Substandard Evil Genius

Bottle Shortage

Scott Milliken — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 05:25:33 GMT

I went to bottle up my latest batch (English Brown Ale) thinking that I had plenty of bottles - I have 11 of the 1L flip top bottles that I bought from NotLarry, plus I had a case of 12 22 oz. bottles from before, and then another 12 of the 1L flip top bottles in a box. Well, as it turns out I'm short 5 of the 22 oz. bottles (somebody didn't return the empty after I gave them some free homebrew!) and the unopened box of flip top bottles I had didn't come with the tops!

I had to improvise - there was a nearly empty 2L bottle of Black Cherry Soda in the fridge, so I emptied it out, washed it out, and it was barely able to hold the leftover that I had in the bottling bucket.

I decided to bottle instead of keg this batch since I plan on giving some out at Christmas.

:RASPBERRY:

Batch #14 - English Brown Ale

Scott Milliken — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 02:00:00 GMT

Name : English Brown Ale
Recipe:
3.3 lbs. Plain Amber Malt Extract
2 Lbs. Plain Amber Dry Malt Extract
8 oz. Crushed Crystal Malt 60L
1 oz. Willamette Hops (Bittering, 60 min)
1/2 oz. Willamette Hops (Finishing, 5 min)
11g Nottingham Yeast
(Above ingredients are the contents of a Brewer's Best English Brown Ale kit)

Brew Date: 21 Nov 2009
Bottling Date: 13 Dec 2009
Drinking Date: Christmas!

Starting Gravity: 1.040
Final Gravity: 1.009
ABV: 4.1%
Calories: 131.5
Carbs: 12.9

(Calculations from Mr. Good Beer)

This time I'm fermenting down in cellar of the house, rather than inside. This is 100% closed off from sunlight and since it is underground on 3 sides is stays a pretty constant temperature in the mid 50s.

I also finally got to use the banjo burner that my parents gave me for Christmas last year. The nice thing is that it easily cut 45 minutes off of the time it takes to brew a batch of beer, because it heats up the kettle very quickly! The downside is that the black paint on the diffuser bubbled off as soon as I started using it and left a sooty, black residue all over the bottom of my brew kettle. I don't know what the manufacturer was thinking, because I didn't even have the thing turned up full blast. I guess people don't think everything through when designing a product. Hopefully it's caked/burned off enough to not force me to get out the brillo pads again after the next batch.

Single Income

Scott Milliken — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:06:00 GMT

Well in just one more week our household will be down to a single income. My wife and I thought long and hard about it, but the cost of daycare is just too much, so we decided to have her stay home with the kids.

Well, that's what we decided, but then our son's daycare had a spot open up in the Pre-School class and moved him up. A year ahead of schedule. Yeah. Now he's learning things at the same pace as the rest of the class. So we've now decided that my wife will still stay home and keep our 5 month old daughter, but we are going to keep paying for our son to stay in day care for as long as we can. If we get to where we can't pay the bills each month then we'll pull him out, but we're going to take advantage of the opportunity as long as we can.

To help offset the costs, though, my wife is now selling Pampered Chef goodies all over Nashville. I thought it was somewhat unbelievable that with all of the Pampered Chef consultants out there that the domain nashvillepamperedchef.com was even available.

And yeah, I need to get some free time available to brew some more beer. I've had empty kegs for the last couple of months, but now that the baby is getting easier to manage, that may actually happen.

Batch #13 - Blackberry Solstice Cider

Scott Milliken — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:29:09 GMT

So I decided to try out one of the techniques listed in the brew recipe book that my sister bought me for Christmas this past year. Instead of just letting my Apfelwein mature in the normal fashion I decided to give is a blackberry flavor. Here's how to do it:

1. Make your Apfelwein the way you normally would - 5 gallons of cider + 2 pounds of corn sugar + 1 packet of Montrachet yeast go into a fermenter for 6 weeks.
2. When you get ready to rack to secondary, take 2-3 bags of frozen blackberries and heat them in 120F water (just enough to cover the top) for 20 minutes to loosen up the enzymes and sugar.
3. Don't drain the berries! Put the whole pan full of stewed fruit in the bottom of the secondary before you add anything else.
4. Rack your batch from primary to secondary (this means siphon it, basically) and let it ferment/age for 2 more weeks.
5. Rack to bottles or kegs and let it age like you normally would.

Now a note about the aging - I'm anxious to see how this plays out, because my sample from the day I racked it to the kegs the batch was much more mellow than a typical Apfelwein would be at this point. It looks and tastes very much like White Zinfandel wine, but with a lot more kick to it. The blackberry flavor is very subtle and hopefully it will come out more as it ages.

Batch #14 - Red Ink Ale

Scott Milliken — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:27:02 GMT

This is just a place holder to keep track of how many batches I've made. I lost the piece of paper I made my notes on. :(

However, it was a standard batch of Brewer's Best Red Ale. I kegged it up on 21 Feb 2009 and it came out really well, though a bit darker in color than I anticipated. It's brown in color, but more red ale in taste than the traditional brown ales that I've been making.

Using PHP and Curl to login to OWA

Scott Milliken — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:56:14 GMT

We run OWA here at work and needed a way to check the status of it through Nagios. If you simply scrape the OWA address, you're only checking that the front end is up - unless you log in you will never actually check the back end to do a full end-to-end service check. Here is some code to log in to an OWA forms based authentication page and return a code as to whether or not you were successful. Of course, you can extend this script to pull the contents of the mailboxes or calendar, but that's not the purpose of this script.


// OWA Login Check
// Written by Scott Milliken
// Permission granted to use under the GPL
//

        $username = "myusername";
        $password = "sekretpassword";
        // You can just use the base URL for your default mailbox
        // or you can add on to it to specify a group mailbox
        // $mailboxURL = "https://email.mydomain.com" for default
        // or for a shared NOC mailbox in the IT department... 
        $mailboxURL = "https://email.mydomain.com/it/noc";
        $authURL = "https://email.mydomain.com/exchweb/bin/auth/owaauth.dll";

        // First go to the URL that a user would use so that you can get your session cookie set

        $pg = curl_init();

        curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_URL, $mailboxURL );
        curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)" );
        curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );

        // You need to define a cookie jar to store and retrieve
        // the session cookies or this won't work
        curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookies.txt" );
        curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookies.txt" );
        curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_HEADER, false );
        curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );

        // Setting these to false is handy for checking multiple
        // frontends that may share the same SSL cert, such as
        // ones in a round robin DNS scheme, but you address
        // them by the "real name" of the host
        curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false );
        curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false );

        // Set this to true for debugging
        curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, false );

        $response = curl_exec( $pg );
        $info = curl_getinfo( $pg );

        // Set the form data for posting the login information
        $postData = array();
        $postData["url"] = $mailboxURL;
        $postData["reason"] = "0";
        $postData["destination"] = $mailboxURL;
        $postData["flags"] = "0";
        $postData["username"] = $username;
        $postData["password"] = $password;
        $postData["SubmitCreds"] = "Log On";

        $postText = "";

        foreach( $postData as $key => $value ) {
                $postText .= $key . "=" . $value . "&";
        }

        curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_REFERER, $info["url"] );
        curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_URL, $authURL );
        curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_POST, true );
        curl_setopt( $pg, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postText );

        $response = curl_exec( $pg );

        // At this point you can either print the following
        // status to show the result of logging in, or you
        // can make another call to the web server for the
        // individual frames, such as
        // $mailboxURL . "/Inbox/?Cmd=contents" will give you
        // the listing of inbox headers (if you call curl again)

        $info = curl_getinfo( $pg );

        $needle = "close all browser windows when you finish using Outlook Web Access";
        if ( strpos( $response, $needle ) )
                printf( "Logon to OWA successful.\n" );
        else
                printf( "Logon to OWA failed.\n" );

?>

MythTV Upgrade

Scott Milliken — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:31:12 GMT

So now that we have the U-Verse service installed (it's quite nice, 25 Mbps downstream with 3 Mbps dedicated for internetz and the rest for video) I want to be able to capture HD output from the set top box and view it in MythTV. The only way to do that currently is through the Hauppauge HD PVR 1212, which I ordered today.

Next I'll be shopping around for a 1TB SATA II drive to add to the main server and I'll most likely be removing the HDTV OTA capture card out of it - after all, I still have the two tuner HDHomeRun for OTA capture and it seems to pull in the stations a little better.

When I'm done I should have 2 OTA HDTV ATSC tuners, 1 U-Verse HDTV capture input with 2TB of online disk space in a master backend and 2 frontends.

Chrimmas Prezentz!

Scott Milliken — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:33:57 GMT

So I heard on the radio this morning that AT&T was finally taking orders for U-Verse in Middle Tennessee beginning today. I had noticed them installing a new SLC at the bottom of the hill for my subdivision back in November, so there was a good chance that I'd be eligible for service. Sure enough, I checked online and it said that I was good to go. I just got a call back from AT&T saying that they could do the install tomorrow, but I asked them for Friday morning, instead.

What is U-Verse?

Fiber to the home. IPTV throughout the house. A DVR with the ability to view the streams on any other receiver in the house. Currently only 1 HDTV stream is available at a time, but that's enough for us. Most of what we watch is still NTSC or HD over the air, which I'll be keeping. Oh, and up to 18 Mbps down / 3 Mbps up internetz connectivity!

EPIC WIN

:HAPPY:

Batch #13 - Solstice Cider

Scott Milliken — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 01:25:28 GMT

I have been meaning to make another batch of cider and another of beer since PhreakNIC, but simply haven't had the time to gather up all of the required ingredients and then to make them. I finally decided to go ahead and do the cider by itself, but since it was already too late to have any by Christmas, I thought it would be nice to start a batch on Winter's Solstice. Four years ago today I was standing on the rocks of Stonehenge, watching the sun come up between the pillars. It was cold as could be and I nearly froze my everything off. It's cold here in Tennessee, too, but inside the house it's kept just under 70 F. To help make this a Winter Solstice batch I'm employing evaporative cooling - I have the fermenter sitting in the bathtub with about 2" of cold water in the bottom and a wet towel wrapped around the carboy. The bottom of the towel is in the water, so it will continue to wick the moisture up and keep the temperature of the fermenter cooler than the ambient temperature. This hack is also known as an Arizona Air Conditioner.
Winter Solstice is the first day of winter, the longest night of the year, and a time that I have always enjoyed, even before my trip to England. Those are the things I'll associate with this batch of cider, as well. I hope to listen to the Paul Winter Consort concert on NPR tonight, which I try to do every year.

Preparation Date : 21 Dec 2008
Kegging Date : 1 Feb 2009
Drinking Date : 14 Feb 2009

:HAPPY:

Children of the Corn

Scott Milliken — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 03:14:35 GMT

We (the family) went back out to Walden Farm in Rutherford County, TN, this year. I got some fun video of my son running through the corn maze, among other things.

Batch #12 - PhreakNIC Pumpkin Sice Ale

Scott Milliken — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:18:25 GMT

Name : pn0x0bian Pumpkin Ale
Recipe:
3.3 lbs. Plain Amber Malt Extract
2 Lbs. Plain Amber Dry Malt Extract
8 oz. Crushed Crystal Malt 60L
1 oz. Willamette Hops (Bittering, 60 min)
1/2 oz. Willamette Hops (Finishing, 5 min)
11g Nottingham Yeast
(Above ingredients are the contents of a Brewer's Best English Brown Ale kit)
2 Tbsp. Pumpkin Pie Spice
2 Tbsp. Imitation Vanilla Extract

Brew Date: 7 Sep 2008
Secondary Date: 21 Sep 2008
Kegging Date: 4 Oct 2008
Drinking Date: 10 Oct 2008

Starting Gravity: 1.053
Final Gravity: 1.007
ABV: 6.1%
Calories: 172.2 per 12 oz.
Carbs: 13.4 per 12 oz.

(Calculations from Mr. Good Beer)

Notes:
Tweaked this just a bit from the last batch that I had made. I put a half tablespoon less of Vanilla in it. I also added the pumpkin pie spice into the water before the grains. This seemed to do a much better job of dissolving the spices into the wort and the smell has carried over past fermentation.

Big PHPimpin'

Scott Milliken — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:24:50 GMT

So I've had my head buried in some code at work for that past couple of weeks, barely escaping pulling my hair out and looking like Kojak.

Let's step in the wayback machine. A few years ago I was tasked with implementing ITIL, at least in terms of Change Management and Incident Management. We had been using a web based app written by the medical center to manage changes, but were unsuccessful in getting them to make any modifications to the software, because they wanted us to migrate over to HP Service Desk with them. They wouldn't even give us the source to let us host it ourselves. The basic idea was that we would eventually get tired of using a bad tool and migrate to what they perceived was a great tool. The only problem is that we could recognize the web app for what it was - something that had flaws, but that we could mold to our own use. The new tool was a fat client app that couldn't be touched via API unless we went through the medical center's support groups and competed for time on their calendar along with all of the well funded doctors. I'm sure it's not much of a stretch for you to realize that we preferred to stick with the old system.

Now step back to the present. The medical center is tired of maintaining really old hardware running a really old version of IIS. They sent us the source and told us to get it hosted locally ASAP so that they could retire the old server. Yay! Er, wait. We don't want to run IIS 5.0 and interface to an Access DB backend! The first thing that I tried was to migrate to SQL server, which was a step in the right direction, but ASP recordset code doesn't quite work in an ASP.NET environment. I kept getting odd, inconsistent results back from queries.

I had to make a choice - convert all of the ASP to ASP.NET, or rewrite the entire thing in PHP. Since I don't really know ASP.NET that well and don't want to, either, I chose to rewrite the entire thing in PHP. I built class libraries around all of the database objects and built methods for everything but rendering HTML. Yesterday we rolled out the new system into production and the most common thing I keep hearing is, "It's so much faster now!" I've also managed to integrate two other tools that I had hosted locally for Change Management into one seamless interface, and get rid of all of the libcurl web scraping routines that I had been using. Yeah, the only way I was able to automate some tasks was to go back to the old school ways of screen scraping. Fortunately now, however, it's just a class method away.

Woot. I used to have the domain phpimp.com. Too bad I don't anymore. heh.

:HAPPY:

Batch #11 - PhreakNIC Apfelwein

Scott Milliken — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:01:07 GMT

I started the batch of Apfelwein for PhreakNIC on Wednesday night, so it should be just hitting the right maturity by the first or second week of October.

The recipe is the standard Apfelwein recipe with no changes on the front end. When I move it to secondary I will probably add some vanilla and cinnamon, but I have 45 days to think about it.

I will also be making a batch of Pumpkin Ale for PhreakNIC and another batch of something else that I haven't decided on yet.

Batch #10 - Limelight

Scott Milliken — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:49:55 GMT

Limelight

Recipe:
Brewer's Best American Light Ale
(Sorry, I threw out the directions before getting the exact ingredients)
6 fresh limes (purchase 1 week after you brew!)

Brew Date: 15 Jun 2008
Secondary Date: 22 Jun 2008
Keg Date: 29 Jun 2008

Starting Gravity: 1.039
Estimated Final Gravity: 1.009
Estimate ABV: 3.91%
Estimated Calories/Pint : 175

I decided to make a "lawnmower beer" for summer - something light and low in alcohol content so that I can drink a few while mowing the lawn, or sitting outside watching the grass grow. I decided to go a little south of the border, though, and make a lime flavored beer.

After only 1 week in the primary fermentation stage, I took 6 fresh limes and scraped the zest off of them into the secondary fermenter. I then cut each lime in half, squeezed out as much juice into the secondary as possible, then dropped the lime halves into there as well. Once I had all of the limes, zest and juice in there, I siphoned the wort from the primary to the secondary. This allowed the yeast to wake back up as I started getting bubble on the airlock around every 20-30 seconds.

Oh, no! You can't let kids think that sex and masturbation feel good!

Scott Milliken — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:16:26 GMT

I think the video clip speaks for itself.

Father and Son Ride the Poop Chute Together

Scott Milliken — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:10:08 GMT

This weekend I took 2.0 out to the Adventure Science Museum (formerly known as the Cumberland Science Museum when I was growing up) since we had a boys' day out. They have a lot of neat stuff there and one section is called Bodyquest. You get to explore the different areas of the body and see how many of the organs work. Part of the experience is to follow food from entry to exit, so you first toss some balls at an open mouth to feed it. Next you have to squeeze the food down the esophagus and it makes lot of neat, fun, disgusting and gross noises. If you push the wrong way it makes an upchuck sound, if you push the right way it makes a gulping sound. Anyway, the next part it to churn the food in the stomach and then finally you wind your way through the small intestine. Both 2.0 and I rode down the slide at the exit, which is basically the Poop Chute. There is a sensor at the end that triggers a fart/poop like sound to play when you get to it. It was enough to make any mother have a nightmare and any child or male laugh out loud.

:RASPBERRY:

Nashville 2600 Hiking Trip

Scott Milliken — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 15:44:55 GMT

Yesterday several of us got together for a great hiking trip at Burgess Falls State Park near Cookeville, TN. The hike is a very easy one - more like a short walk until you get to the main waterfall - and is considered to be one of the most rewarding hikes per step walked because there is so much for such a short trail. There were 11 of us hiking together and 3 more joined up later (Ob1Shinobi and his family were running late). Jeff Wee-Eng represented the 865 area code for us and Ob1 was there for the 931s. The rest of us were local to the Nashville metro area.

SkyDog even tried a new smoking cessation program with ware. Here you can see SkyDog applying the penalty for ware lighting up (which is now illegal in all TN State Parks, by the way).

After we hiked we went to Mamma Rosa's Italian restaurant in Cookeville and enjoyed an excellent meal. The stromboli there beats anything else in the entire Southeast region, and trust me, I've tried to find another as good. However, even after eating a giant stromboli, Jeff Wee-Eng ordered a sausage foot-long sub... to eat right then. Once the waitress got over the shock and brought him the sub, he ate it all up. When she came back to see if we needed anything else, he ordered a piece of chocolate layer cake. I think this boy can give Tim Ball a run for his money in eating contests.

Here is a short video of the waterfall and our resident ecotaku, Jeff Wee-Eng walking along the rocks at the bottom.

Fun Weekend in February

Scott Milliken — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:26:42 GMT

Last weekend we had a fun little outing. We started off at Chick-Fil-A where my son decided that playing in the indoor playground was much more interesting than eating chicken. We did eventually get him to come around and eat something, though.

Later that afternoon I decided that we should go bowling. We had a party at the bowling alley for his birthday back in November and he had a blast, and since the weather wasn't too hospitable, that seemed like a good indoor activity to burn off some of his energy. Here's the score after the first frame. It's amazing how hard it is to bowl your own frame when your son keeps trying to take the ball out of your hand.

He loved using the ramp to bowl with, but the 6 pound ball that they gave him to use was simply too light. He's got the strength to pick up my 16 pounder and the 6 pound one just doesn't have enough weight to build up much momentum. I think next time we'll get him something in the 10 pound range.

All was well until the end of the night when I tried to pick him up and carry him to the car. He wanted my wife to carry him, but she hurt her neck/back and couldn't lift him. When I went to pick him up he jumped right into my chin and made me bite a nice chunk out of my lip. We were both in pain after that, but everything up to that point was a great Saturday.

Trunk Monkey

Scott Milliken — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:22:37 GMT

I need one of these...

It's Alive!

Scott Milliken — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:06:22 GMT

(From Jan 12)

For Christmas I got a kit to convert my beer fridge into a kegerator. This weekend while I had the house to myself I ran to Lowe's for a 2.5" hole saw, got out the power drill and went to it. It didn't take long at all to do - about 1 hour - and looks as good as a pre-made kegerator. The only drawback is that as I was moving the kegs out of the fridge I noticed how close I am to being out of beer! Fortunately I realized that about 30 minutes before the home brew store in Murfreesboro closed and was able to make it down there in time to pick up one kit. I'll be making an American Nut Brown Ale tomorrow morning, apparently.

(Finally uploaded a picture on Feb 19)