Ryan's Currently Unnamed Blog

Yay.. just got home to check on a new project i was worrying about.. and turns out i had nothing to worry about!

Yesterday, my Glass Starter Kit from Northern Brewer showed up, and i didn't get to open it up until after midnight. Within the next month or so, I wanted to be able to share my first batch of beer with some friends, so I wanted to get started right away.

I unpacked everything.. and had already read the instructions online.. so, I kinda knew what I was doing. It took about 4 hours until I was done, and I went to bed worried that I had ruined my first batch.

First, very minor, but i added the barley to my brew kettle before I brought the wort to a boil. I wasn't too worried about this, but of course.. I wanted everything to be PERFECT. But, that just wasn't going to happen.. of course. The biggest worry I had was about the yeast.

You see, it comes in this little package with a little nutrient pouch inside of it. My pouch was already half inflated, indicating that the yeast was already active. I tried to smack the package opened.. and THOUGHT that I succeeded. I can even swear that it continuted to inflate a bit more. It wasn't until I went to pitch the yeast that I realized that the nutrient pouch wasn't broken yet.

Panicked, thinking that my yeast wasn't going to fully activate, I quickly decided to break the pouch and add it to my brew. I sealed it with the stopper and the fermentation lock and before went to bed.

No activity a few hours later... and came home at lunch to find that about once every five minutes... the fementation lock was bubbling!! Yay! That means that SOMETHING in the brew was producing some kind of gas.

I went back to work, and it wasn't until about 11:30pm that I got home.. and the FIRST thing I did was check on my beer! I was SHOCKED to see this:

There was a large head formed and looked like blow off is a real possibility! So much for worrying about it not working out! The lag period supposedly can be up to 48 hours.. and here... 22 hours in.. it looks.. and even smells... a little like beer.

Ok, the smell isn't quite like GOOD beer.. but its vaguely beer related... So.. the plan is.. about a week or so in the carboy... The Thief that was missing from my kit should show up on Monday... and I should be able to get an idea of how its progressing, but i think within a week I can be bottling by first batch and within another couple weeks.. I'll be enjoy an Extra Pale Ale that I made myself!

Wooot!

OK... so.. July 4th is commonly known as independence day here in the United States. I guess about 230 years ago or so we fought some big war to tell England to leave us the hell alone. Of course, that brings to mind all kinds of questions as to how or why we got to where we are today and how we REALLY lost sight of what we were trying to do from here.. talk about scope creep! ha

Anyway... I declared Independence on the 4th of July. I officially removed (or scaled down) my use of Microsoft software from all of the machines that I have direct control over. I was hoping to be able to make a post on the evening of the 4th saying how smoothly everything went and how I don't need Microsoft at all....

But of course... the best laid plans didn't go as I would have hoped. The biggest culprit: Hardware support. I finally managed to get all the machines running Foresight Linux... some were clear sailing.. but the biggest problem was the new machine I have that's about a month old. First, nvidia's Linux support is mediocre... and it took some manual work to get X windows working, but with any luck... this issue will be solved within Foresight so that the next person who tries to do an install will not have the same issues. Yay for open-source projects being agile and able to react to issues as they arise and provide solutions to the community. I really can't say enough about Foresight and really think that they managed to solve the package management issues and now its just a matter of polishing the little things that can go wrong that make BIG headaches for non-technical people. Its getting there!

The other problem is... the shiny new Creative Labs SoundBlaster X-Fi that I finally upgraded to.... has NO Linux support. NONE. Some attempts are being made to reverse engineer a driver, but Creative is planning on taking the path that nvidia has taken... a closed source binary driver. I guess its better then nothing, but really... who cares about the internal calls that your drivers makes to your hardware? If Creative's competitors are really determined to get their hands on these DEEP DARK secrets, they can dedicate some resources to disassembling the drivers and then producing copies of Creatives Hardware at cheaper prices.

When will companies learn that the path to success is through openness and sharing. Wasn't this the problem that Apple had back in the 80s? Superior hardware and software paradigms, but a closed platform. If you didn't pay Apple royalty fees, you couldn't make hardware for their machines. The reality is, if apple would have allowed people to create hardware for their platform, they would have dominated the market, and there would have been all kinds of people trying to produce cheaper harder that was more reliable. By closing your hardware interfaces and forcing it to work with only your software, its only a matter of time before someone produces a lessor product, that's of acceptable quality for significantly less cost that will wipe your product out.

The same argument applies to Record Companies, Movies Companies, Microsoft, Sony, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, and any other area where people are trying to product their business through secrecy, legal action, or encryption and trying to dictate what people can do with the products that they purchased. The irony is, without innovation... there wouldn't be a Music/Movie/Technology industry.

Whoa.. quite a tangent rant.... only other point is.. I wanted to note.. as of last night... my qwerty typing speed is between 85-110wpm, depending on the text... I did my first exercises on a dvorak keyboard... and weighed in at a whopping 16wpm, with really short easy words. Yeah.. this is going to take some time.. but I think its worth trying to see what ends up happening with my typing skills.

So yeah... I've been busy... here's the plan on what I need to do over the next few days:

• Consider move to WordPress from b2evolution
• Finish up blog posts that are half written (most notably, barcamp2007 post)
• Prepare for my Independence Day, July 4th. Planning on making that the day that I switch away from Microsoft completely at home, and move to Foresight Linux
• Follow up with the people who said that they would try Foresight Linux and get their feedback
• Ensure the EverQuest runs just fine under Linux
• update my Foresight Linux laptop to being a development environment
• create my first package for FL, ledger!
• finish work on ledger/AIM interface so that I can track finances from anywhere in the world!
• Begin investigating using TomBoy for GTD
• Begin work on adding support for my SideKick to Conduit so that I can sync my laptop with my phone
• Keep tabs on the logo work for Foresight Linux
• think about additional project for the hardware survey for Foresight Linux
• investigate home brewing! (beer)
• investigate home brewing! (Nintendo DS)
• figure out what i'm gonna do with the 3month old busted HP Laptop

I'm sure i'm forgetting something.. but yeah.. that covers most of it.. i hope at least!