No Accounting for Taste
Monday, November 19, 2007 - 09:54 AM
Major disappointment Friday night. Like I said in my previous post about the show The Next Great American Band, there’s no accounting for taste.
Franklin Bridge was eliminated. That’s right, the group that was easily the best band in the competition was eliminated. Meanwhile, the wedding band (Denver and the Mile High Orchestra) and the novelty act (Light of Doom) are still in the running. How is that even possible? People have absolutely no taste. This is just really, really sad and pathetic.
I could go on and on about this, but I won’t. I just hope that Franklin Bridge gets the recognition that they deserve. I sincerely hope that they do not let this travesty of justice get them down, or hinder their ambitions to pursue their musical endeavors. I wish them the absolute best of luck.
Flickr Badge Revisited
Thursday, November 15, 2007 - 09:38 AM
Well, I ended up switching to the HTML Flickr badge due to the interference with the Lightbox effect. I tried updating to the latest version of Lightbox to see if it would fix the problem, since one of the revision notes said that it keeps Flash in the background, but it didn’t. I’d rather have the Flash badge, it’s just so much nicer, but what can I do? I’m going to write to the author of Lightbox, but who knows if I’ll get a response.
Creation Museum
Tuesday, November 13, 2007 - 04:34 PM
Admit it, when you heard about it you wanted to go and see what it was all about. But you didn’t want to fork over $20 to these nut-jobs just to get a glimpse at their insanity.
Well, here’s someone who went, so that you wouldn’t have to:
John Scalzi’s trip to the Creation Museum
While perfectly safe for viewing at work, if you plan on reading through the comments (which I highly recommend), you’re going to have a really hard time stifling the laughter.
Enjoy!
Flickr Badge Issue
Tuesday, November 13, 2007 - 11:34 AM
I just noticed a weird issue with having the Flickr “badge” over in the left column. If you go to one of the pages where I use the Lightbox effect (like the Posters page), and click on a graphic (initiating the lightbox), the Flickr badge stays on top of the lightbox! Does anyone out there know enough javascript to fix this? I’d really hate to get rid of the Flickr badge because of this.
Don’t Worry
Monday, November 12, 2007 - 12:53 PM
I had an interesting time brewing over the weekend. I stopped by the LHBS* to pick up the new Brewer’s Best Holiday Ale kit. (It’s a higher gravity spiced ale. If you’ve had any number of micro-brew “Christmas” ales, you know the style.)
So, Saturday afternoon I set about brewing the kit. It was pretty straight forward to begin with, but I ran into some problems later in the process. For some reason, when adding the spices I threw them directly into the boiling wort. I don’t know why I made this mistake, since I have a mesh “hop” bag that I’ve used for spices before. When it came time to transfer the wort into the fermenter, I had a problem. I couldn’t just pour it in, like I normally do, because of the orange peel floating in the wort. I tried pouring it through a colander, but the residue from the hop pellets kept clogging the holes in the colander. I kept having to un-clog the holes, or try pouring the wort gently over the edge so that I could pick out the orange peel bits before they made their way into the ferment (some of them did).
The whole thing was a major pain. Plus, one of the big dangers that brewers face is contaminating the batch. Foreign microbes can do bad things to fermenting beer.
Sunday, when I came back from rehearsal with Call it Karma, I checked on the fermenting batch. The top (plastic lid) of the fermenter was bulging up from pressure inside. The airlock was clogged. I quickly yanked the airlock out to relieve the pressure (although, I wish I had grabbed a towel to hold over it first, as foam from the krausen sprayed out and onto the wall of the closet where I keep the fermenter). After the initial “Phhwhhooshhh!!!” of air and foam, foam continued to slowly come out of the hole. I grabbed my siphon hose (after quickly mixing up some sanitizer and cleaning the hose) and rigged a “blow-off” tube.
The funny thing was, after I all of these problems, I wasn’t the slightest bit worried. A few months ago, things like this would have had me panicking and running to the online forums asking “Did I ruin my beer?”
They have a saying in the forums: “Relax, don’t worry, and have a homebrew.”
Basically, if you follow general cleaning practices, and keep your equipment clean and sanitized, it’s really hard to ruin a batch of beer. I’ve only had a couple of batches not turn out right. One was because the temperature during the fermentation got too high, the other was because I was experimenting with the recipe (although, some people did like that particular batch, I wasn’t that fond of it).
*Local Home Brew Supply