Four Years

You can accomplish a great deal in four years.  The mighty Hoover Dam was completed in 4 years.  It was the world’s largest electric power producing facility and the world’s largest concrete structure when it was completed in 1935.  Another thing that has happened in 4 years is my current job (not that it is ending now).  I went from the bottom of the stack to a reasonably high position in my company over the span of 4 years.  I’ve worked a great deal to do it, but I can’t say that it is all by my hand.

Perhaps the most amazing thing that has happened over the last 4 years is my marriage.  Today, my wife and I celebrate 4 years.  It has been nothing short of wonderful.  We have two beautiful children, a great home, and family who love us.  I look forward to many more years of memories that I will cherish.

Look out world…

Here he comes

Spots of Light

I never thought I would be the type to wax philosophical on a blog, but here goes nothing…

Both today and yesterday I have felt that I am in a bit of a funk. Just not overly excited about work and probably not hiding it too well either. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that we are working with our offices in different continents, which translates to at least 15 or 20 emails waiting for me daily when I get to the office at 7am… Most of which require action on my part.

I was really feeling this way this morning when I got a call from Kim, who was about to drop off Josh at daycare before going to work. Talking to her and hearing Josh in the background really turned my day around in a way that I can’t really explain. In the fog of an under-excited work day, the thought of them shone through to me like brilliant spots of light.

Rachel Brew in the Bottle

Upgrades…

With the arrival of our new Panasonic HDC-SD9 (no, we didn’t pay the list price), it didn’t take long to realize that the old PC wasn’t going to cut it when it came to editing HD video clips. A single processor, 2.4GHz Pentium 4, with 3.5 GB of RAM running Vista and it struggled to create a 40 second HD WMV file at 540p. When I say struggled, i mean it took at least 45 minutes to write out this file. To make matters worse, it seemed like the video frames were played back in fast forward for 10 seconds, then froze on a frame, playing the audio at the real run rate. Needless to say, I wasn’t very pleased, however it did give me a reason to start to look at new PC’s.

The current situation at home is that I use the above mentioned PC, while Kim uses my dual 1.4 GHz G4 PowerMac, which is also getting a little long in the tooth. I wanted to retire both PC’s and go for a single solution that we could both use, hopefully selling the PowerMac for a low-ish price on Craig’s List to make up for some of the money spent on the new PC. My dad mentioned that Consumer Reports had just done a segment on PC’s in the print edition, and since Kim and I subscribe to the online version I was able to find the report easily. It looked like the best buy from CR would be a Dell 530s, mostly because we want to be able to do semi-advanced video editing (HD) and I enjoy the occasional game on the PC. After some customization of the 530s, we found that the price before taxes looked to be around $900, which wasn’t bad, but still a little steep, so we decided to sleep on it. The next day, after some faithful googling, I found some Dell Coupons online that could help us cut the price a little, with the best deal on the inspiron being $300 off any PC of $999 or more. The problem with this is that the PC I found maxed out around 900. Sure I could load it with other junk I didn’t want, but that’s no way to get the most “bang for the buck”. So I started over with a 530 (note the lack of “s” here) which is larger, including more room for customization. After loading this new PC up, I rolled away with a Quad Core Intel machine with 4GB of RAM, HD audigy sound card, and a Radeon HD 2600 XT. All of this came out to be $1094, which dropped to $794 leaving a final price of $841, which I consider a steal if there ever was one. Once we get all setup, i’ll see about posting some YouTube links to our videos.

Murky IPA

When I hear the work Murky, I think of “Public Opinion Pollster, Paul Murky of Murky Research” from Car Talk. What I don’t think of is an India Pale Ale… at least not until yesterday.

I opened up the first bottle of my recently brewed IPA, expecting great things. After all, it had Warrior Hops, which I’ve really enjoyed in Left Hand‘s Warrior IPA. It had only been conditioning in the bottle for about a week, so I figured it was probably undercarbonated, but it did have a nice head when I poured it. I held it up to the light to take a look and I found it “murky”. I couldn’t see through it, which could be due to Chill Haze, especially since there was a significant amount of sediment in the bottom of the glass. If it is indeed Chill Haze, there are a number of things I could do in the future to avoid it, such as a Wort Chiller.

Brew Notes

- Whole Simcoe Hops instead of pellets or plugs (more sediment in the final product?). I’ve decided to use a hops bag from now on to try to keep it clean.

- Almost no airlock activity during all of primary… So little that I actually pitched 2 vials of the California Ale Yeast for safety sake. I can only guess that my explosive stout damaged the seal of my Fermenting Bucket.

Murky IPA

1 lb Crystal 60

3 lb Amber DME

3 lb Extra Light DME

1 lb Light DME

1 oz Warrior — boiling

.5 oz Simcoe — 15 min

.5 oz Cascade — 15 min

1 oz Cascade — 5 min

.5 oz Simcoe — dry

.5 oz Cascade — dry

White Labs California Ale Yeast

Accidentally Deleted Partion…

One of those things you never want to do.  I have two drives in my PC, one 35GB drive and one 72 GB drive.  When I initially installed Vista, I erroneously installed on the smaller of the 2 drives.  As a byproduct of that mistake, I have to constantly monitor how much disk space I use and today I decided I would reinstall vista on the larger drive.  Since I bought the upgrade instead of the full version, I had to install XP first.  Meanwhile, I was trying to keep track of Josh and get ready to brew the Witbier, so I was multitasking. 

When the blue setup screen of windows came up, I decided to delete the old partitions and recreate them, and, at one point, I had split the larger drive into two smaller partitions.  So I thought to myself that I was cleaning up the partitions to create a solid drive that shouldn’t bother me about diskspace so much.  As soon as I deleted the third partition I froze, realizing what I had just done.  In a panic, I rebooted the PC, hoping that the partition table hadn’t been written to the disks, but I was too late.  Most of the data on that disk is purely backups from my PowerMac, but there was a small sliver that contained media from the windows install that I was redoing and it appeared to be long gone.

I knew the data was still there on the disk, but Windows couldn’t see it.  After some clever googling, I found TestDisk, an Open Source disk recovery tool, and decided to give it a shot, as I had nothing to lose.  To my surprise, it worked perfectly!  Quite user friendly (for a command line tool) and after a reboot, all 250GB of backed up data showed up on my drive. 

The lesson here?  Never partition drives unless you are paying attention to what you are doing… I got lucky, but it isn’t always that easy.

Witbier in Primary

With an OG of 1.054, which syncs up with QBrew, I think the Belgian turned out just about right…

Brew Notes:
- After a bit of advice from the mailing list I subscribe too, I decided to do a partial mash with the Flaked Wheat and Aromatic Malt. Since I had such a small amount to mash, I used only 1 quart of water, but it seems to have converted nicely, at least by the smell of it. If I were more of a pro, I would have checked with iodine, but I didn’t have any on hand.

- I used 2 Valencia Oranges and 2 Blood Oranges for my Orange peel additions. I just used the cheese grater we had and lightly grated the Oranges to shave off the “good stuff”

- Fresh coriander smells great and my cleaned coffee grinder did the job for pulverizing the seeds.

- This is my first batch to go in the new 6.5 gallon carboy. No more brew bucket for now… I want to see how happy my yeast are.

Rachel the Weiss

For my inaugural post, I figured I may as well start with 2 things I love… My Family and Brewing Beer.

As close friends and relatives will know, Kim and I are about to have our second child. We’ve been very fortunate to have such a happy little boy for our first child. We’ve been spoiled by Joshua’s infectious laughter and winning smile, even if it only has about 8 teeth so far. We look forward to what is in store for us when Rachel arrives in 5 weeks.

The other thing that is fairly prominent in my life lately is brewing beer. I’ve been home brewing beer for about 5 months now and I’ve really enjoyed it thus far. There is something very rewarding about being able to pour a nice pint and know that this tall, cool beverage was made with my own two hands. Admittedly, I’m still on the novice track, using Malt Extracts with a few Steeping grains, but I can’t say I’ve been truly disappointed by any of my result other than the Stout that almost exploded.

The way these two tie together is that I wanted to do a brew to celebrate Rachel’s arrival, and with only 5 weeks to go, I needed to get started right away. I thought about the old rhyme about “sugar and spice and everything nice”, which got me thinking about a sweeter spiced beer that I thought would be appropriate for the summertime. The beer I decided to make was a Belgian Witbier, mostly due to the fact that a Witbier (White Beer) is a great summer beer. As an added bonus, the recipe I’ve chosen (Celis Wit clone from Beer Captured) has Orange Peel and Coriander Seed in it to give it a sweet/tart/spiced flavor that I’m hoping will really go well with the style. This beer is also considered a Weissbier (Wheat Beer), which is where I got the name.

Rachel the Weiss
Steeping Grains:
4 oz Flaked Wheat
4 oz Belgium Aromatic Malt

@ 60 minutes
4 lbs Pale LME
2.33 lbs Wheat DME
3/4 oz Willamette

@ 15 minutes
1/2 oz Willamette
3/4 oz Orange Peel
1 tsp Crushed Coriander Seed

@ 5 minutes

1/4 oz Cascade

@ 1 minutes
1/2 oz Orange Peel
1 tsp Crushed Coriander Seed

1 Smack Pack of Wyeast Belgian Witbier