Author: Tom Kern

How can you have more pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

Traditions are good… some traditions die because the are no longer needed or are no longer cared for. Others die simply because something better comes along and becomes the new tradition. And sometimes your fucking neighbors are working with large power tools at 7pm on a Sunday night because they are just that annoying!

I can’t wait for the heat to get here to put people in of doors until the fall.

One tradition that has fallen by the way side or me is the blogging/writing/whatever on Sundays. It’s been supplanted by football in the fall and movies on Sunday afternoon for the rest of the year. So just like last month and blatantly ripping off the death-by-blog crew yet again, I give you the return of Sunday night blogging. Since I seem to be doing ok with small changes over the course of the last year or so it seems like the time is right.

In the last week there has been alot of beer drunk, and alot of cars turning left which is to say I’ve been on vacation and on internet hiatus other then my phone. So that basically means I’ve been using the living bejesus out of my phone for the last couple of days. Now what I find interesting is my cell phone billing period starts on the 7th of every month. And since I took off for Nascar on the 7th I thought it would be neat to share some quick numbers on cell usage by one guy sending text messages and emails to people who really don’t care that much about NASCAR. Which is to say my friends.

So from Wed 4/7/2010 to Sunday 4/11/2010
-Voice Minutes — 12 (includes all kinds of minutes)
-Txt/mms — 309 txt / 68 mms (inbound and out on both counts)
– Data used — 15MB

For me this is what I would call “heavy usage” basically I was burning through a full battery charge every 36hours. The blackberry I currently have (9630) is notorious for having poor battery life. So that is one guy, now multiply that by the 20k to 30k that are out there for the week and it add in that there are 5 towers to cover the whole space of the track and affiliated parking/camping. And this all happens for two weeks out of the year (one in the spring and one in the fall) when there is no racing going on the local area has a population of probably less then 200 people.

Kind of makes you have a little bit more sympathy for the kinds of things that wireless engineers have to deal with.

I’m just really happy that the guy next to us had a 3ton floor jack in his camp when I had to replace the tire on my truck.

IT’s Alive!(?)….

The latest batch of home-brew is fermenting… and well it’s fermenting. I’m on about a 3 batch a year clip. Which for how much beer I drink vs how much I have away to the curious hordes is about the perfect amount. The main obstacles to higher production levels have more to do with my unwillingness to invest in a true fridge for fermentation or dispensing.

Actually this little hobby of mine is coming up to a cross roads of sorts for me… On the one hand I can keep doing what I’m going which are kits and recipes that other people have come up with and keep using the dry malt and syrups. It’s easy and fairly “quick” to turn around a batch of beer in about 3 hours. On the other hand I don’t have the level of control that I would like to have for the final product. I don’t know how much control I really can have since there are so many variables at my level of brewing (temperature, yeast variety, sugar in the brew) and 1 bad part of the process and I’m screwed. On the other hand I don’t feel that I’m at a level that would justify spending the time and money to work all of the “variables” out.

I tend to be of the opinion that I need to either;
1. Start coming up with my own recipes (no small task but do able)
2. Leave the malt extract world behind and start looking at going to a all grain process. (no small task but doable)

I’m tending to lean toward the all grain process since it would let me develop some additional skills in my hobby and at the same time allow me to work slowly but surely to developing my own recipes.

In either case I need to rework my fermentation cooler. I like my ales just as much as the next guy but the freezer with a thermo-coupler is not cutting it anymore. My biggest issue with the freezer is that it’s just a pain in the back (literally) to get the carboy in and out when it’s full. Also the temperature control is not the greatest. I’m thinking a small fridge that could hold 2 carboys would be about perfect. Have one carboy on fermentation and have the other one on aging. I’m not worried about carbonating the beers as that takes place in the keg which would stay in the freezer (though the CO2 tank needs to come out side so I can get two kegs in there). The fermentation fridge also opens up possibilities of expanding beyond beer to things like Wine or Mead (OK maybe not mead).

For the time being I have a batch that will be ready in about a week or so and maybe sometime this summer I will sit down and make this rather nifty chiller that was on life hacker on Friday… that thing would be deadly for Cardinals tailgating.

Gravity zero see me through….

So before I get to the main content of this post… a quick request. If this site is taking longer then 15 seconds to resolve and longer then 10 seconds to load on your Cable or DSL or FTTH connection drop me a comment with the approx times and your connection type. The site has been really slow for the last couple of days and I can’t decide if it’s just my internet or something else.

OK now on to the main cruxt of the conversation this evening.

So you may have heard that I started doing the gym thing on what amounts to a pretty consistent basis last summer. Now while I may sometimes say I was “duped” into going I really can’t say that since I was given every opportunity to say no on multiple occasions and duck out. Oh no… I went… and went… and went.

That started in August, it’s now March… I now get cranky if I haven’t had my gym time to burn off energy. I know this because I’ve had a couple of week long breaks in there (elk hunting, christmas, on call) (yes I take on call off from the gym…) and after about 5 days I start getting really angsty (not the best word but it’s the closest I can come up with). So I see this as a good sign since I’ve always have a certain amount of nervous energy that I’ve never really known how to burn off effectively. And I hate to say it but the time in does seem to have improved my disposition…. I’m not all sunshine and daisies, but at least now I will smile before I make a smart ass remark. So yes it’s been good.

In my time I’ve basically been doing cardio and some weight training, I’m not looking to go into competition more of build some muscle where it was just flappy before (mostly done at this point). For the last month or so I’ve been working on upper body (chest and arms) and to a lesser extent core, I’ve been not so good at mixing it up or the last couple of weeks and I felt myself getting just a touch bored which as we all know if the first step to the “ah fuck it I will go to the gym tomorrow” which ultimately leads to not going to the gym.

That is where I was about two weeks ago. I was talking to my partner in crime at work who is doing his own gym type thing and was having the same level of frustration starting to build. And it was there over lunch he remembered this nifty website for his Blackberry called “gymtechnik.com” and that help him over come his hump… ok I will try anything once, so I wander over there and sign up for a free account. And it’s actually pretty nice it’s just a online workout planner (which I had no idea existed until this website) and found a couple workouts that I could do on at my own pace that were hitting the same muscles in different ways. That and now I also have a way to track progress and what I’ve worked on which appeals to my analytical side (hmmm how interesting I work on curls in the weeks leading up to Nascar and football season… how very interesting)

So yeah, that gymtechnik site is pretty handy for me, yes there are others but none work as well with the Blackberry as that one and until I unload this phone that is the one I’m going to be using (so a solid 3 months minimum knowing me 🙂 )

It’s a good day to fly away…

So in my adventures at work occasionally something cool happens like, my partner in crime at work and I get tickets to the spring training game going on across the street from work simply because it’s a Monday and we are the first ones to say yes. Now a event like this doesn’t happen often and when it does I must gloat (as I know any number of my “friends” would do) to the schmucks still at work in their offices.

First the picture I sent… and then a selection of txt responses I got… Sans name first person to figure out who sent what gets a six pack of Nilla Wafers and first hit off the next keg of homebrew.


For context here is the message that went with my picture…

Subject: God I hate my life;
My asshole boss gave me tickets to a spring training and told me to go… the ass!

And now for the contestants….

“Gloater…I hope you choke on your fried Twinkie”(This one is my personal favorite.)

“That son of a bitch. Next time you should snub him by giving the tickets to me”

“What a douche…and I’m not sure I mean your boss”

“Poor thing”

“Ahh so jealous!”

To know me and to know my friends is to know sarcasm at it’s highest form.

Drown in the now…

I seem to have picked up a new hobby in the last couple of months and I didn’t even realize it until I got done talking to my dad. Apperntly I’ve stumbled into gun collecting or at the very least the old man is giving me first dibs on guns that he either already has or doesn’t want. Now the part about the old man offering me guns is nothing new. The new part is the quantity and the quality of the guns…

2009 and before… it tended to be new rifles and more of a informative “Hey if you want a new hunting rifle this is one you should look at”. In 2010 I’ve talked to my dad three times this year… twice he called about guns the first one was a heavy barrel .308. I already shoot a 30-06 elk and deer hunting so the .308 isn’t of that much interest to me… though if you knew the kind of country we hunted elk in (an area that we lovingly refer to as the “nuclear wasteland of elk”) a .308 starts to make alot more sense. Of course setting up what amounts to a sniper position for elk hunting doesn’t really appeal to me all that much… but then again that’s basically what I’m already doing.

The other gun my dad called me about was a Colt AR-15 .223 (post ban no flash suppressor) that one piqued my interest and I have no idea why. It’s a .223 round which at distance is a little light for elk hunting (figure 200 to 300 yd shot) but it would be good for just about everything else. So this gun truly comes into the category of “toys” or if your Curtis “zombie weapon”.

My issues are all my own and I’m torn, yes I would really like to get this “toy” but at the same time the responsible side of me says there are alot of other things you can do with that money (I get that alot from responsible side it’s all responsible and stuff, it’s really annoying) why am I posting this? because it’s truly the biggest drama in life.. and if my biggest problem is whether or not to buy a gun I know that I truly have no problems.

*alot of mumbling*

Soundgarden is playing right now… and well lets just say I’ve never realized how much Chris Cornell mumbles…. I also never noticed how many times I’ve used one particular Soundgarden song… So yeah… might be time to start broadening my musical horizons or start drilling deeper into the stuff I have.

On “House” tonight the patient of the week was a blogger who wrote EVERYTHING on their blog… except about her bowel movements.

This is the point where I was planning on describing in detail the various types of bowel movements I experince…. lets just say lack of beer and some pretty decent judgment has kept me from doing that…

Your welcome, though if you really want to hear about bowel movements you may want to check in with the deathbyblog crowd… I hear the youngest member has a .44 caliber diaper…..

That is not something I want to face… ever.

For the lust burn in hell…

How I know I’m getting old to fast…. I just mumbled to myself “I’m starting to get sick of this CD” in reference to a album I had bought on iTunes a few weeks ago. I haven’t bought a CD in almost 4 years… and that was such a sour experience I doubt I will buy a CD ever again. Just weird I still refer to a group of songs as a “CD”.

Ok maybe it’s just me… but it’s my blog so you have to deal with it.

How do you know you have a f*ck’d iTunes library on your PC and not your Mac?
There are differences between the two folder like this…

Perfect Circle (4 Albums) Mac 45 Items, 3 hours — PC 116 Items, 7.8 hours (Ok if Cody came down to a PC he could probably have that much perfect circle but Cody works on a whole different level then I do)

There is 14 hours of Tool on my PC… there isn’t that much Original Tool material in the whole world (I know I have everything I can get my hands on)

I might as well put my neurosis to work… I’m going to take a page out of the Death by Blog crew… and start something new this month… I won’t do it every month like them but when the mood strikes and I’m pretty sure I can follow through I will do it. We’ll see how well this works. Anyway the change? The tags on the entries going forward will be tagged with artists that popped up while I’m writing… at the very least the artist that I lifted the title from.

So now you don’t have to be on Google talk/skype list to see what I’m listening to.

Even if it is a bunch of CD’s on iTunes…