Author: Tom Kern

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…

It’s out of my hands…

No it really is… mainly since it’s ethereal in digital realm and all no physicality…

OK let me start again, so there was this “fire” over the weekend, and if you haven’t already you can go read about it. However it did get me thinking if I was presented with a similar set of circumstances what would I do? Probably nothing since I would never pay enough attention to connect all of the dots. No really I probably wouldn’t notice until my couch was fully engulfed and even then I would have to be sitting in it.

No honestly what would I do? I look at my “house” and I don’t have any real attachment to it… I mean it’s a nice a house, the back yard is killer, and if I was just a tad more social I would probably invite people over more often then the divisional round of football playoffs. I think the best way to describe my relationship to my house is probably quite similar to that of “Tyler Durden” or rather the man the that spawned Tyler Durden to paraphrase

no matter what I had the couch situation taken care of, now it’s gone. I need a new couch…

I know it’s no where close (and I can’t find the exact quote just deal). The cruxt of the scene is it’s all just stuff. That you don’t need or more then you need. And that’s how I look at my place it’s just the Kingdom of stuff. Nothing that can’t be replaced. I don’t have any pets, I don’t have wedding pictures what pictures I do have are of friends or their kids and while the pictures of the kids are cute I’m pretty sure I will get more at some point, and lets not get me started on furniture or clothes. As for the electronics, I was due for a upgrade anyway! I have a bookcase of DVD’s that I’ve watched once or twice each that can almost all be replaced. And those that can’t will be out on Blu-Ray or whatever the format of the digital future will be.

The “stuff” that I have that matters to me is all digital in nature. My pictures from various hunting trips, races, trips to the East Coast, and as silly as this sounds I have a couple of cell phone pics from outings to where ever that I keep for the memories. Music, so much music from so many things that I listen to constantly (and all three regular reads know that I generally pull the title of each post from what ever song is playing in iTunes when I’m writing). Files… all of my files from school personal projects and writing that I’ve done (not everything I write ends up here). Finally records… tax, finical, and other various tracking mechanisms. All totally digital.

Now granted I have multiple backups of all of these files and if I lost ONE computer I could pretty easily recreate 99% of the content. In a total loss situation though I would screwed since I don’t take my laptop (which for everything but gaming I consider my main computer) everywhere. Heck I take it on trips and that is probably the single dumbest thing I could do.

Hey nice MacBook Pro, I’m going to take that now!

To top it all off I’m a IT guy for my day job, well I like to think of myself as a IT guy most days. And what do we preach in IT when it comes to backups? One copy onste and one copy off-site (more then 50 miles away, and on different media if possible) I mean it’s not rocket science though some days it seems like it. I guess it’s time to break down and look at something a bit more comprehensive then just “Time Machine” for my backup needs.

I need secure, automagic, high storage limits, and accessible anywhere. I would like neat, easy, and multi-platform. I don’t need to backup all my computers just one. Anything that doesn’t live on my laptop can be copied over easy enough.

Who would have thought a little fire could cause so much thought?

The only downside to this plan? When the zombies come I’m scewed for my data not so much for guns.