Double Barrel

Last Saturday marked the 15th homebrew competition in a friend's backyard, and as usual it was a lot of fun.  Last year I won the competition with a "Barack Obama Black Ale".  As that was my 4th consecutive win there was some talk at the judging table about asserting term limits.

This year we had a great turnout, 15 brews from maybe 10 brewers. I won "best name" for Double Barrel Palin Ail (puns intended).

The beer itself was only moderately popular (my other entry, "Red Head", did very well so far as actual beers went), but here is a recipe for the Palin Ail for those who might be interested, for a 5 US gallon batch:

• 8 oz 60L
• 6 oz Cara Munich
• 6 oz US Victory
• 2 oz Malto Dextrin
• 4 oz flaked rye
• Steeped 30 minutes at 150 F
• 6 lb light malt extract
• 1 lb dry malt extract
• Bittering: 1/2 oz Horizon 11.4 + 1 oz East Kent Golding 4.5
• Flavour: 3/4 oz East Kent Golding + 3/8 oz Nugget from my new hopyard
• Aroma: 1 oz East Kent Golding
• 3/4 tsp Irish Moss
• 1 tsp DAP
• Pitched a Nottingham dry yeast

Overbite in web pages

I'm probably dating myself when I remember (wistfully) the old Dr. Dobb's Journal slogan "Running light without overbite."  Certainly these days, in many parts of the high tech industry,  I don't see a lot of care and attention to load generated by this or that feature.

I returned to my desktop earlier this morning to find the fans cranked up and the cpu spinning at something like 50% load. I wasn't running anything in particular on the machine, no background compiles going on. No, I tracked this down to two web pages with some active content of some kind that I'd casually left open. The pages were: viewing an article on www.economist.com (about 15% cpu); and a friend's blog www.rklau.com/tins/ (bounces between 12-40% cpu).

Remember when 'engineer' was a verb?

en•gi•neer  vt  to contrive or plan out, usually with subtle skill or craft
en•gi•neer•ing  n  the application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and sources of energy are made useful to systems

Amusingly, when writing this note I visited ddj.com. It too loaded up a pile of crap, including a video with sound. Boy how DDJ has changed! And I guess (from the video) they don't see their apparent developer audience as populating cube farms.