Mu: Catharsis

Seriously, when was the last time I posted anything other than a beer recipe. Even something dorky post about my fancy new i860 gaming machine? I'll work on it... Meanwhile, get ready for another beer post :/

A re-hash of last years Porter.

A few months back C's Brother, who has a very different brewing philosophy than I, brewed an ESB. After some discussion, it was obvious that the exactly meaning of the label 'ESB', (extra special bitter), was not particularly well understood by me. Further investigation lead me to a believe that ESB was a term applied to a bitter (or amber ale) that was stronger than normal. Not very helpful given the wide rang of options for what could be called a bitter.

I'm inclined to believe that MSFT is misrepresenting the high failure rate of the Xbox 360. This based on the fact that I am now sending mine back for the second time.

The first time was the Red Ring Of Death. This was occurring from time to time when the machine was started cold. It would often correct it's self if left running for awhile and then restarted. However, once this behavior started, games started freezing randomly.

It's been a few months since I last updated on the Kolsh beer project (or have posted at all, busy summer...) At this point I think the project can be classified as a failure.

Over the last few months, the beer had been mostly aging in secondary. As stated in previous updates, fermentation had continued slowly beyond the initial primary. I allowed this to continue for almost a month before putting the beer into the fridge to lager.

Today I got an invite from Google to try out their new Google Voice service. So far it seems pretty neat.

After several months of procrastination and excessive tinkering the move from CoLo to VPS has been completed. So far so good. Most of the recent pain was spent on the email system. Anyway, enjoy the belated updates and new software.

As hoped, the yeast sprang back to life when the beer was racked into the secondary. It has been slowly bubbling away for the last few weeks. I assume this is the result of the more complex sugars present in the wort -- but I'm not entirely sure.

Yesterday was the first real hike of the spring. (Technically, C and I ascended Moosilauke in March, but that was still winter weather) The Summit was Mt. Madison. About 4K elevation. I'm sore, my heals hurt, and I'm feeling old -- perfect weekend :) The trip was a precursor for a 20 mile, multi-day, multi-summit trip colloquially known as the 'Presidential Traverse'.

Prior to moving to the VPS server, there were two instances of Apache running for borthermu.net. One was hosting the 'common' applications, like web-mail, mysqladmin, etc. The other was hosting the user sites (like this one). When moving the things over, I decided it would be nice to try and merge them together, and try to use only the Debian packaged Apache. This was mostly to get the benefit of security updates.