zhrodague

I'm at my desk at work, waiting for the mortgage counselor to pick up. I'm feeling jittery as I ate two chocolate chip cookies that were left from yesterday's group lunch. group munch. group feed your face.

This morning I went to Thornwood Elementary School and presented "What a Water Engineer Does" to three classes of fifth graders. Then I helped them perform a water filtration activity in which sand, gravel, and cotton balls are layered in the top half of a coke bottle to form a simple sand filter. Then dirty water I made from potting soil and tap water was poured though the filters to demonstrate removal of solids in the water purification process. My asshole boss was beside me while I was giving the presentations, interjecting little comments.

I like to garden. I wanted to figure out how to measure the temperature of the night before, to see if the plants froze. I wasn't able to figure out a convenient logging method. Luckily we passed the last frost here in Pittsburgh.



Then I noticed Woot had this cheap BW976 Thermor BIOS Weather Station with PC Link Interface thingy for $59. I haven't seen any computer-accessible weather sensors of any kind for under $300. It was long overdue for a toy and a piece of other puzzles I've been working on, so I threw the switch. I am very glad that I did, mostly because this unit is deployed and working, and not adding to the piles of junk!

Presumably, during the extrusion stage, which makes the initial peep shape, peeps are bonded together. They are born this way.

Peep welding is a method of bonding peeps together. I can only imagine that would involve either a hot wire, torch, or even using corn syrup as a cement.

Cutting peeps may prove to be a challenge. I imagined cutting frozen peeps with a circular saw, in order to reassemble them as a sort of fractal peep. A mitre saw may be useful for this. I can't imagine what the blade would look like, though, or even how to hold the peep that close to a blade.

Doesn't "Pre-Owned" mean "before it's owned", or that they are "New"?
How do you pre-own anything?
What's wrong with good old "Used Cars"?
Cars that are... yep, you guessed it... used!

God forbid that they would ever actually tell the truth about the product they're selling us. I'd like to own a "Lemon Lot".

Can you imagine??? All the product, and none of the disappointment.

WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get!

The difference between a Cyser that can remove spots from garage floors, and a refreshing Metheglyn that will lull you to sleep on a Summer evening... all comes down to SUGAR!!!

I'm a big-time tinkerer! I like taking perfectly good things, and tweaking them to see if I can make it better. This is what always made me a horrible cook in the past. I was barred from the kitchen by my wife for the first 6 years of our marriage. (How was I to know that those Brown Sugar Turkey Burgers would taste that bad... seemed like a good idea at the time.) My wife will never-ever let me forget it either. It was not until I actually started following the recipe word-for-word that I was allowed to relinquish the family spatula. There's a hilarious commercial for Labatts Blue beer in which the husband partners with a bear to build his wife's shelves, but the bear says, "Who needs directions." The wife then comes home to see they built the ultimate beer dispenser. Ha. So, I treated wine recipes more like a guideline, than a stick-to-it-rule. Switching, and adding ingredients at-will. Although they seemed trivial substitutions at the time... they only seemed to induce disasters.

After life slowed down, my first two batches were "hurried" to say the least.
First a cyser using Shop n' Save brand apple juice, and honey from Costco. This came a few weeks after I'd read this article about how boiling the honey could spoil its delicate flavors.
Then I threw down a batch of strawberry melomel a week later. I thought, I'll add as much fruit as possible to get a good taste. Costco honey, and strawberries from the freezer section. Again, I didn't boil the honey, take a specific gravity, or a pH level reading. Just flying by the seat of my pants. 15lb of honey with whatever the fruit added, and no idea what the eventual alcohol level might be, or how acid/base the musts were.

The always-cheesy mission statement:

Here upon this site (though I know not what a "zhrodague" be), I will chronicle my humble attempt(s) to change my brew-sinning ways. To work towards a better-brewing ethic. To toil tirelessly in the search for a way to consistently provide a pleasing product.

All alliteration aside... this is my Mission Statement.

Time to slow it down!
After 7, yep 7 years of mead-making, I've gotten fed-up with ambiguity, and trusting other people's recipes. Tired of not knowing the exact hydrometer reading, or the exact pH.
The problem is inconsistency, and the solution is cold hard facts!!! I've been an engineer in R&D, and a QA software tester for over a century now, and very successful in what I do. But unfortunately I really have never applied the same science/attention-to-detail/research/documentation/root-cause-analysis that accompanies successful development of ANY product.

In those 7 years of brewing, I've moved 3 times, between 3 states, and to think about it, I haven't stayed longer than 2 years in any one place since 1996. No, I'm not a fugitive, or wanted by any 3 lettered institutions. :) The Military took me across the world, and dumped me off in TX, and Marriage took me across the country with a 2 year lay-over in WV, and finally rooted me in PA.

My lovely wife spends lots of time with the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_electron_microscopy, looking at labeled neurons from rat brains. We discuss the imaging she does, how the apparatus works, and issues she has with the thing. I'm always interested in making pretty pictures, so this got me thinking about how to use an electron beam for making pictures from stuff laying around the house.

Being a recent homeowner, mowing the lawn is a chore that I still look upon fondly. Gas, Machine, nature, and sun. Usually there's some period of fixing things, which I get a kick out of. Being a tinkerer also, go figure, I wonder how else a lawn can be mowed.

My last (and second?) full-time gig had been contracted to produce autonomous lawn-mowing robots. Even though the facility had a multi-million-dollar budget, the brightest minds in the field, and it isn't a product you can buy. That should should illustrate the difficulty in doing something as simple as mowing the freaking lawn. There are other products out there, but they're about what I would pay for a decent used car, which is an absurd price for such a potentially interesting machine.

I wondered if there were any websites that focus on the locations of breweries and wineries. I haven't found any yet. The idea is to make note of the locations of breweries, and indicate the types of beer and ingredients they use. Wine would be slightly different, focusing on the exact and specific regions where the grapes are grown, and allow a user to investigate the historical and predicted climates for the region. Where available, state-sponsored (like the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board) websites can be scraped to provide more local pricing and availability information.

Love your HDHomeRun HDTV tuner? The two tuners on HDHR from Silicondust can accept ATSC/8vsb or QAM 256, and stream it to your PC over ethernet.

Some ridiculous outfits

I freaked out last year, and pulled the bricks out that were in the ground as some sort of forgotten walkway. After much use of many bricks, I decided to use them as edging in the yard. Mike helped me put this one together. The pattern is a slanted radial of bricks. If I were to design this properly, I'd have to use some kind of math that I don't know, so Mike and I just squished the bricks into the shape, until it looked right. The layer of bricks underneath is a mirror-image of the top layer. This surrounds our pear tree.

I have an image of the bor

I built this antenna as an experiment. I looked at a few patents, and was inspired by some of the designs for fractal antennas. Without much knowledge or calculating, I put this together from 12/2 romex. I used an El-Cheapo balun from sadoun.com, but I would not recommend these ultra-cheaply-made units. I am using a $0.99 set of baking-racks as a reflector. This picks up every signal around in the City, even though half of the signals are on the other side of my slate roof. I am using an HDHR ATSC/QAM/8vsb HDTV ethernet tuner thingy. 1080p through my ol

Econojacked - adj. - The forceful seizure of one's economic system.

I propose a method for displaying channels across the world, collected from users everywhere. This scenario, would be similar to sites like WiFiMaps.com, Flickr, and others, where users upload their content, which is then aggregated with other users' content, to form a large set of data for display. Users can see what channels are actually there, whether VHF, UHF, HDTV, QAM, 8vsb, Cable, Satellite, FiOS -- whatever -- in a non-marketing-hype kinda way. This could be coupled with sites like Zap2It, or SchedulesDirect, to provide an additional layer of clarity in what is advertised, versus what is reality, and even different package-plans or antenna types. Coverage maps can be provided generated and overlayed with Google Maps. This should prove to be an interesting feature for the Internet.

I've been monkeying around with FTA Satellite for MythTV, and I have having two hells of a time. I have collected the appropriate hardware, a 30" dish, universal LNBF, and a Hauppauge NOVA-S DVB card -- and all the required cable. I even have a signal meter, compass, mounting hardware, and some other crap. But I can't find any discussions on Google of other people doing these things from the US. I've found discussions about Linux driver issues, Microsoft Windows configurations, non-USians, dish-aiming, signal-strength issues, and even information about the same tools I am using. None of the discussions are of MythTV users aiming their dishes in North America -- so here's mine.

Intertainfo, n. Thinly sliced information, entertainingly slathered atop Internet detritus fillets.

I suggest the phrase 'soylent crime' should be used to describe a crime, where the body is consumed by something -- as if I were to grind up my neighbor, and use the result as a fertilizer. Soylent crime is a crime, where some act of soylency has been performed.