Sub Ubi

A friend and colleague from Olin is starting her epic drive from Boston to Seattle soon, and will be stopping here in NE Ohio for a break. Having not lived here for some time, I needed to find a place that we could have some tasty treats before sending her on her way. So, I did a Google search for “restaurants strongsville ohio.”

This turned up a list of restaurants on some page or another; I naturally clicked on The Brew Kettle, simply because I couldn’t believe that there was a brew pub in Strongsville. It just didn’t jive with my view of the place. I mean, Strongsville is overrun by chains and suburban sprawl, not tasty brewpubs, right?

The Brew Kettle’s decor. Clean, and with a clear theme.

Wrong. Christian, Carrie, and I went there on Friday to check it out. (Dr. Jacobsen is visiting for the month while we do some Transterpreter hacking; more on that in a later post.) We drove over, and the outside of the restaurant is nothing special; it’s in a little strip with a bakery outlet and a dentist’s office. Inside, the decor was clean. The beer list on a large chalkboard was reasonably impressive, but we started by requesting a taster of their own brews.

The food was great. Christian and I split the “Backyard Sampler,” which gave us a 1/4 rack of ribs, some BBQ wings, and some pulled pork. Everything showed signs of having been prepared fresh, and prepared well. The pulled pork, for example, was nicely done, with their own seasonings; likewise, the wings were real chicken wings, and the sauce used in all cases was their own. The fries were good, too.

The thing that makes the Brew Kettle special, though, is that they will let you brew your own beer. Currently, they’re booked until March 2009, but we got very lucky. I inquired if they might have any cancellations, and they said “no”. However, a half-hour later, someone stopped by our table and said that they have an opening right now if we’re still interested in brewing. Apparently, they were already 30 minutes into a brewing slot, weren’t able to get anyone off the top of their cancellation list.

So, we said yes!

Christian adding the flavor hops half-way through the brewing process.

The brewing process took around 2.5 hours; we opted to produce an IPA, as we’re reasonably fond of hoppy beers around here. The recipe we were given had us using American Cascade hops for each stage in our brewing process; we were excited to be using whole-leaf hops as opposed to some compressed, pelletized form. (Not that we know the difference, but they were fun to work with.) In the future, we’ll have to do some research and experimentation. My primary goal will likely be to strive to recreate the glory that is a good pint of Incubus. Or Skrimshander. Or, really, anything Tonie brews at Hopdeamon Brewery, but sadly does not export.

The Brew Kettle takes care of fermenting, and in two weeks, we get to come back for bottling and labeling. As it turns out, we get to design our own label! Naturally, it will involve the Transterpreter, somehow.

As seen on the internets:

While dropping a friend off at the airport today, Carrie noted that Cleveland Hopkins is permanently on an ORANGE alert, which indicates a HIGH RISK of terrorist activity.

I was digging through this blog looking for a Muppet version of the terrorism alert scale, which I thought I had linked to once before… and cannot find at this point. However, I discovered that in 2003 (yes, that’s five years ago now), I actually wrote about this:

Fear has long been the tool of tyrants and despots. It is a powerful mechanism for control, but any population made to live in fear will eventually wake up and realize that the thing they have been conditioned to fear has long since died, or that the fear has been stoked and fed by the very agents who are supposed to dispel that fear, and make their world a better place.

I titled the post Orange alert, my ass. I was an angry young man back then; now, I’m just young. And much better looking. And very self-affirming, with a great sense of humor. And I’m still amazed by the persistent culture of fear-mongering that has taken root in this country.

PS. I found it! The muppet terror alert level indicator can be found at http://www.geekandproud.net/terror/.

I think this thing is hilarious.

The last few weeks have been… action packed. This would seem to be as good a description as any.

The shipping pod arrived on Tuesday, and we had it packed by dinner time.

On Wednesday, the pod went away, and so did we. What followed was an excessive amount of driving over the next few days that left us wondering just how many weeks (so it seemed) that we had been in transit from our comfy basement in Needham. We drove from Boston to the Atlantic Highlands, NJ, then up to Rosseau, Ontario, down to Waterloo, and finally to Columbia Station, Ohio.

Our first destination was a trip to northern New Jersey to be with family. I got a very nice picture of Carrie while we were all gathered together.

We then traveled on to Rosseau, Ontario to see many friends and bear witness to the Christening of Dave and Teena’s new daughter. While leaving at 05:30 did mean that we’d miss traffic north into New York city, we failed to consider that it would mean we’d hit heavy traffic at the border (people from Buffalo apparently like to go up into Canada for the weekend), and we didn’t know that Toronto at rush hour is absolutely foul. Our drive took 17 hours, which is only 1.7 times longer than Google said it would take. We no longer have any reason to ever want to drive into Toronto again.

We had one day “off” on Saturday, and on that day Dave and I went sailing in a small sailboat. This was my first time sailing, and it was a lot of fun. Dave smashed both of his big toes, and as soon as we launched off the dock, we were dumped in the lake and lost our tiller. Dave re-mounted the tiller in the wind-whipped chop, we climbed back in, and successfully tacked along the shore to our picnic destination. Of course, the picnic site was in a sheltered area, so we just dumped ourselves from the boat again to park it… or whatever you call the destination-management process with little sailboats.

Sunday saw us driving down to visit Robin and Meg and the newest member of their family. Monday we then embarked on the final leg of the journey, which took us from Waterloo back to my parents’ house in the Cleveland area. All told, it was 1400 miles of driving in six days.

At this point, our little Toyota Echo (which was getting upwards of 40 MPG on the highway! hooray!) is now in the shop. On the drive, it developed a bit of a growl in the front end, and it looks like both the driver- and passenger-side wheel bearings want replacing. Badly. And, the drive shafts are probably going to go, too, just because it’s a good idea, as they’re tired too, and they had to be removed as part of the operation anyway.

Today, the pod arrived, and we unpacked it. Now, we reserve a truck, and hopefully conduct a move at the end of the month.

We have two trips to make out to Meadville before we move, so there’s still more driving to be done. All told, I’d say that buying a house and making a move in under two months is a reasonably distracting and time-consuming thing, and fitting ceremonies of both death and birth into one week can be a bit draining. But we’re home now, and there’s ice cream to be had.

PS. If you’re a friend or family, and you’d like to be notified when I post new pictures to the photo galleries I’ve set up, please drop me an email and let me know. My photos are password protected (to keep them off the Internets at large), but they’re not terribly top secret. The galleries are located at http://sububi.smugmug.com/, a photo hosting/sharing site that I’ve decided to experiment with for the next year.

PPS. If you’re of the European persuasion, here’s a route of equivalent distance in the UK. It takes you from Canterbury, up around London, to Cambridge, Birmingham, down to Oxford, Reading, Bristol, down through Exeter and Plymouth, up and around to Southampton, up to Bath and over to Cardiff, up along the Welsh coast through Aberystwyth to Bangor, through Colwyn Bay on to Crew, up to Liverpool, on to Manchester and Leeds, up along the east coast to Edinburgh, over to Glasgow, and then ending on the coast (because we like the seashore) in Prestwick. Admittedly, it would be much prettier from Leeds to go up through the Lake District; it comes out roughly the same, but we’d end on the east coast of Scotland, which is rather striking.

I forgot that there are entire weblogs dedicated to ripping old, out-of-print LPs.

That said, I was amazed by what happens when you order pizza online:

Dominoes has a live page that, as you watch, it updates with the status of your pizza. Now, why did we order pizza? Because we have reduced our store of food at home to the bare minimum as we prepare to leave. That, and we failed to buy fresh vegetables today before the store closed. So, we had nothing in the fridge.

Again, I’m amazed by technology. I can order a pizza online, and have live updates in my browser. Crazy.

I’m easily amused lately. It must be the stress of the move. And I’m posting a lot of random poo.

I have no idea what I’m doing with my camera.

Robin points out that I should put the thing on P, ISO 100, and go outside and learn how to compose photos. I’ll get around to this. For the moment, I’ve had the camera for about two days, and I’ve had limited opportunity to use it. I did take it to dinner last night; a bunch (like, twenty) of Olin students gathered for dinner at Vinnie T’s, and I joined. It was tasty, and it was fun to see so many people I knew.

What amazed me about shooting at 8MP RAW was what could be done after the picture was taken. Vinnie T’s was very orange. Everything had a yellow/orange/red cast to it.

Last night, I downloaded a beta of Adobe’s Lightroom 2.0. This is kinda like iPhoto on steroids. The above picture was taken by Nik while he was poking around with the camera; nothing he did on the shot could have compensated for the lighting in the restaurant. (At least, I don’t think you can easily compensate for that kind of lighting at the moment that you want to take the picture.)

After playing with the hue, saturation, and luminosity across the entire color space, I came up with something vaguely human looking:

To me, this kind of technology is freaking magic. Of course, I have no idea what I’m actually doing. I mean, I have a rough understanding of color theory, and can make some sense of what the color curves in Lightroom mean, but mostly, I’m just looking at the photo, looking at the sliders, and moving them to reflect where I think I want that particular color to “go.” I assume someone who really knows what they’re doing could look at the “before” picture and see a path through the color space to a more natural coloration—but I don’t have that ability at this point.

Back to packing.

I’ve started using my del.icio.us bookmarks regularly now. I’m pretty sure there’s only two or three people reading this (hi mom!), but I thought I’d mention it just the same.

In particular, I’ve made a point of using the notes field. Every time I post a bookmark, I do write a bit about why I’m posting it. This is partially to improve my own searching of the links later as well as to make it clear to anyone following along as to why I’m posting it.

In short, it’s a link blog.

So, if you’re interested in the things I’m bookmarking, you can grab the RSS feed for my del.icio.us bookmarks on the right hand side of the page. Mom, since I don’t think you’re using a news reader yet, this probably doesn’t apply to you. But then, you’ve surprised me before…

For the better part of a decade, I’ve lusted after having a digital SLR. Way back when, I even took some summer classes in photography. During our entire stay in England, I wished for something more than the 2MP point-and-shoot that I was using, but it simply wasn’t a realistic possibility.

Now, whether it should have been a possibility now or not is debatable. However, looking at the next year or two, I don’t know when would have been a good time. So, while in Boston (which has a far more substantial craigslist community than the Meadville area), I purchased a Canon 20D. I then picked up a 50mm/1.8 lens from Calumet Photographic, and a 4GB card from Amazon. I now have a digital SLR starter kit. (Admittedly, the 20D is a step above a starter camera, but it’s a few years old, and feels very good in my hands compared to the smaller, lighter Rebel line.)

Canon 20D, from dpreview.com.

As my del.icio.us stream will attest, I now have a lot of learning to do. The nice thing is that I can, I hope, make time to take a photography class at Allegheny, and start growing my knowledge. That, and practice, and read, and look at other people’s photos… I’m simply amazed at the amount of information available online.

This is a short review of the Google Apps-based application FloatingTime (floatingtime.com).

Every semester, Olin College holds an EXPO, where students show off the cool stuff they’ve done. They might give a presentation, or possibly a poster—but it’s two days where we get to see what they’ve been up to. One of the presentations I saw this past term was Zach’s exploration of the Google Apps framework. He called the result of his efforts FloatingTime. To start using it, you log into the app using your Google account ID. A random password is provided for you.

Using a Firefox extension, you get this nifty little toolbar. It’s incredibly simple: you enter in what you’re doing now. It keeps a history, and as you start to type, it pops up previous actions—in my case, I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time “Typing on the email” today.

After a day of logging your activities, you can visit the site, and see how you spent your day:

As you can see, my day was dominated by some errands in the morning and running around Olin. I then checked my email, and decided to write this blog post. An overview pie-chart-of-goodness is also generated:

Now, I know some people are very excited about GTD (Getting Things Done) as a methodology—I’ve read the book and written some small apps to implement it myself… but lately, I’ve found myself unable to dig into work. I’m wasting time. Part of this is because buying a house, bringing things to a close here, and packing all take up more cognitive space than actual time, and it’s hard to focus through the pending transition. At the same time, I’m just allowing myself to be easily distracted.

Do I necessarily thing FloatingTime will help me get control over my days? For me, perhaps not… but I’m an odd duck, and can force myself to concentrate if I want to. So, really, I just need to sit down with my daily planner, sketch out a few days, and get to it. But it was neat to see FloatingTime on the “Editor’s Picks” at the Google Apps homepage, and it inspired me to give it a try.

The reason I think it could help people who are more easily distracted has to do with the toolbar in my browser, constantly asking me the same question, over and over: What are you doing right now? If I was working productively, and thought “I’ll just check my email,” or “I’ll just check my Facebook page,” then FloatingTime is there as a mild deterrent, saying “If you’re going to do it, you need to log it.” Being able to then reflect back on how the day was spent can provide a powerful visualization for how much time in a day can be lost to constantly checking our email, or poking around on the social web.