I went to bottle up my latest batch (English Brown Ale) thinking that I had plenty of bottles - I have 11 of the 1L flip top bottles that I bought from NotLarry, plus I had a case of 12 22 oz. bottles from before, and then another 12 of the 1L flip top bottles in a box. Well, as it turns out I'm short 5 of the 22 oz. bottles (somebody didn't return the empty after I gave them some free homebrew!) and the unopened box of flip top bottles I had didn't come with the tops!

I had to improvise - there was a nearly empty 2L bottle of Black Cherry Soda in the fridge, so I emptied it out, washed it out, and it was barely able to hold the leftover that I had in the bottling bucket.

I decided to bottle instead of keg this batch since I plan on giving some out at Christmas.

Name : English Brown Ale
Recipe:
3.3 lbs. Plain Amber Malt Extract
2 Lbs. Plain Amber Dry Malt Extract
8 oz. Crushed Crystal Malt 60L
1 oz. Willamette Hops (Bittering, 60 min)
1/2 oz. Willamette Hops (Finishing, 5 min)
11g Nottingham Yeast
(Above ingredients are the contents of a Brewer's Best English Brown Ale kit)

Brew Date: 21 Nov 2009
Bottling Date: 13 Dec 2009
Drinking Date: Christmas!

Starting Gravity: 1.040
Final Gravity: 1.009
ABV: 4.1%
Calories: 131.5
Carbs: 12.9

(Calculations from Mr. Good Beer)


This time I'm fermenting down in cellar of the house, rather than inside. This is 100% closed off from sunlight and since it is underground on 3 sides is stays a pretty constant temperature in the mid 50s.

I also finally got to use the banjo burner that my parents gave me for Christmas last year. The nice thing is that it easily cut 45 minutes off of the time it takes to brew a batch of beer, because it heats up the kettle very quickly! The downside is that the black paint on the diffuser bubbled off as soon as I started using it and left a sooty, black residue all over the bottom of my brew kettle. I don't know what the manufacturer was thinking, because I didn't even have the thing turned up full blast. I guess people don't think everything through when designing a product. Hopefully it's caked/burned off enough to not force me to get out the brillo pads again after the next batch.

Well in just one more week our household will be down to a single income. My wife and I thought long and hard about it, but the cost of daycare is just too much, so we decided to have her stay home with the kids.

Well, that's what we decided, but then our son's daycare had a spot open up in the Pre-School class and moved him up. A year ahead of schedule. Yeah. Now he's learning things at the same pace as the rest of the class. So we've now decided that my wife will still stay home and keep our 5 month old daughter, but we are going to keep paying for our son to stay in day care for as long as we can. If we get to where we can't pay the bills each month then we'll pull him out, but we're going to take advantage of the opportunity as long as we can.

To help offset the costs, though, my wife is now selling Pampered Chef goodies all over Nashville. I thought it was somewhat unbelievable that with all of the Pampered Chef consultants out there that the domain nashvillepamperedchef.com was even available.

And yeah, I need to get some free time available to brew some more beer. I've had empty kegs for the last couple of months, but now that the baby is getting easier to manage, that may actually happen.

So I decided to try out one of the techniques listed in the brew recipe book that my sister bought me for Christmas this past year. Instead of just letting my Apfelwein mature in the normal fashion I decided to give is a blackberry flavor. Here's how to do it:

1. Make your Apfelwein the way you normally would - 5 gallons of cider + 2 pounds of corn sugar + 1 packet of Montrachet yeast go into a fermenter for 6 weeks.
2. When you get ready to rack to secondary, take 2-3 bags of frozen blackberries and heat them in 120F water (just enough to cover the top) for 20 minutes to loosen up the enzymes and sugar.
3. Don't drain the berries! Put the whole pan full of stewed fruit in the bottom of the secondary before you add anything else.
4. Rack your batch from primary to secondary (this means siphon it, basically) and let it ferment/age for 2 more weeks.
5. Rack to bottles or kegs and let it age like you normally would.

Now a note about the aging - I'm anxious to see how this plays out, because my sample from the day I racked it to the kegs the batch was much more mellow than a typical Apfelwein would be at this point. It looks and tastes very much like White Zinfandel wine, but with a lot more kick to it. The blackberry flavor is very subtle and hopefully it will come out more as it ages.

This is just a place holder to keep track of how many batches I've made. I lost the piece of paper I made my notes on. :(

However, it was a standard batch of Brewer's Best Red Ale. I kegged it up on 21 Feb 2009 and it came out really well, though a bit darker in color than I anticipated. It's brown in color, but more red ale in taste than the traditional brown ales that I've been making.

We run OWA here at work and needed a way to check the status of it through Nagios. If you simply scrape the OWA address, you're only checking that the front end is up - unless you log in you will never actually check the back end to do a full end-to-end service check. Here is some code to log in to an OWA forms based authentication page and return a code as to whether or not you were successful. Of course, you can extend this script to pull the contents of the mailboxes or calendar, but that's not the purpose of this script.


<?php
// OWA Login Check
// Written by Scott Milliken
// Permission granted to use under the GPL
//

$username = "myusername";
$password = "sekretpassword";
// You can just use the base URL for your default mailbox
// or you can add on to it to specify a group mailbox
// $mailboxURL = "https://email.mydomain.com" for default
// or for a shared NOC mailbox in the IT department...
$mailboxURL = "https://email.mydomain.com/it/noc";
$authURL = "https://email.mydomain.com/exchweb/bin/auth/owaauth.dll";

// First go to the URL that a user would use so that you can get your session cookie set

$pg = curl_init();

curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_URL, $mailboxURL );
curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)" );
curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );

// You need to define a cookie jar to store and retrieve
// the session cookies or this won't work
curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookies.txt" );
curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookies.txt" );
curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_HEADER, false );
curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );

// Setting these to false is handy for checking multiple
// frontends that may share the same SSL cert, such as
// ones in a round robin DNS scheme, but you address
// them by the "real name" of the host
curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false );
curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false );

// Set this to true for debugging
curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, false );

$response = curl_exec( $pg );
$info = curl_getinfo( $pg );

// Set the form data for posting the login information
$postData = array();
$postData["url"] = $mailboxURL;
$postData["reason"] = "0";
$postData["destination"] = $mailboxURL;
$postData["flags"] = "0";
$postData["username"] = $username;
$postData["password"] = $password;
$postData["SubmitCreds"] = "Log On";

$postText = "";

foreach( $postData as $key => $value ) {
$postText .= $key . "=" . $value . "&";
}

curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_REFERER, $info["url"] );
curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_URL, $authURL );
curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_POST, true );
curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postText );

$response = curl_exec( $pg );

// At this point you can either print the following
// status to show the result of logging in, or you
// can make another call to the web server for the
// individual frames, such as
// $mailboxURL . "/Inbox/?Cmd=contents" will give you
// the listing of inbox headers (if you call curl again)

$info = curl_getinfo( $pg );

$needle = "close all browser windows when you finish using Outlook Web Access";
if ( strpos( $response, $needle ) )
printf( "Logon to OWA successful.\n" );
else
printf( "Logon to OWA failed.\n" );

?>


So now that we have the U-Verse service installed (it's quite nice, 25 Mbps downstream with 3 Mbps dedicated for internetz and the rest for video) I want to be able to capture HD output from the set top box and view it in MythTV. The only way to do that currently is through the Hauppauge HD PVR 1212, which I ordered today.

Next I'll be shopping around for a 1TB SATA II drive to add to the main server and I'll most likely be removing the HDTV OTA capture card out of it - after all, I still have the two tuner HDHomeRun for OTA capture and it seems to pull in the stations a little better.

When I'm done I should have 2 OTA HDTV ATSC tuners, 1 U-Verse HDTV capture input with 2TB of online disk space in a master backend and 2 frontends.

So I heard on the radio this morning that AT&T was finally taking orders for U-Verse in Middle Tennessee beginning today. I had noticed them installing a new SLC at the bottom of the hill for my subdivision back in November, so there was a good chance that I'd be eligible for service. Sure enough, I checked online and it said that I was good to go. I just got a call back from AT&T saying that they could do the install tomorrow, but I asked them for Friday morning, instead.

What is U-Verse?

Fiber to the home. IPTV throughout the house. A DVR with the ability to view the streams on any other receiver in the house. Currently only 1 HDTV stream is available at a time, but that's enough for us. Most of what we watch is still NTSC or HD over the air, which I'll be keeping. Oh, and up to 18 Mbps down / 3 Mbps up internetz connectivity!

EPIC WIN

I have been meaning to make another batch of cider and another of beer since PhreakNIC, but simply haven't had the time to gather up all of the required ingredients and then to make them. I finally decided to go ahead and do the cider by itself, but since it was already too late to have any by Christmas, I thought it would be nice to start a batch on Winter's Solstice. Four years ago today I was standing on the rocks of Stonehenge, watching the sun come up between the pillars. It was cold as could be and I nearly froze my everything off. It's cold here in Tennessee, too, but inside the house it's kept just under 70 F. To help make this a Winter Solstice batch I'm employing evaporative cooling - I have the fermenter sitting in the bathtub with about 2" of cold water in the bottom and a wet towel wrapped around the carboy. The bottom of the towel is in the water, so it will continue to wick the moisture up and keep the temperature of the fermenter cooler than the ambient temperature. This hack is also known as an Arizona Air Conditioner.
Winter Solstice is the first day of winter, the longest night of the year, and a time that I have always enjoyed, even before my trip to England. Those are the things I'll associate with this batch of cider, as well. I hope to listen to the Paul Winter Consort concert on NPR tonight, which I try to do every year.

Preparation Date : 21 Dec 2008
Kegging Date : 1 Feb 2009
Drinking Date : 14 Feb 2009

We (the family) went back out to Walden Farm in Rutherford County, TN, this year. I got some fun video of my son running through the corn maze, among other things.