Texas – The Big Room (and the little things in it)

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.

Aqua-pedestrianism and Ice Cream Yeast

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

Another “Open Thread”/quick followup

Time to take the special-needs kitty to the vet for boarding and gas up Flagella (yes, I named my car Flagella) and hit the road. By popular (i.e. more than zero people) demand, here’s my route (again, RSS readers will need to come to the website to see the map). Wish me (good) luck.

ID to TX [height=480;width=560]

Another cheatin’ “Open Thread” and random stuff

No single topics to dominate a post today. I’m in a hurry (as usual lately) and have very little time. Tomorrow morning I’m back on the 1600-mile route back to Southeast Texas, hopefully to sign the closing paperwork on the house we’re trying to buy.

My Mountain Dew� Wine appears to be still sitting there after several hours. Either the benzoic acid is still inhibiting the fermentation (in which case it’ll go REALLY slowly) or the yeast is just in shock or something. We’ll see how it looks in the morning. I’ll leave it for a week or so anyway to see how it does. Meanwhile I’ll refrigerate the other batch of yeast culture until I get back. If I have to develop my own strain of “Mountain Dew Yeast” I will, dagnabbit!

I did get a chance to go for a quick walk in the Big Room on the way back from some errands yesterday, so it gives me an excuse to play with the wordpress map plugin again (RSS feed readers: the map doesn’t get inserted there. Please check out the interactive map at the blog’s website here.) Comments on the map (or anything else, really – I DID say “Open Thread” after all) are encouraged – what do you think? I’d like to do some audio content for points on a map at some point, too. Maybe some video.

Lava Rock Walk [height=560;width=560]

If anyone’s bored enough to want to see how I get from Southeast Idaho to Southeast Texas, I can post a map of that tomorrow, too…

“They laughed at me! But I’ll show them all! AH, HAHAHAHA!”

Another T-shirt to add to my list of T-shirts I want.

I’m spending more hours shoveling my way through the books and papers and crap we’ve got up here at House v1.0, since if all goes well I’ll be making a brief run back down to Southeast Texas so we can sign the papers for House v2.0 down there, at which point we’ll be able to start actually moving. I sure hope this one goes through. Not only is it our third attempt to buy a house down there, but I’ve already identified a convenient location to build my “Intentional Food Microbiology” brewlab in it.

Since there’s no way I can afford to buy a -80�F freezer, I have an obvious interest in alternate means of preserving the yeast, mold, and bacterial cultures that I want to keep. To me, drying seems like the most desirable method when it’s feasible, since dried cultures should require the least amount of maintenance. After a several-month delay, I’ve finally gotten around to getting back in touch with the archivist at Brewer’s Digest to see about getting an old article on the viability of dried yeast cultures[1].

Speaking of old but useful scientific papers, there’s an extremely nifty challenge going on through the month of May (deadline: May 31st) over at “Skulls in the Stars” blog: find a classic scientific paper, read it, and blog about it.

“My �challenge�, for those sciencebloggers who choose to accept it, is this: read and research an old, classic scientific paper and write a blog post about it. I recommend choosing something pre- World War II, as that was the era of hand-crafted, �in your basement�-style science. There�s a lot to learn not only about the ingenuity of researchers in an era when materials were not readily available, but also about the problems and concerns of scientists of that era, often things we take for granted now!”

I think this is a brilliant idea – the classic papers often seem to be forgotten and often explain things that people seem to take for granted these days. I already mentioned my post about the Gram Stain (original paper published in 1884), though that post really talks more about what has happened with the Gram Stain over the last 125 years rather than only being about the original paper. There are a couple of other classic microbiology papers that I’m going to try to get to if I have time before the May 31st deadline arrives.

I also need to get some yeast activated and get my must processed – I’m hoping a brief boil will reduce the amount of a yeast-inhibiting substance in it. I’ll post more detail after I get it going.

[1] Wickerham LJ, AND Flickinger MH:”Viability of yeast preserved two years by
the lyophile process.” 1946; Brewers Digest, 21, 55-59; 65.

I finally got to Bristol Brewing Company…

Signage in front of the Bristol Brewing Company After spotting the company’s mention in Jeff Sparrow’s “Wildbrews“, I’ve been wanting to visit Bristol Brewing Company, particularly since they may be the only such brewery using local yeasts and bacteria that they isolated themselves from their local environment.

Since we’re moving from Southeastern Idaho to Southeastern Texas, I’ve been going back and forth between the two location. It just so happens that along with New Belgium Brewing Company, Bristol Brewing is actually right along a convenient route between the two locations. (Let’s see if I can figure out how to work the Google Maps plugin):

How’s that look? How does it work? (Those of you reading this on the RSS feed: The interactive map only appears on the website, it would seem. Please check it out here.) I made the KML file myself…

Bristol Brewing is a cozy little brewpub, and the people there are encouragingly helpful. They were in the middle of bottling, so there were no tours. Also, there were not currently any of the skull-‘n-bones beers available. However, I did get an educational series of tastes of their current brews on tap (thank you to the employee I spent most of the time talking to whose name I’ve embarrassingly forgotten, but who I believe was Tad Davis judging from the photos on the web site). I also lucked out and their microbiologist, Ken Andrews, happened to be there. I asked about their native Colorado brewing flora. Turns out Bristol Brewing isn’t quite as bold as I originally thought. They’re still doing their primary fermentation with “normal” brewing yeasts. What they’ve done is inoculated some wine barrels with the locally-isolated yeasts and bacteria, and they use the barrels for a secondary fermentation and aging instead. Much safer if you have to worry about having a drinkable product at the end, and of course it makes me feel like more of a crazed rebel for wanting to isolate my own local bugs for the main fermentation. So, a great visit overall.

Incidentally, it seems they’ll be tapping a new Skull-‘n-Bones brew in a couple of weeks, at 5pm on Tuesday, May 27th (2008). It sounds like they’ll probably have some available for a few days before it all disappears, so I’m hoping my return to Texas can be timed such that I can swing by and at least get a taste.

WANT: “Teamaker” hops

Just a brief “aw, crap, has it really been over two weeks since my last post?” post, really, but I thought this was interesting.

It would seem that there’s a variety of hops that’s been registered recently known as the “Teamaker” variety. It’s got all the magic bacteria-stopping power of a hops plant, but composed of almost entirely the non-bitter component. I’m not sure how hard it would be for me to get them to send me a plant or two to evaluate it’s usefulness for yeast cultivation (as an anti-firmicutes antibiotic) and for controlling the growth of bacteria in fermented foods and drinks…

House-hunting (“Yep, these are house droppings all right. Fresh ones too…” [everybody’s seen that Monty Python bit, right?]) in southeast Texas and the related travel (both in the area here and between here and the other abode in southeastern Idaho) is eating my life at the moment, but I’ll try not to neglect the blog so much.

More to follow.

Well, a PHP example, anyway

Once I dove in and started messing around, I only had to fix two typos as the example I was working on seems to work correctly, at least to the extent that I’ve tested it. I now have what appears to be a working example of Geostring parsing in PHP. In this case, the example reads my feed from the Twitter website, sifts out any geostring tags it finds, then generates Google Maps links for each one found. As I write this, there are two geostring tags on that page, representing places (and times)
that I have actually been, and it seems to work.

You can take a look at the source code for the example here, or see it in action here.

Feel free to grab a copy to play with if you’d like (or write one yourself that isn’t so messy – hey, as someone who doesn’t consider himself a professional “coder”, I’m just happy that it did exactly what I wanted it to do on the first try…). You should only need to worry about two things – changing the $text_to_read, and whether or not your web server (or CLI) has fopen wrappers turned on so the script can read another web page if you use a web page as your text to parse rather than a local file.

Since generating a geostring tag is trivial, I didn’t bother trying to incorporate that into this example. If you want one, then here:

<?php
//generate a geostr tag with the most typical information only
//point not part of a track nor including heading or angle
$lat=44.027168;
$lon=-111.297892;
$elev=”1711.9m”; //could leave off the “m” and treat as float, since it defaults to “meters”
$timestamp=”20071125T123438-06″; //6 hours behind UTC

print(“geostr:$lat,$lon,$elev:$timestamp:geostr”);
//”full” version: print(“geostr:$lat,$lon,$elev:$timestamp,:,:geostr”);
//completely unnecessary, but legal
?>

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.