ben.parmeter

My congratulations to you Mr. Obama. You worked incredibly hard to get to this point and have won the hearts and minds of many of us over this journey. I’m proud of this country for making a wise decision for a change. You haven’t even become our president yet, but the sense of hope is already welling up inside us.

I just have one small request during your next four years.

Please help us to restore the sense of pride that we have lost over the last eight years. I hated to feel ashamed of our country when traveling abroad – but let’s face it, Americans lost the popularity contest and have been steadily dropping in the rankings over the past eight years. They’ll still think of us as fat and stupid, but at least that would be better than war mongers, liars, and hate filled nasty persons.

Yup – simple request. Make us proud.

Photo Courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/raul

I don’t often write about music on this blog, but I feel it’s time to rectify that right now. Mostly, I didn’t really feel that gushing about the new music that I personally like, is all that interesting for the readership here. To hell with that. I’m going to gush and rave and hype. Have I lost you yet?

Recently, I’ve been turned on to a couple of fresh bands that I’m really enjoying. First of the bunch, in a more mainstream thread, Tokyo Police Club released an album called Elephant Shell. I’ve been hooked on these guys for months – even though something inside me says I shouldn’t like this album, I do. It’s impossible not to like the poppy-crunchy-ness. I fully expect these guys to be on your local alternative clear-channel radio stations any day now. Let’s see, who else, oh yes, PAS/CAL is one of my new favorites. Just listen to this track off their latest full length and tell me I’m crazy. Outstanding stuff. It’s just all over the place, changing tempo, starting, stopping, melodies, all in this six minute long song. I love it. And lastly for today, Noah and the Whale have at least one track that I am enamored with which you can listen to here (scroll to the bottom “Five Years Time”). It’s an endearing song. Hope you enjoy that one as much as I do.

I grabbed a bottle of my first homebrew tonight, and tossed it into the freezer to get it nice and cool. After about 30-45 minutes of cooling, I grabbed two pint glasses from the cupboard. The first test, opening the bottle. Using the fridge mounted bottle opener, I leveraged off the bottle cap which released a satisfying hiss as the carbonation rushed out. A misty fog briefly wafted from the top of the bottle. Also a good sign. I gingerly tilted the bottle to pour the liquid into the pint glasses, taking care not to stir up too much sediment. Bringing the pint glass to my nose, I sniffed to see if I could detect any off odors. Nope – nothing detectably bad. In fact, it smelled delightful. And then, the taste. Now, I won’t sugar coat this and tell you that it’s the best beer I’ve ever tasted… that would be over stating things just a bit. No, I’ll be honest, it’s not the best beer I’ve tasted. It’s a bit on the light side, not a very strong flavor. Not to say it doesn’t have good mouthfeel and body. It was fizzy and satisfying indeed. However, it lacked any real strong flavor of hops or malts – just smooth. Suzy says she detected a hint of lemon and seemed a little displeased with the flavor in general when paired with food. However, I couldn’t really complain. This is my first brew after all and the beginning of a great love affair with home brewing. I give it a B+. Next up, Hefe!

UPDATE 10-15: Tasted another bottle tonight and wow what a difference a day makes. The beer tasted brilliant today. Maybe that last bottle was a slightly off sample – or maybe it just needed more time. Either way, this is getting more exciting by the day!

The fermentation process has slowed to what seems like inactivity. However, this may actually be part of the conditioning phase of the brewing process. My concern is that, it has only really been active (active = visible gases bubbling the airlock) for about 6 days or less which perhaps could mean that the entire fermenting process may have been at too high a temperature (over 75F), and possibly caused the yeast to ferment too quickly. If this is the case, my beer could attain I higher alcohol content and thus a strong alcohol taste. However, leaving the beer in a conditioning phase for another week may help to even that flavor out.

And if I’m wrong about the conditioning phase, Suzy and I moved the whole bucket to the bathtub which we filled with cold water to bring the temperature down a bit. Perhaps this will help move things along at the proper pace. Probably should have done this in the first place, since it’s really hard to control temperatures in warm house in the summertime.

Until next time…

UPDATE: After submersing the bucket in the cool water of the bathtub, the fermentation seems to have resumed to normal. Now the challenge is keeping the water level up in the bathtub so we can keep the temperature within good fermentation levels. I think despite this, I’m going to bottle this weekend. I’m really looking forward to bottling actually – should be quite fun.

I’m currently at 30000 feet cruising at 400 mph marvelling at my workday. Just a mere ten hours ago I was waking up and getting ready to catch the plane. I was wisked off, in just mere hours to my remote worksite hundreds of miles away. I put in my time meeting, greeting, shaking hands, powering through power point, you know, doing business like things. And then a moment later I’m sharing a beer with a long time friend and coworker under the beautiful blue Oregon skies. And now I’m back on the plane again, headed home. All in a days work. This is truly the modern age.

I am in love with this iPhone WordPress app. Expect to see more posts like this one, written from remote locations. If I have connectivity this weekend you may even get a post on camping at salt point state park – with pictures even.

Until next time, enjoy.

Today’s post is inspired by cockeyed.com and their outstanding “how much is inside?” feature. Have you ever wondered just what’s inside that continuous spray bottle of sun block. Just how the heck does it actually continuously spray out the liquid inside? I mean, usually a bottle of plastic design like the one I have is simply a pump mechanism, but this continuous spray is like magic to me. So when we finally ran out of sun block I decided it was time to perform a vivisection on the spray bottle to determine just what’s inside this little mystery of the universe. For your viewing pleasure, I’ve provided the video and some photos here of my experiment.

Much to my surprise, there is a very simple mechanism inside. What I found was that it’s basically a thick rubber tube, which constricts a plastic bladder (not sure what all the stringy glue/rubber is around that bladder), and releases the spray when you press down on the head on top of the bottle. There was something very H.R. Giger about that bladder. Kind of organic in an alien birth-pod kinda way. Odd.

Anyway, mystery solved!!

It’s been a few weeks now and my facial hair experiment is going strong. I’ve got a pretty good amount of little bristle-like hairs on my chin. This is pretty exciting for me, because I’ve never really tried to ever grow facial hair before. By that I mean, that I’m actually allowing it to grow, albeit in very specific areas. I’ve chosen a very specific type of beard where I limit the the facial hair to my chin and lower lip (commonly known as the poets beard). I’ve actually shaved the bit of hair between the chin and the lower lip because the hair that grows there seems patchy and uneven.

You be the judge, does it look good? Should I keep it up? Taking (blatantly plagiarizing) an idea from Dave and his blog, I’ve added a “poll” to my wordpress install so we can get some feedback. For now I’m leaving it with no end date so we can get a good amount of data. Here we go internet, tell me:

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I’m still researching new gallery options. There are lots of options out there so it may take me some time to try them out. Stay tuned.

Nothing really exciting to post today, however, I haven’t really posted anything in a long time. It’s Sunday night and I’m sitting on the couch, sipping a tasty microbrew, watching some recorded television on the DVR and banging out a post on my laptop. (Also, since I’ve finally upgraded WordPress to v2.5, I wanted to give it the old run through the wringer.) This post is very, very disjointed so I will apologize in advance. Let’s get to it.

It’s been a super productive weekend. Friday night we had some friends and family over to drink some beer, eat pizza and watch the long awaited season premier of Battlestar Galactica. It’s been over a year since the last episode and quite frankly I’d forgotten how darn awesome this show is. I know, you’re secretly laughing at me right now. You’re thinking about how much of a sci-fi nerd Ben is. Well whatever. I love it. Anyway… we had a great night partying until the wee hours of the morning, playing cards, video games, and drinking 30+ year old Drambuie. Yum.

Saturday we went to Suzy’s condo and recruited some help from Suzy’s parents to finish up some projects that we’ve been wanting to get done for ages. We put in nearly eight hours of work on the place in one day. I’m proud to say that the painting is finished (well 99.9% of it anyway), and the cabinets are also nearly finished. Just some minor touch up work to finish up and it will be time to put in the carpet and linoleum. We’re on the home stretch. We literally have just weeks before this place will be finished. It’s truly exciting.

Sunday we enjoyed a fancy-pants brunch with the parents at a local fancy-pants restaurant. Breakfast was replete with a Belgian chocolate fountain, champagne, coffee, fruit, eggs benedict and potatoes. Delicious. After we were finished there, we decided to go take some pictures of our progress at the condo, however we ended up wrapping up a few more projects and spending another hour there. After finally getting home we bid the parents farewell and I worked on the yard for a couple of hours. That pretty much catches us up to the present time.

I’m starting to grow a beard. Well, not really a beard. It’s called a “poet’s beard”, chin whiskers, petite goatee, etc. Basically, I’m growing facial hair just around my chin. No mustache, no full beard, no full goatee. I’ve never grown any facial hair before, on purpose that is. I’ve never really get that long. So we’ll see how long I stick with this particular experiment. Let’s see how long Suzy puts up with it. I think it looks kinda cool – so here we go on with week number two.

That’s it for tonight internet. Until next time, stay safe and be good.

This is a nerdy tech post. You have been warned.

Those of you who read this blog (all two of you) may remember a previous post where I talked about setting up a RAID array under Ubuntu. My intended purpose was to store all of my pictures, movies and music on a independent set of disks as a backup. In case my main OS HD failed, I’d have a mirrored backup on standby. And it paid off! Just months after I implemented this, my main OS HD failed and I lost everything on that drive. Luckily, I had my RAID backup which had everything conveniently backed up. I simply bought a new hard drive, re-installed the OS and restored the data from my RAID array. Needless to say, I’m sold on RAID backups. This solved my personal backup needs, but it became evident that my wife also needed a solution when her iPod hard drive got wiped and her music collection disappeared (thought we found a backup on her laptop HD). Purchasing a NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution was expensive and pretty much out of my league. Until now…

After doing some internet searches, I discovered FreeNAS. I guess I should have known that there would already be a perfect solution in the open source community. But this software is truly phenomenal. It’s polished, simple, and perfect for what I need. Folks, this thing is open source software based on FreeBSD (an open source OS), and it all fits on a 32MB USB Flash Drive.

Lets back up for a moment, what is FreeNAS exactly? It basically provides you with all the software you need to setup a fully featured network attached storage system. All you really need to do is supply the hardware. This means you can take that old Pentium III system sitting in your closet, and turn it into a fast, powerful home server. It can serve up movies, music and pictures to your laptop, desktop, WMA, XBOX, or Media PC. No need for a keyboard, mouse or monitor. All you need is a network cable and power to the system and this thing can sit anywhere in your house.

The list of features on this is mind boggling. RAID0/1/5, JBOD, SMB/CIFS, FTP, uPNP, RSYNC, and on and on… The web user interface (featured as my graphic above) is incredibly slick and easy to use. I literally had this thing setup and running in under 5 minutes. Seriously. It installs just that fast. It’s the perfect use for my tiny Intel D201GLY board, which has a built-in CPU and runs completely silent (no fans).

This experiment wasn’t without it’s issues. When I started, I was using a Promise 4-Port SATA card, which after extensive testing I discovered was the source of my problems. Using this card exhibited some really unstable behavior, especially under heavy network loads. I finally decided that I didn’t really need four ports for my little home project and removed the card. And I’m happy to say that it works flawlessly with the two onboard SATA ports.

All I need to do now is find a case for this thing and put it up on the bookshelf. I have to say that I’m super happy with this project and I hope to put it to full-time use soon.

Until next time…

I’ve been given some feedback recently that the content of my site is too heavily focused on tech. You know, nerdy subjects. I admit it, that 90% of my material is geek fodder. And I just want to say, “deal with it”. I write about stuff that interests me and that just so happens to be computer stuff. I hope that I’m not alienating anyone by saying this, but I will most likely continue to write about this stuff. (Editors Note: I said the word “stuff” three damn times in that paragraph – apparently my vocab sucks too)

Maybe this is a testament to my personality, or perhaps lack there-of. This behavior of mine extends into my social face to face interactions as well. I am very conscious of this behavior, and when I meet someone for the first time it’s a lot easier for me to break the ice by talking tech. There it is. I’m socially retarded. The jig is up. Please forgive me. Will you still continue to be my friend?

Anyway, I’ll try not to be so droll and boring in the future with those kinds of posts. It’s just that interesting, non-tech content is hard for me.

Over-and-out.