Beach Brew

Microsoft MP3 player targets Apple’s iPod. 22/07/2006. ABC News Online

I have been reading a lot about of stories about this as it has the tech press bubbling. I think most of them are missing the point though. This move is going to annoy a lot of MS partners. They wouldn’t do this too lightly. However, the ipod is starting to help Apple make inroads to the home p market where MS dominates. Now MS feels they need to stem this tide and their partners and getting the job done for them. MacBook sales have been going very well and MS are worried that Apple is going to start making some real strides into their OS market.

National Public Toilet Map
This surely must be some kind of bad joke. I was going to say a piss take but that would be an awful unintentional pun. I found this via Needs to be Glassed. I can’t believe that this actually exists. You can even register on the site wtf? Maybe you would like to take some time and suggest a toilet….

I can not believe the federal government is spending our money on this.

I cracked the first bottle, other than the one the impatient Ash cracked, of my first batch of wheat beer tonight. It has been in the bottle for about 1.5 weeks. Seems to have conditioned well and smoothed out just enough. It seemed a little over the top at bottling.

It has all the banana and clove flavours you would expect. I would have liked it to have just a little more body and a slightly higher bitterness. Other than that it’s a pretty good drop. I’m looking forward to getting some feedback on this one.

This is a problem I have had for a while and have found a few postings around the place with other people having the problem. The solution is really quite simple, or was in my case. I have my firewall blocking all active x scripts. Obviously windows update relies on these. So let them in and your update should work. Just block them again after. I would have thought this was something Microsoft would document. I also thought I wouldn’t be silly enough to not to find this immediately.

I just dumped about 42l of my beer. It was from a couple of batches that were not actually terrible but just not very good. They had been sitting around for a while not being drunk so I decided best to get rid of it than having it take up space. It is ok though as I have plenty more than that still.

Also have two fermenters full lagering atm. Will bottle those in a few weeks time if they taste good out of the fermenter. If not then they get lagered for longer. Now I have plenty of extra brewing capacity at least.

I am still tossing up between a BDG and a Saison. Both are styles I really want to make. I also want to make another porter as it is one of my favourites and my last one was fairly ordinary. The first one I ever made was great so I think I will go back to the original recipe.

I bottled my wheat beer today after almost two weeks in the fermenter. No secondary for this beer. It is going to be cloudy and full of yeast anyway. I just racked it into a bottling bucket and bottled. The beer has a very strong banana and alcohol aroma despite being a reasonably low gravity beer. It has a very strong banana flavour too. I think it will change significantly over the next couple of weeks though. It will be much nicer cold and carbonated too. Should be drinking it in a week.

I racked the pils and schwarz off for lagering today too. They are currently being dropped down to lagering temp. This is about 2C in my case. I would like to get them colder but that us about the limit of the gear I have. I will give them at least 4 weeks but maybe a little longer. I also used a clarifying agent on them as they were a bit cloudy. I wanted to get them right so even though they probably would have come clear I thought I would make sure.