Prepare to get schooled

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was a computer science pioneer. She is credited with writing the very first computer compiler. She postulated and articulated the concepts that led to the development of COBOL, and popularized the term ‘debugging’. In short, she is one of the giants whose shoulders we all stand upon.

Thanks HackaDay for posting about her.  The video below seems simple enough, but she had a very interesting way of explaining latency in a manner that everyday people could wrap their minds around.  This right here can help you understand that every time we advance in how tiny we can manufacture our chips we can experience a leap in processing speed.  The power of this explanation is really its simplicity.

Epic levels of cosplay?

So I've never heard of Katsucon, and live no where near there but a fellow blogger that's gone all pro on my over at Geeksarsexy.net posted some videos of the "best of" from the con and well I'm absolutely floored.  Every year the freak flags in my area come out for Sakura-con, but I have never once seen cosplay costumes of this caliber in Seattle.   What do you think?  I would never, (seriously never) be caught dead dressing up like anime but some of these are really well done.

SAN Managment

F*CKSTICKS I was working with my ISCSI SAN yesterday because one of the volumes was getting full (seriously why does everyone save so much data) and I needed to delete an unused volume and use that space to expand the nearly full one.  Well genius boy over here deleted the live one.  ISCSI is really sticky so even though the volume is deleted it is still serving data and let me restore from the Friday backup to the new larger volume and overnight I remapped the shares to the restored files and started syncing the two.

Net result no one but me will know, but there is nothing like the rush of pure adrenaline when you realize you just deleted 300gigs of users data at 3pm!  Sweet Jesus thank you so much for LTO4 Tape drives, I restored at 1.5gb/m so restoring 300 gigs was only about 3 hours but either way I'm exhausted and not going to be in charge of making any decisions today.

Success and some failure to boot

So I did succeed in getting a beer brewed, I'm pretty pissed off about the amount of work to get the damn beer out of my keggle into my fermenter.  I have those sweet taps on the side of the kettle with awesome screens that should keep the adjunct fairies from gumming up my works, but I underestimated the power of 12 pounds of pumpkin guts.  It took more than 30 minutes from when I decided my beer was cool enough to transfer to get 5 and 1/6 gallons of wort out of that keg and I know I left another 1/2 gallon worth of liquid stuck in those pumpkin guts that clogged my kettle screen.

The new rule is adjunct stuff for beer goes in a motherfucking bag, I wanted nothing more than to be done last night and my beer was not letting me get into the house and cook dinner for my wife.  It was 45°F outside yesterday and I was out there for about 5 hours with little interruption, which is just me whining I know but damn it mother nature was not helping my cause.  My efficiency is still pretty piss at around 59% given my second wash of my grain gave me wort about 1 gallon with 1.058 OG so I made a tiny batch of Raspberry Leftover Ale.  After a boil I had a little more than 1/2 gallon of 1.078 OG to put in my growler and pitched my extra thing of Nottingham Dry Ale yeast and called it a night around 11:30pm.  Both beers where bubbling away this morning when I left, so we'll take success where it we can get it I suppose.

My taste of the unfermented sample tells me the pumpkin flavor is going to be huge, and I didn't get any cranberry taste at all so 3 lbs might not have been enough.  

Brewing tomorrow

I have to get my shit together, but I have bought all the ingredients for brewing tomorrow afternoon.  The first run on my cooler mashturn was only about 50% efficiency, so I'm looking to crush that tomorrow but took the precaution of buying Dried Malt Extract(DME) in case I need to bump up my Original Gravity(OG) before the boil.

Here is the recipe I'm working off of: Pumpkin Cranberry Ale

Crazy video

Well here is a way to start off your weekend, it seems like it's about to get NSFW at any moment but the video stays tame, the lyrics less so.




Soundcloud for internationals

Smoker at home

A few weeks ago, I started on a really masochistic streak with my cooking and tried to smoke a Corned Beef Brisket on my barbecue on a week night.  I got it on the coals by 6pm and didn't finish until about 2 in the morning the next day.  It turned out pretty good, but still needed another few hours to be truly fall apart tender. I cheated around midnight and put it on a roasting pan in the oven at 250 so I could try to sleep rather than having to check the coals every half hour or so, but the experience got me thinking about ways to achieve that smoked flavor without all of the work.  Wouldn't you know it Saveur had my back.