Spiced Summer Ale
Saturday, June 09, 2007 - 09:23 PM
I did a little brewin’ tonight. I had some ingredients left over from my last batch, which was a pale ale, so I kinda threw together a recipe around that. Since it’s just about summer, I decided to do a lighter ale with some spices that would make it a refreshing drink for a hot summer day.
There was one problem with the recipe, however. I had 1/2 pound of light dry malt extract that I was going to use, but I couldn’t find it come brew time! Apparently, it just up and walked away (I didn’t know malt extract could do that). Anyways, because of that this recipe ends up being a little lower gravity than I had originally planned. Since it’s supposed to be a lighter style drink for a summer day, I figure that it’s not that big of a deal.
Spiced Summer Ale
6 pounds Northwestern Gold LME
1 pound Crystal 60L
1 pound belgium biscuit
.5 oz Nugget (11.6%) @ 60 min.
1 oz Willamette (4.5%) @ 30 min.
.5 oz Cascade (5.8%) @ 5 min.
1/2 tsp. yeast nutrients @ 15 min.
1/2 oz crushed coriander seed at flameout
1 oz sweet orange peel at flameout
1 Tbsp. whole cloves at flameout
1056 American Ale Wyeast
Add 2 gallons water to brew pot and heat to 160’. Put specialty grains in grain bag and steep at 160’ for 30 minutes. Heat 1/2 gallon water in separate pot. Remove grain bag and place in strainer above brew pot, pour hot water from other pot over the grains. Turn up heat and add liquid malt extract, bring to a boil. Add hops and yeast nutrients according to schedule.
Place coriander, orange peel and cloves in a grain or hops bag. At end of boil, remove wort from heat and add bag with spices. Let spices steep for 20 minutes while wort cools. Put 1 1/2 gallons cold water in fermenter. Remove bag with spices and place in strainer over fermenter, pout 1/2 gallon cold water over bag.
Pour wort into fermenter and top off to over 5 gallons with cold water. Add yeast, let ferment for up to one week and transfer to secondary for 2 weeks then bottle or keg.
Minor site improvement
Friday, June 08, 2007 - 06:30 PM
Well, I finally got around to changing the poster page to utilize the Lightbox effect to display the images of the posters, getting rid of that stupid javascript popup that would cause the browser to flip to the top of the page when you clicked on the links. Also, this eliminates the possibility that some pop-up blocker might get in the way of displaying the images.
Eventually I plan on updating some of the poster images. Some are just crappy images, some are too small, and some are too big. The plan is to get the best possible image for each poster (even if that means scanning them in - which is a pain in the ass on a letter size flat bed scanner because you have to scan it in sections and stitch those sections together in Photoshop). Also, I want to decide on a standard size - not only for the sake of consistency, but also because the ones that are too small don’t really show any of the detail, and the larger ones take too long to load and can be a bit cumbersome since you have to scroll down to see the whole thing.
I’m not sure when I’ll get around to any of this, but that’s the plan.
Note to SBC
Friday, June 08, 2007 - 03:10 PM
It would really be helpful if you didn’t randomly change your customers’ static public IP addresses without telling them first.
This isn’t the first time I’ve dealt with this issue with SBC. I have some clients who (unfortunately) have SBC as their ISP. A few of them have static public IP addresses, which they need for various reasons which are unimportant here. Obviously, their networks (firewalls, VPNs, what have you) behind the router (DSL modem) are configured with the static address information. For various reasons, SBC will change the clients’ IP address. This is usually when a change is made to the account, like a different price plan or speed.
Again, this is not the first time I’ve dealt with this. My client will call me up and say their internet is down. I’ll go through some troubleshooting over the phone. I’ll start with the basics, checking to make sure everything is plugged in and has the appropriate lights on, then having them restart everything just to be sure. Then I’ll move on to pinging the firewall, the router, stuff on the outside by IP address instead of domain name, etc. Then I’ll have them log in to the firewall and the router and check the settings. (Of course, if I’m near their office and can get there in a timely fashion, I’ll do all of this myself.)
Once I determine that everything on their network is functioning properly, and that the problem is outside of their network, I have them call SBC (or, if I’m on site, I’ll call). Now is when the real fun begins. You see, if you have never dealt with SBC support for their internet services, their de-facto answer is “the problem’s on your end”. They don’t check anything, they don’t test anything, they just tell you that the problem isn’t them, it’s you. If it’s the customer on the phone with them, they really have no recourse at this point and end up calling me back. If I’m on the phone with them, I can begin to explain why I know that the problem is SBC’s. Eventually, we get around to the fact that SBC did, in fact, change the customer’s IP settings.
Okay, again, not the first time I’ve dealt with this. This is so aggravating for several reasons:
First, doesn’t it occur to SBC that if their customers have plans with static public IP addresses there is probably a good reason for that, and that arbitrarily changing the IP address just might cause some problems for them?
Second, even if there’s some technical reason for making the change, which I tend to doubt, why in the world would you do it without notifying the customer beforehand? Really. That’s just insane.
But lastly, when the customer calls for support because of this change, which I might point out is inevitable, don’t friggin’ sit there and tell them that the problem is on their network!! It should be painfully obvious to the first support person that you talk to, once they look at your account information (assuming that they actually are), that there has been a change made to their account. What’s going on here? Why does it take more than one call, or having to convince the support person otherwise, to figure this out?
Basically it comes down to this: Why does SBC train their support personnel to just say “the problem’s on your end” without actually doing any troubleshooting, or even looking at the customer’s account information?