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Category: beer

Flat New Holland Beer: The Poet

Published May 6, 2008

Yesterday while Danielle was over I picked up a six pack of New Holland’s beer The Poet. I’m happy because Meijer is now carrying it, which makes it easy to pick up for enjoying with dinner. Unfortunately, all but one or two bottles of this beer seem to be as flat as you can see up above. There’s just no head / foam on it at all.

After finding the contact page on New Holland’s site I emailed Isaac Hartman, who is listed as the Ambassador of Great Beer (Sales). Hopefully he’ll respond and, at the very least, do what he can to ensure that their beer at Meijer is better in the future.

As this beer tastes pretty sweet, I’m figuring that it didn’t bottle condition right. Maybe New Holland gave Meijer a few cases of them expecting them to age a bit in the store room or on the shelf and instead they just went into refrigeration. Or… who knows. It’s definitely not right, though.

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Southern Tier’s Back Burner

Published April 29, 2008

Souther Tier's Back Burner Barley Wine poured into a glass.

Things have been a bit boring around here lately, with me working at my job, working on the new server, riding my bike, and trying to relax a bit, so I just thought I’d post this photo of Souther Tier‘s Back Burner, a decent (and quite hoppy) barleywine which I drank while watching The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with Danielle on Sunday night.

Today I got GEOM-based disk mirroring working on banstyle.nuxx.net, but in doing so I realized that the on-board SiI3114 controller only supports SATA/150 (aka SATA I) and thusly no NCQ, which disappointed me. To remedy this I ordered part number N82E16816104007 from Newegg.com, a Koutech PSA421 4-Channel Serial ATA & Serial ATA II 64-bit PCI Host Controller which appears to be a reference (or very standard) implementation of the SiI3124 PCI/PCI-X to 4 Port SATA300 chipset. This should fit in the one usable slot in the case and provide the SATA interface that I really want. I just wish it’d arrive sooner.

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/mode +w #beer

Published April 23, 2008

Victory's Hop Wallop poured into a glass. It's a somewhat syrupy, very hoppy beer. I like it.

Tonight I ended up staying at work until about 8:20pm helping a coworker out with something. It’s not set and he’s on vacation tomorrow, so I’ll end up working on it too. Ah well.

Since I got home too late to go ride my bike I ended up boxing up Ivan’s P3, making a frozen pizza, then watching some TiVo’d stuff and WTVS-HD before wandering back up here to my computer. So, why did I box up the P3? Well, remember the failing PLED post? Yep, it’s bad. While the first one didn’t display very well, the second doesn’t display at all.

I had actually emailed the pictures of the questionable display (1, 2) to the tech support people at Crystalfontz to see if what I was seeing really is indicative of a failing PLED. One of the tech support people replied, confirming that it is what I thought, and suggesting a replacement display. If you’d like to read the whole thread between the tech support person and I, it’s archived as a PNG here.

So, now Ivan is sorting out grabbing a new LCD and then I’ll get back to work on his P3. For now I’ve boxed it up and it’s sitting in a safe place, above ground level, not below any water pipes.

My next (current?) project is now a set of PCBs similar to the RS232 to Eaton Leonard Level Shifter boards which I did last year, but instead accepting ~7VDC – ~40VDC (or straight 5VDC) for the power, with the conversion being handled by a reference implementation of a switching supply. (This is the supply whose ripple is shown here.) The parts are ordered for the first run of them, I just need to wait until they arrive, confirm the footprints, order the PCBs, test, and build.

But for now? I rest.

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