iBrew prt 3

It may be odd that this is part three but just go with it.

Here's the next batch I put together. I'm thinking this is a chocolate porter.

1.5 lbs chocolate malt, steeped twenty five minutes

1 ounce UK Gold Hops, add, boil one hour.

3.3 lbs dark LME

2 lbs dark DME

Add the extract, boil fifteen minutes further.

Ice bath. Move to carboy. I developed a yeast culture for this one. Used Munton's gold yeast and gave it a quarter gallon starter. Three days later it was ready to pitch. If you do this beer, you'll need a run-off hose and bucket to deal with it. Trust me, the last time I did it I used an airlock and the next morning I had fermenting beer all over my ceiling.

I've made this recipe before. It's really good. I claim this isn't a stout because I'm not using roasted barley or coffee barley. This is actually pretty standard. It's pretty much the same as a recipe kit. The only thing I added was another pound of chocolate barley. I'm actually making this one for a friend's wedding. They already gave me the go-ahead on this style.

This is different.

How often do you see a virus spread map where it looks like the western world is the center. Swine flu has done a horrible thing. It's made me scared of bacon.

I got this plaque...

I got an award today: Award for distinguished service as a teaching assistant. They give one out a year in the department. I don't know why they don't just say, teaching assistant of the year. Probably cause it doesn't look as good on a plaque.

It's funny, I don't think I deserved it this year. Last year and the year before, yeah, my teaching work was the best. I mean absolutely stellar. I went all out - not for an award or anything but I always try to do a good job. This year, well, my heart just was never in it. I kind of half-assed it all the way. I was teaching the same things I always teach which means I often have the ability to phone it in but still, I just don't think I really deserved it this year.

Oh I imagine there were politics along the lines of, "well, we gave it to so-and-so last year because it was their last chance so we better give it to Jason this year." Still, I don't like receiving something because it was my turn. I mean, I want to deserve it. Don't get me wrong, I smiled and accepted the award when it was given. I took the plaque and immediately added the line to my resume and re-sent it out. I'm not stupid or anything.

I just wish it meant to me what it should mean. I wish it meant what it would have meant last year. I knocked it out of the park last year. Last school year, I had the absolute best reviews by students of any teaching assistant on the entire campus. I actually know that. I scored a perfect five-O in instruction satisfaction. That's a perfect score and is largely unheard of. I had a hundred and twenty students and that was the final result. Every last one of them scored me perfectly. Really. that's unheard of.

This year, I phoned it in. This year I BS'd it. I mean, I know exactly why they gave it to who they did last year. I don't begrudge that person. Trust me, I really like the person who got it. That person did a great job and it was that person's last year teaching. This was awarded to me this year to make sure it got spread around. It just feels a little wrong.

It's nice having a plaque though. I'd never had one before. All my friends growing up had been in sports teams and at some point or another, their team won some league championship or something. They all had trophies and plaques and what-not. Now I have an award for distinguished service as a teaching assistant.

What distinguishes service as a teaching assistant? Ok, if someone came in with a gun to the classroom and the TA wrestled the person to the ground and no-one was hurt, that would be distinguished service above and beyond. All I did was what any reasonable teacher does. I cared and I didn't let them know I cared. You see, you have to be tough. You have to take someone you absolutely adore and take them out to the hall and quietly but efficiently tear into them about their abuses. You have to scare them into thinking the most important thing in the world is not disappointing you. Generally, when it comes up, I try to make such a student hate me for it. The reason you do it is because afterwards, their grade goes from just failing to a bit above passing. At the end, they walk away angry and that is left with you the rest of your life. You carry it forever. You say to yourself, "but look what happened to their grade."

The problem is that I carry it with me. I have this plaque which says I was awarded for distinguished service as a teaching assistant. It's nice to have a plaque. Seeing it, well it makes me cry. Remembering my own cold, hard words, remembering the the uncaring looks I gave, that hurts. I have no idea what becomes of the students I teach. When I drink, I like to think that I pushed them a little farther and that helped in their lives. When I am sober (and believe it or not, that's the vast majority of the time), I do everything I can not to think about it.

The problem is, I have this plaque. I hate teaching...

Argh!

My boundary value problem is not well-posed! Argh!

I am a Code Monkey!

When I was in college, there were rare occasions in which some of the professors around campus would be gathered together to discuss some topic. At times it would be as mundane as figuring out ways to improve student advising methods and at other times it would be as esoteric as discussing the metaphysical implications of of non-determinism. Whether mundane or philosophical, there was one thing I found I loved. I loved hearing these incredibly intelligent people talk about issues and bring their considerable intellect to these conversations. I would hear comments and thoughts presented with such acuity, with such insight, with a keen sense of where the truth lay. For a young student, it was the best poetry I could ever find. It was soothing and invigorating. I remember one particular professor, Dr. Ed LaMonte. He could take any idea and find merit in it and then deliver the meritous parts with a distinct manner and eliminate the failings.

I would hear these conversations, these discussions and a deep desire would rise in me. I desired more than anything else to be able to speak with such eloquence. I wanted to posses for myself opinions of importance. I wanted there to be good reason to be heard. I wanted in the conversation. With this in mind I set about finding something I could possibly be an expert in. I searched through many fields. I landed in physics. Physics presented the only course-work which required me to really think about my work and I was relatively good at it. I won't say it was without challenges and if you need proof you can go talk to my adviser in college, Dr. Duane Pontius.

I often questioned why I was putting myself through these challenges. Why would I put so much effort into something so obviously hard to accomplish - and when I finished college I wasn't done. I applied for eight different graduate schools. None of them had anything in common except that they were all physics programs. At the time, I had no idea what I was doing. You see, the way you get to a good graduate school is you do some research as a college student and then you get in touch with all the professors in the field you did research in. I did no such thing. I had almost no research experience other than a Summer program in which I learned I didn't like computer code administration.

Luckily enough for me, some one at Wake Forest University took an interest in my back ground so off to graduate school I went. This brought on more and more diverse challenges to face. First, I went to Winston-Salem, NC entirely by myself not knowing anyone there. It was very lonely at first, trying to make a life for myself. Further, I had brought on more mathematical pain. The level of work had increased and I was putting more time than ever into understanding this material these professors were trying to teach me. I eventually signed on doing research on black holes. There's a difficulty with studying black holes - you can't see them. In fact, all evidence to date for the existence of black holes is secondary. This means one must study the theory of black holes and for the one field of study with even minute funding, this means programming a computer to calculate black hole conditions. This means lots of computer code.

Today I am about to graduate and there are post-doc options for me - more options where I will program a computer to compute something about black holes. I came searching for eloquence and understanding. I came searching to find something I can do that would give people reason to listen to me. I came searching for a sense of direction. What I have found is that I am a code monkey. I write codes to implement other people's ideas. I write codes to test little tiny aspects of those ideas. I write codes that often have very little to do with what I am actually interested in. I came to graduate school to try to learn to be a great thinker. I am afraid what I learned was a set of marketable skills that often involve little real, original thought.

iBREW

Yet another of my mac themed blogs this one entitled to let you know, not only do I compute initial conditions for the binary black hole problem, not only is my user pic one of my own pieces of art, but I also brew beer on weekends. Yes, today I am the proud father (don't take that too seriously, I have real respect for true fathers) of my own double double. It's my forth batch of beer and let me tell you, I have learned a lot in the process.

I learned how to start and keep yeast. I learned to pitch the right ammount of yeast. I learned to boil the hops well before the malt. I leanred to take my time and make the best wort I ever could. Now I proudly watch as my beautiful yeast keep churnin' up CO2. Yes that makes me a contributor to global warming but believe me it's worth it for truly good beer.

I'll just let you know what a double double means. To start with, that means a lot of hops - which means a lot of bitter. But before that I started with a pure barley grain. I steeped one pound of roasted barley in hot water for twenty minutes. That will yield a slight coffeeish taste to the whole affair. I then applied my first ounce of Chinook hops which rates at 11.5 AAUs. That's a representation of bitterness. 11.5 is fairly high. That boiled for thirty minutes.

At that point I added one pound of Munton's light dried malt extract. That's malted from barley for those non-brewers out there. I also then added another ounce of my Chinook hops. With all my bittering hops now in, I set it to boil for another thirty minutes.

Ah, the smell of hops still fills my house.

At this point, it was time to set about the real business of adding the finishing hops. Two ounces of Cascade hops at 5.9 AAUs to finish. That got ten minutes. At the same time I added another three pounds of Munton's dried malt extract. Things were starting to get strong.

After ten minutes of boil it was time to finish the wort. I had six point six pounds of Munston's hopped dried liquid malt extract to add. That came in and was there for a whole other ten minutes to caramalize. This summed to a five gallon wort (that means five gallons of beer in the end) and I am now watching it bubble away.

You see, the yeast converts the sugars boiled out of the barley malt into alcohol. This process creates CO2. On a typical beer, your carboy can likely be topped with a simple air-lock. An air-lock is a nifty device which allows gas to leave the carboy but does not allow anything to enter. On this particular batch, however, a simple air-lock wouldn't do. You see, a typical batch of beer would be brewed with perhaps only five pounds of barley malt. Mine, on the other hand, was brewed with eleven point six pounds of barley malt, ten point six of which were light malt. What this means is more than twice as many sugars for the yeast to convert. Of course, all this meant I had to use more yeast than usual. My local brewpub, Foothills (if you're ever in Winston-Salem and you don't go to Foothills, you're an idiot) spared me a good bit of ale yeast - about an eighth of a gallon to be exact. That was precisely the ammount needed for such a strong undertaking. What this means however is a huge ammount of Kreusen. Kreusen is created in the early fermenting process. Kreusen is extra yeast and hops gathering at the top and forming into a thick foam.

Typically, this Kreusen isn't a problem, but when you're going over the end on strength of your beer, your carboy likely can't contain it. If you don't think of this ahead of time, this can often mean having your air-lock fire up like a missile and you have excess beer all over the place. So when you know this will be a problem, you set up a run-off hose. The run-off hose runs into a bucket of water and all the excess Kreusen flows into that.

Currently, I am happily watching my future beer blow CO2 into a bucket. Yes I am adding to global warming but I am doing so in the wonderful goal of making really good beer and no-one can complain at me for that.

Pircay and DRM

For those that don't live in this century, piracy isn't just something that happens off the coast of Somalia, there is a whole other kind. We call it digital piracy. Companies that make digital media have reacted lately with what they call digital rights management (DRM). I have strong opinions about this. I originally posted this at my gamespot blog: http://www.gamespot.com/users/grigjd3/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=m-100-25646294&tag=all-about;blog1

I repeat it hear.

The issue of piracy and DRM are ever present in the gaming community with many different perspectives. Lately, the rage over this has shown up in two very well written blog entries. bacchus2 recently revisited his thoughts on the issue in his signature calm and well thought out manner. That he is patient with my anti-establishment rage when I comment on his blog is a great virtue. Aberinkulas laid down the gauntlet and declared his allegiance to the rebellion the other day. While perhaps more emotional, his presentation aims like a laser at one of the two key points people should understand about piracy and DRM. I would suggest reading both blogs - especially because they represent well different sides of the issue. I feel today that there needs to be a central argument to the anti-DRM discussion. This entry is my first attempt at this. I hope any who read will add or subtract from the argument as they see deserving.

Let's start by admitting piracy is real and piracy is common. I have a couple of pirated cds myself. I got them in college and I have yet to divest myself of them. Knowing this I know firmly that piracy is real and it does have an effect on the industry. I will not make a claim that some do that piracy helps the industry (though I won't argue against that claim either). I will not argue that piracy is too small an effect to be noticed. Piracy exists and it has an effect of the developers and publishers of digital media.

That out of the way, I want to ask the question, can we do anything about piracy? My answer is yes. There is one sure fire way to stop digital piracy. The way we stop digital piracy is by no longer having music, videos, video games or any other item that can be viewed digitally. This is the only way to stop piracy. There are those in the industry who will tell you that DRM can be used to minimize piracy or slow it down. If someone tells you that, they are either ignorant or telling you a lie. The simple fact of the matter is that millions upon millions of dollars have been spent on DRM software meant to control how you use a product and there has been absolutely no evidence that such DRM has saved or created one penny of wealth for the developers or publishers of digital media. It is true that this is difficult to measure but for the last decade, people have been working on DRM related to PC software and the fact of the matter is that in that time, for all that money spent, the PC video gaming industry has shrunk in volume, record labels are unable to compete with itunes, which recently removed DRM from their products and videos have only become easier to access on the internet - often directly provided for free by the tv channel that produced a show. There may be some snotty person out there who will demand I back this up with numbers and studies but I can gauruntee these are the trends that have occured in the digital media world. TV shows are offered online for free directly from the producers, volume of music sales have increased even as music piracy runs rampant and the record labels recede into meaninglessness and the PC video game industry is in tatters. For all the DRM we have created, for all the money and effort and time people have invested in it, for the purposes of any form of entertaining media, DRM has not saved a company one penny.

The reason for this is simple. DRM is propietary software written by a limited group of people with a limited budget and a limited time frame. Cracking DRM is a time honored tradition amongst the largest most talented and skilled group of computer programmers in existance - the general public. There is absolutely nothing one company can do to protect their digital products from the general public. The general public has all the expert programmers and electrical engineers in the world at their disposal. DRM producers will never be able to compare to that. So without a doubt, DRM does not stop piracy. DRM doesn't even slow piracy. New versions of DRM merely provides a challenge that the best and the brightest of the world eagerly seek to overcome - and these best and brightest, they don't even care about what they are making a crack of. There's not even any money in it for them. Most of the time, they don't bother to listen to the music or play the game. That's not why they do it. They do it to show us how smart they are. I know. I am a physicist and a programmer at that. I share an office with one such individual. I personally know five others. Each on of them has left their own personal mark on the DRM-breaking world. They don't do it to get access to some product they didn't pay for. They do it to show off. The problem every DRM developer faces is that the six people I know who break DRM aren't even a meaningful fraction of the total group who does this. DRM-breaking is the most popular technical pass-time for the incredibly intelligent. There simply is no ammount of resources that can be used to overcome that.

So this establishes that DRM is a complete waste of time. In fact, it is a myth, perpetrated by companies looking for money from producers of digital media. The sole benefactor of DRM are the computer programmers who program DRM and the companies that sell DRM software to others. Knowing this, I ask, what is the real effect of DRM? The answer to this is the most obvious I've ever seen. Just go read Aberinkulas's blog. That is a perfect example of the rage DRM inspires in law abiding customers who pay good money for their video games. The only thing DRM accomplishes is saying to the customer, I don't trust you to do the right thing so I will put you through meaningless hoops. This is absolutely a failed business model and every example and every case of DRM use reinforces this. The most poignant case is that of Spore. Spore was perhaps the most anticipated game of the latter part of 2008. It received great reviews, but it's sales were comparatively dismal. This is a case where we had a game with lot's of excitement about it. There was lot's of hype. It got wonderful reviews. My friends tell me it's a really good game. Why then would it not have stellar sales? - draconian DRM. With this argument I put the following forward to game developers and producers, to music labels, to anyone considering the use of DRM in their products. If you are considering the use of DRM realize that the only reason you would want to use it is if you don't want sales. There can be reasons why you'd want a game to flop. For one, you might want to put yourself in a lower tax bracket. If you feel that is neccesary, you can move yourself in that direction by the use of DRM. For another, you may hate life and all people and want to destroy your company so everyone who works for you can be out of a job and you then commit suicide. But if these aren't your motivations, do not use DRM! It will only hurt you.

The links are likely broken. Go to my original to find these incredible minds.