Month: February 2012

FML

Literally reaching to unplug the network jack on my laptop so I can put it in my bag so I can leave so that I can attend a hockey game this evening and someone comes by the cube and says “Oh thank god, someone from CM is here! I need help with a production issue.”

The problem is poorly explained, I ask for clarification. Dude runs back to his phone and continues with his conversation. I’m trying to figure out WTF is going on. And now I’m holding so that he can finish his phone call so that I can figure out WTF he wants, which, to the best of my understanding, is something they’ve ad hoc‘ed all through testing and QA so there is no way in hell we’ve set up a control for this in the configuration application.

So…Friday night, no hockey, stuck at work, and just waiting for the chance to jump in.

Hooray.

Things are looking gravy again

Wednesday and Thursday were depressing days at work. All of the gains from last week crumbled into a crapular pit of despair on Wednesday afternoon.

And then I decided to rewrite an entire module from the ground up. This is different than refactoring in that I don’t have the time to make improvements, I’m only trying to fix references and get around whatever undocumented crufty magic lies in .sln, .csproj, and .wixproj files. Love IDEs until I don’t I guess.

So today was the grand test, and, the answer is yes. So now the remaining trick is to cobble together something that can be referenced by consumers without breaking consumers that don’t reference the new stuff. Additional fun factor: both versions use the same file names and namespaces.

FML!

But I believe we are finally out of unknown unknowns now. From here it is plumbing.

Wix is ruining my life

On the one hand, yay, job security!

On the other hand, holy hell! Probably more a factor of how we initially wrote the code, but the upgrade path has been abysmal going from v3.0 to v3.6. Just today I had to rewrite almost three years of custom actions just to get the damn things to compile. All of this to try to prove that it is running wix 3.0 compiled custom actions in a wix 3.6 msi that is causing all of the big explosions.

This explains why we are almost two years behind. Very much hoping the next upgrade cycle is not so ass bitey.

Dry dry dry dry

Last week, or maybe it was the week before, we uncorked a bottle of the Riesling for dinner.

It was so very dry which is not something we were shooting for. Others might like this however.

Adding to the pain, there was a bit of fusel alcohol still hanging about. This roughed things up a bit. Looks like there are a few more weeks (months?) to go on this one before we hit peak. Will also be sweetening the next Riesling after taking it down to 1.000.

Diacetyl rest before the crash

Took the McBee’s out of the fermentation chamber (fancy way of saying old coal room in the basement) today. She looks a lovely creamy butterscotch in the carboy that translates to a light straw color in the hydrometer test cylinder. There’s a metric butt tonne of trub sitting at the bottom of the carboy. SG reading was a bit higher than anticipated–1.015 instead of the expected 1.009.

Given that it’s been on the cold side in the ol’ carboy what with us actually getting a cold snap the last week I’ve pulled her out and set her next to the furnace covered in a tshirt and pillow case. Probably leave it there until Wednesday to give it time to warm up, kick out any diacetyl lying about and wrap up any remaining sugar.

Going to cold crash this by setting the carboy out on the back porch for two or three days before bottling. This assumes the weather cooperates. This should help settle anything else out. I have to say, though, it was pretty clear even though I gave up on running it through a filter on the way to the carboy because we were running short of time. Looking to bottle this next weekend if I get steady SG readings over the next week.

Drank a few swallows out of the sample tube and I think this one is going be an excellent session beer.

Grain rich, beer pour

Stopped by the LHBS while oot and aboot today and picked up the following:

  • 10 lbs US 2 Row
  • 1 lb US Crystal/Carmel 80L
  • 1 lb UK Chocolate Malt
  • 1 lb UK Black Malt
  • 1 lb UK Torrified Wheat
  • 1 lb US Flaked Wheat
  • 1 lb CN Flaked Oats
  • 1 pkg Danstar Nottingham Dry Yeast
  • 1 oz Fuggle Loose Pellet
  • 1 oz Nugget Loose Pellet

Combine that with some brown sugar and spring water to be acquired from the grocer and we’ve got fixing for the next Circle Bar Brewery batch. It’s to be an oatmeal stout based on a recipe I found online. That one had a slightly more complicated grain bill and called for Cluster hops for bittering. I collapsed the UK Pale Ale and Pale malts into a bog standard US 2-Row malt. I also subbed out Nugget for the Cluster. With a much higher AA content I’ll cut the amount of hops by 25% at the bittering addition. I’ve christened this one Toasted Otis in honor of the late Otis “Oats” B. Toast, Esq.

Currently the recipe looks like this:

Fermentables

  • 10 lbs US 2 Row
  • 1 lb US Crystal/Carmel 80L
  • 1 lb UK Chocolate Malt
  • 1 lb UK Black Malt
  • 1 lb UK Torrified Wheat
  • 1 lb US Flaked Wheat
  • 1 lb CN Flaked Oats
  • .25 lb Muscavado (going to substitute dark brown sugar)

Hops

  • .75 oz Nugget loose pellet
  • 1 oz Fuggle loose pellet

Doing BIAB for this one. Plan is to heat 8.25 gallons of water to 158F and dough in. Cover up and let it sit for 45 minutes. Give her a stir or two, verify the temp is okay, and then cover and rest for another 45 minutes.

Mash out at 170F by lifting bag and letting it drain and do a bit of squeezing to get all the goodness we can out of this. I’ll probably sit the bag in a bucket and collect a little more wort to add at the 45 minute mark.

Start the boil timer at 60 minutes when we clear the hot break. Add Nugget hops at this time. Add the Fuggle at 10 minutes to flame out.

Cool wort in water bath until we hit 70F and pitch yeast.

Looking at three weeks in primary before even checking on SG readings. Carb to 2 volumes and serve some time near the end of March if we’re lucky. BeerAlchemy shows we should expect:
5.5 gallons
OG: 1.064
FG: 1.014
ABV: 6.6%
IBU: 38.1
SRM: 37.2

Pretty much right on the high side of the standard across the board.

The biggest problem right now? It’s a tie between not having my bad sewn (so improvising) and finding the time to run this batch. I can improvise a bag by cutting a largish piece of voile and just folding in the corners. Not sure I can fit this in around an auction that I want to attend tomorrow. There are a few Guinness plastic crates and an “Antique Grain Mill” advertised. Werry interested in the mill if it looks serviceable. A bit interested in the crates because it’s nice to have crates I’ve found.

There comes a time…

When coding a largish application from the ground up there comes a time when things look bleak. This usually happens shortly after the application becomes too complex to hold the whole thing in your memory. Either the levels of abstraction get too disorienting or, if you’ve foregone abstraction, keeping all of the “meaningful indexes” straight feels daunting.

And then, perhaps a few hours of panic and toil later (if you’re lucky) it all kind of comes together. You’ve moved from running against test data and start running “live”. Not truly live, of course, unless you want to live dangerously but you get the point. If you’re unlucky it just bogs down into a horrible mess.

Today we are lucky. The thinger I’ve been pounding on for the past week and a half generates useful stuff. If I were a gambling man, I’d go ahead and make the changes to build something that other folks will see. But I’m not. So come Monday I’ll be rabbiting away at swotting up a production asset, doing some tweaking in the build system, and then releasing my WIX generator on the QA resources. This gets my team out of the game of slogging through an ever increasing number of modules when making across-the-board changes. New changes are as simple as writing a new IGenieJob.

It also forces strict standardization on a collection of installer products that have grown organically over the past three years. At the end of last year I managed to normalize a number of things. This is the final step to making this an automated, predictable, and easily troubleshot process for $COMPANY_NAME.

Not to mention, spinning up new installer projects just got a whole lot easier. Also, I get to check off one of my big 2012 annual review goals before it ever gets officially assigned to me. 🙂

A good way to end the week. I will possibly be quite intoxicated within the next five hours.

Fat bottom girls

I’ve been thinking about putting up an RIS because I really like a big, malty beer. My problems are twofold however. First, I need to actually make my BIAB bag. Second, my pipeline is still a bit narrow for the level of consumption being engaged in.

I brewed what probably qualifies as a Blonde Ale that will makes its way to bottles next weekend. It was a slightly more voluminous brew than I had anticipated because my BIAB is not yet dialed in. I also used a three (five?) gallon paint strainer as my bag. I had to stretch the elastic to near its breaking point to fit it around the lip of my kettle. The smaller–roughly eight and a half pound–grain bill fit more snugly than I would have liked. To do a proper RIS, I’d need to double the bill so want a much larger bag. I’ve got the voile. I don’t have the nylon thread or the patience to sew this myself. This may change this weekend as I could be brewing if I had all the equipment.

The second problem is less of an impediment but more painful. I have maybe a rack of the Nutter left to get me through the three weeks until the McBee’s Blonde can be served. (McBee’s–a play on BMC–designed to appeal to several BMC drinkers in the neighborhood) While there is more of the McBee’s by volume, I think it will also go quickly. I try to farm out at least a sixer to folks who stop by to help out on Brew Day. I tend to offer one to anyone who stops by the house. There is a party coming up next weekend which should decimate any remaining stock. McBee’s will be ready just before St. Patrick’s Day and I imagine I’ll bring a bunch to the neighborhood party. There isn’t anything else in production at the moment.

And an RIS is easily a three month project to drinkability. Six to respectability. Twelve to reach its zenith.

I’d like to have two in the fridge before I take on something with that kind of lead time. On the other hand, if I put an RIS up now it will be peaking for the 2012 holiday season.

So this weekend I resolve to either sew my bag and/or do a smaller stout, either a dry or an oatmeal if LHBS has chocolate roast in stock. If they don’t then I guess make an online order and then wait until next week where it will be difficult to fit in a brew day.

Kicking the habit

So it’s been a little over twelve hours since I deactivated my Facebook account. Other than a low grade itch to check on folks’ statuses, I’m doing okay. One benefit should be more frequent posting here…so I’ve got that going for me…which is nice.

It wasn’t any one thing that pushed me over the edge, but it was a large collection of little things that made me reconsider what I was getting out of Facebook. Most of the bad things had to do with reading something that I disagree with and then fighting over whether I wanted to wade in knowing full well that nothing ever changes based on an Internet conversation. I’m a bit of a know-it-all with a bad case of Male Answer Syndrome (a.k.a. Manswer Syndrome or MAS) so the inner conflict was more difficult than I imagine it might be for other folks.

In the past week or so I’ve been drawn in to a fruitless conversation with someone who insists that there are card-carrying members of the CPUSA at all levels of government and in the media. I’ve watched a neighborhood personality conflict get real close to going critical–things are certainly irreparable now. I’ve bit my tongue any number of times while reading political status updates from the fringes of my friends list. In short, I spend a good deal of time stewing over what is going on and I’d prefer to not do that.

On the side of things I’ll miss I’d definitely include some of the running bits some of my less proximal friends have been doing. I’ll miss the serendipity of finding funnies or interesting bits that other friends have posted. There are a few nascent relationships that have come about on Facebook that will probably stall without me being there. The neighborhood scuttlebutt is something I’ll be excluding myself from. Then again, I’ve got Elz on hand to be my filter there.

I’ll keep on using Jim and Oscar’s page because I have a few long-running gags going there. I’ll be more vigilant about collecting and reading email as well as texting to get around not having Facebook’s breadth of reach. I’ll post more regularly here to let folks know what I’m up to.

All in all, I think this is going to be a good thing. If it turns out otherwise, well, reactivating the account is as simple as logging on using my credentials and then we’re back where we started. Here we go ’round again.