Author Archives: gmcdavid

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About gmcdavid

Retired IT professional with a wide range of interests. Married. Three sons, two with autistic-spectrum disorders and the third being transgender with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. From Chicago but now living in the Twin Cities metro, Minnesota. Episcopalian. Carleton College (BA 1972, physics) and Stanford University (MS 1974, Applied Physics; MS 1976 Statistics).

Bottled some ale

I finally bottled the ale that I started in March. It is darker than I thought, so I am calling it a brown ale rather than a pale ale. Should still be good. Next time I try for a pale ale I will use much less crystal malt. Final gravity 1.010, so about 5.0% alcohol by volume.

The process of bottling is somewhat involved, and, because of the need for sanitation, finicky. So I always put it off. However, it is not as bad as anticipation makes it. I finished this 5 gallon batch, including the final cleanup, in a little over 2 hours.

Kindle fun

I jailbroke my Kindle 3, using this download. I then proceeded to apply the Screen Saver Hack which lets you replace the pictures of all those authors by whatever you want. It worked perfectly and did not take long. The time consuming part was converting a set of family pictures to 600 x 800 grayscale png files.

The author of the jailbreak has an interesting note about his hack for the latest Kindle firmware.

Monday Night Irish Class, June 6, 2011

Irish Class, June 6, 2011

Rang Gaeilge, 6ú lá Mí na Mheiteamh 2011

<!–

Fadas: áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚ

–>

Tá bindealán ar mo ordóg. Throid mé an sábh agus bhuaig an sábh. There is a bandage on my thumb. I fought the saw and the saw won.

Warning labels

Amóinia — Ammonia
Eye irritant.
Keep out of reach of children.
Griog súl.
Coimeád as láimhe leanaí.

I looked at “Eye irritant” and mentally rewrote it as “Irritant of eyes.” Immediately I thought: “That’s a
genitive plural.”

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