Published: 12/29/2012
| Maris Otter Malt |
4 lbs. |
| Black Roasted Barley |
8 oz. |
| Chocolate Malt |
8 oz. |
| Total |
5 lbs. |
Ten quarts of strike water raised to 163°, then mashed for 60 minutes.
|
Time (Minutes) |
|
10 |
20 |
30 |
40 |
50 |
| Temperature |
156° |
156° |
153° |
154° |
150° |
Sparged with 4½ quarts of water at 165° for 15 minutes.
Boiled for 60 minutes with the following hop schedule:
| 60 minutes remaining |
Chinook |
2 oz. |
Ice bathed wart to 70°. Filtered trub from wart on the way into the primary fermenter with fine mesh filter.
Original Gravity: 1.055
| Yeast |
| London Ale |
White Labs |
WLP013 |
1 vial |
| Date |
Temperature |
Gravity |
Notes |
| 12/29/2012 |
70° |
1.055 |
Tastes like sweetened espresso. |
| 12/31/2102 |
73° |
1.023 |
Still tasting sweetness. Bitterness beginning to balance. |
| 1/1/2013 |
73° |
1.022 |
|
| 1/3/2013 |
73° |
1.021 |
|
| 1/5/2013 |
73° |
1.020 |
Racked to secondary fermenter. |
| 1/15/2013 |
73° |
1.016 |
Bottled into 12 oz longnecks. |
Final Gravity: 1.016
| Bottle Date: 1/15/2013 |
Priming sugar: 1.5 oz in 2 cups water |
| Yield: 212 oz / 1.66 gallons |
Bottle type: 12 oz. longnecks |
Original volume was 5 gallons, but after boil, only about 1.75 gallons remained. Next batch I would go for a 3.5 gallon boil, and adjust grain bill accordingly.
Published: 12/11/2012
The newest version of WordPress, 3.5, (code-named ‘Elvin’) dropped today, three months and five days after 3.4.2. Major changes in this release include an upgraded media manager, a new default theme, dashboard resolution improvements, and some behind the scenes improvements.
Upgrading from 3.4.2 was as easy as it always is for WordPress upgrades. Maybe I have been lucky, but I’ve never had an issue with any upgrade, and this one was no different. Speed has never been a problem, either; the upgrade completed in about 20 seconds, and I’m off trying the new features.
New Media Manager
The biggest change that I see in version 3.5 is the new media manager. The interface has changed drastically, and at first I felt that it might be a bit overwhelming for the less tech savvy. After using it, though, I realized it only looked intimidating. It’s actually quite easy to use if you just dive in.
WordPress 3.5 Image Gallery
Image galleries have been around since 2.5, but they have never been easy to work with. You had to upload, attach, then manually put the gallery shortcode in. With the new media manager, creating galleries becomes trivial. You can drag and drop the images to reorder, caption them quickly, and with button-click ease, insert them into you posts.
I had always been frustrated by the lack of a good image gallery in WordPress. The NextGEN Gallery plugin always filled the gap, but with the improvements, I have started removing NextGEN from many of my sites. NextGEN’s image arrangement was always lacking, I thought. While it gives you nice pop-ups for each image in the gallery, site visitors can’t comment on individual images, which I hate. I guess it depends on what you are looking for out of your image gallery. I will still use NextGEN in given situations, but it won’t automatically be installed on new sites anymore.
Another new function of the media manager is the ability to insert several images into a post at once, then write the post around the inserted images. I tend to write first, then insert images later, so I’m not sure how useful this will be for me, but I can see how others would find it useful.
New Default Theme
Seeing as how it’s almost 2013, I guess it was just about time for the Twenty Twelve theme release. It’s everything that Twenty Ten and Eleven were, updated and kept light. It’s a fine default theme and its look stays pretty consistent across various devices. As they say on the About page: simple, flexible, and elegant.
Dashboard Resolution Improvements
Even on smaller screens, the WordPress dashboard could get a little grainy if you zoomed in. On higher resolution devices, it could get a little grainy if you stood across the room. Well, no more, even when zoomed in as far as you can. It’s eye candy for the backend, for sure, and really doesn’t have the slightest impact on reaching the people you are trying to reach with your website, but it really does look great.
Square Buttons
Speaking of changes that have no impact on reaching people, the buttons are more square now. I know, not Earth-shaking, but I did notice. Moving on…
Behind the Scenes Stuff
There are some things that you might not notice if you’re not a developer. TinyMCE, the editor you more than likely use to edit all your posts, updates to the latest version, as does jQuery and SimplePie.
The XML-RPC WordPress API, which is used to post from your smart phone or tablet, is now always enabled. I see no reason it shouldn’t have always been by default. Saves me a step when setting up a new site, seeing as how that was one of the first options I changed within the first five minutes after setup.
All in All
I’m pretty impressed. It’s a nice release. Seems stable and as speedy as the previous version, and has noteworthy improvements. And I really like the new media manager. And the square buttons.
Published: 12/09/2012
Got a little happy with the camera this afternoon. Merry Christmas.
Hutch
Three-corner Cabinet
Small Santa
Frosty Christmas Tree
Kitchen Tree
Big Santa
Archway
Antique Tool Box
Antique Tool Box
Published: 12/04/2012
Most everybody has discovered the amazing NORAD Tracks Santa website. Or cellphone app. Or Twitter feed. But just how did the North American Aerospace Defense Command get started on their yearly track of the Man in Red? Seems to me like they would have more important things to do.
It all started in December 24, 1955, when NORAD was still CONAD, the Colorado Springs’ Continental Air Defense Command, and Sears made a big mistake. Seems that Sears got in touch with Santa, and got his permission to publish his personal phone number so that kids could call in and talk with him. The problem was, when they published the phone number in a newspaper ad, they published the wrong number. As it turns out, the wrong number for Santa was the right number for CONAD.
Colonel Harry Shoup
On duty that night at CONAD was Colonel Harry Shoup, USAF, and when the calls for Santa started rolling in, Colonel Shoup didn’t miss a beat. Sure, the kids couldn’t talk to Santa that night, but the Colonel and his team were able to look up Santa’s location on radar and let all the children calling in know where Santa was.
Fast forward to present day, and CONAD is now NORAD, Colonel Shoup has passed away, and volunteers now handle 12,000 emails, 70,000 phone calls from all over the world, and tweets to over 100,000 followers on Christmas Eve.
Did CONAD have more important things to do on December 24, 1955? Probably, but does the story of what Colonel Shoup did really surprise you from a member of our military? Like many stories from the armed forces, it is at the same time both astonishing and expected, run-of-the-mill and ground-shaking. We find what they do astounding, yet we understand it is simply just what they do.
Through the course of this year, I have thanked many members of military, active and retired, but today I have one very special thank you for Colonel Harry Shoup, USAF (b. September 29, 1917, d. March 14, 2009).
Thank you, Colonel Shoup, not only for your service to this country, but for answering the phone one night and telling a little girl where Santa was. And Merry Christmas.
NORAD Tracks Santa
Published: 12/03/2012
Looks like it could be happening again. Last time it was the SOPA/PIPA House and Senate bills that eventually went down after The Day the Whole ‘Net Went Away last January. This time the threat is from the International Telecommunications Union (previously the International Telegraph Union), an obscure limb of the United Nations tree.
Just like last time, no leaders of the Internet community are being invited to the discussion.
I have a lot of issues with this, the first being that the ITU wants to move the management of domain names away from the current Internet community driven model. Guess who they want to be responsible for the domain name management? The U.N.
Yep. If they accomplish what they really want, I would have to register brockrogers.com (not to mention my business’s domain name and all of my client’s domain names) through the U.N. Absurd.
Second concern: The U.N. thinks they have the right to do this based on a treaty that’s a quarter of a century old. When it was written, not only did Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Wikipedia not exist, the World Wide Web didn’t exist.
And my final (major) concern: In addition to the U.N. controlling domain names, they would also control the flow, or restriction, of data, effectively allowing them to censor the Internet. I think it’s also important to point out that this meeting is taking place in the United Arab Emirates, a country that is on the Countries Under Surveillance list compiled by Reporters Without Borders. The government forcibly censors anything they consider ‘politically sensitive,’ all Israeli domains, any material considered against the perceived moral values of the UAE. They also prevent most, if not all, VoIP services, such as Skype, Vontage, and the like.
Stay aware of what is going on here. Countries that censor the Internet include Bahrain, Burma, China, Cuba, and North Korea. Not a list I think we should be eager to join.
