Brews you can use

I have another song stuck in my head. It’s not the annoying kind that runs constantly, but rather the kind which starts up close to breakdown or shut down, like HAL singing “Daisy, Daisy” as Dave removed his cards one by one.

Which is to say, it was running constantly today.

Grace has been requiring two things to go to sleep lately: me, and music. The music for the last … month? … has been Pete Seeger, Children’s Concert at Town Hall, IIRC. Good, classic stuff all around, but what sticks in my head is:

Now that’s the end of him and her
Ding dang dong, go the wedding bells
There’ll be no little tadpoles, covered with fur
Ding dang dong, go the wedding bells

[chorus]
Here’s to Cheshire, here’s to cheese
Here’s to the pear and the apple trees
and here’s to the lovely strawberries
Ding dang dong, go the wedding bells

It’s the last verse of one of the tracks, and the only one I can make out over the fidgeting and chattering of a 4 year old trying to avoid sleep. The furry tadpoles probably have something to do with that.

So, of course I googled for snippets of the song trying to fill in the blanks. The rest of the song doesn’t make much sense either. It’s one of many variants of “Froggy went a’ courting”, an English folk song dating back to 1611 with references as early as the 1580s. In other words, this one’s been running through the collective heads of a decent portion of western civilization for over 400 years. Neat.

It’s also interesting that its a nominally kid-friendly song [Theory: every English-language song over 200 years old has either been forgotten, turned into a hymn, or mellowed into a children's song (if secular)] ending in the deaths of the main characters. It makes me not feel as bad about wanting to have all three little pigs be eaten, because the “smartest” one only had his labor-intensive brick house half-finished before The Big Bad Wolf’s fateful visit.

(Think “Three Little Pigs” as a parable of engineering tradeoffs. No, I don’t tell it that way, although in my version the wolf sometimes heads into town for a ham sandwich after giving up on the fresher pork…)

I finally got around to cleaning my draft lines and taps after <mumble> months, probably over a year. I don’t know whether to be gratified by what came off/out of them, or horrified that I was drinking stuff that passed through, near, around — within the same zip code — as it. Shudder. The beer and cider tastes much better now, although that may be psychological.

I’ve got to get around to doing that more often.

While I was at it, I put the brown ale I brewed on 9/8 on tap. It was still warm and this time overcarbonated, but otherwise very drinkable. I think I’ll be enjoying this one tomorrow evening when it finally cools down. I also racked a stout that I brewed on 9/23.

And now I’m having a little toast. Some petrus oud bruin that’s been sitting in my fridg^H^H^H^H^Hcellar for a year or so. Quite good stuff.

I poured it, and sat down to write this post, when I noticed some of my spam alarms were going off at work. Bugger. Well, I guess I get to celebrate some beer progress with a bit of spam killing while I’m at it.

It completely slipped my mind that tomorrow is Talk Like a Pirate Day.

On “Brews you can use”? How strange.

I never thought flat, warm, un-aged beer could taste so good.

Yep, I actually got around to racking last week’s brew to the serving keg. It tasted a touch sweet, probably just enough to make it fizz up in the keg. No gravity readings, no notes, no stress…. (Rough Recipe, for posteritythe curious: quarter pound each of Simpson’s extra dark crystal, medium crystal, black malt, and Crisp Amber malt, twelve pounds of Rahr 2-row, 2 oz Fuggle in the boil, Wyeast 1028 yeast.)

While I was down there, I also tasted the ciders I started last October or November, and never touched. They’re still in their primary fermenters. That’s supposed to be a big no-no, but the ciders are still definitely drinkable. I may toss a few oak cubes in when I keg them, to complete the “rough and ready rustic” effect.

I think I may have ended a drought.

I haven’t brewed a beer since last November. I’ve thought of doing it a few times — even got to the point of gathering ingredients — but something always comes up. Kids, other plans, just a royally bad day, illness, sometimes acute laziness. I’ve been ==>this<== close to selling off my brewing equipment, just because its idleness [yeah, it's idleness, that's the ticket ...] was driving me mad.

Driving me to drink, in fact. For a while, I was substituting beer for soda (probably a net win, healthwise), but this and other unpleasantness had me first supplementing with, then switching to the distilled stuff to take a bit more of the fabled “edge” off. I would go weeks without having a single beer, but the whiskey (and occasional gin, rum, or tequila) would disappear at an alarming rate. Not good for motivation, or health.

Then I started biking to work. Amazing stress reliever. The alcohol consumption dropped to normal levels, I felt much more human, felt that I could do things. Perhaps even brew beer.

I was going to brew on Labor day, in memory of Michael Jackson (”no, not that one” as we once needed to say) who had passed away suddenly the week before. It almost worked, I had a plan, I had a free day to do it, and I had the ingredients.

In retrospect, though, I should have made the yeast starter the day I spent fixing the TiVo — the old tube of yeast didn’t revive in time, and my “emergency dry yeast” supply was even older. Feh, brewing canceled. To work off *that* stress, I tossed the kids in the bike trailer and started pedaling, eventually finding my way home after about 25 miles of wandering.

So, today was the day. I fought a nasty, exhausting headache all morning, couldn’t even stomach a lunch beyond crackers and ginger ale, but dammit, I needed this. I finally started around 2:00 pm, and tried to keep it simple and stress-free. I took only fragmentary notes, and no gravity readings. I did a shorter than normal mash (the result was still very clear) and boiled a little less than normal, and was all cleaned up and put away at quarter after six. So fast, I swear I must have forgotten something…

I’m not worrying too much about it (”Did I kill the yeast?” “Will it ferment?” “How will it taste?”) — any stress would be very counterproductive at this point. Either I get a decent little (or big?) brown ale or porter-ish vageuly-English beer out of it, or I don’t. Either way, I’ve taken a big step out of a nearly year-long brewing funk, and that feels good.

Like many techies, I have (and love) a TiVo. It’s a 2001 vintage DirectTiVo, and has been showing its age: the video’s been sporadically skipping for the last month, and it started rebooting late last week. It also has a lifetime subscription attached to it, which means ‘repair’ is highly preferable to ‘replace.’ It probably needed a new hard drive, which is a relatively easy operation. Just hook up the old drives in a spare PC, boot a special mfstools Linux CD, and use the included tools to backup the old disk then restore onto the new disk.

Unlike most techies, though, I don’t have a spare computer sitting around, other than a couple dead/dying/decrepit/disintegrating laptops which would need some special hardware to talk to regular IDE drives. Mfstools isn’t ported to FreeBSD (which runs this server) or MacOS X (which all our working laptops run). What to do?

From previous “rescue” operations, we had an external firewire hdd enclosure, so on a lark I mounted my TiVo ‘A’ drive in this, dd‘ed an image of it to a file, then mounted the new disk in the enclosure and dd‘ed the image on to that. Apparently this will work on some single-drive TiVos, but it fails spectacularly on a double-drive model like mine. The TiVo software doesn’t automatically “forget” about missing disks, apparently, and the box never booted in this config. For this to work, I’d need to run the proper mfstools on my Mac or FreeBSD box.

Finally last night, I figured out a virtual solution to the latter.

I’d played with qemu several times in the past. It’s a nice, free/opensource CPU emulator, and a great way to run a new/foreign OS in a sandbox. It’s how I run Windows XP on my work Linux box The virtual hard drives can be simple raw files just like the ones I was ‘dd‘ing back and forth earlier. There’s also an OS X port. Hmm…

It took a little trial and error (mostly the latter) to get right, but I was able to:

1. mount the A and B disks in the external enclosure, and collect disk images with dd
2. Create a new virtual disk by ‘dd‘ing 60 GB of /dev/zero to a new file.
3. Start up qemu with the disk A image, disk B image, mfstools iso image, and the new empty file as disks 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively.
4. Copy all data and settings to the new drive with:
   mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -zpi /dev/hdd
5. mount the new drive in the external enclosure and dd the new image onto it.

And it worked!

This was more time-consuming than it needed to be since the dds ran at about 10MB/s, but it got the TV back without needing to beg/borrow/steal an extra computer.

I (re?)discovered the MAKE Magazine blog last weekend, and stumbled across a post on my favorite science/tech show of all time. The Secret Life of Machines was the creation of British special-effects artists Tim Hunkin and Rex Garrod, and contains some truly superlative “how it works” demos, just the proper amount of wit (British, dry, of course), and none of the modern Discovery channel style overproduction to get in the way/make you want to throw something heavy at the TV.

Because of its quality and brief run, the show became somewhat of an obsession for me: its theme music (”The Russians are Coming” by Val Bennet, a reggae cover of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five”) was one of the first pieces of music I sought out back in the heady “illegal file sharing is cool” early days of napster, and I convinced Jess to buy the first two seasons on VHS for my birthday one year. The videos were aimed at the educational market and thus hideously expensive; they also left out the third “Secret Life of the Office” series, which includes (among other things), Tim and Rex demonstrating a pair of makeshift fax machines made from lathes.

The first comment on the MAKE blog post pointed out that Tim Hunkin posted a link on his site to a torrent of the full three seasons. Hey, no guilt. Download ctorrent, spend a day or two downloading 3.6GB of AVIs from random overseas hosts (nobody in the US serving it until I was finished), and start watching.

Best of all, Grace seems pretty interested in them. “I want to watch a show on Papa’s computer.” “Let’s watch the Vacuum Cleaner one.” Of course, comprehension/retention may be a little longer in coming. After finishing “The Internal Combustion Engine” she said: “That was a fun show.”

“Yes I thought so, too…. So, do you know how a car engine works now?”

<thoughtful pause> “I did, but I don’t remember. Let’s watch it again tomorrow.”

“Certainly.”

After putting it off for way too long, I finally started biking to work last Tuesday. I’ve car commuted twice since then, to give my legs a break, but I think bike’s the definite preferred commute. The bike commute keeps me awake and my mind engaged, so I just feel more energetic and alert throughout the day. It’s a nice natural high, and I can feel the beginnings of an addiction — I’ve noticed myself getting uncharacteristically cranky when I’d rather be biking.

I still have a bit of learning to do until I really know how to ride a bike, though. I remember it being much simpler as a kid — “pedal this way really fast, if something gets in your way, turn “. Part of that could have been simpler equipment. My first bike was single-speed cruiser, and by the time I moved in to a ten-speed, I didn’t really see the need to shift.

The ride this time around is a decent used Raleigh mountain bike with nice fat (and heavy) tubes and more gears than I know what to do with — 24 nominally, including the way-too-useful-for-me “Granny gear”. I chose it because (a) I liked the sturdy feel of the cruiser I outgrew long, long ago, and (b) I’m nearly 300 pounds, so part of me thinks I would crush a nice sleek (and light) road bike. I could use the exercise, anyway.

No pictures yet, but think:

but only one of me, and not as well-dressed.

I still haven’t gotten the hang of pedaling smoothly, or found a good cadence. One experienced biker at work suggested 90 rpm as a good spinning speed, and I started trying to find that. 90rpm = 3 revs every 2 seconds, or 3 pushes of the pedal every 2 seconds…. Think 3 beats per measure. Accent the first beat, and you’ve got a nice brisk Walz. “Tales from the Vienna woods” would be a good target. Currently, I seem to be dialing in at more “Blue Danube” speed when I can actually maintain a cadence. The usual mode, though is more like “Hall of the Mountain King” followed by panting and coasting.

Well, at least it gets me there…

I was just getting the urge to blog about various trivialities today, and things got all weird. Everyone I know (out to two degrees, so far) is OK and accounted for, with a few close calls. So far, at least, it’s turning out to be not as bad as it could have been.

The kids were probably feeding on some of the anxiety, and acting unruly. We took a walk to calm down a bit. There were thunderstorms approaching, causing air traffic to be re-routed over our neighborhood. The news choppers were constantly commuting to and from the scene of the disaster. Quite eerie.

Grace almost gets what’s going on. She’s just learning to ride a bike, and seems to have integrated this into her fears from a close call on the bike…. While walking home, she told me she didn’t want to ride her bike across a bridge, because it would break it and it would collapse. I tried to reassure her that very smart people design bridges to stay up, and it works most of the time. That appears to have worked — she suggested going over a “bridge that they haven’t built yet and we haven’t been over before” tomorrow.

What would I do without kids? The absurdities I can come up with pale in comparison.

I work pretty close to the bridge. I’m debating swinging by the area to see it for myself. It still doesn’t seem real…

Well, laptop #3 has bitten the dust. It at least had an entertaining (and well-traveled) life, if a somewhat mundane end. I’d had this one since early 2005; it was a nice little find — 12″ screen, weighed less than 2 pounds. While it was still under warranty, I had to send it back to the manufacturer (in Taiwan) twice for screen replacements. On the second trip, the case was pretty nastily damaged, but still held together through several trips, being thrown to the floor by a toddler, and several adventures.

Until today. I opened the laptop and heard a sickening crack as one of the screen hinges didn’t move, and instead split the base of the screen about halfway across. Crap. Laptops aren’t exactly useful if you can’t open them…

I’d said several times that, after 6 years of running and tinkering with FreeBSD on whatever Intel laptop I could get cheap, that my next laptop will be a mac. Jess is doing some triumphal “he’s been assimilated” blogging at the moment. I’m still getting used to the new macbook

So far, so good. Here’s hoping <raises virtual drink> I can keep from destroying this one.

(And I’m not ruling out FreeBSD under parallels quite yet )