Let's take a look at a couple of words/acronyms, shall we? I'm talking about the difference between SWAG, and Schwag. SWAG stands for "Scientific Wild Assed Guess," but some people also use it as "Stuff We All Get." Both are relevant to the geek community, especially those of us who attend trade shows. I see this as silly confusion.

Wayne's World, despite it's sophomoric purpose, brought a great new word into the foreground, namely "schwing." Schwing is the word that stood for getting an instant hard-on. The motions that Wayne and Garth always made when saying it are permanently etched into the brains of anyone that has ever seen the skit or the movie. It's total pop culture, which makes it cool++;. Schwag is based upon the word schwing. Sure, you can keep "SWAG" for the crap that is given away at trade shows - the $0.12 screen printed ink pens, the logo stress balls, even the 4,298th coffee cup that I've been given. However, that 1GB memory stick with your company logo on it? Yeah, I'll be a whore for your company, just gimme that thumb drive. That, my friend, is schwag. If it's really cool stuff and the person handing it to you feels that twinge of pain at giving it away, then it's definitely schwag.

I started something new within the hacker and geek communities back in PN6. At the time I traveled extensively and spoke at a lot of trade shows. People who were paying $2500 to get in got really cool things, like laptop backpacks or nice binders or similar. Those who spoke at the trade show got in for free. Yippee. So I decided to merge the two together - if you showed up, you got schwag; if you spoke, you got in free and got schwag. That first year I was financing all of it, so the schwag was a logo imprinted pint glass and a bottle of Hacker-Pschorr beer. The next year I expanded - the attendees got one type of schwag, while the presenters and main organizers got an extra piece of schwag. Yes, I'm playing the devil here, because the purpose of this disparity is to create envy. If you want to get the extra cool schwag, you need to participate. PhreakNIC is put on by volunteers who sink a lot of time into it. Those who speak put in a lot of time as well, and are not paid to be here (well, by us... some are sent by work).

Many people know that I've been trying to hand off Nashville 2600 leadership to someone else for a while. It's time to give someone else a chance to show what they can do. However, there is a legacy that I also want to protect. The different items that we've had over the years are not about branding, or trying to become "The Gap" of the hacker world. It's also not about trying to make money - the admission fees pretty much cover the operating costs, and the shirts pay for themselves and the volunteer giveaways. The only thing related to PhreakNIC that someone should be able to buy their way into is a t-shirt, plain and simple. Yes, we can make other items easily. We could probably even make more money, but this isn't a business, it's a community project. This is the vision that the next leader of Nashville 2600 must never lose sight of, because it helps us to keep our integrity and our focus on what really matters - the convention.

That being said, this year there is no swag. There's only schwag.

I've been checking in on my apfelwein carboy about every other day since I got back from vacation, and I hadn't seen a single bubble in the airlock that entire time, so I decided to go ahead and keg it. When I made it, I only had 1.5 lbs. of corn sugar while the recipe calls for 2 lbs., so it makes sense that the yeasts would have run out of food and died off already.

I have to say, now that I'm using cornelius kegs, it sure is a lot easier to go from fermenter to glass. Natural carbonation will take about a week, but you can force carbonate somewhat easily by rocking the keg back and forth while under pressure. Not having to swap out mini kegs or bottles also helps, since I have one big container to put the beer/cider in, instead of 4 mini kegs or 52 bottles.

I didn't take any SG readings on this batch of cider, but I probably will on the next one. However, the descriptions were very accurate - this is a very dry tasting hard cider. It's hard to imagine how a batch with the full 2 lbs. of corn sugar would taste, since it would convert even more to alcohol. My goal here is to create something that not only I enjoy, but that my wife will enjoy. She likes sweet things, rather than dry, so I may have to experiment. Some have suggested mixing it with ginger ale or sprite in the glass to give it a sweeter, champagne like taste and feel, so we may do that before I let her try it.

So my wife, son and I have been up in Gatlinburg since Friday. Knowing how horribly busy everything would be during the holiday weekend (Labor Day), we decided that we may as well milk some money and tickets out of the timeshare sales folks. After all, my wife is the master of saying "no". Especially late at night. *cough*

Anyway, we set up two for Saturday and one for Sunday. The theory was that our son would turn into a terror at about the 75 minute mark and they would get us out of there as quickly as possible to protect their sanity. Oh, no, that's not how it worked at all. Each gig ended up lasting about 3 hours, and we paid the price. However, in exchange, we got:

1 - Crappy meal for 3 at the Holiday Inn
2 - Tickets for me and my wife (our son was free, anyway) to the Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies
3 - $200 cash
4 - A horribly restrictive 2 night getaway to our choice of 30+ destinations (which we won't use since they make it so difficult to use)
5 - A decent offer of 2 nights at a different resort which we probably will use

On Tuesday my in-laws drove up to join us, and while Grandma babysat the rest of us drove over to Cherokee to play at the Harrah's Casino a little bit. I managed to get 4 Aces on the draw in video poker and won $120. Grandpa kept winning, too, and walked away $300 ahead. My wife lost about $45 total, so all in all it wasn't bad, especially since Grandpa paid for dinner last night.

Today we drive back home and tomorrow we'll send our son to daycare while we parents set up his new bedroom with a twin bed and all that jazz. Joy.

Heroes fans! Check out the following:

Yamagato Fellowship

This is a website set up for the charitable organization that Hiro Nakamura's father runs. There's some neat back story on Takezo Kensei that will be relevant to Season 2.

(oops, corrected the URL)

Name : Brewer's Best English Brown Ale
Boil Time : 60 minutes
Variation : Used White Labs WLP002 yeast instead of the included dry yeast.

Brewing Date : August 19, 2007
Secondary Fermentation Date : August 25, 2007
Starting Gravity : 1.049
Secondary Fermentation Gravity : 1.012
Final Gravity : 1.009
Alcohol By Volume : 5.30%
Kegging Date : September 6, 2007
First Draw : September 10, 2007

This batch went much better than the first batch of English Pale Ale - familiarity does make it a lot easier. Now that I know how to use the hydrometer, and have a "thief" to pull the sample out, I'm confident that I'm accurate on my reading. I did have to adjust the number slightly because of the temperature of the wort. The water coming out of the tap was over 70F because we're in the third straight week of hitting 100F nearly every day. I ended up pitching the yeast once I got the wort down to about 85F because it was simply taking too long to cool. That shouldn't really have an adverse effect on the batch, though. I let the WLP002 yeast sit out at room temperature for the full 3 hour brewing session, so it should have been pretty awake already. By the time I went to bed there was a little bubbling action going on with the airlock - nothing fast, but a slow up/down motion of the bubbler.

Skydog and Ladymerlin dropped by yesterday to see the process and borrow my Mr. Beer keg so that they could do a small batch of cider. I gave both of them a taste of Batch #2 and they both enjoyed it. Actually, Ladymerlin said that she doesn't like beer, but she's only tasted crap in the past, apparently. She kept saying how good the brewing wort smelled, so that's when she decided to try the finished beer I had in the fridge. Skydog enjoyed his pint that I poured for him and said he could feel it, so between that and my own reaction, I think my first batch was well beyond lawnmower beer and the hydrometer reading was simply way off. This batch should give a better idea.

ZOMG this batch is much lighter than the first batch of English Brown Ale that I made. Instead of having that heavy taste like a porter (which was still good) it is very light tasting. Unfortunately between the light taste and the high alcohol content (5.3% ABV) I can see myself sitting upstairs and getting completely trashed while watching a football game. Oh, wait, that's a problem how?

Recipe: Ed Wort's Apfelwein
Variations: Only had about 1.75 pounds of corn sugar, so that's what I used


Fermentation Date : 18 Aug 2007
Kegging Date : 12 Sep 2007
Drinking Date : 18 Oct 2007 (PhreakNIC!)

I picked up a 6 gallon glass carboy, a handle, and some Montrachet yeast at All Season's on Friday. Publix had the Mott's pure apple juice on sale 2-for-1 for the 1/2 gallon bottle, so I picked that up on the cheap. Ingredient costs were less than $15 for the entire batch. Add in the cost of the extra equipment that I bought (carboy, handle, airlock, stopper, 2 more 5L kegs, 4 pressure relief bungs) and it's more like $80. That still comes in cheaper than buying 52 ciders at the grocery store ($1.53 each), but I wouldn't have bought 52 ciders at once. Cost on this based on just the ingredients is a mere $0.30 per 12 oz serving of cider.

After kegging I tasted the apfelwein - it definitely has a very dry taste to it. I'll check it again this weekend after the CO2 has had a chance to carbonate it, and once the fridge has gotten it nice and cold.

I'm going to go buy a carboy this afternoon and an extra bubbler, along with another batch of English Brown Ale extract. I plan on brewing up another batch of the brown ale this weekend, and to make a batch of Apfelwein in the carboy. It'll take at least a month for the Apfelwein, but the ale should be ready to keg before I go on vacation Labor Day Weekend.

I took an online focus group study this week that paid $75, so that's half of a homebrew keg system. My wife has her old dorm fridge down at her grandfather's house, sitting unused, so if it's the right inside height then it looks like I'll get a free fridge to convert to a kegerator. If that's the case, I'll buy the keg kit next week and have it in time for the ale to fit into. Yay!

So I gave out some samples of my home brew batch #2 last week and have gotten some of the results back from the independent taste tests.

Mirage didn't like it, but he's weird, anyway.

Alan from work emailed me to say that he *really* liked the porter. Oops, it's not a porter. hahahahaha.

I think what happened is that I let the grain bag seep for a bit longer than I should have. I also let it slow cook the entire time, rather than going for a full rolling boil, so I didn't have any real evaporation. Although I'd think that would make the brew a bit lighter/weaker than it came out, but I have to agree, it is a very dark brown ale. However, I likes it.

Ok, it still boggles my mind that CBS actually covered this during daylight hours. For those who didn't catch it and are interested, here's the link for the segment that I uploaded to Google Video.

WoW Arena at WSVG2007

Yesterday I had DISHnetwork installed at the house, and I think I was close to making the installer's head explode. He had a hard time understanding why I ordered a 4 room setup and put them all in the same room. Let's see if I can explain it well enough - there are two receivers (R1 and R2), each with two tuners (T1 and T2). R1T1 and R2T1 both use an infrared remote, which I can emulate through an infrared transmitter. That makes it ideal for controlling with my MythTV box. R1T2 and R2T2 both use UHF remotes, which I don't have a way to emulate - I'm sure it's possible, just not economical. However, my wife still wanted the ability to change channels and watch TV in other rooms that don't have MythTV front ends on them - namely the kitchen and bedroom. R1T2 sends its signal out on Channel 73, and R2T2 sends its signal out on Channel 80, and they appear to not interfere with each other. I fed the output of R1T2 back into my house cabling setup, reversed the splitters (so that what used to be an OUT is now an IN), and I have the ability to walk around the house with the UHF remote and change the channels on the "dumb tv sets". I'm not using both T2's yet because the tech support people at DISHnetwork said that I can still use infrared on the T2's, so I may get another PVR-150 to add into my MythTV box and then have 3 independent inputs from satellite.