justin-shepard.net

So I’m about halfway through my Christmas vacation. There’s nothing quite like having two weeks off of work to get things done. I’ve been relaxing, of course, but there’s always things to be done. I’ve been tidying my apartment, doing some shopping and getting ready for the holidays. Part of that last one involved whipping up a batch of snickerdoodles (recipe courtesy of Accidental Hedonist).

One big item that I’ve been getting off my todo list is watching all ten seasons of “Friends”, though I’m not marathoning it as I originally thought I might. I’m about halfway through, and enjoying it quite a lot. So many memories.

Tomorrow I plan to get up, have some cinnamon rolls for breakfast, open some presents, and then have a nice dinner with turkey, and mashed potatoes and such. Yummy!

Courtesy of a friend of mine, some videos of a blender I find just a bit frightening: Will It Blend?

I’ve been tagged, so there’s only one thing to do: play along. The rules are simple: post five little known facts about yourself, and then tag five others to do the same. I feared the hardest part of this would be the five others, but it turns out that was the easy part.

1. My long-time love of Corvettes was interrupted briefly in high school when I had a thing for Mustangs.
2. I learned to play the piano so that I could learn to play the guitar (a story for another time). Twenty years later I still don’t know how to play the guitar and furthermore, I haven’t touched a piano in about as long.
3. I occasionally have dreams of writing a novel, but then remember that I’m not focused enough on writing to pull it off.
4. The only accident I’ve ever been in involved about half a dozen cars. Fortunately, no one was hurt. It was also the first time I was scheduled to appear as a witness in court. Much like my more recent court-related experiences, nothing actually came of it.
5. When I see another Subaru on the road, and I’m all alone in my car, I have the irresistible urge to say “Subarooooo” in a high-pitched voice. Like I said, irresistible.

And now that you have the facts, foXXtail, xenotrope, jezcabelle, nzknight and themadegyptian are tagged.

Tonight the White Ribbon and the Tripel (whose name keeps being forgotten) went into bottles, and should be ready for drinking in time for Christmas and New Year’s, respectively.

The trick was that we needed enough bottles for all that beer (nearly ten gallons of it). That’s nearly 100 bottles. Hmmm, maybe we should’ve been singing while we bottled. Anyway, we didn’t have quite that many bottles as some of the Tripel was going into the cobalt flip-tops. And we did decide to dump some of the jalepeno hefeweizen, to ensure we had enough bottles. It was a little sad to be dumping it out, but realistically there was no way they were actually going to get drunk. At best, they had a future in chili.

So now, I’ve got boxes of carbonating beers all over my apartment again. Time for a break, I think.

In honor of it being my last week of work for the year, I’ve been browsing through iTunes for Christmas music, looking for particular versions of Christmas songs.

You see, growing up my parents had a tape of Christmas music that we’d always listen to around Christmas. I haven’t had any luck finding the precise album my parents had, but I’ve had good luck finding the specific songs (or at least they sound right to my memory). When you get right down to it, though, one version of “White Christmas” has a lot in common with every other version of “White Christmas”. And so it’s just a matter of trying to decide if the song’s tempo and the singer’s voice is the same as my memory.

I’ve had good luck following the mantra of “When in doubt, choose the Bing Crosby version.”

Is getting a DHCP daemon finally setup on your network so that you don’t have to manually re-enter your laptop’s network configuration when you return from using it at work, or any other locale where DHCP is running.

Tonight, after putting it off for several days, this year’s version of the White Ribbon Christmas Ale is being brewed up. Being a Christmas Ale, it should really be done in time for Christmas, so sooner is definitely better. I really should have taken care of it sooner, but it was a busy week last week, and I ended up getting other things done.

At any rate, one of the coolest parts of the White Ribbon this year is that it’s the first time we’ve revisited an old recipe. It’s been “New! New! New!” since brewing began last year. I’m curious to see if the changes I’ve made to the recipe come closer to what I’m aiming for than last year’s was. Not to say that I disliked last year’s White Ribbon, of course. It was pretty good, I was just looking for something with a bit more gingerbread character (I may not be fully satisfied on that side of things until I do an all-grain version of the White Ribbon).

So, in that vein, several key spice ingredients were increased in quantity. The grain bill got completely revamped as well, since White Ribbon ’05 was based on a kit recipe. There’s also going to be both brown sugar and molasses (versus only molasses last year) for flavor and to kick the ABV up over 7%. The hops used will also be different, as will the yeast. I didn’t get exactly the yeast I really wanted, but that’s often the case when buying locally. I’ve also changed a few process related things, to say nothing of the greater experience I have now.

All in all, White Ribbon ’06 is shaping up to be a pretty good beer. We’ll see how it goes over in the local crowd.

I’m still tweaking the site a bit, changing what’s on the side bar, etc. So don’t be surprised if things randomly disappear and reappear.

Also, at some point I’m probably going to be redoing the style of the site. The (slightly modified) default theme is all well and good, but I like to tinker.

Welcome to my new blog here at justin-shepard.net. In moving away from Blogger and three-musketeers.net I felt that it was time for a change of blog name too. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to come up with anything, so for now the blog’s title is the site name.

Watch over the coming weeks as I move the rest of the stuff from my old site to here. I’m undecided whether I’ll be moving my old GyrBlog posts here or not. I haven’t been able to get WordPress’s Blogger.com importer to work, so I may leave them there or make an archive section here to allow people to browse the old stuff.

I’m also aiming to be better about more regular updates with the move. We’ll see how that goes!