This is just weird: Cassini Images Bizarre Hexagon on Saturn. Initial explainations include possible standing waves in the atmosphere (can one create hexagonal standing waves?) and some bizarre electromagentic radiation, quite possibly creating a unique aurora.
All of these planets are yours except for Saturn. Attempt no landings here.
About 10 years ago when I was still in college, I attended a Saturday afternoon party at a friend’s house in Oakland featuring a game of vicious urban croquet. At this party, one of my friend’s roommates passed out unlabeled brown bottles of beer, urging us to try it but not waste it as he only had enough for one bottle per person. Up to this point, Henry Weinhard’s and the occasional Guinness were my two favorite beers. Always willing to try something new, I flipped open the cap and took a swig. It was MAGNIFICENT! The taste was very sweet, almost like a soda, but with a distinct grainy and hoppy background that assured me it was still a beer. I sought out the generous roommate to ask him what the brew was and where I could buy it.
“It’s called Goat Scrotum Ale,” he told me with an impish giggle.
After being reassured that the name was only fanciful and the brew did not, indeed, contain any farm animal genitalia, I asked him where he bought it and why he took the labels off.
“It never had any labels. You can’t buy this beer anywhere – I made it.”
Before this moment I had never really considered that one could make his own beer. I had heard of folks making their own beer and wine in the past, sure, but I also heard tales of exploding bottles, sour tastes and general disarray in the process. That something this amazing could be produced at home by a stoner college student amazed me.
Thus started my long (and I mean looooong) descent into the world of homebrewing. As I do with all new ideas, I ventured to the bookstore to read up on the process. I even bought a kit from the Barnes and Noble bookstore (where else would you buy a beer kit?) that came with a can of pre-hopped pale malt extract, a small packet of yeast and a book with recipes and instructions. I learned, however, that I would also need a fermentor, bottles, a capper, sanitizer, tubing and on and on… this would be a daunting project. So I shelved it.
Almost 10 years would pass before I finally brewed my first beer. During that time I revisited the idea again and again, but never took the plunge. It took a massive life change that sparked a desire to stop waffling and start doing all those things I’ve always wanted to do, plus the fortuitous winning of a raffle prize for one free brewing lesson, to finally get me to boil up my first wort.
I now have several beers under my belt. This past weekend, during a brew-in for the Delta Brewing club, I decided to re-live that first experience that changed the way I looked at beer forever. I never had the chance to speak with the brewer at that party again so I never got the recipe for what I assumed was his own creation. When I found a recipe with the same name and containing ingredients that would lend the same flavor as what I had on that day in Charles Papazian’s The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, I knew I had to brew it up. You should have seen the looks on my fellow homebrewers faces as I added all of the wild ingredients to my boil – chocolate, licorice root, juniper berries, freshly grated ginger… Mmmmm…
It may take a full month before I’m able to completely enjoy my tribute to the joy of homebrewing, but it will be well worth the wait. The recipe that follows is a slight variation on Papazian’s recipe taking into account both availability of ingrediants and some of my own homebrewing experience.
Goat Scrotum Ale (A variation)
5lbs liquid dark malt extract
1lb. 120L crystal malt
1/4lb. black patent malt
1/4lb. roasted barley
1 1/2oz. Northern Brewer hops (60 min)
1/4 oz. Kent Goldings hops (2 min)
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup dark molasses
2 tsp. gypsum
1 lb. honey
4oz. freshly grated ginger
1oz. licorice root
1/4 cup slightly crushed juniper berries
6oz. Hershey’s baking chocolate
1 Whirlfloc tablet
1 vial White Labs WLP002 English Ale Yeast, increased to about 2 quarts using a starter.
O.G. About 1065
F.G. Not sure yet
Steep the grains at 150-170 deg. for half an hour. Pull out the grains, then bring the water to a boil. Add the Northern Brewer hops and gypsum and start the timer for an hour. At the half hour mark, add the brown sugar, molasses, licorice root, juniper berries and chocolate. With 20 minutes left in the boil, add the Whirlfloc tablet. Just before flameout, add both the Kent Goldings hops and the honey. Cool the wort, place in the fermentor, oxygenate and pitch the yeast. I’ll be letting my wort sit on the yeast cake for about two weeks before bottling to ensure a complete fermentation.
I just had a wild hair to take a look at site for the guy I’d like to see as the Democratic front-runner next year, Delaware Senator Joseph Biden. I typed in www.JosephBiden.com assuming that would take me to his site. Go ahead and click on it and see where you go. (For those too lazy to click, it forwards to BarackObama.com).
For the record, the actual URL for Joseph Biden is, apparently, www.joebiden.com. There’s something questionably ethical about one presidential candidate comandeering the domain for the name of one of his rivals. I wouldn’t pin it on Obama himself – more than likely an overzealous staffer. Still… Fishy.
The best way to improve your beer knowledge is to learn not only new techniques, but to understand what is happening in the beers you love. One of the best ways to do this is become a beer judge.
The brewing world has many, many competitions across the nation. Most of them follow the rules and guidelines set up by the American Homebrewer’s Association (AHA) and the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP).
The BJCP outlines what knowledge and experience is required for judges and certifies those interested in judging beers on an official basis. More importantly, it outlines what judges are looking for when reviewing a beer for competition.
Even if you don;t plan on becoming a judge or competing, you will find the BJCP style guidelines useful wheen seeking a baseline for your own recipes. After all, if you’re looking to make a special porter featuring some unusual ingredient it helps to know where to start.
Gathering the collective wisdom of homebrewers on the Internet, the Homebrew Wiki is a growing source for homebrew information.
The Homewbrew Wiki
This is making the rounds on the Internet at the moment: The Random Beer Name Generator. If you’re looking for a good name for your latest brew, this baby can help. Or, if you’re looking for inspiration for creating a recipe, perhaps you can start here. I, for instance, can’t wait to start brewing up a batch of “Electric April Fools Day Red Hefeweizen”. Mmmmm… Red Hefeweizen…
Building on the previous post, one of the issues I’m facing right now is the enormous amount of work I have to accomplish, not all of it paid. In addition to addressing my client work, I also need to focus on building the business and finding new clients. That means marketing, networking, accounting, etc. It turns out I have a bit of a knack for these things. I love marketing and networking with people, I love meeting with clients and strategizing about their websites. And, yes, I do still enjoy occasionally implementing the work I plan for, though that’s lower on my “enjoy” list than it used to be.
The bigger issue right now for me, and the connecting thread in my last three posts, is that there’s far too much work for one guy to do at the moment. The answer, of course, is to find help, and I;ve begun doing that. However, there are a few challenges there as well. Specifically, how to find solid folks who meet my standards who are also affordable for me to still make a profit on the work performed. I’ve received a number of offers from offshore companies, but I’ve managed offshore relationships in the past and I find them to often be more trouble than they’re worth. I’d much rather tap talent local to me, not only in the USA but specifically in Contra Costa County. Even with ubiquitous telecommunications technology, I still like to sit across from a table and look someone in the eye before I trust them with something as vital to me as my clients’ work.
Of course, finding and vetting these folks takes time, which is already an exhausted resource. Worse, it’s unpaid time. In the long term, that time is really an investment for, when I find a groupd of folks I can work with, I’ll be able to take on a lot more work and actually build the business. In these early days, though, when cashflow is everything, it kills me to have to take that time away.
Hence my current trap – I can remain a one man band and take on as much work as my time allows, or I can take some of that time and focus on building a lasting, sustainable business. In my industry, there are a ton of freelancers, most of them happy to do the work they get and leave it at that. But what happens when they move or burn out or change careers? Their clients are often passed on to other folks who may or may not be as trusty as the original freelancers. Plus, despite the money that comes from it, freelancers usually hate maintenance. One of the greatest joys in freelancing is being able to do something new every day. When you get stuck updating and maintaining the same thing day in and day out, it can get tiring.
TechKnowMe is my solution to this problem. I’d love to just freelance, but I have a couple of dozen other things I want to pursue as businesses down the line as well. I’m concerned that, when I’m ready to pursue those dreams, I’ll feel like I’m letting my clients down by ditching them and dumping them on someone else. If, however, I have a cache of programmers, designers and administrators I trust to spread the work, I can be confident that, no matter what, my clients will be taken care of. And this is the same value proposition I wish to offer to the freelancers I hire. It’s better to work as part of a team rather than as a one-person show – better for the clients, better for the freelancer.
But, again, getting that together takes time, which equals money to me right now. So the conundrum continues – risk my cashflow to build a business, or risk my business to maintain cashflow? There’s no real answer, I just need to keep plugging and focusing on keeping the cash coming in while I build. Still, it’s a lot for one guy to handle.
The truth of the matter, sad as it is, is that I don’t enjoy coding as much as I used to. There was a time in my life when sitting down to the computer to plug away at some code was something I genuinely looked forward to. But something in me snapped. I think I just became more social at some point and no longer liked the constant isloation that coding provides. While it’s true I still like my alone time, my interest have, instead, drifted toward the customer-facing tasks of designing and planning a site rather than actually implementing it.
I genuinely enjoy talking to business owners about their web sites, their goals and how I can help achieve them. It brings me great joy to share in their excitement and be a font of information and solutions. When time comes to implement, however, it’s becoming a bit of a drag for me.
Maybe it’s just because the code itself isn’t as challenging as it once was. I’m a sponge for information and I love a good challenge. Coding always presented endless fun logic puzzles for me to solve. But I’ve solved most of the puzzles I come across most often, and the bigger puzzles that I want to solve, to be frank, aren’t at all profitable. Take AI, for instance. The idea of teaching a computer to think is what drew me to programming in the first place when I was 10 years old. Movies and TV had taught me that computers were hyper-intelligent sentient beings. When my mother tried to explain that, in truth, computers are simply machines that take instructions from humans, I was determined that I’d eventually give a computer the necessary instructions to think for itself. That dream has always lingered in the back of my head, and I enjoy keeping up with some of the topics happening in AI research these days. But in the end, AI is still just research. Sure, there are plenty of commercial applications for it, but the interesting stuff is all in the research, which costs more money than it generates.
I think, ultimately, I’d like to build a business model where I’m paid to play with ideas and such, generating money for myself, my team and my customers. I probably should have gone into research, but I never had the discipline that modern academia requires. I’m not one for bureaucracy and political intrigue, so working in academia would probably make me miserable. Still, I like playing with ideas.
Which brings me back to TechKnowMe. I get endless amounts of pleasure in looking at the technology available and helping small business owners find ways to use it to meet their business goals. In this role, I get to play with ideas, explore possibilites and see them come to fruition. At the moment, though, I’m a one-man show, which means I also need to deal with the dirty nitty-gritty. I still enjoy coding now and then, but I need to find some folks who love to code as much as I used to. Hand off the nitty gritty implementation details to them, check their work, then refine it to suit the needs of my clients. That’s the business model I’m currently working toward. It’s attainable, but man is it a lot of work.
In September I left my full time job to work full time for myself, officially kicking off TechKnowMe as a real, not just in my “spare” time, business. It has been a leap of faith and a fascinating learning experience. I keep telling myself I’m going to blog about the experience for you, since I do think it’s something many of you will find interesting, but I keep running into the same problem – no time.
Time management has always been a weakness of mine. I can easily find myself taking on too much at once or deciding to take a “10-minute break” that lasts an hour. One of the best things about working for one’s self is the freedom and flexibility it provides. That also happens to be its greatest curse.
I’ve been trying various methods of maintaining my schedule and keeping myself in line. I find that when I know precisely what needs to be done, I’m far better at plugging away at it. I’ve implemented some tips and trick divined from Getting Things Done by David Allen, which is chock full of powerful ideas. Some days, though, I fell things have gotten so far away from me that even taking the tim to organize them is daunting.
So this is one of my uphill battles at the moment – finding a way to balance work and life and keep everything moving happily along. There are so many things I want to do, but it’s difficult to find time amongst the things I need to do. One thing I want to do is, as I said, share my experiences in the new venture with you, and I’m going to make a commitment to do that, however sporadically. On days like today, you’ll get a bunch of posts out of me. Then you may not hear from me for a week or two while I push on to get some other things done. All I can ask of you is to be patient and keep reading and, please please please, leave comments sharing your experience and advice. I’ll try to be better at responding to those as well.
I finally got around to brewing up the More Beer Christmas Ale kit I bought back on October. Both the kit and the yeast have been sitting in my fridge for almost six months. I was afraid the yeast may have completely expired, so I did my second yeast starter. Less than 24 hours later, the wort is fermenting like wild. Look for yourself!
For more information about yeast starters, what they can do for your brew and how to make them, check out Jamil Zainasheff’s MrMalty.com.