Pretty Day
08:52:44 MST on Tuesday November 29 2005 #It is bright and sunny and cooold ! Very cold, so that cat doesn't want go on long walks. Quick check out the front of the property, where has Japhy, our neighbours cat , gone. Cool, now in in in!
So cold that this morning walking into the library, the trees out front, in the sun, had crows sitting in them all huddled down. Very uncrow-like. They looked cute! I'm quite sure that crows hate looking cute.
Friday Cat Blogging: On the lookout
13:16:52 MST on Friday November 25 2005 #Thor, ever vigilant. He's probably on the lookout for more of that yummy turkey :)
Homebrew.in
16:33:45 MST on Thursday November 24 2005 #I officially launched my beer blog, Homebrew.in` last night. It is there that I will be musing on and reporting on beer, homebrewing, and all related things. This should allow this blog to go back to the way it used to be before I got this hobby which seems to have taken over this blog with looks like half the posts this month :)
Go check it out, and watch that space for further brewin' news.
Furl, Tagyu and PithHelmet
10:20:47 MST on Wednesday November 23 2005 #I use Furl for storing all my bookmarks. It's free it works, it has search - and stores an archive of all the pages you've visited, so in my opinion it's better that it's main competitor del.icio.us (though del.icio.us has a much nicer api, feels much more hackable, and keeps getting better while furl seems a little stuck.)
Anyhow the one feature that del.icio.us has the I really want for Furl is suggested tags/categories. This saves me from actually thinking about where a bookmark should be organized - it's just labelled for me. Thankfully Tagyu exists, has a rest API, and a has Siddharth Uppal's user contributed perl API (which will hopefull be on CPAN shortly). So all I needed to do was mash them together.
Which I did using a Pithhelmet Machete script - a simple perl script that alters the HTML for the furl submit form every time I request it. Think greasemonkey for Safari, in perl :) !
Anyhow - if you want to do the same here's the script.
Sony DRM Update
13:32:53 MST on Monday November 21 2005 #So last week was a big week in the Sony DRM story, with Sony succumbing to the pressure to do something good, and offering a recall of all the the CDs. If you've bought a CD on this list, and played it on your windows box you are most likely infected. Sony will send you a replacement CD without the DRM (and actually let you download the MP3s from their site). They've also released a 3rd un-installer for the rootkit, and this one doesn't look to have major security holes. If you used a previous version, read this on how to fix you machine.
In tangentially related news it looks like the rootkit infringed on other peoples copyrights which is fun/sad as it's sole purpose was to prevent people from infringing on Sony's. Also the EULA requires you delete the music from the CD if you go bankrupt -- honest.
Finally today's Foxtrot:
Beer: Brewing the Espresso Porter
08:40:02 MST on Tuesday November 22 2005 #On Saturday I brewed up my Porter, but to keep it interesting I changed up a few things. The porter was supposed to be an western, microbrew style porter -- like Sierra Nevada's hoppy and dark. But since we aren't huge fans of hops, I decided to reduce the hopping time, and give it it's bite from something else: Espresso -- something we are big fans of.
I spent a little time researching a decided to go with 4 double shots added just before pitching the yeast. If the flavour isn't there at racking time, I'll add some more.
The process itself went smoother, it's clear I'm getting better at this. And the next morning we woke up to the smell of beer brewing, and a nice big head of krausen. :)
Beer: Bottling the Stout
11:00:19 MST on Sunday November 20 2005 #On Friday we bottled the stout after five weeks of conditioning in the carboy. In another couple of weeks it should be ready to taste - though further conditioning should improve it's flavor. I'm guessing from the hydrometer readings that it's about 4.2% alcohol. The small sample I tasted, tasted sweet and stouty, a very good sign, as the IPA tasted evil at this point.
This morning I applied the handsome new labels, (yes that's a turkish mosaic you see in the center), and now all there is too do is wait.
Friday Cat Blogging: Hitting the books
09:28:52 MST on Saturday November 19 2005 #Ok, It's Saturday but I snapped the pic last night, so it sort counts, doesn't it ?
The Elysian
11:14:33 MST on Friday November 18 2005 #On our weekend in Seattle we managed to do both beers, and lunch at The Elysian . This brewpub has always been a fav. Amazing beer - and a big space where getting a table and hearing your conversation is never a problem. Except this time around we discovered that sometimes on Friday nights getting a table is a little more difficult :). Still good food, with a range of vegi selections, and truly amazing beer brewed on the premises kept us coming back. And this weekend was no different. As for the brews we tried the Porter, the Stout and the truly stunning Barleywine. The Barleywine was described on the menu as
nearly all Pale malt, with some Crystal, Caramalt and Munich malt for color
It also had 11.7% alcohol by volume. This was a heavy, malty, complex brew that packed a punch. I was very very impressed.
Skiing !!!
12:57:56 MST on Tuesday November 15 2005 #Friday morning just before we took off for Seattle, Rachel checked the weather. It was going to rain..... and SNOW in the Mountains. She promptly checked the ski resorts, most all of them were opening that day. So we packed an extra suitcase full of snow gear.
In Seattle we upgraded the car to something that could hold ski's, and headed to REI and rented some teles.
On Saturday morning we headed to Snoqualmie for a day of teleing. (We'd hoped to do Mt Baker which had 80" of snow - but also has a sucky road that required chains, not something our rental came with :) ) As it turns out we didn't quite pull of a day - the first day on skis is a bit tough and we hit the ground a number of times, and called it a day early. Which was ok, as much of the snow had come overnight, so when we started the day the place was empty and the powder was plentiful, but by the time we left there was a pretty good number of people, and the pow had been all skied out. So that was the right call.
On the whole a heck of a lot of Fun!!! And a great start to the Season.
Omakase at Nishino
07:09:02 MST on Wednesday November 16 2005 #Mere hours after landing in Seattle on Friday we were sitting down to a truly amazing meal at Nishino.
Brandon had arranged for our foursome - Brandon, Leslie, Rachel and myself, to have the shorter of the two Omakase ("Let the chef decide") dinners offered by Nishino. This was a fabulous idea. Even the short dinner was an amazing amount of food. And it was amazing food. I was just blown away.
The dinner went down like this (as far as I can remember): It started off with three rolls - a little roe was involved but so little that Rachel was not put off -- and enough to add a nice texture. This was followed by a salad with ginger sauce and fried lotus root. Fried lotus root is a good idea. Next up a small round of sashimi followed by mushroom broth served in little teapots. Smokey and delicious. Then was a course of halibut cheek, mmmmmm! Penultimately we had sushi - a nice selection of damned good sushi. We finished with mochi ice cream - mango and strawberry.
We also finished very full, and very very happy. This is what dinner should be like every night :)
If you want to get an even better idea of what this was like Tasting Menu has a beautifully illustrated ebook describing one Omakase dinner from Nishino -- and an autumn one at that. Autumn Omakase. You can also check out some of their Nishino Reviews
DRM Take Two: The Sony Rootkit
20:20:19 MST on Monday November 14 2005 #A few weeks ago I wrote up a little piece on DRM and how it means A.) You don't actually own anything you buy when that that thing has DRM B.) How this costs you more money than actually owning it (and doesn't stop copyright infringers from getting things for free, or even slow them down)
Last week a major DRM story broke, when it was reveal the Sony used a "root kit" as part of their DRM on certain CDs. Root kits are normally use by black hat hackers, to maintain control of systems they've broken into. The kits prevent you from knowing that your machine has been broken into, and what your machine is doing on behalf of the hackers.
And this is exactly what Sony's drm software did it did. When you popped the CD into you're CDROM drive, on a windows box, it asked you if you wanted to install their music software (which is the only way to listen to this disk on a Windows box). When you clicked yes, it also installed a hidden program to monitor all usage of your CD drive and prevent you from using it to rip the CD. But the program that was doing this, altered windows so you wouldn't even know it existed, or that it was running. What's worse if you did manage to find it -- a very difficult task indeed, as almost all virus scanners are fooled, as is Windows itself -- when you remove it, it intentionally disables your CD drive. It does so so thoroughly that a reinstall of windows is the easiest way to fix the problem.
These are not the tactics of ethical people. These are not the tools of the good guys. And this is the way DRM works, sinking from one unethical low, to new even deeper depths.
If you want to track this story further watch this site.
Beer Tasting: Part 1 and Part 2
09:57:59 MST on Tuesday November 8 2005 #Part 1:
Two Fridays ago, the day Brooke and Jamie got in, we popped open the first of the "nmcfarl Espaņola IPA". It was unfortunately ungood. Jamie liked the "smoothness", he felt was inherent in all the homebrews he had tasted. Other than that not a lot of compliments. It did taste like beer. But it tasted like a VERY hoppy American Style IPA, which it was supposed to be, so that was good. The bad was that it had heavy fruit notes, that clash with the style badly. And it had an odd chemical after taste. On the whole not so good. It was also cloudy like a Hefewisen, indicating to me an insufficient cold break on brewing day -- something I had suspected at the time.
Part 2:
This last Friday, November 4th, I popped open another bottle. It had been 2 weeks since bottling and this was the recommended date to pop them open, according to my brewing book. This was good advise, and the beer tastes considerably better now. The fruitiness has mellowed considerably, and now there is only a mild cherry note, which adds to the complexity and doesn't detract as before. The hops have perhaps mellowed a little, and the whole thing tastes much more balanced. The chemical notes linger, which is unfortunate, but the beer is quite drinkable - more so than a number of IPA's which I've had in the past, and this is a good thing - cause I have 40 some odd bottles to drink :)
Bandelier Hike to the Rio Grande
06:30:24 MST on Monday November 7 2005 #On Friday, Brooke and Jamie's last real day with us, we headed up to Bandelier. As usualy we did the ruins trail hike. This pic out of the official photo gallery gives you a good idea of what that's about.
That hike is cool - definitely a must see if you visit, but the next hike was even better. The after a nice packed lunch of cheesy potatoe burritos, we headed out down to the Rio Grande, on a hike we'd never done before (you can see it on this map pdf). It was amazing. This was way more amazing that most any of the amazing hikes in the park. (It's a pretty amazing park :)). We had fall colors, waterfalls, the remnants of huge rock falls, bright red canyon walls, shade and a babbling brooke almost all the way out to the Rio Grande -- which was looking impressivly full of water and moving along a quite a clip. This is the hike at Bandelier, at least for this time of year. It is simply stunning.
Fall
08:29:30 MST on Sunday November 6 2005 #I just got back from my morning kitten walk, and it's fall. The light is all angular, the wind bitter. The temperature is in the low 30's, and the cat wanted to cut the walk short. Most notable however was the leaves falling, like a constant rain. Walking under the trees out front, you get covered in little leaves, and I had to keep shaking them off of the Economist I was reading. The cat of course had a ball attacking them .....