More Brewing

Today I kegged Delicious Aloysius, which is full of Glacier hops and is named after an icy fictional detective.  A few weeks ago, the recipe went something like:

Delicious Aloysius

1 lb Briess Caramel 40L
6.6lb Extra Light Liquid Malt Extract
1 oz Glacier - 60 min
1 oz Glacier - 15 min
1 oz Tettnang - 0 min
Safeale US-05



Anyway, I had an idea.  I always spend a lot of time filtering the hops from my wort, and I figure the problem is my filters are too small.  The ideal case would be a tight screen about the size of a sheet pan, which attaches to a sheet pan with a hole in it.  I could attach some rails to it so I could slot a funnel onto the underside.  Then I could pour a lot more beer into the fermenter before I ran out of working filter medium.

So yeah, I'm going to see if I can find the parts to build such a thing.  Wish me luck.

The Birth of a Thousand Cuts

Here are some pictures of the flooring we put in:

Notes on Installing Laminate Flooring

So we just spent the weekend installing some laminate flooring in our living room.  It's surprisingly like work.

First, why laminate and not hardwood?  Well, we got a bunch of samples of both that we liked, and performed the highly scientific test of beating them against each other to see how easily they scratched.  The high-quality laminate stuff was by far the most durable, and it looks very similar to the real stuff.  Now that it's installed, you can't really tell that it's not hardwood, except that it feels different than hardwood to bare feet.

So, what does a person need to know?  Well, I needed a lot more tools than any of the online guides mentioned.  At various points I used:

• Tapping block
• Deadblow hammer
• Pull bar
• Spacers
• Measuring tape and ruler
• Level
• Miter saw
• Regular circular saw
• Circular saw with adjustable depth
• Hand miter saw
• Hacksaw
• Plant trimmers (for clipping tiny pieces off the thresholds)
• Screwdrivers of all sorts
• Drill
• Utility knives
• Electric jamb saw
• Hand undercut saw
• Sheetrock saw
• Various types of pliers
• Table mounted vise
• Dremel tool with cutoff blade
• Assorted safety equipment (goggles, earplugs, gloves)
• Wood glue

In other words, it's not something you should attempt unless you have a fairly well stocked toolbox.  You'll have problems, and you'll need to solve them.  Check out my hooks while the DJ revolves them.

I made some mistakes in the process as well.  The big ones:

1. The thresholds I got to cover transitions require a little over an inch of space for this aluminum trough that you have to screw down.  When I started, I only left a spacer's worth of space.  This meant I had to do some fairly serious cutting with the flooring already in place when I realized my mistake.  This added a half day and a trip to Lowe's to the process.
2. While you should leave that inch for the threshold transitions, you don't necessarily want to screw the troughs down first, because they'll often need something under them to provide extra height.  For a few thresholds, I ended up solving this problem by putting down scraps of underlayment.  Later, I went to Tractor Supply and got a big bag washers for about 50 cents, and I'm using those for the last few.  My bathroom, for example, has a threshold trough that's five washers higher than the subfloor.
3. There will be places where it is difficult to lock a board in place.  For example, a board with an angled end can be very difficult.  Your best bet is to realized early that you can sand off the locking lips of the plank (a flathead screwdriver will make short work of them as well), and glue it in place.

What else?  There's a fairly specific angle for your tapping block that won't damage the boards.  It's not quite flat, but it's not too steep.  Maybe 10 degrees.

If you purchase the quarter-round made out of PVC, it's white all the way through.  That means you don't have to paint the ends when you cut it.  It's also a little bigger than wooden quarter round, which means you can cover more.

In one very tight area I ended up removing the baseboards as well - there just wasn't enough space to work otherwise.

It would've been really nice to have a jigsaw.  

I didn't realize at first that I could lock the planks from any direction.  The instructions suggested an only-left-to-right-and-down sort of thing.

Once you've put threshold in the metal trough, it's pretty much in there.  A few times I was able to very carefully remove it with a butter knife.

Also, my dog doesn't like running on it.  I still don't think hardwood would hold up though - he makes a pretty big splash when he jumps to or from the couch.

Keep your vacuum cleaner handy - you're going to track in a lot of sawdust.

That covers most of the stuff that wasn't in any of the instructions or Youtube videos.  I recommend you do this stuff yourself when you can, at least once, because it's a great learning experience.  After you've done it once, it's okay to pay someone (example: I'm going to pay someone to repaint the kitchen and living room.  I've painted rooms, and I know the process, and I've decided I don't have the patience for the detail work.)

Carpet on Craigslist

I just posted an ad to Craigslist:

About 250 ft^2 of carpet and pad, free to anyone who has the means to haul it off. What would you use this carpet for? Here's a few suggestions from our crack team of flooring scientists:
* Re-carpet your dorm room
* Add some warmth to your man-cave (don't your feet get cold on the concrete when you go for a beer?)
* Hang it on the wall and paint a soft, fuzzy mural, you avant-garde paradigm changer!
* Carpet the ceiling of your stairwell, just like The King
* Re-upholster your vintage '73 Chevy El Camino (fuzzy dice not included)
* Add it to your Craigslist used carpet collection. *shudder*

Whatever you plan to do with this shining example of freecycled goodness, this fountain of fabulous flooring, this diamond in the fluff, you should do it soon, because I'm taking it down to the dump in the next day or two. For real.

Mah Dawg

... drives a hard bargain.

If you like this, you'll like all sorts of other things from the always awesome pianolessdevil.  Seriously, go there.

Slap Yo Momma

Regarding the cliche that something is "So good it'll make you slap your momma," don't.

Seriously, no matter how good those baby back ribs seem right now, it's going to sound really stupid when the cops show up.

This was of course established in State of Virginia v. Sweet Baby Ray, in which the court not only held the defendant in contempt of his momma, but also upheld the suspension of habeas porkus.

Update: The court did acknowledge that the ribs in question were corpus delicious.

My Reading List Lately

The Integral Trees, Larry Niven
Slow start, but it really picks up.  It's essentially a vehicle for exploring how life might evolve in zero-gravity, with a bonus of how orbital mechanics can be turned into a catchy tribal poem.  Plus some tribal warfare in a mixed-gee environment.

Forty Signs of Rain, Kim Stanley Robinson
There aren't a lot of sci-fi authors who can pack in as many ideas per page as Robinson.  He also tends toward realism - there are no one-dimensional Heinlein-cutouts in his books.  This one tackles the meaning of science to humanity, the applicability of game theory to altruistic behavior (that there's some hard science, ya'll), the tensions between traditional scientific journal culture and the culture of high-tech businesses, and a lot of other stuff in between.

The Magicians, Lev Grossman
This book grabbed me by the hair and held my eyeballs to the page for two straight days.  I loved it.  It's a Harry Potter/Narnia story done in a realistic manner.  While there's a protagonist the story follows, he's no more the protagonist than anyone is in their own real-life story.  Characters and situations are played for some genuine shades of gray, and the standard-trope density is very low.  Fun times.

The Golden Compass/The Subtle Knife/The Amber Spyglass, Phillip Pullman
I picked these up at a used bookstore, and enjoyed them.  If you're not familiar - Phillip Pullman wrote these as Narnia stories for atheists, as an alternative to C.S. Lewis's Christian apologia.  They're nowhere near the sophistication of The Magicians, but if there's a young adult in your life struggling with their natural tendency towards heathenism, I'd certainly recommend this series.

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
I hate to seem like one of the unwashed masses, but this seemed like a rambling story about a bunch of rich kids boffing and jaunting around Europe.  I know it's supposed to juxtapose these folks against the realities of war and violence and such, but I couldn't help imagining Holden Caufield narrating it: "And then all these phonies went to a phony restaurant and ordered some crummy wine and got in a fight and it just makes me sick."

American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
I didn't really research this book beforehand, but about halfway through I glommed onto the idea that he was equating wealth inequality, entitlement, and excess with murder, and I really started to dig it.  Just in case you missed it, this fantastically wealthy mass-murderer screams "I need more tax breaks!" about 40 pages before the end.

Under the Dome, Stephen King
Stephen King's thousand page metaphorical indictment of the second Bush administration.  If that's the sort of thing you'd like, then you'd really like that sort of thing.  For the record, I enjoyed it.  Dick Cheney, I mean Big Jim Rennie, isn't exactly a nuanced character, but even King's flat characters don't suffer from lack of interesting detail.

Throne of Jade, Naomi Novik
This is the cotton candy of the list: fast, sweet, and not too filling.  It's the second in a series of historical fantasy books that imagines a Napoleonic War, but with dragons.  Given the main character is a gentleman in a profession that doesn't pay much attention to rules of etiquette, there's are usually shades of a novel of manners.  If you need a book to read on the plane, you could do far worse - Tom Clancy never had dragons.