blather's blog

I realized this evening that I have been remiss in keeping up with beer postings. What follows is revision 3 of the Kamchatka Imperial Coffee Stout. The reputation of this brew is such that those in the know upon hearing its name quickly begin making arrangements to sleep somewhere near to where they are standing.

• #2 Simpsons Medium Crystal
• #2 English Maris Otter
• #0.5 Simpsons Chocolate
• #0.5 Simpsons Roasted Barley
• #0.75 Simpsons Black Malt

Strike water @170°F for 60 minutes

• #6 Northern Brewer Pilsen malt syrup
• #6 Northern Brewer Dark malt syrup
• 1 oz. Galena hops (12.8%AA) at 60 minutes
• 1 oz. Fuggle hops (4.8%AA) at 20 minutes
• 1 oz. Willamette hops (4.7%AA) at 5 minutes
• 2 cups unfiltered coffee at 5 minutes
• 3 quarts filtered coffee in primary
• Wyeast 1006 PACMAN yeast, in 2L wort starter

Original Gravity: 1.101

"Each year in the United States, there are dozens of new attempts to create intentional communities...The historical record indicates...at the end of the day, few individuals want to entangle themselves in highly complex household relationships."[1] And yet, for egalitarian, ideological, religious or gastronomical reasons, the dirty hippies keep trying.

Being a student of...well everything that interests me, I have always been fond of reading the random treatise on self-governance or informal order. Always seeking the alternative to the ponderous, plodding bureaucracy that mankind is increasingly subjected to (i.e. dominated by). The commune idea was always interesting because it could (by virtue of an abstraction of thought) be a sandbox for testing the particulars of self-governance.

Yeah. I know. Free love, drugs and rock 'n' roll make for a pretty good three-day weekend but they don't seem to work out as long term commune guidelines. When you put real people in it the abstraction usually breaks. So, when Spencer asked me if I'd like to help with his commune my interest was piqued and the outlines of the abstraction dissolved as reality invaded the space.

I was inspired by a recent hello from a good friend to dig out some relics of role playing campaigns probably suffering from bit decay on an old hard drive. Caution: These are of legendary age.

It has been a busy Summer. H.Roe Bartle Scout Reservation, new high-pressure job, disappearing chickens, old high-pressure contract obligations, the intentional (but unplanned) keggerator, noisy (failing) car parts, the accidental lager experiment, "you should cut your hair [you dirty hippy]", the lawn too and holes in the roof. So busy I didn't get to solder one piece of my ZigBee project or practice one chord on my guitar, but that could also be because I spent too much time becoming one with the couch while viewing the History Channel.

At Bartle I discovered that plodding, ponderous bureaucracy is not dead and that bureaucrats, no matter their color or creed, are still fond of reciting, "I don't make the rules" with a certain tone of finality. I discovered that our group of boys is a rather good bunch -- even the ones who are, at times, unruly or pugnacious. I also came to the realization that I cannot maintain a part-time work schedule while at scout camp and I'll probably take the 10 days off entirely next year.

I came to the conclusion that I may be a poor chicken farmer or, at least, my infrastructure may be poorly designed for a free range chicken farm. The last two girls just disappeared on me. A few weeks ago on a Friday, sometime between 11AM and dusk -- just gone. And as Spencer pointed out: Even if one isn't emotionally attached to them it is a heartbreaking commentary on one's agri-management skills. Too true. About a week after they disappeared Spencer reported getting his first egg.

I did get a few books read. The one I'll take a moment to comment on is Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan. It was interesting on several levels. First is the author's veiled admonishment of Western agriculture inefficiencies as at every turn he finds the total use (and reuse) of resources in these Eastern cultures. From today's perspective conservation and reuse is becoming the norm but considering the original publication of the text was 1911 Mr. King was far ahead of his time. Second is the description, usually in great detail, of pre-industrial agricultural devices, techniques and production along with current prices. Passages like, " ...they sold them green, shelled, at two cents, Mexican, per [unit]. At this price and yield his return would be $15.48, gold, per acre" drew me into a freewheeling era of global travel where gold was the international currency (and apparently the Chinese accepted Mexican Dollars).

It is still a busy Summer. The lawn still needs to be mowed and there are still holes in the roof. Sirius still follows the sun.

As the summer has come on full force the girls spend most of their time following the shade throughout the day. Their range has extended greatly -- yesterday morning I spotted them patrolling the treeline at the bottom of the yard. I find this particularly exciting because their consumption of feed has reduced by about half and I'm imagining they're making up the difference with fat, tasty bugs.

Their growth rate seems to have slowed -- perhaps because of the heat -- but the interesting item of the week (and quite surprising to me) was when Martha gave me a grownup 'cluck' one morning while I was weeding the garden.

The girls always come to see what's going on when I'm weeding the garden -- I suppose they assume that I eat bugs too and think I've found some when I'm out there pulling up stuff. Usually, there is a lot of 'cheep cheeping' and there was this time too then I heard the grownup cluck and looked up. Martha was looking at me as if she was just as surprised as me.

I didn't hear it again for a few more days but now Martha is clucking like a grownup almost all of the time. Abigail hasn't developed her voice yet but I expect to hear something from her in the next couple of weeks.

While not my first microcontroller this is my first Arduino. I've been playing with PIC controllers loaded with the PICAXE bootloader for a while, probably out of some sick sense of nostalgia for the assembler class I took on the Motorola 68000 back in college. I quickly grew tired of managing bytes, words and double words and doing decimal maths the long way so I wandered over to see what the Arduino was all about.

The Arduino is noticeable because it has received a lot of attention lately and for good reason. The Arduino platform has exposed microcontrollers to the masses and has made it cheap. Both economically and in terms of learning time. For about $40 you can be writing code for your microcontroller and turning on and off LEDs -- for $60 you can be up and experimenting with most of the Arduino's base functionality with Sparkfun's Starter Kit for Arduino (a great kit and a great timesaver).

Once you have your Arduino the only other piece that is required is the Arduino IDE and the drivers to make your USB connection look like a serial port. The IDE is a java application so it is pretty painless, the FTDI USB Drivers are included in the IDE distribution and your windows machine should be able to find and install them automatically when you plug in the Arduino for the first time -- the OS X install is almost as painless.

To continue you'll need your Arduino, a USB cable, the IDE and drivers installed and an LED. Open up the Arduino IDE, follow along and we'll create the microcontroller equivalent of a 'Hello World' program.

It has been a busy week -- for me, not the chickens. The chickens seem to be learning the extent of the yard and its boundaries. I don't have fence up everywhere and they still stray a bit but when they see me coming they know to run back into our yard. This beats seeing me, with sticks in both hands, ambling around behind them like a zombie scarecrow trying to herd them home.

The girls have adult tail feathers in and strut around the yard like they own it. They're about half or three-quarters full size and every morning when I open their coop I'm pretty sure they've grown a little bit overnight.

As a special treat we have a communique from Spencer the owner of the other half of this chicken family:

Tell your ladies (lay-dees?) that their 5 sisters say hello: Fussex (a.k.a. Jackie Brown), Glamour Chicken, Shelly (Glamour Chicken's twin sister), Chickenbutt (whose tail feathers are now grown back in) and Peckerhead (literally peck-her-head). Most of these gals pretty much named themselves. Oh, and they LOVE rose petals and chopped up apples.

It's good to see that the other half of the original flock is well and that someone else is far more creative with chicken names than I am.

Another week has passed and the girls are getting along famously. Neither seems to be on the edge of panic any longer and both have taken to following me around and unpiling my piles of grass clippings shortly after I make them.

Martha seems to be taking on the alpha hen role; one can see where the phrase 'mother hen' originates watching these two.

They've been living exclusively out of the chicken tractor for about two weeks now and have learned all the ins and outs of their new lifestyle. They've learned where food and water is and where to settle in for the night. The chicken tractor isn't complete yet but it lacks mostly external wire -- chickens get really confused when you put up new chicken wire where there was none before.

With prices for benchtop power supplies hovering around $150 for an entry level unit most electronics hobbyists, such as myself, tend to rely on a multitude of wall warts and USB powered serial breakout boards for supplying power to our projects during development. When I saw the Benchtop Power Board Kit last week while browsing the Sparkfun site my nether region was all a tingle -- a benchtop power supply that uses an ATX power unit from a PC. For $15!

I can't say I was a bundle of anticipation waiting for my package from Sparkfun. With Spring quickly moving into Summer and the garden planting half finished my electronics to-do list has been collecting dust. However, the notion was growing that this kit (once completed) would solve a lot of my project slow downs and I began soldering as soon as it arrived.

The board itself is well laid out and there are only a handful of parts so the kit doesn't require much in the way of thought to assemble. You will need to provide your own solid core wire to connect the binding posts to the board. I completed the kit in about 15 minutes, dusted off an old ATX power supply, plugged it in and fired the thing up. Voltages measured almost right on the money on each rail. This is a pretty slick unit -- now I only need some time to get back to that electronics to-do list.

[Some discussion has been made about static minimum loads on ATX power supplies and that a lack of static loads may make your PSU go *poof* with the requisite amount of smoke and sparks. See some additional discussion here.]