Month: June 2006

Bruce’s Things

For the last few days, I was on sort of mountain retreat (it wasn’t really that glamorous), during which I listened to a LOT of podcasts and a lot of audio books and audio book summaries.

One of the most interesting and entertaining things I listened to was Bruce Sterling’s presentation from one of those goofy O’Reilly conferences.

Some of you may be aware of my nascent efforts to ridicule the Web 2.0 hype while provoking some actual thought about what the future of the Web might look like. Bruce Sterling expresses very well some of what irritates me so much about “Web 2.0” and also quotes extensively from an interview with Alan Liu, author of The Laws of Cool, who is highly critical of “Web 2.0” as a way to describe the current state of the Web. This is all great stuff.

Another main topic of Bruce’s keynote was the idea of “The Internet of Things” — the term he uses to describe a future time when physical objects are tied into the Internet. The standard example used to explain the benefits of this is “imagine using google to find your shoes in the morning”. Bruce says that he thinks it will take 30 years for the “Internet of Things” to truly arrive. I disagree. I predict that it will take 1/3 as long. I suspect that even my estimate is too pessimistic, though. I also predict that it won’t be google that people are using, but something much better.

Margaritifer #3

Margaritifer Winery’s 3rd Wine is in the Bottles!

This morning, Molly and John came over and helped us bottle The Canali Cab 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon. It all went very smoothly, and we managed to finish before the weather got stinky hot. I had a couple sips of it, and I think it’s going to be good! We’ll drink more tonight! Pictures will be posted to www.margaritifer.com soon!

After the bottling, we drank some other wine, and Molly said it was similar to, but not as good as the Margaritifer Phoboshine Apple Wine. That’s nice. I cooked some sausages and almost burned down the house because the bbq was so filty with grease from previous barbeques. That frightened me, and so I spent some time this afternoon cleaning it up.

Thanks Molly and John for the help. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Miracle Drain Opener!

So, I came home a little tipsy last night and dumped a bunch of vegetables into the garbage disposal. Like A LOT of vegetables. Way more than was good for it. The sink became totally clogged.

First thing I tried was sticking my hand in there and then running the garbage disposal for a while (after taking my hand out). Still clogged.

Then I got out the plunger and started plunging. This seems to have moved the clog further down the pipe, because now water was coming up in the other sink (without the garbage disposal).

Then I poured in a bunch of liquid plumber and followed the directions. Still clogged. So I went to bed.

This morning, the water had drained out, but the sink filled up when I turned out the faucet and the water sat there going down very very slowly. So I poured in more liquid plumber. Didn’t work.

As a last resort before calling the “solid” plumber, I decided to check with my good friend “the Internet”. I found all sorts of people telling me not to use chemical drain openers, and I found lots of people telling me the correct way to use a plunger, but not to use it if your sink is full of chemical drain opener (which mine was) because you’d probably splash the junk all over you and burn your skin off. Some people said to pour in boiling water, which I tried too. Still clogged!

Then I found one smart fellow, who suggested that if your drain is filled with vegetable junk, you can pour salt into it along with hot water and the salt will wilt the vegetation and allow water to flow. So, I said “heck, I’ve tried the most horrible chemicals I have in the house…I’ll try anything!”

So, I poured in a couple cups of salt and started running the hot water. A couple minutes later, the drain cleared and I was extremely happy.

My first yogurt!

Ok, remember how I told you about fermentation a few posts back? Well, we did some more fermenting last night and made some Yogurt! The directions we followed are here, along with some excellent information about what exactly yogurt is and what you can do with it.

If you don’t feel like leaving my site (and I don’t blame you!), here’s the basics: when you introduce the right kind of bacteria into milk, they go crazy and convert sugar into lactic acid. The lactic acid lowers the PH and causes the milk protein to thicken. Hot damn, you’ve got yogurt.

I’ve never been a huge fan of yogurt. However, when we tasted the result this morning with some granola and strawberries, I have to say, it was the best I’ve had.

Stay tuned for my next chemistry experiment…cheese!