way to go in understanding why Jerry made some of the decisions he did in desiging this product, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive. SAP is a good system, but it’s large and complex. There is a lot to learn about it, and a person so inclined could make a career of it. To a large extent, I have. With the exception of the one year I worked at the NASA Integrated Services Network, I have been supporting SAP systems in one way or another since 1998. With any luck, we’ll keep at it. It seems to pay well, and the hours are good mostly.

Question:

Is a beer a character device or a block device?

Discuss. Not too heatedly…

Fair ye well!

Tonight, I drank what was probably my last ever bottle of Young’s Oatmeal Stout. Young’s Ram Brewery had a good run, from 1581 – 2006. Now, they’ve closed the doors. According to the Young’s website:

Traditional draught beer was produced on the site of the Young’s Brewery from 1581 – 2006.

In 2006 Young’s combined its brewing operations with Charles Wells, Bedford to create a major new national force in the brewing industry. This ensures that Young’s remains a vertically integrated brewery producing our own beers for our own pubs.

I know that I always look for tasty, hand-crafted ales from traditional, vertically integrated breweries.

The last Oatmeal Stout was paired with a two-inch-thick pork chop and okra, squash, and tomatoes.

Young’s Ram Brewery has fallen. No more “Old Nick.” No more “Double Chocolate Stout.” No more “Waggle Dance.”

We now raise our collective glass to the hope that Fuller’s Chiswick Brewery survives!

132 is old.

Today marks the 132′rd anniversary of the birth of Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill.

We suggest you mark the occasion with Sir Winston’s usual: a splash of Johnnie Walker in the bottom of a tumbler, add ice, then fill with water. We are told that he preferred the Red labeled version, of which we have a small supply on hand. If you do not, then now is the time.

Noteable news…

Several interesting developments lately…

1. In mid-November, I’ll be changing jobs. Working in the same building, for the same company, just in a different capacity.
2. Saturday, Amy and I celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary.
3. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale on draft in Alabama!
4. Fuller’s ESB reappears in TN… Albeit in smaller 11.2 oz (330 ml) bottles. 330’s are popular in Europe, but they make me mad. Still, I’m glad to have been able to lay in a small supply. There are no hops but fuggles. And Fuller’s ESB is their prophet.

Busy Weekend

It has been a fairly productive weekend. Amy and I did a good deal of much-needed house work, but we got that done pretty quickly. Amy had some Mary-Kay seller come out to the house to do some sort of something.

I took this as an opportunity to run off to Swan Creek Shooting Range for some trigger-time. I put 200 rounds of .45 ACP down-range, and turned my target, a cardboard box with one of those fluorescent targets taped to it, into swiss cheese at about 18-20 yards. The target told a story, and the story was this: “I may not be able to shoot very well, but a have a lot of ammo.”

I had quite a lot ( 8 – 10? ) fail-to-feed-last-round stoppages with both the Kimber and Wilson Combat magazines. The bullets were getting pinned nose-up to the top of the chamber. It seems like it may have stopped during the last 50 rounds or so. That makes a total of 600 rounds through the Kimber. Hopefully it is “broken-in” now, and I won’t see any more.

Grabbed some coffee at Starbucks in Athens on the way. A cup of Italian and a pound of Arabian Mocha Sanai. I really like Yemeni Mokka coffees. No “blends” for me, thank you! I made a pot of it today. The beans were quite oily, and the cup was excellent even out of my cheap auto-drip brewer.

Stopped by and visited my uncle and his family on the way home. I rarely get to see them, but as I was passing by their house on my way home, and they were outside, it would have been rude not to.

Amy and I watched two terrible films. “Jackie Chan is the Prisoner” and “Flash Gordon.” Both of them were absolute stinkers.

We also rented a 10′x10′ storage room to move some of Amy’s school stuff into. We relocated a truck load of boxes from our garage, which will help my state of mind tremendously.

Right now, I’m trying out Fedora Core 5 on a laptop. I’m just curious to see what they’ve changed with this rev. I’ll be happy when either Solaris 10 becomes really useful as a desktop OS (I doubt this will ever happen) or I can get OS X that runs on a Dell.

Today was the first day in two weeks that I’ve been out of bed after 6:00 AM. I slept-in until 8:30. Tomorrow, it is back to 5:30 AM.

Right now, I’m off to read some Heinlein.

Travelogue

May 8-12 Newark, California: SunUP Network Forum

Wednesday

SunUP didn’t start until 09:00 today. Missed the shuttle bus. No big deal. The campus is only a few miles from the hotel. Got delayed in toll-booth traffic for a few minutes. Drove straight to the right building, no wrong turns. This place is MUCH easier to get around than New York.

The first talk this morning was about the Sun-Fujitsu relationship. Basically it amounts to a way for Sun and Fujitsu to trade some technology for a few years, until they can find a way to screw each other. Diplomacy is the art of saying “Nice Doggy” until you can find a big stick.

Then came the Solaris 10 migration “Lessons Learned” session. This was possibly the best talk of the conference. Some of the highlights were:

• Most applications experience a performance gain simply by upgrading to Solaris 10.
• The IP Stack has been rewritten to vastly improve performance.
• A “Container” == A Zone + Resource Management.
• “Whole Root” local zones!!!
• All Zones in a domain share the same process table. So a fork-bomb in any local zone will crash the global zone. I knew this already, but it is nice to see Sun admit to it.
• Memory leaks in a local zone can also take down the global zone. I didn’t know that, but I suspected.

It would be nice if Sun were actually able to get Zones to be as fine grained and self sufficient as LPARS on an IBM mainframe, but they have a LONG way to go.

This would have been the most appropriate discussion to bring up some of the gripes I had about Solaris, but it didn’t seem right to voice them to the guy who migrated his datacenter to Solaris 10. It would have been REALLY nice to have had access to an actual Solaris Engineer.

Then we talked about the new DIMM replacement policy. Most sites like to replace DIMMs that are throwing Correctable memory errors, under the assumption that soft errors will lead to hard errors. Sun did some research, and found that 70% of these correctable errors were replaced on ’suspicion’ of being bad. They collected 800 of these DIMMs that were throwing correctable errors, and ran them all for 5 months under heavy load. They found that at the end of that 5 month period, they didn’t have a single non-correctable error (read system panic). I know that we replaced a LOT of them on our E10k machines in the first
two years I was here.

The new policy is to replace a DIMM only if it has thrown 24 errors over 24 hours. I’m not sure how this meshes with the new Memory Page Retirement functionality that was introduced in Solaris 10, then back-ported to Solaris 9 and Solaris 8. It seems like MPR would retire pages of memory (essentially a “bad block map” for RAM) before they hit that threshold of 24 in 24, and you’d never see enough errors to replace a failing DIMM. They had a customer testimonial, and the guy said that they don’t bother replacing a DIMM until the memory error is logged as persistent. That is how we’ve treated them for the most part over the last few years, anyway.

Sun also suggested the new cediag. This new and presumably useful tool does not ship with the OS, but
instead the 5.0 version of the explorer package. Talking of which, why isn’t explorer part of the OS by now??

The only choices for technical break-out sessions were “Capacity Management” and “Disaster Recovery.” I stayed for the DR discussion. It wasn’t very useful unfortunately. That being said, I’d like to see more break-out sessions next time, particularly ones with Solaris engineers.

The next discussion was on Time Dependant Reliability (snooze). The guy giving the talk was so far above the heads of the audience it wasn’t funny. The crux of his argument was that MTBF is a poor tool for reliability analysis.

The last thing we did was to plan the next meeting. Hopefully, it will be at Sun’s Broomfield campus. Fat Tire is plentiful near Broomfield because the brewery is less than an hour away. I’ve done the tour, and quite enjoyed it.

Wednesday night, I had dinner with Stephen. As good as it was to see Shannon, it was better to see Stephen because I did get to hang out with Shannon and So Jung over Christmas. Stephen, I hadn’t seen since one week before I got married, very near five years. Stephen didn’t have long. Something about Google working him to death, I suspect. Still, it is incredible to me that with real friends, the passage of time evaporates when you get together. It has been eleven years since high school, and it just didn’t matter. I really appreciate that, since it reassures me that I made the right choices in friends so long ago. We ate at the same steak place I had eaten at on the first night. I had two Lagunitas India Pale Ales which claim to be made with 65 different malts and 43 different types of hops. That is incredible. Needless to say, the first one was so good, I had to have a second. Stephen had to leave early, but it was so good to hang out with him that I didn’t care. Hopefully, I’ll get to go back some time.

Thursday

Got up at 09:30. Checked out at just before 10:30. On the I880 toward San Jose. I only missed one turn going into the airport, mostly due to construction around the airport. Flight was supposed to depart at 12:15 PDT. We had to wait on the plane at the terminal for an hour, while they fixed the plan with duct tape. Seriously. Ok, ok… so the problem was that one of the overhead bins came unhinged, and they had to tape it closed. I really didn’t think I’d make my flight from DFW to HSV, and I was certain my luggage wouldn’t. Fortunately, I got to the gate just as boarding was starting. My luggage also made it to HSV unharmed. All-in-all, long, boring, and full flights, but safe ones. I got to Huntsvegas at about 20:15, made it home by 21:00.

Travelogue

May 8-12 Newark, California: SunUP Network Forum

Tuesday

Set the clock for 06:30. Then 06:45. Then 06:50. Amy called 06:46. Got
up. At least I didn’t have to iron anything.

Got the shuttle-bus to Sun’s Menlo Park campus. Like everything here, it was
beautiful. Nice view of the bay and of the mountains. Nice green trees. Just
like everything here.

Signed in with about 50 or 40 other people. They had packets
on the table with everyone’s names on them. When you got your
packet, they handed out Mikasa crystal wine stoppers in the shape
of grapes. This is wine country, I suppose, but that was the
strangest schwag I’ve gotten since EMC handed out toe nail clippers
in 1999. Once you got in the door, they had a table full of
circa-1999 Sun Blueprints books for grabs. I snagged 6 different
ones. A nice addition to the book shelf, but they are all hopelessly
out-of-date and mostly useless.

This was a long freaking day. We started at 08:30 PDT, and didn’t really
stop until 18:30 PDT. By about 15:45, I was ready to start throwing things.
Really, people. If you have this much junk to cover, make it a three day
conference!

As a result of the long time sitting, I began to think of ways Sun annoys me.

1. Solaris excluded, Sun isn’t any good at making software. They have a
   lot of tools that are either half-finished, half-useful, half-tested, or
   half-assed in some other way I haven’t listed yet. Worse than that, they
   have a lot of products with overlapping functionality, and don’t really seem
   to understand the concept of code reusability. I really wish they’d get
   their act together, particularly with systems management software. They
   spent probably three hours out of the day, showing off several new offerings
   that they were really proud of, but were nothing more than an extension of
   the current mess they have (or in a couple of cases, completely new
   messes. One dude told us about this new program going by the moniker SMC. I
   don’t remember what SMC stands for in this case because Sun already has
   at least three other products called SMC.
2. Product names. Is it Netscape Directory Server? Or maybe iPlanet. Or
   maybe SunOne. Uh… how about Java Directory Server? Sun Management Center
   (SunMC, not to be confused with Solaris Management Console: SMC) apparently
   used to be called Symon. Netconnect is now being renamed into two different
   products (that only half-work at this point). PLEASE stop renaming things.
   Or at very least, remove all of the old names from the documentation.
3. Java AWT(Abstract Window Toolkit)/Swing. It is old.
   It is slow. It looks like it has been beaten with an ugly
   stick. When most people say “Java sucks!” they are talking
   about AWT/Swing applications. For some reason, Sun has
   chosen to make all of their systems management applications
   with Swing, rather than native tools using C and probably
   GTK (since they are now shipping Gnome). These apps look
   like they were written in 1989. They are way too slow to
   be useful to anyone. They only work half the time. If you
   need to update the Java Virtual Machine on your box, they
   probably won’t work at all. If you need to run them over
   a remote X-Windows session, the best thing to do is forget
   it. Curiously enough, Sun are not the only guilty party
   here. Veritas has recently perpetrated this with their
   NetBackup admin client. I think that Apple did it right
   by providing a Java interface into Aqua. As a result, you
   can write Java apps that at least look like native
   applications, though they may not always behave like
   native apps. From what few I’ve seen, they actually perform like native
   apps too. What Sun should to is to hire some GUI designers from Cupertino
   to work on a replacement for Swing (which was a replacement for the AWT), or
   just freaking license the Java + Aqua layers. Yeah, right. I know that UNIX is predominately a text-oriented system. I am
   fine with that. However, if you’re going to provide GUI tools and force us to use them for some tasks, PLEASE make them
   useable.

   In a lot of ways, I think that Apple has ruined things for other UNIX vendors, by proving that UNIX can look good and be functional.

4. Could you guys please make better LDAP server and client configuration
   tools?! This is one thing Microsoft has got right. It is really easy to
   configure a secured Active Directory server, and connect clients to it,
   without ever passing clear text passwords over the wire. Replication to
   redundant servers is apparently not very difficult either. They have had
   this working well enough since NT 4.0, and you haven’t. Period. If system administrators can manage to figure out exactly what documentation they need for the Directory Server, it is possible
   to get an LDAP server running, with clients authenticating to it in
   probably about 48 hours if you’ve never done it before. Now try adding TLS.
   Good-freaking-luck. We don’t need to go dinking around with ten different
   tools for creating self-signed certificates, etc. You should assume that:
   1. We need Transaction Layer Security by default. These days, it is
      NOT acceptable to pass clear-text passwords over the wire, unless I
      specifically tell you to.
   2. Unless I tell you differently, self-signed certificates are OK. Ask
      me if I have a “Real” cert, and if not, CREATE A FREAKING CERTIFICATE
      AUTHORITY. Make the admin tools smart enough to push the proper trusts
      out to the clients when I initialize them. Instructions for working
      with self-signed certificates that say things like: “Open the Netscape
      Web Browser” are NOT ACCEPTIBLE. This needs to be automated, easy, and
      above all needs to “just work.”
   3. pam_ldap needs to be smart enough to allow RSA key authentication
      for password-less logins over SSH. You might be able to talk me out of
      that one. It would at least be nice if a system administrator could
      allow that for specific accounts.
   4. Kerberos integration should be documented and as easy to implement as it is on Windows (nearly invisible).

   In other words right now, the Directory Server that ships with Solaris is just a tool. Sun needs to evolve a little bit by providing the tool integrated with the design, configuration, and deployment tools to make it useful quickly.

5. Jumpstart needs to be updated to be smart enough to
   use DHCP. There NO excuse for this. And “Go download JET” isn’t a good answer either, unless Jet both grows up and gets shipped with the OS. Again, this needs to be automated, easy, and just work. We have to use this tool often, and have committed significant time into customizing it for our environment. We shouldn’t have to dance around RARP any more, since DHCP has been the
   standard for at LEAST 10 years.

The patch management discussion nearly drove me over a cliff. They are
trying to make better tools, but it looks like they are worse and that
is really a shame. I can’t imagine that people are going to want to use
these tools unless something dramatic happens. If Sun are planning to charge for these tools, I will laugh.

The most interesting quote of the day was “You cannot manage
availability. Availability is a result.” That is simple, but quite
profound, and I’m glad they are thinking along those lines. Also
interesting is the statistic they gave of the % chance of a system
administrator inadvertently causing an unplanned outage: 1 in 200. So,
every time I log into a machine, I have a .5% chance of causing down time
such as accidentally rebooting production instead of a development machine,
etc. Excellent.

Over all, I left the first day of the conference a LOT more agitated than
when I went in. Hopefully I will get some opportunity to provide input
(read vent) about some of these things tomorrow.

We did get a chance to tour the iForce center today. That was pretty
neat, but I already have an E25k, and they could have done the tour in 20
minutes instead of more than an hour. It got old fast.

I skipped the free dinner, in favor of going to the Apple
Store in Palo Alto. It wasn’t worth the time. I was very
disappointed in it, as the Mac Resource in Huntsville is
way better than this place. Ate at PF Chang’s in Palo Alto.
Had the Orange Peel Shrimp and a Fat Tire.
All I ask of life is a plate of shrimp(or maybe oysters) and enough Fat Tire
to choke a goat. Maybe one day, New Belgium will expand
enough to be able to ship to Alabama. For that matter,
maybe one day Alabama will change their beer laws to make
that worthwhile.

Got Amy a present, then headed back to the hotel.

Travelogue

May 8-12 Newark, California: SunUP Network Forum

Monday
No required SunUP events today. I
think most people used today as their travel-day since Sunday was
Mother’s day (thanks again, Hallmark). Woke up at about 8:00
PDT/10:00 CDT. Let me tell you… It was nice. I still haven’t
gotten used to DST, so I felt like I was taking my hour back.

Got all of my ironing for the week done. This is always a PITA, but
at least it is done now, and I won’t have to worry about ironing
anything else until I get home. Got out on the road. Took US-101
into San Francisco. Crossed the bottom deck of the Bay Bridge, then
turned around and headed back into SF on the upper deck. That was
a really nice view of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, etc…
Drove around down-town SF for about 30 minutes… Seen one city,
seen them all, and what do you know… It looked JUST like it does
on TV.

I’d killed enough time. Now it was 13:00, and time to head to
Monterey. I didn’t bring/buy a paper map. But I got good directions
from Google Maps, plus I had the GPS. I’d done a good job of route
planning, making sure to go through Cupertino. I quickly typed in “1
Infinite Loop” into my Garmin eMap, drove there (there
is a REALLY nice looking Target just around the corner), and took a GPS
waypoint in the parking lot of Apple Computer’s main campus. It was
really a nice campus. Didn’t have much time, so I didn’t dally. Back
on the road.

Talked to Sutton about 15 minutes out of
Monterey. Great timing. Monterey/Pacific Grove was absolutely beautiful.
Seeing Sutton again was awesome. It is amazing to me that it has been more than
10 years since we went our separate ways, and when we get back together, it is
like nothing has changed. Shannon and I have each traveled a boat-load of miles
on a lot of different roads since high school. Despite that fact, I still
regard him as a brother.

Shannon, you have an awesome wife who understands you. I know that because I
can see it. Not many people have that, but I can tell you from experience, that
it makes life enjoyable and worth living. Brandon, you’d better be taking
notes.

Shannon took me on a brief but very productive beer hunt. Didn’t find the
Stone Vertical Epic that I was looking for, but they had Fat Tire (and New
Belgium Abbey). I know that I’m going to Denver next month (it is a
traveling year, after all), but I just couldn’t wait. I know that there are
many good California beers that are worth my time (I bought a bottle of
Lagunitas something-or-other that is still in the rental car). But when New
Belgium brews are available, I just can’t help myself. Fortunately, I
restricted myself to $15. It was difficult, but I managed. We also discovered that Shannon’s dog, Judith, likes dried banana chips. I doubt that our feline would be so inclined, unless someone’s making fish-flavoured bananas now.

Also of note was the really cool tree in Shannon’s front yard that had purple flowers and orange leaves. I wish I knew what kind of tree it is because Amy would love it, and try to plant a dozen of them.

Travelogue

May 8-12 Newark, California: SunUP Network Forum

This is turning out
to be quite the year for travel. I guess that is a good thing
because it certainly makes life more interesting. However, it tends
to generate a lot of extraneous paperwork, particularly when traveling
for work.

Sunday
Not much here. I had a 12:55 flight
from Huntsville to Dallas, to San Jose. Had weather going into
Dallas, but landing wasn’t too bad. I found out that the Scurvy Pirates make really
good nerve-calming music leaving out of Huntsville. I’m kind of
strange about flying. I usually am pretty freaked out during my
first take-off on any given trip. After about 10 minutes in the
air, I usually calm down for the rest of the whole trip. Somehow
listening to “Worse Things than Dying” helped this time.

To get myself into the California state of mind, I dug up all
of the California songs on my iPod at 35,00 feet. Ok, there only
turned out to be two. Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication” and
the Dead Kennedy’s “California Uber Alles.” Fitting.

The approach into San Jose was ridiculously “entertaining.” I’ve had worse landings, but there were a couple of pilots sitting behind me cracking wise the whole way down.

Got my luggage, and drug it out to the shuttle-bus stop.

Douglas Adams wrote somewhere in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy series, something about having that inner twinge that lets
you know just exactly how far you’ve gone from the place of your
birth, and in that instant, experiencing some small part of the
vastness of the Universe. On Earth, he wrote, most people don’t
really notice it because you can never be more than 36,000-odd miles
from your birth-place at any time. Regardless, while waiting for
the bus to the rental car place, I got the twinge. It isn’t unusual
for me. It was just a small matter of wondering why (oh, why) did
I make the decision to take 10 hours out of my life, to go careering
across the sky at 35,000 feet in a pressurized metal tube, and end
up 2000-odd miles from the relative comfort, safety, and routine
of my home. What possessed me to do such a thing, and why the hell
am I here, when I could be at home? Douglas Adams fans would
probably answer: “Excitement, Adventure! Really Wild Things!!!”

I got to the rental car place, and secured an upgrade… I’m a
careful driver, but I don’t consider compact cars to provide much
protection in the unlikely event of a crash. Besides, it was only
a couple quid more per day. I ended up with a Camry (grey) that
came fully equipped with a Sirius radio. Ahh… right at home then. I
found the hotel very easily, after only a 20 minute drive (and only
one wrong turn). GPS is a lovely thing, and I don’t think I’d ever
like to travel without one ever again (ever).

Found a steak joint across the road from the hotel. Had a nice NY Strip (medium,
thank you), and my very first draft Sierra Nevada. The bottled
version is good, but this was awesome. Google maps tells me that
I am less than 200 miles from the brewery. Nice.

Travelogue

April 9-10 Oak Mountain State Park, Birmingham, AL.

Tony Cowan was in Birmingham for a Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia event on Saturday. He was planning on staying the night so he could hang with Robb for a while. So, I suggested the we just camp out in the park. Bought a cheap 8′x8′ Coleman tent the night before… $38 at Wal-mart. Excellent. I haven’t been camping properly since I was about 16. It was LONG past time to do it again. Got to the camp site just at dusk. Got the tent set up, but it was too dark to go dinking around for fire wood. Went to the little camp store, and it was $5 for a bundle of about 7 or 8 bits of split log. I only bought one, which was enough to get the fire started.

It ended up being me, Tony, and a guy called Zack from Mobile. Robb show up after he got off of work… around 9 PM. Knowing that the beer in the metal cup thing had been so successful before, I brought 3 litres of my brown ale. That stuff should be gone soon. All of the Scottish Ale is already gone. So we drank some beer, grilled some food, and poked the fire for a few hours. By midnight, all of the food was gone. So was all of the firewood and charcoal that I had packed with me. The camp store was closed by 9 so, we were pretty much out of luck. Robb had the bright idea to go to a grocery store to find some. We had talked just a few minutes earlier and discovered that both Tony and this Zack guy used to work at Delchamps. So, someone
suggested that we go to Delchamps for firewood. Then Robb made the quote of the night:
Unless you’re driving a Delorean, we’re not going to Delchamps.

Then again, maybe you had to be there.

We found a place open, but they didn’t have any proper fire wood. They had charcoal, but what we needed was light. And charcoal isn’t renowned for burning brightly. We settled on a couple of those freaky firelog things. Turns out, they were just what we needed. Three of them burned all night, and threw enought light to see by. The campground rules said “no open fires” but there didn’t seem to be anybody paying attention to that. We also didn’t pay much attention to the no glass bottles rule. Robb ended up leaving at about 3:30 AM. It was a nice night, so I just layed my sleeping bag out on the picnic table. This was the first time I’ve used one of those mummy style bags. It was a bit clostrophobic for about the first 10 minutes. Then I started to get cold, and it was fine. The bag is rated to -10 F, and I now believe it will take it. Sweet.

At about 10:00 PM Saturday night, Amy’s dad called, so I just called her and told her to call him. Apparently, her grandmother had fallen and broken her hip. So, she called me at 7:00 AM Sunday. I got up, broke camp, then drove home. It was a good trip, and I really enjoyed catching up with Robb and Tony again. Now that I have all the gear, I’ll probably go more often.

Travelogue

March 24-27 Grand Rivers, KY

It has been a while, but I thought that I would write about it anyway. March the 24-27, Amy and I took a short and much-needed weekend trip to Kentucky with Brandon and Miranda. It couldn’t have been a better trip. We got a cottage on Kentucky Lake, at a place called Lighthouse Landing. LL is in Grand Rivers, KY, and is located at the north border of the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. This is really the first time Amy and I have taken a weekend off to go anywhere other than Mobile since we moved to Huntsville.

LBL is a great place to go. The park is huge. It took us over an hour to drive through the length of it. We got to see many different types of wild animals… Bison, elk, deer, turkeys, skunks… All I can say is that Bison are freaking huge. The first one I saw was from a distance, and I just thought he was a particularly hilly part of the terrain. I was quite surprised to see this hill stand up and walk around.

We left from our house on Thursday morning, drove to Nashville, then got onto I-24. About 6 miles from the TN/KY border, Brandon called back and wanted to stop for an early lunch. He saw a Subway sign, and headed for it. When we got to the Subway, it turned out to be one of those Subway-in-a-gas-station thinggies that I typically distrust. In the process of ordering, we worked-out that some weeks previous, this particular deli had severed all afflilation with Subway. Unfortunately, this turned out to be the worst meal of the trip. Fortunately, no one got sick.

We got to Lighthouse Landing about 3 hours and 20 minutes after leaving home. The place is sort of 3/4 marina with %25 cottages and RV campground attached. The weather was still just a little too cold
for most people at that point. Which means that it was perfect for me, and had the side-effect of keeping most of the people away. We also got a good discount on the cottage.

The cottage was about the same as staying in a fully furnished extended-stay hotels. The kitchen came fully equiped. Stove. Microwave. Toaster. Coffee Maker. Freaking dish washer. There was some wicker furniture, a table, a bedroom, and a bathroom on the bottom floor. The top floor had a bedroom and a foyer with a pull-out couch. You could have easily had 6 people stay here without too much stepping on of toes. Most importantly, there was a very nice Weber “One Touch” grill outside, which we used regularly.

The first thing Amy wanted to do was to go check out the Bison. So, we did, and killed most of the afternoon driving around the park, checking things out. Brandon and Miranda took their bikes out for a ride instead. We met back at basecamp at about 4, then drove to Paducah, KY for food, since none of us had packed any. We ended up eating at Applebees for some reason.  After that, we hit up the Wal-Mart for things to grill over the next couple of days. Left Wal-Mart, and went on a beer hunt.  Selection was rather limited, but they DID have Chimay White, so I can’t call it a bust. I got a bottle of the Chimay, Brandon got one too, plus a couple of Sam Smiths (one IPA, one other I don’t remember).

Later that night, we fired up the grill. We ate brats, and drank good beer (including my brown ale and abbey ale) from metal camping cups I had brought. Man, it was great. The weather was cold enough to keep those metal cups and the beer in them cold and quaffable. Perhaps I’ll have people harass me about wasting Chimay white with brats around the grill. All I can say is that it was damn good beer, and I’ll probably never forget the experience. The only problem is that we drank it all up the first night.

Friday we went horse-back riding. I hate horse-back riding. There is something about the smell of horse crap and hay that I find… disgusting. It cost way too much money, and the horses… well just put it this way, if the horses had been donkeys, you would have described them as “sad assed.” They had been taken care of, but were just really old and slow. I took great delight in making mine walk through the mud when ever he tried to walk around it and pin me against a tree. Fortunately, the saddles were western, not English… so I didn’t fall off.

More grilling Friday night. Dry county. No beer run. I really liked that Weber grill. I think I’m going to buy one. I actually managed to get grill marks. Excellent.

Brandon and Miranda left Saturday morning because they had peeps coming into town for Easter (maybe peeps wasn’t the best choice of words). Amy and I went back to Paducah because she wanted to go the big fabric store. We got there only about 20 minutes before they closed, but she wasn’t disappointed. The place was huge, and her eyes lit up as we walked in. I wish we would have had longer to stay there. It was painful for me, but she was digging it the same way I dig poking around a record store for hours.

Did more beer hunting in Paducah. Jackpot. Found this place called “Proof Brothers.” Too bad Brandon had left already. Came back with many beers, including but not limited to:

1. Goose Island Bourbon County Stout (INCREDIBLE! Scored a 97 in the latest “All About Beer” Magazine I had seen before going)
2. Anchor Brewery Old Foghorn
3. Unibrou Terrible
4. Bellhaven Wee Heavy (Very good too)
5. Scotch de Silly
6. Ommengang Three Philosophers
7. Fuller’s Vintage Ale (Looking forward to this one. Only 90,000 were bottled. Mine is #66000-something )
8. Stone Brewery 8th Anniversary Ale
9. A four pack of historic beers from Scottland, including “Alba — Scotch Pine Ale”

They had many more, and I could have spent HOURS and thousands of dollars there. Fortunately restraint prevailed.

After that, we drove across a very scary bridge over the Ohio River into Illinois over US Hwy. 45. We ended up in a place called “Metropolis.” They had posters and statues of Superman everywhere. Truth be told, the place was more like Smallville than Metropolis. It was entertaining for about 2 minutes.

Easter Sunday. Packed-kit and headed home. Took about an hour and a half longer because we drove down through the park. Did I mention that place is huge? I think we’ll probably go back in October. I’m already saving my pennies for the next beer hunt.

Yeah, I'll have a cuppa. . .

I’ve been roasting up some Yemen Mokha Mattari – Muslott coffee beans lately. Sweet Marias got these in November of 2004, and I’m glad I got some because they appear to be all sold out of it. That is a shame because I’m finding them so good. Note that in this case, the word “Mokha” is a place-name for where the
coffee came from, and has nothing to do with the mixture of coffee and chocolate, called mocha. I bought it with some Java Government Estate – Blawan, to make (you guessed it) a Mokha-Java blend. I’ve been
experimenting with it a bit, mostly by roasting a 50-50 blend to various degrees.

One thing that I noticed is that by roasting them together, I got a very uneven roast. The Javas turned out less roasted than the Mokha. This warranted more experimentation.

There’s a guy at work that really likes dark roasts (read Starbucks). I didn’t want to ruin any good beans, so I weighed out 64 grams of a Columbian Supremo (to me, table coffee, nothing special). Fired up the roaster,
and cooked those suckers for 12 minutes. First crack came and went. Then second crack. After about 8 minutes, there were apparently some beans that never got to first crack that finally went… Loudly. They
hit second crack a minute later. Finally, when the garage was full of a ridiculous amount of smoke, I stopped the roast. If he gets any flavor besides charcoal from these, I thought, I’ll be amazed. He wanted to try home roasted, and I was keen to oblige. It turned out that he really liked them. He correctly identified them as South American, though he guessed Brazil. He said that the South Americans were his least favorite, but that seeing that it was possible to produce a good cup, he was going to buy a roaster. That will give me some
one to trade with.

So, before I went to bed that night, I went into the garage with 64 grams of the Mokha. I roasted it until I could not see for the smoke in the garage. That was probably the best cup I have roasted. It tasted
great. Not too bitter, good roast flavor, and packed a PUNCH. I gave a cup to Chris when I walked in at 8:30. I had a 9:00 – 9:30 meeting. When I came back, he was bouncing off the walls. He drinks coffee
pretty much every day. I don’t, and I’d had about 3 cups. Whew. Got to try that again, as it managed to keep me awake and attentive through some very dull meetings that day.

Tried the same thing with the Javas the next day. Not quite as good. Definitely not the same punch.

My grandmother came to town last weekend with my mom, my sister, and my sister’s three kids. I’d roasted some decaf Sumatra water-process decafs, in case anyone wanted a coffee after dinner. My grandmother told me after dinner that she’d smelled it in the garage, and that it was too bad coffee didn’t taste like it smelled. She said that the smell had brought her back to childhood when her mother used to roast ina cast iron dutch oven on the back porch. That made it all worth it to me. Because smell is tied so closely to memory, I was able to bring out something that she had probably not thought about in 40 years. It gave her a memory she probably wouldn’t have thought of for the rest of her life. That’s just pretty cool to me.

Brew log

While not actually brewed, I started a cider Friday night. 6 gallons of local apple cider, 1 qt. of honey from Nathan’s dad’s apiary, and White Labs WLP720 Sweet Mead/Wine Yeast. Original Gravity of the cider was 1.060. That was before I added the honey. Didn’t check it afterwards, but I can’t imagine 1 qt. of honey upping the gravity of 6 gallons of cider very much. Also added 1 tsp. of Wyeast yeast nutrient.

Looks like it hit high krausen yesterday/last night. Nasty sulphury smell now, but I’ve heard that is normal. Eww.

So this is the new year? (Hat-tip: "Death Cab for Cutie")

I don’t do New Year Resolutions. So, this year will be no exception. However, it is not all that uncommon for me to set a few goals from time to time. So this year, I think that I’m going to dig up some books by and about the founding fathers of our country. The goal being mostly to remind myself that the people who founded this country were all right-wing-kook-extremists, just like me. As the post-election left-wing meltdown continues, with liberals screeching about how “Red State” people are ignorant morons, it will be nice to read the words of these intelligent men, and to remember that they are largely responsible for me
thinking the way I do. I am a conservative, I do believe in God, I am patriotic. I am not an uneducated simpleton fool. I sense that I’ll probably write two or three screeds about this in the coming year.

Specifically, I want to look through the Federalist Papers, some Washington, some Jefferson, some Ben Franklin (particularly, I’d like to reread his autobiography), and revise on some of the minor/obscure founding documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Also, I intend to finish the 9/11 commission report.

Also, for career development this year, I’d really like to learn to write useful code in C. Really, as a full-time UNIX systems administrator, I am often ashamed of that fact that I can’t program in C. Perl is great, and as a rule has gotten me out of (also in to) many sticky situations, but really I should learn C.

Finally, I’m really going to try to write more. I will probably use this LiveJournal thing as the medium, since it is easy enough. Nobody but Chris will read it anyway, and the only reason that he will is that he gets all of my posts emailed to him automagically. Chris, read-on. I promise it will be hella boring.

Some things I want to write about:

• Chapter 8 in the new Ann Coulter book, and how she isn’t quite right.
• Good/Bad points in the new Bill O’Reilly book.
• Dr. Strangeconserviative, or How I learned to stop worrying and love the US.
• The current un-official charter of the United Nations
• Canada: Frozen Bombing Range of the North
• Linux Hippies are ruining it for the rest of us
• My favorite line to use at parties: “I’m slightly to the right of Rush Limbaugh.” That one always gets GREAT responses.
• My prediction that the “Half-Blood Prince” in J.K. Rowling’s new book is . . . Haggrid.
• The real American Idiots, Anna Nichole, Paris Hilton, Reality TV, MTV, etc.
• My life-change from Linux+Windows on PC to OS X on Apple G5, how I have adjusted, and if it was worth it.
• Several other topics I can’t remember right now.

I had no champagne for the new year, I’m afraid. I had a nice bottle of Chimay Grand Reserve (a.k.a. Chimay Blue) that I was going to enjoy, but decided to save it. At $9 per bottle, it is packaged like champagne (750 ml, cork finished, wire bale), but tastes better than any champagne I’ve ever had, and is WAY less expensive. Vouve Clicot is probably the best tasting champagne I’ve ever had. It is currently at about $45 for the same 750 ml bottle. Also, I have one bottle of Left Hand Imperial Stout that I am saving for a cold night. I am worried that winter may be over though. We had those two days, just before Christmas where the high
was in the 20’s. Right now, we’re having upper 60’s. Happy January in North Alabama.

I got several new books for Christmas, including the Bill O’Reilly book, Who’s Looking Out for You? Anyone who thinks that O’Reilly is a conservative after reading this book should go have a mental exam or perhaps go look at a dictionary. This book was closer to a “Self Help” book than anything I have ever read before. As it turns out, I like Bill’s writing style much better than his interviewing/commentating style on his TV show (I’ve never listened to his radio show). Perhaps it is because he’s not interrupting someone else’s every third word. I’ll talk more about the book in another entry later because I thought it was actually good and made some points I hadn’t thought about.

Oh, and I swore off Slashdot just over a month ago. Haven’t found a good replacement for it yet, we’ll see how long it lasts… Annoying pratts. So far, I have done well. Been there less than 3 times in the last month. Haven’t missed it, per se. But I do miss having a good source of computer geek news updated several times per day. If not for their agenda of left-wing politics and slamming any company out there that has the nerve to actually try to (gasp) make money, I’d still be a (many-times-a-day) daily visitor.

In summary, happy new year to you all. Really, I plan to live 2005 just like I lived 2004. Keep moving forward, doing what I do, brewing a few beers, fixing a couple of computers, and generally enjoying life in North Alabama with my wife.

Beer

Beer is a subject near and dear to my heart. It has been brewed for very nearly 10,000 years. This is much longer than wine has been around.

I chose the name “lagerhead” for two reasons:
1. It sounds like a type of turtle, and that is just funny.
2. I really dislike lager.

Though there are some really well done lagers, I prefer ales, as they are usually much more robust and flavorful. Some really good ones to try are (in no particular order):

1. Fat Tire Amber Ale (Colorado)
2. Dry Stout
3. Belgian Wit Bier (Also called Biere Blanche)
4. Belgian Trappist/Abbey styles, especially Chimay Blue
5. Scottish & Scotch Ales
6. Oh, ok… almost ANYTHING from Belgium.
7. Porter (George Washington’s favorite type of beer)

More on this subject later.