on and on

Friday was a nice evening, dropped the car of with my dad, had a scotch with him, then went to Sean’s house and had dinner with his folks and Nedra. Tasty BBQ, (wasabi steak, but not too pungent, just tasty), taters, corn (really), happy puppies, tho Augie stayed home. Had some beer, some wine, ah, the good life. Got home and reflexively walked in to check my email, and blinky blinky went the LED on my monitor, blank as a White House check to Haliburton. ugh, not again. So, I did what all l337s do I ignored it all weekend and had a good time. But yesterday after a little thought and no action I got me a shiny new CPU (athlon 2200+ XP!) and a case and case fan. I ruin equipment too fast to be an overclocker, but cooler is generally better.

Spent the evening building a new machine. Took my time, got everything good, ooh, pretty. Wired all together, ready to try it out, plug it in and SNAP, something electrical makes that noise, accompanied by that pleasant smell of fried components. Crap. So, my personal box is dead, pending some pain in the butt diagnostics…next I’ll try some things I should’ve looked at in the first place…memory and video card. If it doesn’t sound like good times to you, you’ve probably never spent 7 hours rolling up a D&D character and invented a character class.

Happier times were Saturday when Sean and I brewed up a batch of IPA. Oh, yeah, it’s gonna be tasty. My only concern is that even at 9pm when we were looking to measure specific gravity (1.041) it was still 76F in the house, which means that it’ll take a long time for a 5 gallon jar of water and goo to cool down from 90F to 78F so that the yeast doesn’t go frickin nutso. Sean went home and I eventually added the yeast anyway after moving the brew to the slightly cooler basement. It did some mad overflowing over the course of the next 36 hours, to the tune of 2-3 pints of scumptious lovin, but the temperature is now holding in the mid-70s like a pair of corduroy OP shorts. Had a Spaten Optimator and replaced the overflow valve with a bubbler last night in an effort to say f-you stoopid computer and now it’s bubblin away, and in a few weeks good times will be had by all. cheers.