Lampshade.

I’m a little (well, a lot) hung over this morning; I helped my neighbor fire up his first batch of homebrew last night, and we kicked it off with a bottle of something that kicked me. All I remember of the label was that it was 11.9% ABV, which is enough to make me silly; then we shared a bottle of Pearl Jam Twenty, which was tasty but not my favorite. The brew went really well; he has a new floor-standing propane burner and we stood around it shivering in the garage, then transferred it into the fermenter as the Ravens started losing in the second quarter.

In related news, my batch of Dead Ringer IPA is just about ready for a move to the secondary fermenter, and if all goes well I’ll finally have the hose and tank setup sometime this week. I have to buy a jar of commercial cleaner and get my keg washed and resealed for the batch when it’s ready, but that can wait until the week after Christmas.

This is the latest addition to the home computer fleet: a used (and free) Lampshade iMac, circa 2002. I’ve already had it torn down once to drop a new hard drive in, and it will need a new optical drive as well (the unit it came with is not reading discs). It can only run up to OS 10.4, but it recognizes large drives and has a built-in monitor, so I’m going to repurpose it as a music server and swap out the trusty old G4 tower sitting under my desk at work.

Sunday afternoon I started work in the coal cellar putting up studs for insulation. I noticed a huge temperature drop the first time I opened the door, so I know it’s still not sealed up properly. The first order of business was to mix up a bunch of hydraulic cement and plug numerous little holes in the foundation as well as a crack running down the wall from the corner of the coal chute. Once that was done, I installed studs along the east wall and got about 1/2 of the south wall done before I ran out of lumber. I figure about four more 2×4′s and two rolls of new R-19 should do the trick. I also stuffed the coal chute full of insulation and found a sheet of plywood to nail up over the opening to cut off the airflow. Once the wall batts are up, I can put the overhead insulation back in place and call that room sealed. Then, hopefully, the den will stay warm.

Old Phone, New Look.

Yesterday I wiped my now decommissioned 1st-gen iPhone and reinstalled iOS 3.1.3. It’s amazing how much of a difference new software made, and it’s nice to have all of the free space. I hooked it up to my trusty music server here at work and loaded up a bunch of playlists via poky USB 1.1 ports, and took it to my drawing class last night. While I was there, downloaded Spotify and the NPR News app, and with those and a few key podcast subscriptions, I think I’m covered.

In Transit.

I got an email this morning from Apple; my iPhone is in Hong Kong on its way to me!

Pitchers and iPods.

After a skip week last week where I was only one of two people who showed up for a class that never happened, I was back at figure drawing last night. Only one model showed up, and she’s someone I’ve drawn about ten times over the last ten years (plus two weeks ago) so there’s not much challenge as far as subject matter. I’m still working out the brush technique, and I haven’t done any research on paper yet, so I stuck mainly to the sketchbook and got a few decent poses out of the evening.

Meanwhile, my 8-year-old iPod is sick; any attempt to use a playlist results in a crash and shutdown. I put a new battery in it about two years ago but it’s not registering a full charge. I haven’t done any troubleshooting yet to determine causes, but I hope I don’t have to retire it.

My Smashing Pumpkin Ale kit is in, but I think I’m going to go all the way and brew it with real pumpkin (instead of pumpkin spice), which also means I have to run out and pick up some extra grains to boil it with before the extract goes in. I’m going to shoot for this weekend to get it going (first, I’ve got to bottle the IPA in the basement).

Done and Done.

My order is placed; I’m advancing directly to 2011 from the dark ages of 2007. A shiny new iPhone 4S should be on its way to the house with my name on it, bringing better reception (I’m told), a better camera, Siri, and all of the bells and whistles I’ve missed out on. Rejoice!

Apple CEO Steve Jobs resigns

Apple CEO Steve Jobs resigns. Wow, it seems to me to be a great time to buy stock–while all of the idiots unload theirs for no reason. I don’t think Apple is going downhill anytime soon; I hope he’s OK.

Welcome to Lion.

Among several asinine things Apple did with the purchase and install process for Lion, there’s this:

Clicking on the Install button brought up another modal dialog that said an installer couldn’t be found; I did a Google search and found one here. They don’t usually make things this redundant. That’s why I’ve been a diehard user for all these years. This is just… inexplicable. It’s what I would have expected to find in Vista.

Stream Your iTunes Library To iPhone Over The Web.

File this under I’ll get to it at some point: Stream Your iTunes Library To your iPhone Over The Web. Eventually, when the new room is done and we upgrade our ancient TV to a modern model, I’m going to set the home server up as a combination file/AV server, and it will be able to stream music and movies. Or, I’ll spring for a $100 MacTV and have that handle all the work (as well as stream on demand from Netflix).

Test Pattern.

I read on Fucked Company that Cidera, a former employer of mine, shut down its service for good yesterday. Godspeed, and god bless. And quiet props go to Doug Humphrey, who was Doug enough to add a goofy farewell haiku in the announcement instead of some bullshit NewEconomySpeak excuse/diatribe.
(Jen just reminded me via email of one of the design ideas she had for a streaming media brochure featuring a test pattern. )

I also read today that Mr. Rogers passed away this morning. Bye, Fred.

Now that I have a wireless network set up at the house, I’m paranoid that it’s insecure. In reading some basic online articles about the 802.11b protocol, I have cause to be concerned. The Wi-Fi Alliance has this basic information to offer, and there’s a good book written on the subject ($20). The ever-timely Airportblog leads me to believe that there’s no really good way to lock a wireless network down other than implementing a bunch of technical third-party fixes, which is discouraging. WEP is a jacket made of holes, which is disturbing, and simply denying MAC addresses is useless as well. Still, something is better than nothing, and it would be nice for Apple to implement something. We can hold out for Leap or some other encryption standard, but the long and short of it is that it’s going to take time to sort this all out.

Found via Wired: Musicbrainz.org, a service that automatically tags and catalogs your existing MP3′s based on metadata and ID tags submitted by you and other folks. It’s a great idea, along the lines of the CDDB, but there’s one drawback: The client is only available for Windows.

More Mud, Please.

So between three guys, two days, and twenty sheets of drywall, there are still gaps in the walls in the bathroom. I knew I wasn’t hiring the A-Team here, but the lackadaisical approach to, um, completing the job has been a bit frustrating. They’ve got the majority of it hung, and there’s tape on half of it so far, but I had to have them remove one panel because they screwed it in over an outlet box. As long as I stay on top of them, things should turn out alright.

In the meantime, I’m waffling about what I should do with my old MacBook Pro. Originally I was going to sell it, but the pictures I took for Craigslist disappeared off my camera. At that point I thought about installing Plex and making it into a media server, but talking it over with a friend made me realize I couldn’t hook it up to our shitty TV if I wanted to. So now I may go back to Craigslist and see if I can get $500 for it.