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.

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).

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.

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.

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.