Possible audio show, and “ask me anything!”…

You may be wondering where I’ve been. (If not, in order to spare my fragile little ego, please pretend that you were. Thank you.) Well, mostly I’ve been in my car driving to and from my spiffy new job.

This hasn’t left me with much time to blog lately, which annoys me a bit. On the other hand, the commute is long enough that I run out of netcasts to listen to during the week, leaving me with driving time back and forth during which I could conceivably be doing something productive.

Continue reading Possible audio show, and “ask me anything!”…

“Berry-Pomegranate” is the new “Strawberry-Kiwi”. Discuss.

We actually (finally) got power and internet back LAST weekend, but this week’s been too hectic to get back into proper blogging again yet. Spending the day dealing with unexpectedly severe, sudden acute “hay-fever” type symptoms hasn’t helped (fortunately, that seems to be just about under control now, hopefully I’ll be feeling more normal after a decent night’s sleep.)

We did actually get out on the lake for a long lake-spanking session last weekend. I finally managed to get some time to go through the pictures yesterday, so there’ll be another interactive photo-map sometime soon (I hope) – and of course more fermentation.

Meanwhile, is it just me or is “pomegranate” the new “in” flavor, much as “kiwi” was about ten years ago?

I WANT MY FRIGGIN’ ELECTRICITY!

99%(!) of Entergy Texas’ customers are apparently without power right now. I wish they’d actually put some effort into preparing the lines for severe weather and streamlining the repairs, instead of letting the whole thing fall apart and then getting the state legislature to approve yet another “Hurricane Cost Recovery Charge” to be added to everyone’s bills to pay to return everything to the same “ready to fail at the next batch of severe weather” state…How do I get in on this deal?

Being without air conditioning in southeast Texas this time of year is almost intolerable. If they manage to restore service quickly despite my cynicism, I’ll probably feel a lot less cranky…

On the upside, it appears there should be some scenic carnage visible out on the lake if I manage to get some time to get out and paddle around a while between bouts of moving bits of broken tree around the yard. Here’s a sample shot taken from the shore of Lake Conroe earlier today:

Continue reading I WANT MY FRIGGIN’ ELECTRICITY!

It’s (Still) Comin’ Right For Us!

There’s some indication that Ike may be starting to curve more quickly towards the East, which would be a good thing. If Ike passes to our East, we should be in the lowest wind/fewest tornadoes part of the storm.

By the way, am I the only one wondering why the news reports feel compelled to make their weather reported stand there on location in the middle of the hurricane? “I’m standing here in the middle of the street a few miles from Galveston, and as you can see on your screen, hurricanes are windy. Also, wet. Back to you, Fred…”

I’m wondering what happens if the storm floods the sewers and they have to report on that. “I’m standing here hip deep in filth…”

Other than a couple of flickers, power is currently still on and internet it still live. Hopefully it’ll keep up. If we’re lucky and Ike ends up crawling past far enough to the east, we might, maybe, escape without serious power outages…

I’ll probably post again “tomorrow” (well, after sunrise today anyway…) if internet and power are still up when I get up.

It’s comin’ right for us!

Hurricane Ike predicted tracks, going right through where we live as of 20080912T100000
(Click image for Wunderground.com’s interactive “Wundermap”…)

Actually, looking more closely at the picture there I think we may be slightly further west than it indicates, but it’s still very likely we’ll end up losing power for a while sometime tonight, but I still am going to try to get a post up for the Giant’s Shoulders blog carnival – I’ve got the paper picked out and read, I just need to do a write-up before I go to bed tonight. Currently it looks like the winds shouldn’t get TOO bad until late tonight/early-tomorrow-morning so we ought to have power long enough…

Yes, there’s a disturbingly severe hurricane “Comin’ right for us!” and I’m worrying about posting about a classic scientific paper before the blog-carnival deadline while I still have power. How’s THAT for dedication?

First we need to move stuff inside, though. I don’t want The Ascospore getting blown away…

Aqua-pedestrianism and Ice Cream Yeast

A teaser image from the interactive map below...Today’s batch of blog-based Stir-Fried Random includes another interactive map of a lake-spanking expedition, a very brief musing on search engines, and a return to “intentional food microbiology” discussion. To preview: you can get pizza without ever getting out of the water on Lake Conroe, “spanking” is amusingly popular for search engines, and no, there is not normally any yeast in ice cream, but perhaps there could be. Read on, please…

Continue reading Aqua-pedestrianism and Ice Cream Yeast

Lake-spanking map and pictures

Lake Conroe has been persistently naughty. Since nobody else seemed to be taking responsibility for its misbehavior, we took matters into our own hands yesterday and gave it a good spanking. I paddled it until I got blisters.

I think this will need to be done much more often, since I don’t think the lake has learned its lesson yet. On the other hand, I learned a few – interactive photo-map and details below…

Continue reading Lake-spanking map and pictures

Eggs suck.

Don’t misunderstand – I like all kinds of foods made with eggs. Eggs are tasty. They’re handy. They’re nutritious, too. Their protein is so good they are the standard against which nutritionists have historically compared other food proteins. As a bonus, a medium-sized egg contains only one-eighth the cholesterol in a single ounce of human brain (and is much less likely to give you kuru).

However, could it be possible to come up with a more inconvenient packaging scheme? This thing was obviously designed by someone that hates us. “Let’s see, we’ll make it tasty and very nutritious. But just so people don’t think we like them, we’ll make it the consistency of snot, and package it by sealing it inside a specially-made, inedible brittle container so that you have to literally smash the thing open to get at the food, ensuring that the consumer* gets nasty goo all over his or her hands, or gets shards of the container mixed in with the food, or both. That’ll show the little jerks. And if that’s not enough, we’ll also have that container extruded out of a chicken’s butt.” (For some odd reason, as I write this, I’m picturing an Evil Santa Claus giving a presentation to the Evil Elves who are about to go off and implement this idea…”Sneezy, Drippy, and Runny – you three will head up the design committee…”)

They’re not screw flies or anything, but perhaps eggs can still count as an example of “irreducible grotesqueness”. (The picture, in case it isn’t obvious, is an egg separator. The image is linked to the site where you can buy them.)

This short rant has been brought to you by I’m-Making-Too-Many-Egg-Based-Meals-Lately Industries. That, and a second test to make sure I’ve got the DNS issues that I initially had resolved now. Can you all see this? I’d be thankful if everyone who was seeing this would post a quick “yeah, I see it” in the comments so that I can get on with the real posts again.

* Am I the only one who finds it insulting to be called a “consumer”, as though I were nothing more than a gaping mouth with a wallet? Am I sitting here mouth agape like a baby bird, waiting for a “supplier” to stroll by, grab some money out of my wallet, and cough up some “product” for me to “consume”? (I contend that I am not a “consumer” but a active participant in this economy, dagnabbit!)

(Tap Tap Tap) Is this thing on?…

Move is underway. Here’s a quick update / test.

Cornelia and Monk(eymutt), the Laser Dogs

On the way home (to Texas, that is, with a load of furniture from House v1.0 in Idaho) we adopted a co-dog. Now Cornelia isn’t the only official dog in the house.

Yeah, I know, pretty frivolous stuff. What do you want – this is mainly a test post. You guys ARE seeing this post, right? (Please comment and let me know). I’ve finally found and jumped through the hoops necessary to migrate the bigroom.org website over to the new host. It’s also running on the old server in House v1.0 on the DSL line as well, but this post isn’t getting put on it. If I’ve done everything correctly, hosting for bigroom.org should now be handled by Eskimo North. Just a few other minor tweaks and I’ll be set to return to House v1.0 and shut down the old server so I can move it down here to Texas.

I’ve gone from about 4400ft elevation down to about 250ft, but the plastic bottles of Mountain Dew® Wine seem to have positive pressure, so it would appear there is still some live yeast left in there and the priming sugar is slowly doing its job. I’m pretty sure the benzoic acid is what’s slowing down the activity so drastically, but it hasn’t killed it off yet.

I’ve also got a couple of entries in mind already for the next The Giants’ Shoulders blog carnival, and hopefully some more crazed brewing project news to offer sometime. And, of course, the promised post on why benzoic acid works. Stay tuned.

Administrivia

As part of the moving process, bigroom.org is going to be moved to hosting on “Eskimo North”, who I found via a Google™ search for “Linux-friendly” ISP’s. If all goes well, there’ll be no noticeable interruption. If all doesn’t go well, there may be up to a day or two while the site appears to be down (while the change propogates around the Domain Name Servers). If this happens, please don’t give up on me!…

Sometime in the next 24 hours or so I’ll take this physical server down so that I can bring it with me to the new Asylum, which will take a couple of days. Hopefully everything will have transitioned over to the new host before I do that. Wish me luck. More postings in a few days…