Dealing with Idiots

Tiffany recently had a conversation with someone that went something like this:

Dude: [so and so] is one of those Mexicans.
Tiffany: [so and so] is from Venezuela.
Dude: [so and so] speaks Spanish. Anyone who speaks Spanish is a Mexican in my book.
Tiffany: You're an idiot.

I came up with an alternative response.

Imaginary Daniel: You know the most surprising part about that? That you have a book. Asshat.

Oh snap.

Rock and Roll Tile

I just picked up the first load of tile. The price at the register? $666.60.

This is going to be the most metal kitchen EVER!

Plumb Frustrating

Have you ever gone to set up something simple, say, OSPF between a couple-three routers, and spent the whole afternoon troubleshooting this problem and that problem so you can issue the less-than-ten commands to make it happen?

You know, first you realize that this laptop doesn't have an ssh client, and then it turns out that the corporate intranet doesn't want you to download putty, then there's a local firewall issue, then you run out of cables and have to go to the store for more RJ-45 tips, then there's a traffic jam, then the command syntax in the manual isn't quite right, then you spend two hours to realize you fat-fingered the passphrase for MD5 setup, then finally it works?

Well, I'm here to tell you that plumbing can be the same way. But it can be just as rewarding.

Here's the offending critter.
It has a water inflow that works perfectly well.

But it didn't have proper outflow. Most of the time, that's not a problem. But every time I make some beer, I've got to let it drain into a big wine bottle for a few days. You can fit a lot of water into 50 feet of quarter-inch tube. That's a pain in the ass.

So anyway, I endeavored to fix this, and hook the outflow into my drainage. Five or six trips to Lowe's later, and after figuring out the magic words, I've got this sweet hookup that I can be proud of.
Finally, I zip tied it up under the sink (the zip-tie is staple-gunned there) to keep it out of the way.

Million Dollar Idea

Been gone all week, driving all over Arkansas. On the way back to good ol' Nashville, a 600-mile haul down I-40, I came up with a great bumper-sticker idea.

Behold!

Why would someone use this bumper sticker, you ask? It's quite simple. Whenever you see a pickup with truck nuts, you put this bumper sticker smack in the middle of the tailgate. Then, the truck has an asshole to match its balls.

BAM!

Update: If you should want to purchase this sticker for yourself, you can do so through the magic of the internet at http://www.cafepress.com/ihatetrucknuts.

Pre-emptive snarky comment: "I thought that adding nuts to the truck was supposed to complement the pre-existing asshole, not the other way around." *zing*

Random Roland

This sign is inside the bathroom of the Great Escape comic/cd/movie store in Nashville.


In case you're having trouble reading that, here's the relevant bit:

Oh hell yeah.

Late Review of Halo 3

I picked up a copy of Halo 3 for cheap from this guy on Craigslist a few weeks ago, and finally got around to playing it. Spent maybe ten hours with the single-player campaign this weekend. My impression? Halo 3 is to shooters what Metallica is to metal. That is, it's not the best shooter ever, but it's well polished, has mass commercial appeal, and you could certainly do worse.

Somehow I never really played Halo 1 or 2. Sure, I played them multiplayer with folks, but that accounts for maybe ten hours of play time since Halo first came out back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I'm no slouch on shooters, though - a quick trip down memory lane brings to mind:

• Doom 1, 2, and 3
• Quake 1, 2, and 3
  
• Unreal, Unreal Tournament, UT2k3, UT2k4
• Metroid Prime 3
• Dead Space (not first person, but possessing of many of the classic game mechanics)
  
• System Shock 2
• Bioshock
• Duke Nukem 3D
• Hexen
• Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay
• Portal (not really a shooter)
  
• Mirror's Edge (also not really a shooter)
• American McGee's Alice
• A couple of the GoldenEye games
• Perfect Dark
• Shogo
• Aliens vs Predator
• Tribes
  
• Probably a few more that aren't coming right to mind
  

So my point is, though I've never really played Halo, I'm appreciative of its place in the canon. I kind of dig a few of the game mechanics - For example, the idea of having a limited number of gun slots is pretty cool. It's well suited to the console, and makes weapon pickups a strategic thing. The same thing goes for the health system - it's simple, logical, and leads directly to some unique tactics.

I was never much of a Counterstrike-type guy. Played it some, but I didn't have the patience. Puzzles I'll sit for (Portal, Mirror's Edge, Braid, Tetris, every Zelda game and many Zelda-like games, etc etc), but the military-style tactics in CS never really floated my boat. Halo seems to be a little bit of a compromise. The player isn't nearly as fast as the Quake or Doom 0r UT guys, but not as slow or vulnerable as a Counterstrike player. The weapons are immediately fairly obvious in function and operation (I never wanted to swap out of Counterstrike to look up on Wikipedia whether realistic gun X was more powerful than realistic gun Y).

Best shooter ever. No. Pretty good. Yeah, sure. Worth my time? I've certainly found myself wanting to play another level today, if that's a good enough metric for you.

Beer Filtering, again

On the recommendation of Radical Brewing, I got a package of stainless steel scrubbing balls and tied one around the end of my racking cane. Worked like a charm. Had a big, ugly green ball at the end.

What I Did Last Weekend

So I go to take the dog outside, and some of the neighborhood kids rush up to me. It seems that someone (no one will own up to WHO) has peed in a plastic bottle, screwed on the lid, tied the bottle to a small bamboo stick, and thrown it up on the power line that runs above the cul de sac. It looks a little something like this.



Of course, they realized this was not a sustainable thing.

So how did we get it down? In the tradition of such luminaries as Neils Bohr and Ted Nugent, I twined together two long bamboo sticks, and fastened a sheetrock saw onto the end with electrical tape. If you've got a problem, yo I'll solve it, check out the hook while my DJ revolves it. Just be careful not to get any pee on you when the bottle falls.

So I took pictures of the pole. (Not a good phrase to Google...)

More Wort Filtering

So I brewed up some new beer yesterday. I based it on the recipe for Ruination IPA (just google for it, man). I tried the cheesecloth-in-a-strainer thing.

Here's the deal: There's way too much crud for a single sheet of cheesecloth to deal with.

So here's the plan for next time. I'm going to have TWO strainers, each with some cheesecloth. I'll use one at a time, so I can swap them out quickly. On top of the on in use goes my splatter guard, to catch the big stuff and make the cheesecloth last longer without getting clogged.

There's got to be a better way. Maybe strap the splatter guard to the top of the wort kettle, and then I can rinse it off from time to time?

Yakety Raz

I produced a short film today that I think illustrates important truths about the human condition, and... oh wait, nevermind, I made a video of my dog running around. Much better.

SQL Transactions - Faster Faster!

So I went into the office yesterday and built a good bit of the stuff from the last post. Still some work to do, but it should be a really useful tool. Here's some of the stuff I learned along the way.

The big one: SQL Transactions rock. You tell the console "start transaction", and that tells the SQL server (mySQL 5.something in this case) "I'm about to do a number of queries, but don't worry about writing the results to disk until the end - Nothing I'm going to do is dependent on what came before it in this transaction."

Once you're done doing your thing, you can "commit" or "rollback". That makes it a nice testing tool as well.

In bootstrapping myself to a properly working system, I ended up with a 74MB flat text file full of SQL INSERTs that needed to be processed. Stupidly, I just told the console "source [my-file]". It took four hours. Tried the same thing again with transactions, and it was done in less than a minute.

What else did I learn? Well, I picked up a few things about the GD library. It's surprisingly easy. I couldn't find a graphing frontend to it that worked on Windows to my satisfaction, so I just started writing a few graphing functions of my own, and they work pretty well.

Oh yeah, I had never used VIEWs in SQL before, but they seem to be pretty powerful. They solved a problem with a subquery that mySQL didn't support, which was real nice. I was trying to grab the high x% of a set of values, and do operations on those (ie, min/max, average, etc).

That happens to me a lot with programming. I was a double E in school, so my formal training in things like database theory is pretty much nil. Everything I know I picked up from having to solve specific problems. Maybe I should go see if I can audit a class or something, I might learn a thing or two.

Reinventing the Wheel - Perfmon Analyzer Notes

Can't sleep. Maybe if I take some notes on the app I've been thinking about, it'll leave my head.

So I spent some time today writing Perl scripts to help me out with some perfmon data. Customer sent me about 200 files with pretty much every Windows counter, each file about 70MB. That's a metric fuckton of stuff to wade through. So the scripts I wrote:

1. Call relog to get rid of everything but the counters I want
2. Call relog to consolidate all the records that appear to come from one server into a single file (okay, 1 and 2 really happen in the same loop. Who's counting?)
   
3. Convert over to a per-server CSV file for easy Excelling
4. Collapse into a couple of Excel files with some extra columns to make it easy to do PivotTable-type stuff

All of that is cool. But there's still things I want to do with the data. For each server, I want to:

• Find average IOPs
• Find peak (top value, average of top 2%, 4%, etc) - Note: There's probably a statistical operation I'm thinking over here. Get out your damned statistics book.
• I think maybe the other thing I'm doing is trying to figure out what percentage of operations are x number of standard deviations about average. Maybe I just want some metric of how "bursty" the system is.
• All the other basic stuff - What percent is reads versus writes, what will that look like after a RAID penalty, how big are my average reads and writes. No reason it couldn't try to fit that data to some patterns and maybe guess at an IO profile.
  
• Kill the fly that's found my monitor in the dark. Stupid horse farm.
  
• Generate a pretty graph of the above
• Do all of the above for both on-hours and off-hours work, and maybe separately for a backup window

For the entire set of servers, and any subset of servers I choose (say, a SQL cluster), I want to

• Find the various IOP values above. There's probably a way to apply Erlang-style analysis and say "I want only a 1% chance of having peak IOPs above this given SAN capacity"
• Associate the servers above with amounts of storage, and graph IOPs versus server and metaLUN size. Ideally, this results in a pretty 1/x graph and helps me easily identify flash and SATA candidates
  
• I killed that fly. Woohoo!
• Heck, there's no reason that the system couldn't take a swag at trying to devise a basic LUN layout.
  

All of the above is entirely possible with Excel, but it would take an extraordinary amount of time. There's no reason it couldn't be automated. For that matter, all of the above assumes that the data has been ingested into a SQL database, which means I could normalize between perfmon, iostat, and whatever other stuff may be out there.

Since it's all in a big ol' database, that opens the doors to larger sets of statistics over time. No reason I wouldn't keep EVERYTHING in there.

Some of this stuff - the LUN layout, the IO profile - could take some work. Most of it is just combing some datasets and doing basic math.

So the thing is - Surely this has been done to death a thousand times before. Where is this application?

Today was a Good Day

So there's this big ol' flowchart on Geekologie about Ice Cube's song. And it made me realize something.
No barkin' from the dog, and no smog
And momma cooked the breakfast with no hog

I've listened to this song for years, and never realized that Ice Cube lives with his mom.

Dude, there's nothing everything is gangsta about that.

Update:
It turns out I didn't understand. Reverend Moyers corrected me:
It's so that he can have "everything in his mamma's name" and when his drugs and drug money and possessions get confiscated, they cain't touch mamma's shit - and you still got it when the police leave!

Running ESX4 in VMware Workstation 6

It's like a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in crispy delicious bacon.

That is, running an ESX 4 server inside VMware workstation. You know, for when you left your high-power blade server in your other pants.

Here's the big stuff. Build your VM. Get into your VMX file with your favorite text editor. Here's a few key things you'll need.
monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = "TRUE"
monitor.virtual_mmu = "software"
monitor.virtual_exec = "hardware"
monitor_control.vt32 = “true”

Also, make sure the VM is set up to use your processor's virtualization functions (ie, Intel VT or AMD-V).

Anyway, I'm waiting for my portable hard drive to come in so I can really get some good VM sprawl going. This poor 80GB laptop drive just ain't cutting it.

In other news... I spent the weekend playing The Beatles Rock Band. I'm already looking forward to getting home and playing the drum roll from Come Together again.

Wort Filtering

When you make beer, you end up with a big ol' pot of steaming wort, and it will have loads of CRUD. If you want to make your life easier and your beer clearer, you need to get the crud out.

So far I've tried:

• A fine-mesh metal strainer
• The strainer plus a coffee filter

The coffee filter is a bad move. There's way too much crud for a coffee filter. Might be a good move after a first pass, but not right off.

The metal strainer is pretty decent. Some crap gets through, but not a ton.

A little cheesecloth with my strainer might work real well.

Ultimately, I probably need to move to some kind of multi-pass system. I just haven't worked it out.

Doggie Gate

We got this playpen. It did its job alright and all, but we decided it wasn't what we were after.

So I took a trip to Lowe's.

Seventeen dollars later, we've got a sweet gate that's both dog and human-friendly.



The door has magnetic clasps so it stays closed, but you don't have to mess with hooks and such. The two weights keep things stable.

Future revisions:

• Going to sand and stain the wood so it looks extra nice.
• Going to replace the staples holding it together with aluminum strips and wood screws
• Need to saw an inch off the wood by the door hinge, to allow the door to fold back all the way
  

Mah Dawg

So we got a puppy last week. His name is Raz. This is mostly what he does:

Nope, he's not dead. Just sleeping upside-down.

Is he really sleeping? Or is he just watching?


So yeah. He's pretty cool. It's only taken a couple days to housetrain him. He'll sit when you ask him to. Still working on leash training.

Observation: Leash train your dog indoors. There are too many distractions in a neighborhood. It's likely to frustrate both dog and owner. Outside is for after your pup knows to pay attention and heel. Not appreciating that set back leash training by a few days.

I did my best to do my homework on dog training. The most fun part? All kinds of things that aren't in the training book occur to you. Like, "I can associate a command with 'Go over the threshold of the door quickly so flies don't get into the house'". Once you've got the framework, you can do all kinds of interesting things.

For instance, the 'play fetch' game just kind of evolved. It was pretty simple to work out a series of reinforcements to turn the instinct into a game. Very fun.

So anyway, here's a video (from a few days ago, before he had worked out 'fetch'). He's a funny little guy.

Quackhead Wheat: The Label

Oh yeah.

Classic Post: A Tale of Two Pastries

Note: I haven't built anything good this week, so here's a web page I made a few years ago about donuts.

I've always believed in freedom. In speech, religion, music, or beer, free is usually best. Why, then, should I be subject to the tyranny of the bakery? They're never open when I want a donut. Wal-Mart has donuts 24/7, but shopping there isn't exactly supporting your local sheriff.

All these feelings came to a head recently when I decided it was time to make my own donuts. What follows is a fictionalized account with names changed to protect the innnocent.

It started with an episode of Alton Brown's Good Eats. If you're looking for it, it's the one called "Circle of Life" (S08E04). To make donuts as Alton describes, we need the following items. Items in red I don't have.

Hardware	Software
Large mixing bowl Stand mixer Kneading hook Deep-Fry thermometer Dutch oven Adjustable Pastry Cutters Food scale Cooling rack Rolling Pin 3/8" Rolling Guides Chopsticks Whisk Saucepan	Donuts: 1-1.5 gallons peanut oil 1.5 C. Milk 2.5 oz shortening 2 packages instant yeast 1/3 C. warm water 2 eggs 0.25 C. Sugar 1 tsp nutmeg 1.5 tsp salt 23 oz flour
	Glaze: 0.25 C. Milk 1 tsp vanilla 2 C. Confectioner's Sugar

A few hardware notes:

My deep fry thermometer I found for about $10 at the ARECO Restaurant-Supply store at the bottom of the big curve on School St. It has an adjustable clip so it'll stick to the side of whatever pot you're using, and it's very easy-to-read. In short, it's teh r0x0r.

Stand Mixer and Kneading hook? Who do I look like, Donald Trump?! To do the initial mixing I used my el-cheapo (Wal-Mart, $12) 200W hand mixer. I nearly killed the poor thing, so if you have hardware similar to mine, be careful. The kneading? I did it by hand.

Adjustable pastry cutters... I looked all over town for these. They're a set of concentric rings so you can select any size circle you want. ARECO told me they sold their last set the day before - I'll be ordering some from them. Wal-Mart, of course, had never heard of any such thing, and didn't have anything even resembling a biscuit or cookie cutter. Nothing at Ozark Natural Foods. The Bed, Bath, and Beyond people tried to point me to these metal devices that seem to be for retarded children who can't cook eggs and have too much money. Also, they had nothing at all to do with dough cutting.

My solution was two-pronged. For the outside I'd use a medium-sized plastic cup. It's from Jimmy John's if you must have one just like it, and is covered with funny statistics that are sure to get the conversation started at your next Math-Department throwdown.

For the inside I use a straight-sided Pucker's-branded plastic shot glass. To get one just like this, work at Shorty-Small's for a month as a dishwasher and come home covered in industrial-grade sewage every night. Then find a way to get a shot glass out of the deal before you quit.

Tiffany shows off our rockin donut-cutters.

Dutch oven? Bah, humbug! If I had one, I'd have used it, but I just used a big pot instead. No big deal here. I tend to think the mass of the oil overrules any thermodynamic properties of the pot in question.

Software notes

Good nutmeg is easy to find if you're in the know. I wasn't in the know, so it took me awhile, but that doesn't have to be your fate. Head to the Ozark Natural Foods on College and go all the way over to the left wall. Here are bulk spices - It's all in alphabetical order. The ground nutmeg will probably be visible, but reach in behind it and you'll find the whole nutmeg nuts. If you're not down with the ONF process, just put however many nuts you want in one of those plastic bags on the counter, tie it off with one of the large twisties, and label the twistie with the number on the nutmeg (0726, if I remember correctly). One tsp is about 1/3 of one of these nuts, so you'll really only need one nut. Two nuts cost me $0.34. If I'd had a hundred dollar bill in my wallet, I'd have used it to pay just to see the look on the cashier's face as she counted out $99.66 in change.

23 oz of flour? But Dan-sensei, I have no scale! Seriously, go get one, it's important. I picked up the cheapest one at Wal-Mart (<$4), though I sure would like a nice digital one.

Also, go ahead and pick up some whole-milk. I used skim, and while the results were good, Tiff hypothesized that whole milk might be tastier still. I'm inclined to agree. Get on with the donuts already!

Alright, alright, here's what you'll do. Put the yeast in that warm water. Don't use tap-water, either. It's got chlorine in it, that'll kill your yeast. I used bottled water. If you have a Brita filter, that'll work just fine. Also, I know it's instant yeast- we're giving it a head-start.

Now get out your mixing bowl and throw in the milk, shortening, eggs, sugar, nutmegs, salt, and half the flour. By the time you've measured the flour and everything else, your yeast should've been sitting around for about ten minutes, so throw it in as well now. Beat this with a mixer until it's homogenous. Now sift in the rest of the flour in, keeping the mixer going. You should have some hella-doughy stuff in the bowl now. If you've got a kneading hook, now's the time to put it on and set the mixer on medium until you've got a ball of dough on the hook. If you've got no kneading hook, it's time to flour the table and start doing it old-school.

After all, ain't no school like the old school.

Once all of the dough's kneads have been met, throw it in an oiled bowl, cover it, and let it sit for about an hour. It should double in size. I've got a picture of some dough, but this is after we'd already made most of the donuts. Your dough will be bursting over the top of a bowl that big at this point in the process.

Once the dough is risen, take it out and throw it on a well-floured table. With bread, you'd punch it down right now. Donuts are foods of a gentler path, so we're just going to fold it. That is, pat down the dough gently, fold it in quarters, and repeat. Once you've done this thrice or fource, the yeast gases will be well distributed.

Roll the dough out to about 3/8". If you're fancy, you can use rolling guides. If you're more of an Ace Hardware person, you can use 3/8" strips of wood to guide you. If you're an invincible donut ninja like myself, you throw caution to the wind and guess.

Now, bring out the cutting tools of your choice. Once you've got a stack of raw donuts, roll that excess dough back up and let it rise for another half-hour. You can do this a few times. On the third time or so, we just decided to make donut holes (pictured on the right). The leftovers from this we made into two bearclaw shaped things.

Let the cut donuts rise for another half-hour before you cook them. They'll rise up impressively, really. This brings us to....

Fire and Thunder, Donut-Style!

Start heating up your oil. You want it solidly at 365 Fahrenheit. USE THAT THERMOMETER Seriously, I tried a few donuts at 355 and 375/380 (for science, of course), and while not bad, they were noticably different. I can only assume that greater temperature deviations would've made things that bore little resemblance to donuts.

To flip the donuts, ol' Alton recommends chopsticks. I had none, but I had plenty of bamboo skewers, so I employed a few of these to become a walrus. Once safely disguised, I snuck up on the simmering donuts, cooing old walrus songs to ease their minds. I let them cook 1 minute on each side - a timer really helps here as well.

To receive the cooked donuts, I put some paper towels on top of a half-sheet pan ($9, ARECO, useful for 1001 things and far better than the pans from Wal-Mart). I put a cooling rack on this so the donuts could drip.

The donut holes don't quite cook the same - you can't reliably flip them. To help them cook evenly, I poked at them with my skewers while they were cooking, keeping them rolling and bouncing.

After cooking all the dough, I had about 15 donuts and maybe 2 dozen donut holes, plus the funny shaped bearclaw things. All of this is for naught, though, if we have no glaze. Donuts without glaze are like pudding without meat - you can't have it.

Note: If you don't want the donuts to stick together thile they cook, wait about 5 seconds between donuts when putting them in the oil.

Glazed over

The preceding paragraphs have been mostly believable. Here, however, it where you'll have to take my words on faith.

Mix the milk and vanilla in a saucepan. Recall, that's 1 tsp of vanilla and 1/4 Cup Milk. No, really, that's one-fourth cup. It'll seem like nothing. I'm serious, though.

Heat this up a bit - Not to boiling, but let's say to around 150 F. My thermometer and my saucepan were incompatible, so I had to guess.

Once you've done this, throw in 2 cups of confectioner's sugar. That's the very fine kind, if you spread it on your nose you can pretend you're Johnny Depp in Blow. And yes, I bloody-well meant TWO CUPS. It'll seem to dwarf the milk, and you'll wonder how that'll ever turn into a glaze. Trust me.

Now, start whisking, In no time at all, that measly quarter-cup of milk will consume every bit of that sugar. It's really quite unbelievable, even if you're watching it.

Be careful with this glaze, by the way. It'll burn easily. Keep the heat very low, and keep it well-whisked. Take your donuts one at a time, dip them into the glaze, and put them back on the rack. Couldn't be easier.

Note: You don't have to wait until all your donuts are done. This glaze can be reheated if you're careful. I recommend this, because by now you're probably ready for a donut. I know I am. I think I'll have one.

Aye, that's a tasty donut!

Beer Notes

So I've made two beers so far. A third is ready to be bottled tomorrow. A fourth is patiently fermenting. (A second-and-a-half one, which I've disowned, had to be thrown out. I killed the yeast due to some stupidity.)

Here are the first two:

Amber Ale (Beer #2)

I got it from this recipe. I didn't do the full month in primary - Two weeks for me.

How did it turn out? Well, rather inconsistent, but that's my fault. The good ones are entirely drinkable, well balanced, medium-hoppy and not too sweet. The bad ones are either flat, or fizz for days, or just taste funky.

Why? Well, it was my second attempt at bottling, and I encountered an issue I didn't know how to deal with: About 15 beers from the bottom of the bucket, my bottle-filler clogged up.

Not being an experienced type, I assumed it was broken. I switched to the tube alone, and filled the rest of the bottles as best I could. The result is that there's about a one in four chance of getting a beer that just isn't good. All that extra oxygen and gunk didn't do good things.

So anyway, to mitigate that happening again, I bought an extra bottle-filler for quick-change emergencies, and am taking extra precautions to filter the gunk out of the wort.

American Pale Ale (Recipe #1)

This one is pretty yummy. It's a little cloudy - Hey, I didn't properly filter it, and I didn't have a proper wort-chilling solution. Nonetheless, it turned out great!

The ingredients? Dammit, I didn't record them. They came from this kit though. I'll have to ask the good folks at Rebel Brewer what they put in it next time I'm there.

Why Polders Rock

Was waiting to open my packet of yeast until the water was just the right temperature.

I've used this thermometer for just about everything there is to do in the kitchen. I wish I had two more just in case one broke. Then I found out they're only like $20 on amazon now, where they used to be $60. Always more stuff to buy...

Wort Chillin', Rhyme Illin', Can't Shake that West Coast Fillin'

So I built a wort chiller.


That doesn't mean I can freeze warts off at home. Gross. It means that I can cool down big pots of boiling wort, which is kind of like proto-beer. It's beer that has all the barley and hops and such mixed in, but hasn't yet had any yeast added. And it needs to be cooled off, like, right now.

That's where my wort chiller comes in. It carries heat away from the wort swiftly, as if the very hounds of Mordor were at its back. But, you know... with thermodynamics and stuff. No hounds were harmed.

One thing I like about the way I built Chilla v1.0. The first is that the on/off valve is very accessible. It's right up there with the main bits of the chiller, meaning I don't have to get under the sink to turn it on and off, like with the Alpha designs.

Mostly, this was about me learning how some basic plumbing works. I've never really done any, so I didn't know what anything was called, or even what was available at my local home improvement big box. The first thing I tried was one of those self-tapping thingamajigs that you use to get a water line to your ice maker. It was immediately clear that this was a terrible place to have the on/off switch for the chiller.

It became especially clear when I accidentally twisted the self-tapping thingy out of the pressurized line and sprayed water all over myself. Dammit.

So I got a new heavy duty 3/8" line (with a 1/2" nut up top, of course), and a nice little 3/8"x3/8"x1/4" adapter that I could screw a 1/4" line directly onto. Real easy, low leaking risk. Of course, you can see the leak here left over from my troubleshooting.



Then it was mostly just learning how to put things together so they worked. Here's a quick lesson.
In case you're not the Rain Man, here's that in English. First, we need names for those things - From the left, I'm going to call them A, B, and C, because I can't think of any names that are kid-friendly right now.

1. So you insert B into C. The flat side of the flare goes in first.
2. Put your tube into B+C contraption. Put it in a good ways.
3. IF AND ONLY IF your tube is plastic, insert A all the way into the end of it. Otherwise, skip to 4.
4. Push the B+C piece almost to the end of the tube. If it's a plastic tube, this will be bloody difficult.
5. Insert into the appropriate threaded end (might be a union, or maybe an adapter, or whatever)
6. Tighten.
7. Turn on the water, realize you didn't tighten enough, turn the water off.
8. Tighten some more.

So anyways, there you go. If you can't figure out how to build a wort chiller from the above, there's not much I can do for you.

Notes on how well it worked pending - I haven't tried it yet.

Building a Pig Rack

I think that grilling is a lot like heroin addiction. Having never done heroin, I base this entirely on the song Mr. Brownstone.

I used ta do a little but a little wouldn't do
So the little got more and more

Totally like grilling, right? There will come a time when charring up a few dry-aged USDA Prime ribeyes with kosher salt, freshly ground pepper, and grapeseed oil just won't be enough. When that day comes, you'll be looking for a stronger fix, and that fix may just be roasting an entire swine.

I could devote a month of blog posts to the whole process, but there's plenty of that online. I want to tell you about my kickass rack.

First, here's the pit it's meant to go on. It's 48 cinderblocks, stacked in a 4x2x4 block oven, three-guys-from-cuba-style.

The rack is designed to sit on top of this oven. I've prepared a technical diagram.


What you'll need:

• Seven foot fence posts - Qty 4
• Iron rebar rods, four feet - Qty 12
• Plumbing clamps - Qty 48
• A drill press with a bench vise
• Some drill bits that are slightly larger than your rebar rods
• A carpenter's level
• Duct tape

That's right - This kickass rack was built with the help of duct tape.

The general process: drill a line of holes through your fence posts, insert rebar, and use the clamps to keep them in place. This design can be disassembled for easy storage. You can see the details of the construction in this mouthwatering shot, full of mind-bogglingly attractive individuals.

Of course, it's more difficult than that. Here's a few helpful tips:

1. Drill larger holes on one side of each fence-post than the other. This is because pre-cut rebar tends to be bent at the end, and you'll need some extra room to get the rods through.
2. ...Or, avoid that problem altogether by buying long pieces of rebar and cutting them yourself, like this enterprising fellow!
3. Before drilling the first hole, duct tape your carpenter's level to the end of your fence post. Then , as you slide it down the vise to drill each hole, make sure it's level. This will ensure that your holes line up exactly. Pretty cool, huh?
4. Keep your rebar fairly close together. As you can see in the picture, I kept them about 6" apart. Why is this? If you're roasting a small pig, it would be a horrible disaster if it were to fall into the pit.
5. Stay away from galvanized metal on the parts that will touch the pig - it's muy peligroso. That generally means no chain-link fence or chicken wire, no matter how easy and convenient that would be.
6. Bungie-cord the two racks together. This will take the danger out of flipping the pig, like these poor folks using the beta version of the pig rack. That's just an accident waiting to happen.
7. Have a table ready that you can set the bottom half of the rack on when the pig is ready. Also, have some John Phillips Sousa queued up on the iPod for the majestic march from the pit to the carving table. Godamned if I'm not starting to tear up and get a little verclempt looking at this picture.

This is basically version 2 of the pig rack. The main improvement planned for Version 3: A hinged metal lid, in three pieces. Will eliminate the need to use aluminum foil. Why three pieces? Two small hinged pieces on the ends to allow coals to be easily added, as well as to check on the pig from time to time. Mounted with wingnuts so it can be removed and mounted on either rack to accomodate the mid-day flip.

So there you go - Building a pig rack can be almost as fun and rewarding as cooking a pig, but not quite as fun and rewarding as eating one.

Kit Notes

About a month ago, I picked up a basic brewing kit from rebelbrewer.com. It included

• 6.5 Gallon Fermenter Bucket with drilled and grommeted lid
• 6.5 Gallon Bottling Bucket with spigot
• Three Piece Airlock
• Floating Thermometer
• 24" Racking Cane
• 4 ft of Transfer Tubing
• Tubing Clamp
• Spring Action Bottle Filler
• Twin Lever Deluxe Bottle Capper
• 144 (approx.) Bottle Caps to get you started
• 18" Heat Resistant Brew Spoon
• Bottle Brush
• Instruction Book

Most of this stuff is just what the doctor ordered, but I'd recommend a few changes to anyone looking to pick this up.

1. Forget the floating thermometer, and get a good Polder probe thermometer off Amazon. It's useful for all kinds of other stuff. I've had mine for years, and it kicks the crap out of that floating thing.
   
2. Get a couple of extra bottle fillers. If one should happen to clog up during bottling, it's much easier to swap them out than to deal with cleaning in the middle everything.
3. Go ahead and get an extra fermenter bucket. It doubles your capacity for about $15. This is important - If you're like me, you're going to end up giving away about 80% of your first batch. This way your friends can actually try a couple of beers, and you'll have more than a six pack left.
4. The instruction book is bogus. Get Palmer's How to Brew. It got me started, and it's still laying the science on me. Because Science: It works, bitches.

Notes - Grain Steeping Ratio

When steeping grain, keep the ratio below one gallon of water per pound of grain.

Also - I brewed up a batch of Porter from a recipe. It called for some amount (I forget how much) of malto-dextrin. At the time, I didn't understand. John Palmer comes to the rescue, though: This is an unfermentable sugar that adds body to the beer.

Beer Labels

Because you can't have a beer without a cool label, I did a little work in the Gimp and came up with these. I didn't do the original drawings - the wife, Tiffany, does that way better - but I did all the path-tracing and coloring and such.

My Draining Rack

I first had to bottle some beer about two weeks ago. Of course, you need a way to drain your bottles after they're sanitized. I wasn't big on spending $25-30 on one of those bottle draining tree thingies, so I improvised.

Version 1 - Quick and Dirty:
I took the cardboard bottom from a case of bottled water, marked a bunch of circles on it, and then box-cuttered holes out of it. (Well, my neighbor John took care of most of the box-cuttering while I prepped the rest of the stuff)

I took the result and duct-taped it over the sink.

Verdict: Good in a pinch, but it obviously didn't last. Threw out the soggy mess right afterward.

Version 2 - Electric Boogaloo:
Purchased a 2" hole cutter and a 2'x2' piece of plywood. The nice folks at Lowe's cut 6" off one side. Measured out the area on the big piece that would be open when I placed it over the sink.

Verdict: Better, and reusable. However, it only did about 20 bottles at a time. Working in batches is a pain - I can never remember what order I placed the bottles in.

Version 3 - Rise of the Machines
Drilled a LOT more 2" holes. Chopped the 6x24" scrap into two 6x12" pieces. Drilled some starter holes and used some leftover wood screws to make legs.


Verdict: Rocks. I can do over 50 bottles, which is just right for a five-gallon batch. Also, I can leave it sitting in my laundry room, and drain rinsed bottles as they're used.

First Post

So I'm starting this blog to take notes on whatever projects I'm working on at the moment. Right now that means beer, bread, home improvement, and general geekery. Subject to change without notice. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited. Do not try this at home.