Sears Fail!

For those of you who missed it, or got to the site too late...

This was actually up on the Sears website for a brief period this morning (read the description of the product under the Sears logo) - classic!

Hop Harvest!

Last night I started harvesting my hops. I picked about 70% of my crop and I'm hoping for another good round of hops by mid-late September (if the weather stays nice and warm). So far I've only had hop cone production on with the Cascades, but definitely a much better yield than I expected for first growth year.

Here are some pictures:




These are currently sitting in a paper bag behind a couple computers to dry them out before using them in a brew.

The Magnabrew Hop Garden

Here's a picture that I took today of my hop garden. I'm assuming that due to the different duration of sunlight that each get, they are descending in size from left to right. Perhaps is has to do with one variety of hops doing better in the Buffalo climate - I'm not sure. I have three different varieties growing.

From left to right: Cascade, Mt. Hood, and Sterling

Speedskating Dryland Workout - 6/29/2009

WEEK THREE (HARD)

• ACTIVE STRETCH

• WARM-UP JOG W/HOPS, GRAPEVINE, BACKWARDS, ETC.

• 4 SETS "ONE LEG SQUAT" (60 @ 51 PACE & 75" REST)

• 4 SETS "SIDE TO SIDE DITCH" (75" @ 100 PACE & 75" REST)

• 4 SETS "LOW WALK" UP HILL (90" @ 100 PACE W/JOG BACK DOWN HILL & 1' REST)

• 4 SETS "BROAD JUMP" UP HILL (45" @ NO PACE W/WALK BACK DOWN HILL & 1' REST)

• COOL DOWN JOG (10')

• STATIC STRETCH

Location: Chestnut Ridge Park

Bankrupt Corporations As Boats/Ships...

A nice way to represent this data! Pretty amazing how big Lehman Bros actually was - GM is quite dwarfed in comparison, and Chrysler looks like a insignificant.

My Belgian IPA @ 9AM

Drinking one of my Belgian IPA's at 9am - like any good 3rd shifter would do!

Buffalo's Homebrewing Events/Competitions

Unbeknown to me, there is a group events coming up this Spring/Summer for the local homebrewer. A couple of these seem to be new this year, while the Cole's IPA Festival is going on it's 3rd year. I plan on partaking in all these events.

April

Friday, April 24th - Beerology at The Buffalo Science Museum

• Event Website
• $20 (Museum members) and $25 (Non-Museum members)
  

May

May 30th - Pearl Street Brewmaster's Challenge

• No Entry Fee
• Style: Belgian Wit
  
• Competition Introduction
• Entry Form
• Guidelines
  

June

June 6th - Cole's 75th Anniversary Homebrewing Competition

• Call For Entries
  
• Entry Form
• $5 Entrance Fee
  
• Entries due by EOB on May 30th, 2009

July

Saturday, July 14th - Cole's 3rd Annual IPA Festival/Competition

• No Entry Fee
  
• Entry Form
• Forms due June 30th
• Submittions due by July 6th

Stay up to date with other Flying Bison related events

O'Reilly DBA Training Fail!

FAIL!

I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a joke or not, but perhaps they'll discuss what happened here!

Magnabrew's Hop Monastery (Belgian IPA)

Brew day today. It's been a real long time, but it's good to get back into it. My favorite beers are IPAs and Belgian Beers (Abbey Ales, Wit Ales, etc). I came across a recipe for a Belgian IPA, and I figured that I should master this (not officially a style of beer) genre. I liked the fact that the style is still under development, which allows me to experiment with it a little more - as seen by my derivation from the recipe I was trying to clone. Hopefully it will turn out alright!

Batch Size: ~3.00 gal (Did not sparge nearly enough)
Original Gravity: 1.079 SG (19% brix)
Sparge Gravity: 1.061 SG (15% brix)
Boil Time: 60 Minutes
Mash Time: 90 Minutes
Target Temperature: 149 deg
Strike Water Volume: 3 gallons
Strike Temperature: 164 deg


Ingredients
--------------

Grain

5.00 lb German Pilsner (1.7 SRM)
3.00 lb UK Golden Promise (2.4 - 3 SRM)
2.00 lb Belgian Pale Malt (3.2 SRM)
0.75 lb Organic Brown Sugar

Hops

1.00 oz Hallertauer, New Zealand [8.6%] (60 min)
1.00 oz Styrian Goldings [2.0%] (20 min)
1.00 oz Saaz [5.8%] (20 min)
1.00 oz Tettnang [4.7%] (10 min)
1.00 oz Styrian Goldings [2.0%] (5 min)

Yeast

Wyeast 1214 Belgian Ale Yeast Activator Pack

I currently have this sitting in the primary fermenter at a temperature of ~66 degrees. Now all I have to do is sit and wait for the yeast to do its work!

Awesome Solaris Bug!

Certain Solaris SPARC Systems may Experience 95 Year Time Jumps

Hey T.O, Welcome To Buffalo!

Quite a shock yesterday when I heard that T.O was signing with Buffalo. Last week when ESPN had a run through of all the teams that were not interested in him (with Miami and 49ers being the only ones who were interested) and I jokingly mentioned that this is the type of guy that the Bills need to pickup. The Bills never seem to pay these high profile guys, and tend to veer away from those with even the slightest of character issues. Sometimes overlooking "character" issues for the short term can allow for on field success, which the Bills desperately need.

I think this will be great for Lee Evans who will, for the first time, have a second receiver that can draw away some coverage from him. Marshawn and Fred Jackson should benefit from this as well. T.O is still a good player, regardless of his off field drama, and is definitely better than our current number 1, 2, and 3 WRs. I'm feeling pretty excited right now, but time will tell.

Good Quote To Live By...

"Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even if chequered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory or defeat."

Consultant Says Buffalo Needs To Overhaul Parking System - Really?!?!

http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/story/548555.html

So let me get this straight. The city currently has a "Parking Board" yet they needed to hire outside consultants for ~$95,000 to tell the city that they should take over control of all parking and pay a Czar $140,000 a year to figure out a way to "improve" parking - because the City has a great track record of being efficient and getting the job done! We can't trust the private sector to handle our parking - that's what tax dollars are for!

Back To School

After about 4 years, I'm going back to UB to take CSE 422. I wanted to take this class while an undergrad, but unfortunately lacked the available time.

I'm looking forward to learning more about the FreeBSD kernel internals and improving my C coding skills. I'm hoping that we'll also get deep into ZFS and DTrace - but I'm assuming that these topics may not get as much attention as I would like. I guess that's why I have free time :-)

Review : Zenoss Core Network and System Monitoring

I recently read "Zenoss Core Network and System Monitoring" by Michael Badger and from Packt Publishing. I was excited to hear that there was a book available that covered the Zenoss monitoring system in a more structured and step by step method (as compared with documentation found online). When I began with Zenoss, the documentation was very high level and left much to be desired. This generally caused me to spend a lot of time on IRC, in the forums, and trying to figure out what to do with the simplistic documentation that existed. This book is exactly what I was looking for when I started to venture into the world of Zenoss, and was a nice review for someone (like me) who is comfortable with the system. The book does a real nice job of giving an overview of the system architecture, then steps through each stage of an example installation and configuration, device and event management, generating reports, user management, transforms, etc.

I would also recommend this book for anyone who is new to network and system monitoring, as the book goes into the details of installing and configuring SNMP, WMI, Windows Event Logs, and Syslog.

This book is a must have for anyone who plans on using Zenoss or anyone that is wondering if Zenoss is the right monitoring solution for them.

You can find the book here.