nuxx.net – Page 255 – Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Ketchikan, Alaska in 1996

November 22, 2004

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I know I posted a bit about this before. However, something I’ve wanted complete for eight years is finally done. I’ve just completed uploading all of the photos that I know to have from the times in 1996 when I visited Ketchikan, Alaska. This was a rather interesting trip made under a number of circumstances (which I won’t get into here). Suffice to say, it was a very memorable and life-changing time for me.

That said, all the photos I know to have are now available, complete with captions. The 158 photos are available for viewing here: http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/alaska_1996

These were batch scanned on an Epson Perfection 3170, then run through a simple Auto Level / Auto Color / Auto Contrast routine in Photoshop. While they aren’t ideal, they do look pretty good, much better than the original prints. I’d imagine that individual images could be cleaned up further if need be.

Please, feel free to look through them, and if you can make corrections to any of the captions, let me know. As these photos were all taken over eight years ago, my memory is a bit fuzzy as to names. However, events and other details are fairly crisp.

If everything goes as planned, I’m hoping to add more photos to the gallery this week, including a trip I took to Washington DC with Civil Air Patrol in (I believe) 1994, England in 1995, many photos I took of people from (I)ndustry BBS, photos from when I was in high school, and a few of some people from Undernet’s #industry.

Beer – Part Deux!

November 20, 2004

[Crossposted to and .]

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Well, about five and a half days have passed since I brewed up my first batch of beer. As the bubbling has slowed to about four per minute, I figured it was time to get the beer off the trub (the yeast and gunk at the bottom of the fermenter) and into a secondary fermenter to allow it to batch age.

So, that’s what I did, and there’s pictures of it available. To see them, either click here or on the photo above. I’ve also uploaded my current brewing notes in case anyone is interested in reading them.

Some of the notable pictures include:

· I’m impressed by the clarity of the beer thus far.
· The trub – the stuff lingering in the bottom of the fermenter.
· The fermenter, sanitized and ready to go.
· It’s likely to batch age like this for the next two weeks.

Oh, and if anyone here who also brews beer sees anything that I’m doing wrong or can provide me with any pointers, I’d greatly appreciate them.

Thanks!

beer moved from livejournal

Coffee!

November 19, 2004

[Cross-posted to and .]

Mmm… I apologize for not having better pictures, but I wanted to take a moment to brag about something…

I just got done roasting and then brewing a 50/50 blend of Organic Mexican and Organic Sumatra coffee. This was then ground and roasted with some wonderfully clean-tasting spring water, and it has made for an absolutely amazing friday afternoon snack. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything sweet (dark chocolate would be especially good) to munch on. :\

The coffee was acquired from The Runcible Spoon in Bloomington, IN, and the mug pictured above is a Ray Troll mug for Raven’s Brew coffee, purchased from SOHO COHO in 1996.

Did I mention my fondness for southeast Alaska?

food moved from livejournal

Mmm… Beer!

November 16, 2004

[Crossposted to and .]

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So… My house smells like a brewery. Last week I decided to take a stab at brewing beer, so I picked up the supplies. Today I actually gave everything a go. Because it’s fairly involved and I’ve never done it before, I didn’t take a lot of pictures, but there are quite a few of them here.

Now I’ve got about a week or so to wait, then the beer will go into the secondary fermenter, with bottling coming a few weeks later.

It’s supposed to be a English Brown Ale, so hopefully it’ll be good. :)

beer moved from livejournal

Clifty Falls State Park

November 11, 2004

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In my driving around on Tuesday, I came across a place called Clifty Falls State Park. Per the state’s site it appears that I didn’t see all of the park that I could have. Alas, I did still have fun wandering around. Click the picture above to see the photos I took there. Also, it seems that the Indiana DNR has some videos of the park here. I missed the tunnel. :(

moved from livejournal outdoors travel

Mammoth Cave National Park

November 8, 2004

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Well, I sure was the cheap tourist today. I managed to visit three National Park Service sites, even though one of them was closed. Whoops!

So… What did happen today. (A word of warning about the photos… Something is odd with the automatic exposure on my camera. I think that it was set to ‘center spot weighted’ from when I was doing some eBay photos, so the exposure is quite a bit…. Off… In some of the shots. I’m sorta frustrated at that. At least it can be cleaned up if need be.)

Well, first I woke up at right about 8am, got dressed, then headed southbound on I-65 towards Mammoth Cave National Park. I stopped at Burger King for some breakfast (two egg/cheese crossants, hash browns, and a coffee) as it’s the only really veggie-friendly breakfast-serving fast food place that I know of. The trip down there didn’t really take too long, and while heading southbound I somehow hit a timezone border. WTF? I was headed practically straight south… Regardless, that all put me at the park at about 9:40am CST, which was just in time for the 9:45am Frozen Niagara tour. It turns out that this particular tour is the longest one offered on weekdays during the winter season. I wouldn’t have minded something longer, but with that being the only option, I took it.

Clicky if you really want to read this…

moved from livejournal outdoors travel

Help!

October 31, 2004

To all the electronics geeks, I need help finding something. I’m looking for a 1U enclosure for a project I want to work on, and I’d like it to be plastic. I’ve seen them around online, but I can’t find a place to buy them.

Do you know where I could get one?

I’ve got a piece of gear I want to mount in an enclosure, and a plastic box would work great… And being rack-mountable would be even better. :)

So, again, what am I looking for? A 1U rack mount plastic enclosure, similar to the one seen here. (No, it doesn’t need any knobs or switches or whatever, I’ll take care of mounting those.)

Thanks!

electronics making things moved from livejournal

Eclipse!

October 27, 2004

So, as most people know, tonight was the lunar eclipse which was visible all across North America (at the very least). So, what did I do? I took pictures of it, or at least tried to.

That image up above is a thumbnail from one of the images, slightly blurred to clean it up, just after the eclipse had fully taken effect. So, there you go: eclipse images.

These look a lot better once played with in Photoshop, mostly because I used some digital zoom, but this can be corrected for. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll end up with a nice Coolpix 4800 which should help alleviate this the next time.

moved from livejournal outdoors

:)

October 18, 2004

Ahh, I figured out the problem.

It seems that in my haste to get vpopmail reinstalled this morning, I gave it an argument of -DSPAM_THRESHOLD=5. Normally I wouldn’t have used that argument, but it seems that the updated FreeBSD port requires it. That, or I don’t remember using it last time… Anyway, that particular vpopmail flag made it DELETE all spam with a score of greater than 5. Sure, most stuff got through, but some was getting deleted. Oops! Since I’ve discovered this flag’s true use (note that this flag is NOT documented in the vpopmail docs) I’ve since recompiled with it set to 30. (And yes, that can only be set per-server, at compile time.) I figure that spam which received a score greater than 30 is hopelessly bad, and should not be delt with.

So, that’s that. Now it’s time to go home and have some dinner. I think tonight’s tasty treat will be veggie nuggets with a spicy salsa to dip them in.

computers food moved from livejournal

…

October 18, 2004

Hmm. So today I installed SpamAssassin 3.0. Things went good, except in the middle of everything an errant find command b0rked my vpopmail install. (Who would have thought that find . -delete -name “bayes*” would delete everything in and beneth the current directory, while find . -name “bayes*” -delete would only recursively delete all files matching ‘bayes*’.)

Anyway, vpopmail is reinstalled, SpamAssassin is doing it’s thing, etc. Except for one problem. I don’t get any spam. At all. I get messages that are flagged as not being spam, but I never ever get any flagged as spam. I’m really not sure what’s going on… SpamAssassin isn’t capable of deleting messages, and I’ve got nothing in place to ensure that the messages go away. And messages that are flagged as not being spam come through. So, I’m not sure what’s up.

One thought is that spam counts happen to be way down today (this is a distinct possibility) and that all the spam I am getting is the silly no body / no subject / no date mail, which the MTA is doing away with.

I guess the only thing to do is go home, reset the junkmail counters in Mail.app, and see if they increase over night. If I don’t get *any* spam, I’ll have to look further. Every message that I’ve expected to receive has gotten through… I just don’t have any test spam.

[UPDATE]

I’d forgotten I left this window open… In the mean time, I sent something that was apt to be flagged as spam, but it was legit. Now to figure out what’s going on…

computers moved from livejournal