t a l l a p e

Ingredients:

2lb flaked wheat
.5lb light wheat
.5lb flaked oat
6.6lb wheat LME
2.5oz 5.1% Tettnang hops
Wyeast 3944
1oz bitter orange
1 tsp black peppercorns
8 whole cloves
2 cinnamon sticks

• Steep grains for 60 minutes at 155 in 3 gallons of water.
• (I still haven’t figured out what sparging really means, or there would be a sparge step here.)
• Bring to a boil.
• Add 1.25oz hops
• boil for 60 minutes
• add remaining hops and all flavoring ingredients
• boil for an additional 10 minutes
• Remove from heat, cool, pitch yeast.

A normal belgian wit has bitter orange peel and coriander, and is supposed to be a little sour and sort of bright. I’m hoping for something that will have a little more body (thus the oat and the light wheat in the grain bill), and a bit of a taste of cider or mulled wine. This is my first experiment with a spiced beer, so we’ll see how it goes.

(Funny story: I almost went with 0.5oz of cloves — which is a _lot_ of cloves, maybe 50 or 60. Then I did some fortuitous Googling, and found a ton of comments around the web from people talking about how 10 or 15 cloves almost overpowered (or did overpower) their beer. I think it might be a good thing that I searched when I did…)

(PS, I may or may not be thinking of restarting this blog in some sense. We’ll see. It’s been a while…)

I spent this afternoon converting half of one side of my porch into a little vegetable garden. I have no idea whether it’s going to work, but in theory, here’s what I have (or will have):

• 6 “Brandywine” tomato plants (an heirloom variety)
• 6 “Mountain Pride” tomato plants (This is a modern hybrid variety, bought by accident when I meant to buy another hybrid. That said, they may work better, for all I know.)
• 6 kale plants
• 4 bell pepper plants — 2 yellow, 2 orange (growing upwards from the hanging buckets)
• 2 mustard green plants
• 3 spinach plants

As I said, I have no idea whether it’s going to work out. If I had actual space to use as a garden, I wouldn’t pack everything in as tightly as I have it here, and there is a real question as to whether the soil can hold sufficient nutrients to actually grow all of this.

I have a nice big back porch, and over the last couple of years (thanks mostly to Kate), I’ve collected bunches of plants. But, well, it’s October and this being New England, it’s starting to get cold.

Heck, it’s snowing right now.

I only have a couple of windows that get any sun in my apartment — the widest side of the building faces a 10′ wide driveway to another 3-story building, and I’m on the first floor. The kitchen windows, though, not only face onto a small parking lot but also face south.

So, I spent a little time today putting up some shelving in front of those windows. It worked out pretty well, I think…

I’ve been working on a long post about some tech stuff, specifically Amazon’s EC2, cloud computing in general, and some of the things that I’ve been working through lately with regards to making a quickly-growing website scalable. I’ll post it once I’m convinced that it’s done.

For the moment, I want to write about something different. Money. Specifically, why this recession doesn’t actually suck for everyone.

You’ve probably noticed that the economy is in serious trouble.

The stock market is down a full 50% from it’s high point of a little over a year ago. I’ve had something like 55% of my 401k wiped out over the past 6 months, which isn’t a good thing by any measure. Even my little “play-money” investment account has had a big chunk taken out of it.

Housing used to be a safe investment, but housing prices are falling quickly (even softening in Cambridge, MA for the first time in my memory). Combined with the fact that rates are going to have to go back up sometime soon, which is going to further depress prices, this just doesn’t seem like the time to buy something that you’re not going to hold onto for 5 or 10 years at least.

For a lot of people — most people — the combination of these things means lots of pain at the moment. Anyone over 50 is looking at their retirement savings and wondering if they’re going to be working until they die. Anyone with a family and a mortgage is looking at those falling home prices and probably beginning to wonder what happens if another kid comes along or something like that.

But for those who are lucky enough to have an active job market in their field, there is actually an opportunity to start to build wealth in a way that there hasn’t been for decades. The S&P 500 hit 1350 not too long ago, and today it’s around 700. But that just means that it’s really affordable as a long-term investment. Things are going to be a little crazy over the next couple of years, I’d imagine, and it’s very possible that the equity markets are going to drop a lot farther (as is very well explained in the Economix blog at the NYTimes site). But in the long term, they’re going to stabilize, and the value of the stocks in them are going to start to go back up.

Look at this way: the S&P 500 is made up of 500 massive companies. They collectively account for a very large portion of all of the economic activity in this country. If you buy tracking shares in the S&P 500 today, one of two things is going to happen: the economy is eventually going to recover and that index will start to go up again (historically, at a rate of return of around 8%); or, the economy won’t recover in which case we’re in hard-core Mad Max territory and it doesn’t matter anyway.

So, if you’re young and you have cash flow, go open a Roth IRA, or start investing in your 401k (my employer doesn’t offer a 401k, which makes me sad). Open an investment account. Set aside enough cash to cover you for a couple of months, and use the rest of it to buy into an ETF that tracks one of the major indexes. Go back to your budget, and see if you can figure out a way to max out your 401k contributions or IRA contributions. Or do both! Once you’ve maxed those out, invest anything else you can for a couple of years, in tracking funds, and let it sit for a couple of years. (Or, if you’re in particularly good shape, buy some Bershire Hathaway while it’s, uh…cheap.) Worst comes to worst, you’re going to maybe lose a little money, maybe break even, in which case you’ve effectively just put your money in a savings account. Best case, you can leave it there until the economy turns around, and your money will have grown.

(I want to make clear that I’m cognizant of the fact that this doesn’t apply to lots and lots of people; and that I’m not making any attempt to gloss over the amount of pain and turmoil this economy is causing for a lot of people. I’m simply trying to explain why it is that I don’t see the current adjustment as being a universally bad thing. In a lot of ways it’s pain that we as a nation had to take at some point, and for some of us who have been very, very lucky, it’s actually a chance to build for the future in a way that hasn’t been available for decades.)

Noticed this on my company’s website today, and it’s pretty cool: Cut&Paste’s Digital Design Tournament. It’s design, but as a sport. A spectator sport.

The Boston show is coming up in mid-March, and I’d definitely be there if that weekend wasn’t already pretty busy.

(Mikey, I’m talking to you…)

Someone invited himself to Franke James’ house for dinner. Woah. Ballsy, but kinda cool, actually. Now I’m trying to think of someone whose house I should invite myself to…

(I’m putting this under the “urbanism” category on this blog because I actually think of this as being, in some odd way, notably urban behavior. People (Republicans) often talk about how much “kinder” and “more open” the rural parts of the country are. And it’s true that you might not have to flag down quite as many cars to get some help changing a flat tire or something. But it’s also true that your chances of having something interesting happen, whether because of the sheer chutzpah of someone who invited himself to dinner, or because you ran into someone you hadn’t seen in a while, or….are much greater in urban areas. If you decide to look for them. Or at least it seems that way.)

I think sleep helps.

I’ve been working on getting the Linux Virtual Server/IPVS server running on an EC2 instance. It’s a little tricky, because you need kernel modules that aren’t included in the stock kernel.

So, I went ahead and compiled them, working roughly off of the directions that were posted by Tag 1 Consulting.

Anyway, to simplify things, I figured that I’d go ahead and create RPMs with the resulting files, posted here for your amusement and edification. These will only work with the 2.6.16.33-xenU kernel that’s current on Amazon’s EC2.

ipvs-modules-xen-261633-1.x86_64.rpm
ipvs-modules-xen-261633-1.src.rpm

(If you can’t see the Youtube video embedded above, go watch it here.)

I’m not one of the fancy people who has a smoker (someday…oh yes…someday), but last weekend I stopped by the local butcher and they happened to have a rack of beef ribs for very cheap. So, I bought them, to play with them.

I made a very simple dry rub, with salt, pepper, cayenne powder, cumin, and a little bit of brown sugar, and after removing the membrane from the ribs coated them in the spices and left them in the fridge overnight.

Cooking turned out to be the easy part. No fire management, no trying to decide what kind of wood to use for the proper smoke flavor…just a 225-degree oven for 5 or 6 hours (ie, “until done”), and then eat.

Very tasty, in the end.

On a related note, I happened to stumble on a great “basics of beef ribs” page, which made my mouth water. I bet doing things the way that guy did would be even tastier (especially the wet sauce that he added at the end…mmm…). His recipe, but baking in very low heat instead of smoking, would work fine…

Mike Zarren is a Boston boy, who lived in my house at UChicago back in the day. He was my tie to home in many ways.

He now works for the Celtics, in their front office. Here’s what was posted about him on the TrueHoop blog over at ESPN:

You know Mike Zarren? Stat wizard, lifelong Celtics fan, and Danny Ainge’s right-hand man? I can see him down on the floor, in the corner. He can’t stop jumping up and down. I talked to him earlier, and he has had umpteen 20-hour days lately. Big night for him.

Mike, congratulations. I’m incredibly happy for you, and thrilled that you ended up doing exactly what you wanted to do, and thankful that you did it will.

Vincent House love, my man.

(Also, for the record, Zarren never slept in college, either, and “jumping up and down” is his natural state. Just saying.)

11:46 – They pre-filmed a “please don’t riot” commercial! And, we have our first sighting of Brian Scalabrine on the bench…now we just need Scot Pollard to show up to make the experience complete.

11:44 – Oh, one more thing. Bill Simmons, I hope your dad doesn’t actually have that heart attack you’ve been predicting for years.

11:41 – 3:10 left, 34 point lead, I’m officially going to stop writing now. It’s time to watch.

11:33 – Slaughter rule.

No, seriously, someone break out the slaughter rule.

There are deficits that can be made up, and there are deficits that cannot.

36 points, 5:07, is a “cannot”.

Something that’s exciting to me: the Celtics actually matter again! I was 6 the last time the Celtics won a world championship, and for almost the entire interim they’ve been terrible. Awful. I played basketball as a kid, but I never got into watching pro basketball at all, because it just wasn’t fun to cheer for a team that was bad year after year after year.

But this…this is fun. This is a whole city that’s psyched, absolutely pumped up, because of this team, and that’s fabulous. And they’re fun to watch!

Note to the rest of the world: yes, we’re spoiled. Over the last couple of years. But in my lifetime, these past few years are pretty unique.

11:29 – Note to the Lakers: DO NOT LEAVE RAY ALLEN STANDING BEHIND THE THREE POINT LINE ALL BY HIMSELF. It will not work.

36 point lead.

11:28 – RONDO! 21 points. Damn, yo. Maybe he can stay, huh?

The commercial for “Hancock” has been updated with shots from this game. Slick.

11:23 – Kobe isn’t on the court? What the hell? Did he get 5 more fouls when I wasn’t looking?

I believe the technical term for this is “giving up”.

(Mind you, Kobe was playing like crap. He forgot how to pass. Every possession was either the other 4 guys passing and trying to get 3′s, or Kobe dribbling around for a while until he drove to the basket or took a ridiculous falling jumper with hands in his face.)

Ray Allen hits two open three point shots, and the Celtics lead is 31. With 9:07 left, Boston has hit three digits.

11:20 – Bad pass by Vujacec, followed by a huge outlet from Brown. Someone needs to teach Farmar to grab the guy instead of pushing him in the back. Or, now that I think about it, actually, maybe not…it’s somehow fitting for this series.

11:19 – 30 points, 11:11 left in the 4th. Rondo is being very aggressive.

11:11 – If you were wondering, John Havlicek is the definition of regal. Thank you, Mark Jackson.

11:08 – Rondo with his 6th steal. The announcers said earlier that the NBA record for steals in a playoff game was 7. Woah. He’s certainly stepping it up tonight. (But he still can’t shoot.)

And Kobe comes back with the best possible example of a “I will not pass to you fools” drive.

11:05 – A few times over the past few years, I’ve been watching Pats-Colts games, usually towards the end of the 3rd quarter or the beginning of the 4th, when the Patriots have tended to look a little slow. I’ve taken to yelling at the TV at times, specifically yelling “KILL MANNING! KILL MANNING!” when the Patriots are on D.

It’s not that I actually want them to kill Peyton Manning. He’s a bit silly, but generally inoffensive. It’s more that I’m attempting from afar to convey that point that it’s time to GO. Time to play hard. Time to step it up a notch, do everything right, etc.

Right now, I want to yell some equivalent of KILL MANNING at the Celtics. They’re still up big (30 points at the timeout), but they’re not playing as hard as they were, and they’re not making choices that are as good as they were earlier.

10:56 – Garnett is stronger than Gasol, if you were wondering. That held ball was huge, if only for his confidence. Next time down the floor he goes hard to the basket.

Rondo has more offensive rebounds than the Lakers (!!!!!!!!!!)

Let me add another exclamation point to that.

!

Dude’s, like, 5’10″. He went OVER GARNETT to tip in Garnett’s miss on the last possession.

10:56 – I’m having a good time right now imagining the guys that I grew up with down in Neponset (or, more to the point, the guys that I played little league with back in Cedar Grove).

31 point game, 5:56 to go in the third quarter.

Bryant forces up a fall-away jumper from 18 feet. Poor choice.

10:48 – RONDO! I like the up-tempo game that the Celtics are playing. They’re not trying to milk the clock, they’re playing hard on both ends and trying to extend the lead instead of just sitting back and trying to play keep away.

Rondo with his fifth steal, it’s a 29-point game.

10:45 – Am I the only one who is more scared of Fisher than Kobe right now?

10:43 – Pierce starts the second half with a scoop shot. Like I said about cute.

Next time down the floor, though, good movement gets Ray Allen a totally open 3-point look.

10:36 – Stuart Scott brings back the Red Auerbach story line.

And I think that Dwayne Wade is wearing the same suit on the halftime show that he’s wearing in the T-Mobile press conference commercial. Awwwwkward.

SECOND QUARTER – Okay, here’s what I was trying to say before the end of the second quarter got ridiculous (and my heart rate is way, way up right now. Seriously. Out of control.). The Celtics look dominant at the moment. They’re running harder, they’ve gotten fantastic play from their bench (Big Baby with some good D down low, Posey being Posey). But, towards the end of the second quarter, they got a little cute. They started making one more pass than was needed. For better or worse (better now, worse later?) they got away with it. But that’s the kind of thing that worked against them — in spades — back in game 2. And that game ended up being far more exciting than it should have been when it got to the end.

The crowd has been ridiculous. The noise is crazy. I wish the announcers would let themselves be a little more into it: Gus Johnson would have had an aneurysm at the end of the second quarter, when Garnett put that floater down over Odom for the plus-one.

10:18 – Here’s what I was saying a second ago, before Kevin Garnett…never mind…Perkins with the block, down to the other end, work some time off the clock, and PERKINS TO FINISH!

10:17 – Another turnover for Kobe! And Garnett finishes huge! Holy crap!

10:16 – The Celtics are getting really, really cute.

10:13 – Right now the Lakers have 9 turnovers, with 16 Celtics points off of them. The Celts have 3 turnovers, with 4 Lakers points off of them. Along with the offensive rebounds, that’s the story right now.

And RONDO!!!!! With his 4th steal of the game…make that 10 turnovers for the Lakers…but the Celtics give it right back after a posession that featured 42 stupid passes, the first 41 of them somehow successful.

10:08 – At one point, the Celtics had 11 personal fouls, the Lakers 4. That disparity is coming together, at least.

Rondo can’t shoot. At all. I shoot better than he does. And I’m not a good shooter. But, at least they’re having to guard Rondo, and can’t just leave him to go run around like a 9 year old girl playing with a high school basketball team while his man double teams people…

10:06 – Garnett almost comes away with the steal in the backcourt. He’s tearing it up right now.

A buddy of mine from college just called. I haven’t talked to him in, oh, 2 years. I asked if I could call him back tomorrow, and then he basically hung up on me because I was way too distracted to actually have a conversation.

10:04 – It’s a 14 point game, Celts on an 11-0 run, Jackson takes another timeout. Kobe has just gone from “I’m going to win this game” mode to “I’m going to win this game all by myself or make people worship me while I go down in flames because I try to do everything all by myself” mode.

10:01 – Fisher picks up his third foul. That hurts for the Lakers. You know what hurts for the NBA? Every time they show the play where Allen took a hand to the eye, opening a cut over his nose, and no foul was called.

9:59 – Posey is a stud. Allen is still in the locker room, getting his eye looked at, though he’s apparently still alive if Michelle Tafoya’s shout is any indication. Celts fans screaming and yelling, going nuts when they see Allen coming out.

9:55 – The offensive rebound disparity is ridiculous at this point. Energy. It’s all energy. James Posey is not a big guy, but he just grabbed one in traffic. Big Baby got one immediately prior in the middle of three Lakers. Run harder than the other guys, good things happen.

9:53 – Garnett’s back; can he keep it going?

9:48 – Gorgeous fast-break basket by Leon Powe, after a terrible outlet pass. Celts are running like crazy, the Lakers are trying to make it easy, it seems. They’re getting a lot of calls, but they’re going to have to get a lot more than this if it’s going to work.

9:44 – Kobe Bryant almost comes up with a steal, I’ll give him this, he’s going to try to win this on his own if he has to.

Doc gets called for a Tech, a typical Joey Crawford call, and then Pierce drops a three. The Celtics are shooting badly, but they’re playing with a lot more energy than the Lakers (except Bryant).

9:41 – Big Baby is in the game, interesting choice considering that he hasn’t played at all in the finals. But Eddie House has things going, it seems, and if he gets his toes in the right place he could be big again.

FIRST QUARTER: things of note: Garnett is tearing it up inside; there will be no game 5. If he can keep this going for a whole game, there is no question how this one is going to end.

Bryant has gotten off to a strong start, but I’m not sure that he can keep counting on 25-foot three pointers.

Pierce has had a tough start shooting, but he’s taking it inside without fear, and the Lakers are collapsing onto him which is giving other people open looks. Though it would help if more of those people were not Rajon Rondo.

9:34 – Pierce on the board, Mark Jackson is talking shit about the crowd in LA.

9:32 – Simmons, if you ever read this, your live-blog of Game 4 was not up to snuff. This isn’t either, but really, you couldn’t do better than this?

9:31 – PJ Brown alley-oop to Garnett, and the announcers have to yell to be heard over the crowd.

9:30 – Eat more PB&J, kids. Then you’ll be as hyperactive as Kevin Garnett, as dead-eye as Ray Allen, and as hard-core as Pierce.

9:25 – Doc Rivers deep in conversation with one of the refs. Perhaps about the fact that his guys are getting drilled every time down the floor, and getting called for terrible fouls on the defensive end. Hmm.

I’m not totally credulous of the idea that the NBA fixes games. In fact, I don’t think they do. But really? This is a fairly called game? So far, I don’t think so.

But, Boston up two.

The Red Bull ad that was just on had the tagline “Red Bull gives you wiings”. I’m not sure the misspelling was intentional.

9:18 – RONDO!

9:16 – Rondo has 3 steals in 5 minutes of game time.

9:15 – “How do you break a window on a plane?” I’m glad that the commentators are on their game tonight.

9:14 – Rondo is a monster on the offensive boards. What?

9:12 – One of those kinds of games, I guess. Three phantom fouls on the Celtics early, Pierce called for a blocking foul when it should have been a charge, Garnett called for a foul when Fisher dribbles into his chest. Ridiculous. I guess maybe Simmons was right about the refs.

No, seriously. It’s really quite fantastic, and I’m looking for someone(s) to live there. 6 or 7 bedrooms, lots and lots of porch space, 3 full bathrooms, off-street parking and laundry and all kinds of good things…

http://tallape.org/rent.html

…I get mocked.

The Something Store has a simple premise: you give them $10, they send you something. Thing is, you don’t get to choose what. They just randomly select something from all of the somethings that they happen to have on hand, and send it to you.

Woah.

For most of the time that I worked for StudentUniverse, the company’s offices were in Watertown, MA, in the Arsenal on the Charles complex. Prior to my working there, the space was shared with a (now-defunct) company called ThingWorld, which employed ThingMakers to make Things. (Apparently these Things were multimedia things for the internet, I guess). I consider ThingWorld notable both as a shining example of how easy it was to get funding for an internet business in the late 90′s, and for having set a new standard in vagueness in corporate branding. That said, The Something Store may well have topped them.

For some reason, my life has been full of bacon lately.

Last weekend I played on an ultimate team that named itself “The Kevin Bacons” (it’s a pickup team, why not?).

One of the folks playing on that team brought bacon breakfast cookies to the field. (Note: bacon cookies are not a good idea.)

And then today, XKCD discussed the dangers of stove ownership.

And I found a link to a flowchart of bacon-related decision-making.

This is all very random.

And by “it’s 40″, I mean that it’s about 40 degrees outside. It’s also dark, and raining. No better time to grill up some steaks…

I have a confession to make: I sometimes watch television shows that have no particular purpose other than extolling the (apparently great) virtue and wonder of being really, really rich. It’s not intentional — the building where I work (for the next two weeks) has a number of financial firms in it, and when the markets close some of the folks who work in those firms hit the gym, and they like to watch financial news. If I get there after them, I have to go with what they’ve chosen to watch…

Because of this, though, I’ve been introduced to one of the funniest things ever: Jim Cramer.

You may remember Jim Cramer because of his well-circulated flip-out last summer.

But he really does his best work on his own show, Mad Money.

Really. Imagine, for a second, a steroid-crazed baseball player. Imagine someone giving said baseball player a very large shot of adrenaline, or some speed, or something like that. Then putting lots of flashy lights all over the place, and a bunch of buttons that make strange noises. And then asking them to talk about the economy.

There you have it. Classic comedy (or, more properly, classic Unintentional Comedy).

[Edit]: I wouldn’t have guessed that Cramer was once a reporter…but if he was going to be, it makes sense somehow that he once ran the The Harvard Crimson…