In terms of homebrew both my wife and my parents gifted me with shiny new homebrew toys. From my parents I got a really nice Monster Mill 3 grain grinder. My wife got my a Bayou Classic SQ-14 propane burner. While I’m the one who does most everything in the kitchen from cooking to cleaning, I know she’s happier to not have to maneuver around me on a brew day just to get a snack or some milk for Gabriel. So now I’ve been working on moving my brewing experience to the garage. It’s a little colder, but there’s a lot more space, and it is much easier to clean things up afterwards.

The first new brew day in the garage wasn’t smooth sailing. I knew there would be some extra work figuring out how to deal with new processes and set things up in a new space. What I hadn’t been counting on was my mill utterly failing. At first the free spinning rollers wouldn’t spin. Then nothing spun and the torque from the drill tried to rip off my thumb. Fortunately I let go of the drill quick and the mill simply tipped dumping grain all over. I had been smart enough to use old musty grain to test the mill out with before putting the good grain in. Occasionally I can be forward thinking. Anyway after about two hours of banging on it finally fixed the issue (the hopper needed to be bent in a little bit as one of the edges of the hopper was just barely touching the roller, but created enough friction to keep it from moving). Once working it was great! Sadly my first brew day was hours longer than even brewing in the kitchen had been. Fortunately my second garage brewing attempt was much better, and was about an hour quicker than I’d normally have; and that’s even after doing a 90 minute boil on a bunch of pilsner malt!

Professionally speaking I’ve been the assistant brewer at Rogues’ Harbor Inn for roughly 9 months. The start of this year saw the release of the first beer that is based off my own original recipe! My first ever commercial brew was a Robust Porter. It’s a little different than the homebrew version that I made. I generally get much better attenuation at home than I do at the brewery. As a result the commercial version of my porter was a little sweeter, but that actually worked out well. It accentuated the chocolate malt and gave it a nice espresso and chocolate character. The homebrew was a little more roasted since it finished drier. I’m happy with my first commercial recipe and I certainly hope other people have been enjoying it as well!

I’m hoping this trend continues, not just in my beer related portion of life, but in all facets of my life! I could use a really good year since the second half of last year was less than stellar for me.

Cheers!

Apparently the term was originally born as a jab about those people who drool all over their newest bit of technology in public. Of course this term was given to us by the same people who insist on using the term “fanboi”, yes, with that awful spelling. A lot of the words born on the Internet, usually spread like wildfire by forum trolls, make me cringe. It’s as bad as people who use all the abbreviations popularized by texting even in long form media. This new abuse of the English language might, in my opinion, be the worst. It certainly has jumped straight to the top 5 at any rate.

I was asking myself this again the other day when I realized that not only had I grown used to there being no image, I’ve actually come to like the large empty space. To me it is somehow oddly compelling. While this might change at some point, for now I think I’m enjoying things just the way they are.

Trust me, I’ve been watching hockey, especially this years playoffs, even after the Sabres were eliminated. Tampa Bay sending team Ovechkin packing has been a hilight for me of the second round. Seeing that the Vancouver v. Nashville series is the only competitive one of the second round is something that I would have never dreamed of! Secretly I’m pulling for a Tampa Bay v. Nashville Stanley Cup series. Why? Why not! We’ve seen a lot of the team that every one expects to win big year after year. It’s fun to watch a couple of discounted teams overcome the odds and show why best of 7 series are far more entertaining than a one and done can ever be.

So here’s to a few more weeks of big saves, heroic goals, questionable calls, and unlikely stars. And if there just happens to be a big all out brawl between Boston and Philly, well I can’t say that I’d complain about that.

My main brew day setup currently consists of the Blichmann Boilmaker 10 gallon brew pot(which is also used to heat water for the hot liquor tank and for the mash), a 10 gallon Rubber Maid cooler that has been converted in to a mash tun. In theory I should be able to do a bit over 20lbs of grain in it. So far the most I’ve used with it was 17lbs for an IPA I have going. Right now I have a second 5 gallon cooler that serves as a hot liquor tank, but I’m probably going to replace that this summer with a 10 gallon one. I use glass carboys for my fermentations (6.5 gallon ones for primary fermentation which then gets racked over to 5 gallon carboys). When the beer is ready it gets put in to 5 gallon Cornelius kegs(old soda style kegs) where it then gets put in the kegerator to carbonate(forced carbonation) and to be served. Most of my beers take 3 to 4 weeks from the point I start the brew to the day I’m ready to drink them. Once I have all the plumbing I need I’ll be using the pump to transfer hot wort so that I don’t have to lift the heavy kettle to the stove. Everything is currently transferred via gravity so it involves a lot more lifting than I’d like to do.

It’s amazing how this hobby has grown in to quite a passion for me. I like the brewing process every bit as much as I do enjoying a good beer. I’ve had some times where many months pass between brew sessions, but I always come back to it. There’s still a lot more growth to do and things I can get to enhance my homebrew setup. It’s a great adventure and I look forward to the next chapter of it!

What premise is that has raised my ire while nursing the first coffee of the morning? “Airline fees aren’t all that bad.” Yes, someone is actually choosing to defend the price gouging of the airline industry. The title was enough to make me go What The… But after a cleansing breath I figured, well maybe this person actually has some point I never thought of – some brilliant insight that will make me see everything in a brand new light. Yeah, right.

The ever increasing add-on fees that airlines have been imposing the last several years have gotten a lot of press. They rank above, in many travelers minds, the TSA for the most annoying thing about air travel these days. In fact it hardly seems a month can go by without some airline inventing some new fee to further burden the pocket book. To say that this never ending cavalcade of fees has a good side (to people other than investors in the airline industry) is ludicrous.

The authors premise that fees make it so that one pays for what they get rather than paying for many services that they don’t care about is absurd. Perhaps if the airline industry lowered the average fare rate and then added fees for additional services the author’s argument might be given some merit, but the fact that the fees are imposed on top of the current fares takes a lot away from that premise. It’s especially worse because the airline advertises all these services they have as perks of traveling with them, but then wants to charge you extra once you’ve purchased your ticket. Those aren’t perks, those are optional extras and shouldn’t be advertised as why flying on airline x is superior to catching a ride with airline y. It’s especially absurd to claim that baggage fees make sense as carrying your luggage is a basic service of transportation. What’s next, I buy a car, but if I want the trunk to be accessible I have to pay additional service fees to the manufacturer? Plus the more burdened travelers are with checked baggage fees the more they resort to cramming as much as possible on to carry-on making boarding an unboarding a nightmare of rude people all clamoring for as much space ass they can grab at.

Fees exist simply so that they don’t have to dramatically increase ticket rates to cover their losses in these rough economic times. When people scour the Internet for the lowest fare the airlines have come up with fees as a way to make up for the loss while allowing them to look competitive from a ticket pricing standpoint. People might balk at fees, but they would scream murder if the overall average ticket price dramatically shot up. It’s part of the psychology of traveling and the airlines know it. If they can find creative ways to get a dollar here and another dollar there they will. The airlines are a business and they aren’t there for your comfort, they are there to make money. But that doesn’t mean we should go about saying that these extra fees are a good thing in terms of air travel.

The only part of the author’s article that I agree with is that fees are here to stay. They are going to become an accepted part of air travel that people are just going to learn to accept rather than having to come up with slower or less convenient means of reaching their destination. For me, however, between fees and complimentary gropings, well the next trip to see my parents we’re planning on taking a couple extra days so we can drive there and back.

Anyway…

One feature I’ve always wished would be added to the iPad is the ability to select a default browser rather than always being forced to Safari every time that I click on a link. Apple doesn’t seem interested in adding that functionality. Normally the “walled garden” approach that Apple has adopted doesn’t bother me. I like that for most things the device just works. Still some of the things Apple seems anxious to lock down make little sense to me, especially from a usability standpoint. Maintaining control isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however singsong a strangle hold is, and that’s what it feels like Apple is intent on doing sometimes. With all that in mind I finally decided it was time to jailbreak my iPad.

Greenpois0n was recently updated allowing an untethered jailbreak of iOS 4.2.1. I read up on it and skimmed a couple forums to see if people had been experiencing very bad things when using it to jailbreak their iPads. Other than a couple incidents which read like idiot user syndrome rather than an issue with the software, I didn’t find many negative reports. So after backing up my iPad I decided to take the plunge.

I followed the instructions I found on padgadget.com which seemed simple enough, but the update kept failing. Each time my ipad booted back in to its normal non-jailbroken self so I wasn’t worried about bricking it(I did a complete back up of it before I started). After looking around a bit I found some advice on a couple of forums that worked like a charm. Basically I had to use the terminal to open up greenpois0n directly from the .app package rather than double clicking the pretty icon. For whatever reason opening it via the terminal worked and the loader for Cydia showed up on my iPad. It was only about ten minutes from start to the point where Atomic was set as my default iPad browser.

Not bad for a days work – which could have been only a few minutes of work if I hadn’t ran in to problems initially. So far everything seems to be working well and I haven’t had any stability issues.

Virgin Mobile has had the Samsung Intercept for a little while now. It’s the first Android phone that they’ve offered and I can safely say I wasn’t overly excited by it. It got pretty bad reviews for being laggy and having a very non-responsive touchscreen. Then there is the price. Sure, with prepaid the phone prices are always on the high side as there is no contract that helps to subsidize the phones cost, but for what the Intercept offered the price was bad. Today Virgin Mobile announced the LG Optimus V. Not only does it look like a much nicer phone (early reviews are backing that up), but it’s 100 bucks cheaper which puts it squarely in the range I’m willing to pay.

Sure, this is by no means a top of the line phone. That’s the one drawback with a lot of the prepaid services, they tend to sell at best mid-range phones that tend to be “outdated”. However seeing as how a phone has never been, and likely never will be my primary device of communication, having the latest and greatest isn’t a major priority for me. When I’m out and about it’ll let me quickly check email or look up something on the web which is all I’m really looking for. And of course all this comes in at 25$ a month for unlimited texts, email, web, data. Sure, it only gives me 300 minutes of voice a month, but right now I average about 30 minutes a month. With my current phone the highest voice minutes used in a month was a little over 200 and that was used by Denise who was having issues with her phone and spending all my minutes trying to get someone to fix her problem.

I’ve still got 60 days and gobs of minutes with my current prepaid so I’ve got time to ponder it, and to see what other phones might come out in the prepaid arena. But right now I’m thinking that come my birthday I might finally be joint the smartphone generation.

So, once again, I’m going to attempt to do a post a day. These might end up being a lot more like microblogging type of posts rather than a lot of long form posts, but hopefully it’s going to jump start things. I’ve really fallen behind in writing of any kind these days. No excuses sounds like a good mantra, but really, can I make it work for the next 30 days (March 4th being Gabriel’s birthday)? I guess we’re about to find out.