chromosphere

I have been incredibly slack on the blog. I’m just popping on to say: “Dammit Yahoo!” – http://www.ygroupsblog.com/blog/2010/03/24/updates-in-your-groups/ – Enabling this for everyone is a real pain in the arse!

Grrr!

The snow has gone!

Recent beer – a brew marathon:

• Dark mild – racked into keg and fined; 13 pints remainder bottled (somewhat cloudy!)
• Belgian Blond – dropped 65 points in 8 days. Chimay yeast=wow.  Crash cooling, should be a good one.
• 80/- – probably mostly done inside 4 days. Give it a while to tidy up though. Smells caramel and roasty.
• Mad Boris RIS Mk II – the most foam I have ever seen; 35-40L at least. 1.088 OG rapidly dropping still!

Flipping cold. About -9C last night (and -17.7C the other side of Oxford), and more of the same tonight.

But the cold weather has bought some unexpected visitors – notably there were a few reed buntings (pictured) flying around the garden all day (first time I have seen them here), as well as a late visit from a pair of siskins who haven’t been around for ages. Yesterday, a local great spotted woodpecker popped in for a while. All this as well as a load of chaffinches, goldfinches, robins, blue tits, great tits, coal tits, blackbirds, song thrushes, a pair of yellowhammers, wood pigeons (grrr) and the local house sparrow colony.

Nice.

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Welcome to 2010. This year’s upcoming stuff:

• Annular Eclipse over Africa, India and China on 15th Jan
• Total Eclipse over the Pacific on July 11th (and quite a long one too)
• Total Lunar Eclipse on Dec 21st
• The Winter Olympics
• The World Cup

I won’t be going to watch any of these events (though I might just sneek a peak of the lunar eclipse if I’m up early in the morning and it’s clear). And, if I can help it, I may avoid the World Cup on TV almost entirely too…

In brewing news, my Southwold bitter just lasted the holidays, my East India Pale Ale (Amsinck, 1868 – from the Durden Park book) has finished and is in the keg, and I have a big starter of yeast recultured from Chimay Red to play with in the near future.

No posts in ages, too much stuff to talk about it the last month and no time to do it! Here’s a brief run-down of our last few months which have been pretty hectic:

• Our Wedding!
• And Honeymoon! (photos when I finally manage to sort them…)
• A Boneshaker win for me!
• Village Ball
• Loads of friends’ birthdays and family visits
• A visit to the Lovibonds Brewery in Henley-on-Thames (thanks Jeff – great day!)
• Veggie patch digging/harvesting/sowing, and loss of all tomatoes to blight
• Chutney/Xmas cake making
• Beer: a Fuggles-based bitter, a wild hop honey ale, best and ordinary bitters for the Sutton Festival. And a new mash tun and boiler to come soon (with luck).

Phew!

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I just had to rebuild a RAID 1 array on my PC after having a Barracuda go potty on me. Mine is a Promise PDC20376 on an old MSI KT4 Ultra – hope you have a better controller), and some advice:

1. The BIOS utility (2.0.0) didn’t give you a progress bar for the rebuild option as I’d expect and as the manual states.
2. It’s not obvious that the array is rebuilding at all…
3. …unless you download and install the Promise Array Management software where you can see the status and progress when booted with the degraded array
4. When it rebuilds a 750GB array, it takes literally hours (about 12 in total, though I lost count…)…

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