True Blood and junk

So many things I don't even know where to begin.

I've started on a rhubarb wine, that will take something like 2 months to finish up and is the reason that I'm going to buy another couple of carboys. It takes 20 lbs of rhubarb to make 5 gallons of the stuff, but I think it's going to be above average awesome.

The specific recipe and directions can be found in this PDF. I added about 6oz of thistle honey to it, and found that 10lbs of corn sugar only had me at 17 or 18 balling which is ~1.080OG so get 12 or even 13 lbs of corn sugar if you follow this recipe.

Next up, True Blood started and I still haven't finished watching last season. I think I have 3 episodes left and cannot find time for that, not to mention I'd like to watch the Game of Thrones season if I could get the time.

Oh sleep you cruel mistress.

Usb powered water bottle humidifier

Try to ignore the obvious/gratuitous mac in the background and see the beauty and awesome that is this tiny usb powered humidifier.


Via Lifehacker

anime suggestions?

A while ago The verge posted about anime suggestions, and I've been meaning to see what people thought of the suggestions and get feedback on which I should start with. I'll highlight the one's I've already watched some or all of in Green. In general, I'm not in love with shows that are gundam based. I've watched most of Big O! and forgave it's gundam-ness because it managed to on about the time of night I was watching tv every night. Oh Adult swim, I almost miss staying up watching you.

• Code Geass
• High School of the Dead
• Lucky Star
• Black Lagoon
• Cowboy Bebop
• Yu Yu Hakusho
• Gundam Wing
• G Gundam
• Death Note
• The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi
• Big O!
• School Days
• Afro Samurai
• Evangelion
• Full Metal Alchemist (Original and Brotherhood)
• Detective Conan/Case Closed
• Hellsing (Original and Ultimate)
• Samurai Champloo
• Onegai Sensei/Twins
• Witch Hunter Robin
• Speed Grapher
• Love Hina
• Devil May Cry
• Welcome to the NHK
• Goshuushou Sama Ninomiya Kun

High-Intensity Interval Training Infographic

This is mostly for my own reference, but maybe it's interesting to you too.

I've been working with weights in the gym and seen some success in weight loss, but I'm needing to add cardio if I ever have a prayer of meeting anything but strength goals. Being somewhat short on time I think HIIT is the way to go for my needs. I need to rest a bit this week because I've got a sprint triathlon this weekend, but this is a good reference for next week. I'll try the Tabata method for 4 weeks and see if it's worth anything, and then try the Little method.  Keep in mind I'm just trying to add days of cardio on my off days of weight lifting, the turbulence method would make it even harder to get through my lift sets. As it is, I sometimes feel like I need a banana just to get through my lifts. Adding cardio into that and I'd probably pass out.


More Health and Fitness News & Tips at Greatist.

nothing gets done before midnight

Nothing gets done before midnight.

This phrase has been rattling around in my head for the last week or so, and seems to be the pace of things in  my life and household any more. I needed to bottle a beer to get it out of the damn heat, got to bed just before 1 AM. Needed to make a new round of protein bars, got upstairs at 12:01. If I plan on getting in a workout tonight, I'll wager you I don't get a wink more than 5 hours so I can get up and go to spin class. I don't have anyone but myself to blame I suppose, but it takes until almost 8 to get dinner cooked and eaten and some order in the kitchen restored. Then round about an hour to get the boy to bed, so I can work on something not family related. You'd be surprised how little you can get done in 3 hours.

Last night it was getting rhubarb chopped and into bags to freeze. I'm planning on making rhubarb wine, and my family sent me about 30lbs of it to get me started, I didn't even get that delivery until just before 9 PM, and didn't start working until 10:30.

In any event the summer is getting started in earnest after dragging it's feet all through May and I've got strawberries that look to be coming in nicely and tomatoes that I hope aren't in the pot too late to deliver some fruit before August. I've made a bit of a fence on one side of the back patio to try and contain a very mobile toddler, and am working on plans to make him something like this digger out in the back. I've got wine to make, a sprint triathlon in the middle of the month and more ideas for things to write rattling around inside of my head. In truth I've had the blogger page open in a browser tab for the last week trying to get around to posting something. It's pretty amazing to me that I used to post at least once a day here.

Sometimes I guess you just run out of things to say.

Going to Bat

I won't make any comments about either his service in the US military or the rest of his congressional record, but John McCain is sort of my hero this second. It's dull to watch for sure, but he introduced legislation to force cable companies and network operators to offer a la carte programming (choose just the channels you want) and prevent local market sports blackouts when the venue or team publicly funded. Both of these things are awesome, and chances of passing are about nill. The third point of the legislation should sound like an awesome victory for the startup Aero.



Source: The verge

Blackberry Wheat and Hopville goes down

A few weeks ago I finally managed to get back on the brewing horse and get a beer done. It's in the barrel soaking up some oak, and that sadly means I need to start dreaming about the next batch to put in the damn thing. For the curious until May 6th you can see the recipe here on Hopville.

I'm starting to think I need a bigger primary fermenter as the nearly 6.5 gallon barrel requires just a tad bit more beer than I can fit in the space my bucket provides. So far I've been managing that by using my 3 gallon glass fermenter to hold the excess needed to top up the barrel, but it's introduced lots of racking to my process. For normal beers that's probably fine, but when you brew weird beers with fruit and other crap that plug up racking lines it's less fine. When you do have all that crap and want to filter some of it out...it's a lot less fine. I have an idea for how to do a great job filtering out stuff, but it would mean putting everything into a second vessel before transferring it into the barrel; racking is stressful enough without introducing an extra resting stop. I'm pretty sure I managed to get way too much oxygen into it the way I went about it this time so I'm probably going to revisit the intermediary filter vessel.

Shit like this makes me want a conical fermenter, even though it wouldn't take care of the the floating fruit conundrum. Maybe a conical with a false bottom? It would catch the largest particulate, but the meshing would have to be pretty fine to make the whole thing work. Oh equipment, you are a never ending conundrum.

To my next point, Hopville. So recently Hopville got purchased by another company, which makes me a bit sad as I've been using it as my recipe storage and brew process assistant. It looks like the new company BrewToad is going to be a good steward, and I have hope that their recipe manager will be an improvement over the buggy beta limbo Hopville has been trapped in for the 8 months or so. It did inspire me to checkout other pieces of software again. Hopville had been a relatively painless way of managing stuff, and my short trial of beersmith was around the same time I started brewing so I found the process cloying as a novice brewer. It asked for a lot of information to even get started, and on the whole wasn't how I wanted to spend my limited amount of hobby hours. I'm tempted to give the Beersmith 2 android app a try though. It looked kind of slick for brew day, as each step had a timer you could hit start on to help keep track of time.