Kevin's musings

Second times the charm. Tested out a few things and then determined
that the following steps would result in cider goodness:

Put apples in bucket.

Take 2×4. Smash apples with end of 2×4.

Pour mashed fruit into the cider press and press.

Jeremy and I managed to press about 15 gallons of cider tonight. 10gal
went into carboys so it could start it’s lovely fermenting. The
rest we put into our fridges to drink now. Very very yummy.

Attempted cider tonight. I went over to
Beer at Home (which it turns
out is only a mile from my house) and rented a cider press. They
had a nice new unit there they rent out for $15/day. Got that
back home in time for jeremy and jeff to show up. Sean and
Evelyn also were passing through and stopped to help out. We
picked tons and tons of apples. Next step was to chop them up
and get them into the cider press, which we managed to do just
fine. Then the press didn’t press. It would get to a point and
then just be too hard to crank. We tried a number of things,
discussed theories, but the best we could come up with is that
the apples were too hard and needed to be mushed before
cidering further. So, we are going to freeze the apples tonight,
thaw them tomorrow and then try pressing them again tomorrow
night. At least we got all the apples picked.

Spent the afternoon upgrading my firewall. It was a very stable
machine, but it was running RedHat 7.3, which is beyond getting
old. Also, I wanted to add more network interfaces to it to
handle the new dsl line I should in theory be getting next
week.

I had hopes it would be a pretty simple operation. I installed fedora
core 2 on a test box, and got it configured with selinux and
the packages I wanted. Then, I just swapped the drive into the
old machine along with a 4 port matrox network card. The first
issue I ran into was that the video card had decided to croak on
that firewall box, and I never noticed since I never logged into
the console there. Managed to scrounge up another AGP card and
got past that problem. Then I had to figure out which port was
which on the network cards. This new setup I have currently 4
active interfaces and will soon have 6. One each for: main dsl,
cable, new dsl, internal network, wireless, and dmz.

Moving the access point to it’s own interface was a pain. Had to
reconfigure it and then tweak the firewall rules to allow what I
wanted. It should now allow vpn traffic and thats about it. Next
pain was me messing up on modifying the /etc/sysconfig/syslog
file to not log all the firewall denies to the console. I put in
there a ‘-n 4′ instead of ‘-c 4′. -n tells it to not background,
so it would hang there on boot.

Some nice things about this setup: I named the interfaces based on
what they are connected to, not eth0 or whatever. Makes looking
at the firewall logs very nice, you can see right away that a
package was IN=dsl and going OUT=wireless. selinux should make
things pretty secure. Even root is pretty restricted on what it
can do.

A word about D&D:

I’ve been playing in a D&D game (most) every tuesday night for a
while. It’s really been quite nice to do some role playing
again. I really missed it. Exersizing your imagination, your
ability to think of what to do in weird/tough situations, and
hang out with cool people are all quite nice. D&D isn’t
something I remember too well, since I last played 1st edition
AD&D and started with basic D&D. In a lot of senses the system
itself doesn’t matter, the role playing and figuring things out
is the important part. I do prefer
GURPS over D&D as a
system, but I guess in the end it doesn’t matter.

Speaking of
GURPS
as soon as I get my new copies of the 4th edition books (just coming
out now), I am planning on running a game here. Probibly monday
or wed night. I have a few takers already, but could use a few
more. Anyone interested? Drop me an email.

Some more pictures of the lovely jessica:

On the transitory nature of wines.

Drinking a nice bottle of merlot tonight and it got me thinking. Sure,
with the mass produced vats of wine there are a number of
bottles of each particular wine made, but still each one is it’s
own particular grapes. Even if there are 10,000 bottles of some
particular wine “batch” bottled, you have to think after a few
years most of those bottles are either gone and drunk, or
sitting in some collectors basement. So, enjoy the unique bottle
of wine that you have. Those grapes and that yeast fermented for
you!

Side note: the wine I had tonight was a 1997 mendocino merlot -
Sketchbook collection. They have a
website
which is pretty unimpressive. I was hoping they would at least have
images of the labels. The label is surely why I got this
wine. It has a old hound on it (looks white with brindle spots)
saying “don’t wake me – I’m old”.

Jessica the new foster dog is working out quite well. She’s very on
the shy side. If you approach her too fast she will run away
from you. Likewise if you yell at her she takes it very
seriously.

Here are some pictures of
jessica.

Well, not too bad a weekend. Friday night was most excellent. Saturday
and Sunday I mostly got caught up on stuff around the house. In
no particular order: Laundry, vacuuming, taking out trash,
taking out doggie doo, moving around computer power supplies,
getting test computer working again and re-installed, mowing,
part of the deck treated with water seal, and probibly a bunch
more things I can’t remember doing now.

Earlier tonight went up to ft fun and helped the
greyhound group
bring another 5 dogs in from kansas. Got them looked over and parceled
out. I got a new foster girl… her name is jessica. She’s a
very cute little greyhound. She is very much on the shy
side. She is totally uninterested in the cat (which is
good). She does have a few injuries tho. A nasty cut on her
back leg and a dew claw that is really pulled and probibly
will need to get removed. She put up with my bandaging her
reasonably well. When I got home from picking her up merlin
had managed to lick a small cut on his paw and turn it into
a nasty bloody wound. Luckily I had all the stuff from
bandaging up Jessica and wrapped up his paw to keep him from
licking it. He is definitely a dog that licks any wound
making it much worse.

This next week should be a pretty busy one. Fair bit of things going
on work wise,
CLUE North meeting on monday,
Hopefully D&D game on tuesday night, Might take merlin down
to therapy dog class Wed night, thursday night is hacking
society, and then next Sunday we might be renting a press
and making cider from all the apples on my apple tree.

Friday night was a pretty delightfull night. Went up to boulder at 6pm
to bottle beer. It was a very nice mellow brown ale we made 2
weeks ago. We were all there and bottling at 6 and done byt
around 7ish.

Then, after a quick stop back by my place to let the dogs out, it was
downtown to
Buca Di Beppo
for a birthday gathering for
sgailean and
other folks that have birthdays this week. There was a pretty
nice group for dinner. Amazingly we managed to order just
exactly the correct amount of food. Everything was eaten and
everyone said they were full. Lots of wine, good conversation
and dessert.

After dinner most folks went on a pub crawl/wander around downtown. We
stopped at an “irish” pub, but it was very loud and everyone
there was drinking buckets of corona. We decided to leave. Then,
off to a russian vodka bar. We had a very nice time there. The
crazed russian host got us a vodka menu and served us
forthwith. The texas vodka that rise wanted was not too bad, the
honey vodka was quite good, and the black rasberry was pretty
understated. We had a nice time sitting on the patio and talking
and drinking vodka. Around 12:30 I decided to wander home and
get back to the dogs. All in all a very nice evening.

Well, another year another birthday (yesterday). Was a pretty mellow
and unimpressive day. Worked along as usual and got a fair bit
done. After work I went and shopped for groceries and liquor,
came home and made myself a nice steak dinner. Then relaxed and
watched movies with drink in hand.

Hopefully making up for it, this friday there’s going to be dinner and
a pub/bar/club crawl down in denver with several of us who have
had/are having aug birthdays. Any local denver/boulder folks
reading this drop me a line for details.