Stoner's World

So far, I have the following equipment and ingredients for my brewing adventure:

• 5 gallon carboy
• hydrometer (with tube)
• 2 air locks
• sanitizer
• liquid malt extract
• powder malt extract
• grain malts
• grain bag
• hops (pellets)
• yeast
• priming sugar
• bottle caps

All of this courteous of my father. The equipment is from his wine making excursions. The ingredients come from a kit he bought me for my birthday. It’s for a brown ale, which suits me just fine.

I still need the following equipment:

• 8 gallon stainless steel pot
• propane burner and stand (optional but preferred)
• food-grade tubing
• siphon
• bottle filler
• capper
• secondary fermenter or a bottling bucket
• thermometer (something more appropriate for brewing then the ones I already have)
• bottle washer

I figure I can easily make a bottle tree for drying the bottles after sanitizing them. Oh, and I need bottles – about 5 dozen or so. I’m excited. This is going to be fun.

I started using last.fm about a week ago. So far, it’s done a good job of “discovering” music that’s similar to what I like. One artist that kept popping up was named Cargo Cult and the songs were damn good. So, I checked them out at Magnatune. I’ve shopped at Magnatune before and what I really like about Magnatune is the transparency. They tell you how you can and cannot use the music (which most record companies simply tell you what you cannot do with it,) they disclose how much they pay the artists for album sales, they let you pick how much you want to pay for the albums, they use non-DRM encumbered formats so you can listen to your music however you like…Magnatune is all kinds of goodness.

Another benefit of buying from Magnatune is they encourage limited sharing of the music by allowing you to give 3 copies of what you bought away to friends. So, I bought Cargo Cult’s album Alchemy and can give it to 3 others. Preview the songs at Magnatune and if you like what you hear, let me know and I’ll send you a link to download the album.

New year (well…3 months into it), new code and a new design. Things were getting stale and I was not very happy with the version of WordPress I had installed…so I upgraded. WordPress still doesn’t do everything I want, however. I did find a couple plugins that aim to provide some of the functionality I want, namely a built-in wiki system. One was poorly documented and didn’t seem very well thought out. The other only allows you to create wiki pages on the admin-side of WordPress – not at all what I want. So, I’ll keep looking and testing.