Once bottling of the pumpkin ale was complete, I started the barleywine brew also mentioned in the above link. I slightly modified my plans to include steeping some bitter orange peel along with the grains. The OG for this is 1.082 at 75 degrees. Once primary fermentation is done, I am to pitch the champagne yeast right into that vessel, and then rack to secondary once THAT fermentation is finished. This brew could get up to 11% alcohol! Yow!
Last Friday I was on the radio. The auto-archiving on WZBC is now working. These links should function until October 30.
Hour 1: http://zbconline.com/wzbc-2009-10-1
Hour 2: http://zbconline.com/wzbc-2009-10-1
Hour 3: http://zbconline.com/wzbc-2009-10-1
Playlist below:
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Some production and consumption notes:
Saturday I made a pumpkin ale. I have long wanted to make a clone of Souther Tier’s Pumking, but I’m not ready for all-grain brewing yet, so instead I picked up a kit of the on-sale Harvest Feast Pumpkin Ale from Beer and Wine Hobby. This kit consisted of 6.6 pounds of malt extract, with a pound of flaked barley, half a pound of chocolate malt, 2 oz of Hallertau hops for bittering, a can of pumpkin puree for those of us without fresh pumpkin available, two packets of magical ‘pumpkin spice’, the usual priming sugar, and Irish moss for clarification. I opted for the dry yeast version of the kit as my fridge is full. As usual, I started things off by rehydrating the yeast using a stir plate. (Someday I may actually make a yeast starter the night before brew day.) Brewing was straightforward, but I did try a few new things for this batch! I sparged my grain bag with hot water instead of squeezing it, making the total boil volume just shy of four gallons. I actually strained out the hop and protein residue before adding to the fermenter; hopefully this results in less useless sediment at the bottom and more clear beer to drink! The kit instructions said that the gravity of the wort should have been 1.042. In reality, it was 10 points higher, 1.052 after temperature correction! I can’t imagine what may have happened. This brew also calls for racking to secondary and adding a second sachet of pumpkin spices. I don’t have a glass carboy, so I will have to rack to my bottling bucket and then back into my primary fermenter just as I did with my chocolate stout.
The brewing store was busy, and I think they may have given me a yeast that was not quite intended for this beer. They handed me a packet of Safbrew T-58 yeast which is what I used for my “Belgian” honey amber ale. This yeast generates spicy and fruity flavors all its own, so this may be a really weird ale!
My next beer project will be a barleywine based on Death by Barleywine. I bought 10 pounds of dried amber malt extract; a pound of crystal malt and half a pound each of chocolate malt and roasted barley; 1 ounce of Nugget hops for bittering and 3 ounces of Cascade: one for aroma, one for flavor, and one for dry-hopping; a packet of Pasteur champagne yeast to take over once the Safale S04 dies off; and French oak chips for aging. The oak chips take about 6 weeks to fully infuse, at which point I will bottle and let that stuff sit until the bleak midwinter. Mmm.
We also roasted a chicken Saturday night. It was a kosher chicken and that made a serious difference. Moist and juicy! I attempted to make a nice chicken gravy with the drippings, but we were too hungry to wait for it to boil down!
Sunday I attempted to make a Steak and Ale pie with the last of my Park Ave Porter Plus . It was tasty, but the crust didn’t puff up as puff pastry is supposed to! It just got warm and stayed mushy. Bummer :(
Oh, and today while on a stop at the liquor store to get a single bottle of wine, I picked up Sam Adams Imperial Series Stout and Double Bock, a bottle of Troegenator, a Stone Vertical Epic 09.09.09, and a Red Hook Tripel. I hate having a semi-decent beer store right on my walk home from the train.
crossposted from The Hydrogen ProjectI am late in posting this, but this week is the third Capoeira Gerais batizado in Boston.
Events are Thursday and Saturday in Marlboro and Friday night in Chinatown. See the poster for all details. You should not miss this. To paraphrase a friend who came to last year’s: “I spent two hours alternately saying HOLY SHIT and WHOA. Those guys were unbelievable”
crossposted from The Hydrogen Projectfs1rgen
I have mostly completed the XML document that describes the FS1r data model, at least enough to start writing code to parse it. Because spending 30 minutes at a time reading Xerces-C is almost useless, I have abstracted away the XML parser so that I can write a Xerces-C driver later and a RapidXML driver now. Since the RapidXML driver was, well, rapid, I am now onto writing a very basic test XML so I can build the genetic algorithm component using GALib. A lot of my ideas about the data model have had to change to adapt to the GALib environment; I’m awfully glad I started reading the manual before I wrote all that code.
For fs1rgen I am using git. I made a public repository on github for it, but since I’m always in a hurry to get off the train when I check stuff in, and I haven’t really figured out git anyway, there’s not much there.
LoopCollector
I have abandoned the C++ command-line version and I am now thinking of writing a third prototype in Perl before implementing the VST version. I have started the VST version but the VST scaffolding is a little tough to figure out a half hour at a time. I may implement a prototype in ChucK, Pd, or CSound, whichever I can figure out the quickest.
eyeCalendar
I have taken eyeCalendar off my sidebar here after some performance problems. It’s a low priority now that I’m not actively tracking Boston music events since the whole baby thing keeps me craving sleep more often!
Blogging
I have been offered a spot as a contributor at Way of the Spatula. In addition, I am spinning any non-DJ type musical content into a separate blog: The Republic of Nynex. There’s no content there, yet. I need to finish my software projects first!
If anyone has a suggestion on a Linux RSS reader that can handle HTTP authentication or cookies, let me know. I would like to stop using LiveJournal as my feed reader. I tried RSSOwl but I do not like it.
crossposted from The Hydrogen ProjectThe words of C. B. Stubblefield adorn every bottle of Stubb’s barbecue products: “First of all, you have to have the taste and the time.”
Well, I didn’t have the time today, so I had to buy a bottle of someone else’s sauce.
Today was my extended family’s July and August birthday party and was the first chance for most of them to meet our new baby. Always on the lookout for a barbecue excuse, I offered to make ribs at my dad’s house where the party was being held. He and I have the exact same smoker configuration. For some reason, even though I only bought my kit after he did (and made some really awesome ribs) he thinks I have some magic power that he doesn’t, so he told me that he would pick up the charcoal and he would watch me do everything.
Anyway, since the party was on a Saturday, I wouldn’t have time to make my ribs the day before since I would be at work. Food was to be served at 1:00 P.M., so my options were limited. I decided to try my hand at Memphis dry ribs since this style only requires 1-2 hours to cook.
Friday night, I made some brief preparations. I put together a half-batch of my old standby, Mike Mills’ Magic Dust. While not strictly Memphis style, it is somewhat similar to the spicy version of this Memphis rub which I will try in the future. Notice that the Memphis Dust does not include ANY cayenne or chili powder by default!
What makes dry ribs dry is the lack of a sauce basted at the end of the smoke. You still can use a mop. I would recommend it for any barbecue, honestly. I improvised since I couldn’t find the recipe I used last time: 1 cup olive oil, ½ cup apple cider vinegar, ½ cup Worcestershire sauce, a can of Miller Lite, and a few spoons of Phat Mike’s mysterious rub that appears to be equal portions paprika and espresso grinds.
This got packed up with a my actual mop and a few foil pans. I asked my dad to get a few oak logs handy.
This morning, I stopped at McKinnon’s, hoping to get some full slabs of the baby back ribs on sale starting Friday. They had three half slabs and when I asked at the counter they were otherwise out! Instead, I picked up two slabs of spare ribs. They were cut super thick: ten pounds each! I also picked up a bottle of Charlie Beigg’s Maine Apple barbecue sauce, and some ice for the trip. Upon arriving at my parents’, my dad presented me with yet another rack of ribs (baby backs!). To start the fire, he usually uses small pieces of pine wood that have been covered in wax. This is basically a homemade version of those fire log contraptions you get from the grocery store. It worked well enough. The cooker got up to temp pretty quickly. My dad went to run some errands, and told me to wait on the baby back ribs so he could watch the whole process.
Turns out that half a batch of Magic Dust is exactly enough for two slabs of untrimmed spare ribs (the meat flaps on the backs were mostly fat and the knife was getting slippery) and one side of baby backs. After scraping and oiling the cooking grates, I loaded the spares into the cooker, and waited for my father’s return.
Once he got back, I spiced the baby backs, and I placed that rack on the warming rack.
Now, the other thing about dry ribs is that they are smoked really hot for barbecue. I was shooting for a temperature of 350°F, so I actually started the fire in the main cooking chamber, not in the firebox. Guess what? Some of the spare ribs got a little burnt! Oh well.
After about two hours and much pestering by the family, I took the ribs to be sliced. I actually trimmed off the brisket bone and all the cartilage-y bits but served them anyway, warning people about the difference. Nobody seemed to mind. There were leftovers, but honestly, three racks of ribs for 15 people who were also eating dynamites is a little overkill. One comment made by my brother makes me want to explore some of the standard Char-Griller modifications to reduce the right-side hotspot, but that will be a long time from now, I’m sure.
crossposted from The Hydrogen Project- LLVM
- Erlang
- J2EE
- VST and CoreAudio/MIDI
- Stronger Objective-C
- More Perl (Moose)
- GALib
- PD/Max and SuperCollider
- Linux kernel hacking (at long last) and all the other stuff about Linux I forgot over the past 6 years of not having a daily Linux beater.
- strong Python (work requirement, blah)
- C++ topics (boost, template hackery)
- Clojure or some other functional language
- more J2EE since I appear to be working on that in the office now also
This weekend is the Salem CultureFest, basically a small arts festival with some typical carnival attractions. Pretty much everything was of a multicultural bent: African instruments for sale, Japanese calligraphy demos, reggae band, drum circles, etc.
In the middle of yesterday’s program was a demonstration by the K-9 unit of the Salem Police. Does this strike anyone else as a bizarre entry?
crossposted from The Hydrogen Project
Tonight’s Test Pattern will focus on Glasgow label Iridite Productions. From their press package:
“It’s all about the music”
Iridite was founded on this principle in the summer of 1999. Dedicated to producing quality electronic dance music, and acting as a platform for both established and new artists whose work was yet to be heard. This music would be unified not strictly by genre but by its quality, the styles ranging from down tempo to Detroit inspired Techno, Dub and House. Initially the aim was to bring together different artists on each release, each track being the strongest possible selection by that artist for the EP at that time, creating a fluid mix of high quality music without trying to hard to be overtly “eclectic”.
From Matt:
I will be playing tracks from Iridite’s entire 10-year history (well, most of it). If time permits, I will also present some unreleased, untitled tracks by unnamed artists coming up on future Iridite releases.
Listen in tonight at 6PM on 90.3 FM or www.wzbc.org
crossposted from The Hydrogen ProjectEvery time I try to write this entry, something else happens.
Last Sunday, while my mother-in-law was visiting, we had let the cats outside to run around. Usually this is not much of a problem; at worst they would bring us back injured mice or birds and let them loose in the house. But this day, my wife noticed that Les, our boy cat, was ferociously cleaning one spot on his belly. When she approached him, he ran away, which is very uncharacteristic. Eventually she got a look at him and saw a huge gash, and came running to get me. I attempted to pick him up which provoked a violent response, but my wife was able to coax him into his carrier with the promise of catnip. I called our usual vet, who was expectedly closed. I didn’t listen to the full instructions and ended up calling the local 24/7 emergency vet hospital. They told me to bring Les in, where they cleaned out the wound, gave him antibiotics, gave us three days’ of pain medication, and put him in an e-collar.
Unfortunately, the antibiotics did not prevent the stitches from getting infected. Two days later, my wife noticed swelling and redness in the shaved area and thus she brought him to the Feline Hospital in Salem. They reopened the stitches and kept him for 4 days. This past Saturday, we watched the vet bandage the huge, gaping, bloody hole in our cat, then brought him home. He was fine most of the night afterwards, except at one point, when he got spooked by his bandage and flipped out.
This flipping out occurred again the next morning. Les actually managed to pull out a gauze pad from under another layer of gauze AND a layer of Vetrap while jumping and flipping and slamming his head into the footboard of our bed. We called the vet again, this time listening to the entire message and beeping her. When she called us back, she told us to bring him in for rebandaging.
This morning, after I left for work, he once again managed to tear out the pad. He’s at the hospital now, and he’s staying until they suture him back up tomorrow.
crossposted from The Hydrogen Project
Born 6/18/2009 at 1:27PM (or so) 8lbs. 9oz. 19 inches long!
Cute as hell IMHO. Pictures forthcoming for when I get my camera attached at home.
crossposted from The Hydrogen ProjectAssorted small updates, since it’s been a while:
- Picked up some stuff at the Salem Record Exchange: Mr. G, Nitzer Ebb, King Crimson, Stewart Copeland, CTR, David Sylvian and Holger Czukay, SAW, Baby Ford, and DAF. Going through all the records strewn about my office. If I know what it sounds like, it goes back in the boxes, otherwise it gets played. Not all of my records are surviving this process. I will be selling some records on Craigslist soon, and for cheep.
- If you’re a WZBC person reading this, I am still looking for people to do Test Pattern this summer. Contact me for more information. You can just leave a comment below if you like.
- Tomorrow is another grand cooking day. I have a 5 pound pork loin that will turn into pork chops and the magnificent apple-sausage stuffed pork loin, possibly on the grill if it doesn’t rain. I am also making baked beans from scratch using the recipe from Peace, Love, and BBQ (minus the bacon). Although I would like the rain so I don’t have to water the lawn (I won’t bore you) I would love to finally get the chance to do some BBQ this summer for the first time since October!
- Baby is coming any day now. We’ve had a number of false alarms, but no actual baby yet, or there would have been an announcement.
- The next capoeira batizado is the weekend of September 24th.
crossposted from The Hydrogen ProjectI bottled my porter project yesterday! FG was 1.019, which gives an absurdly low ABV of 2.944%? I don’t believe it. Anyway, I tasted the very last bit of gritty stuff at the bottom of the bucket and it was delicious! I just hope I didn’t bottle too early!
crossposted from The Hydrogen ProjecteyeCalendar
eyeCalendar is my WordPress plugin project. It fetches iCalendar format files and merges the contents together, allowing totally custom formatting on the part of the site administrator. Until recently, it featured on the sidebar over yonder → aggregating Hydrogen Economy events with many other Boston events sucked down from Facebook, Going.com, a number of public Google calendars, and Upcoming.
A bug in eyeCalendar resulted in my PHP installation consuming all available CPU on its server. As of now, it’s disabled until I fix the problem. I think the root cause is in the fetch code, but I can’t be sure until I test and test some more. As such the widget is disabled until I fix that problem. Since the project has not seen an actual release, I’m sure nobody actually cares except me! There is one other developer attached to the SourceForge project but he hasn’t done anything.
LoopCollector
LoopCollector is an audio effect inspired by an event described by The Custodian. It cuts source audio into arbitrarily long chunks and rearranges those chunks to form a rhythmic pattern. I created this project mostly to teach myself how to program AudioUnits and VST plugins.
I began by prototyping the algorithm in a Perl script. A second version of the Perl script followed. Neither was satisfactory. Currently I’m implementing a command line version in C++. These three are all totally dependent on sox to decode and encode audio. The perl scripts open up pipes to sox and I’m pretty sure the C++ version will too. I originally wrote the code so that it could eventually form the basis of both the VST and AudioUnit versions, so I used all manner of wacky C++ template crap so that I could write code that handles floats and ints and chars and shorts without rewriting anything. I’ve scaled back on the wacky templates since I realized that this all a prototype anyway and probably would require massive work to fit into a VST plug-in!
I haven’t got any sound samples yet, because I haven’t had any satisfactory results, but as soon as I do, I will probably post them.
Music
I have radio shows on May 29th (covering NCP part 1 from 7PM to 10PM) and June 5th (Test Pattern the subject matter of which I have not yet decided, so 6PM to 7PM)
Susanna from Rare Frequency is doing a Raster-Noton Test Pattern May 29th as a preview for the Alva Noto/Byetone appearance at Middlesex.
I have some actual ideas for some actual productions bouncing around in my head. I will get them out on some format if it takes me years. The InfiniteStateMachine series on the creation of the ISM label has only helped fuel my musical aspirations.
fs1rgen
I bought a Yamaha FS1r a number of years ago and I still don’t have a clue how to program the damn thing. I originally bought as the sound module to a wind controller I never bought (although maybe some day I will purchase one of the new Akai EWI USB units). The front panel is far too tiny for all the options in a single patch, and the only available Mac OS X editor is complicated despite the larger screen. What I have decided to do is use the MIDI implementation described in the manual to create a genetic algorithm of sorts that can generate patches.
Because I haven’t started coding yet, I’m going to write up a design here. I’ll even put it under a cut so you can skip it.
( Read the rest of this entry » )crossposted from The Hydrogen ProjectLast Saturday, I brewed the porter kit my parents bought me for my birthday. I decided once again to tweak it, this time by adding molasses (just shy of 1/4 cup) to the boil right from the start, then a bag of cracked coffee beans for 30 minutes and 1/4 cup of cocoa powder for 5 minutes. OG was just about 1.042. Should be tasty!
crossposted from The Hydrogen ProjectYesterday was my birthday. I ended up sleeping poorly Tuesday night and had a long day planned Wednesday. After work was to be the capoeira open house followed by dinner out with my wife and then on to see Dietrich Schonemann and Miro Pajic at the Phoenix Landing in Cambridge.
Apparently it is a Brazilian tradition that on your birthday you have fight everybody. So, after we trained a number of difficult movements for the first time (aù macaco, aù compasso, and queda de rins) Coreba taught us all how to sing Happy Birthday in Portuguese, then we started the roda. I don’t think quite everyone played with me, because we had some arrivals for the following class who weren’t warmed up, and a few brand new people. I played better than I have in a long time, and I think this is due to the new physical therapy regime I’ve been following. I don’t have the pain I was experiencing after class and I have a lot more stamina as a result. Unfortunately I smacked poor Chinesinha in the nose with my foot!
Dinner was at the East Coast Grill. I would like to say that everything was delicious, but unfortunately I decided to try their “Extremely Hot Crispy Hell Bone.” This is a dry-rubbed smoked pork spare rib treated with some brutal ungodly compound. It completely scoured my taste buds and sinuses. I think my brisket sandwich was tasty, but I actually could not taste the baked beans served with it, nor the watermelon! All they had was texture.
The Phoenix was kind of empty, possibly because the Crystal Method was playing last night. (ick) Schoenemann was good. We didn’t stay for much of Miro’s set because we were too tired and old! It took us an hour to get home because all roads out of Boston close at midnight, apparently, and the clerk at the convenience store decided to take a half hour to harangue the girl in front of us to not accidentally touch his hand while taking her change or something.
Other things that happened on my birthday:
- Maine legalizes gay marriage: hurray!
- 3DRealms, developer of the running joke Duke Nukem Forever, goes under: meh
Have you ever wanted to try Capoeira? Maybe you’ve never even heard of it. Capoeira is a Brazilian martial art that has a long history among African slaves. It was illegalized and disguised as a dance for many years, and bears this influence today, as capoeira is played in a circle accompanied by musical instruments and songs. Maybe you’ve seen capoeiristas playing in public. You’d recognize them by the kicks, flips, handstands, and other acrobatic movements.
Capoeira Gerais is having a free demonstration and Open House Wednesday, May 6, in Boston at Boston Ultimate Fitness (aka Nam Pai Academy) at 6:00 PM. Contra-Mestre Marquinho Coreba is originally from Brazil and previously taught capoeira in Spain and Switzerland.
Boston Ultimate Fitness is located in Chinatown at 33 Harrison Ave, on the 7th Floor, upstairs from Nick the Tailor (but take the elevator).
If you can’t come to the open house but would still like to take a class, you can come any Monday or Wednesday at 6:00 PM. Classes are an hour in length. Or, check Contra-Mestre Coreba’s schedule on http://www.capoeirageraisboston.com
If you are participating, make sure to wear or bring comfortable clothing and sneakers. A TOWEL and WATER strongly recommended, because you are going to sweat! (if you forget the water, there are vending machines and a water fountain at the gym)
crossposted from The Hydrogen ProjectThis weekend I finally re-seasoned* the grates on my grill, and so to celebrate, I made the following meal Sunday afternoon.
First off, I thawed a tri-tip roast I had obtained for cheep at Trader Joe’s some months ago. The tri-tip is a cut of beef from the bottom sirloin. In the US, it’s most popular in California, but it is known in other countries by other names (triangle steak, punta de Solomo, colita de cuadril, etc.)
Later that day, after starting the charcoal, I created more Magic Dust. This comes from a recipe out of Peace, Love, and Barbecue. Unfortunately, I had run out of cayenne without knowing it, so I used crushed red pepper instead.
Next, I coated six potatoes with olive oil and magic dust, and mounted them on my fancy new rib and potato rack. Once the fire was ready, I put these into the grill first as they would take longer than the meat.
As for the fire, I added a log of oak in. This had been sitting in my basement all winter, so I had to hose off all the dust. This became a slight problem later on.
Once the potatoes were cooking, I sprinkled more Magic Dust all over the meat. Transferring the meat to the grill was a little tricky since the roast is actually pretty thin compared to big chunk of a roast. I managed to not drop anything, thankfully.
I had also purchased a bunch of asparagus. These I trimmed and placed in a foil hobo pack with some onion slices, salt, pepper, and butter, which then went on the top rack of the grill.
After about 45 minutes of cooking, the meat was still 25 degrees away from completion, but the fire had nearly gone out. I opened up the vents in hopes that the log would catch, but it only smoldered while the coals burned to ash. The roast actually started losing degrees while I started more charcoal. In an effort to regain lost time, I placed the meat right over the freshly-relit fire, resulting in one side getting charred a bit. Nobody seemed to mind this on the finished product, though.
Last but not least was a warmed-up can of Bush’s Grillin’ Beans. I have no great ability to bake beans yet, and my father-in-law’s recipe is a secret! Also, I don’t think we have any beans and I forgot to buy more. Oops.
* Over the winter I put them in the oven on a self-cleaning cycle to remove all the crud that built up over the past two years.
crossposted from The Hydrogen ProjectProfile
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