chromosphere

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!

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…)…

Tonight I am running a whisky tasting at my cricket club.

Looking forward to 5 large measures each of some unfiltered single cask – even the one that I have no idea what the tasting notes were… (OK – it’s an Ardmore – a speyside – and it’s 14 years old. I know nothing more that…)

The Queen’s new website was released today – even Sir Tim Berners-Lee helped her out at the official launch.

I think she could maybe do with a new calendar too… Their current one (see screenshot on left in case they fix it) seems to be a day out. It’s Friday the 13th Feb tomorrow – there’s no Saturday the 13th Feb, well, at least not this year…

My guess is that there’s a developer somewhere that doesn’t realise that the day of the week returned by the function that retrieves the royal appointments is for weeks that start on a Sunday and not a Monday…

(PS – Oooh, Friday the 13th – do the Hogs Back Brewery still do their special brew on such dates?)

I got a letter from my insurance company yesterday stating that they had written to me before about an outstanding premium due on my account, and that if I don’t pay it off soon, then my cover will end.

Apparently, the outstanding amount was due on 1st January, 1900, and was for the grand total amount of £0.00. Hmm.

I would have scanned it in but it turns out my scanner is buggered… still, it had a really annoying bit of dust on the detector anyhow.

EDIT: Got it scanned in – here we go…!