I finally bottled the cherry stout that I brewed back in January. Continue reading
Bottled the beer
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Dialects
Walking
Walked the skyway over lunch hour both yesterday and today. The usual–from Government Center to the Hyatt Regency and back. I am looking forward to warmer weather so I can go outside. There is essentially one way to walk much more than a mile on the skyway and I need a change of scenery.
Tedious necessities
Today’s snowstorm (this is Minnesota) meant that I was an hour late getting home. Also cold and wet. I immediately had to load some dead computer stuff (4 computers, 1 monitor, and 1 scanner) into the car for recycling tomorrow. Then I had to type up, edit, and submit the minutes of colgaffneyis last Board meeting–the next one is Tuesday. I finished that just after 8PM. Next I had to do taxes. I had done most of the work last week so I was able to finish a little after 9. And I think it is finished. The returns (one for us and one for J) have been submitted electronically and I have saved backup copies of the files (I work in systems administration–paranoia is my profession). The only possible issue is that a return might be rejected by either the IRS or Minnesota. This is unlikely. TurboTax is quite good and our tax life is not that interesting. Just sometimes painful.
Conservation of Energy: Not just a good idea, it is the law.
Awareness of the problem with biofuels is spreading, but Sean Carroll speaks more to this geek than Paul Krugman or the editors of Time:
Funny thing about energy: it’s conserved! …. We bring you this reminder because a knowledge of basic physics can occasionally be helpful when formulating public policy.
In particular, biofuels (such as ethanol) and hydrogen are not actually sources of energy — given the vagaries of thermodynamics, it costs more energy to create them than we can get by actually using them, as there will inevitably be some waste heat and entropy produced.
Traditional Wisdom
Monday Night Irish Class, April 7, 2008
Irish class, April 7, 2008
Irish class, April 7, 2008
The first exercise was to take three scrambled sentences from an article
in Lá and put them back in order, without using our dictionaries.
The general form is:
- Verb
- Subject or subject Phrase. The noun will be in the nominative case.
- One of more of:
- Direct object
- Preposition phrase
- Adverbial Phrase
- Possibly a dependent clause. Look for go, nach or a+verbal noun. Then analyze as above.
It is a lot harder than it sounds, after step 1.
Busy
… but I still was able to get out for a walk on the Skyway, similar to my route back on Monday of last week. Chilly outside, so I stayed in the Skyway the whole way.
What the user wanted
I received a couple e-mails today about the rewrite of a computer system that I am involved with (not at work). They reminded me of these classic sketches.
Taxes–2nd pass
As I wrote previously, our 2007 tax situation was chaotic. It now looks like we will be getting a record refund from the Feds and paying a record amount to the State. Still, that works out in our favor.
Our son J has a separate tax return, but I am stuck on that, He is getting Social Security Disability payments, but we do not yet have the SSA-1099 for him.
While writing this I realized we have a similar situation for our younger son, Tom. We will be contacting their social worker.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 