In the Rural Doghouse....

So Ive been looking around the net for a decent deal on a pickup when I ran across this little bit in an advertisemnt for a farm truck. I spit my beer out. If anything like this came out of my mouth Im sure the closest female wouldnt hesitate for the instant slap. A good laugh though:

"This HD truck is all equipped and ready to help your wife with the winter feeding and fencing chores..You might be surprised how much work she can get done by herself with this outfit..Besides the anniversary is prolly commin' up..The ole' 2 birds w/ 1 stone theory apply's here..Power, economy, durability, and her in a better mooooo..'d at the end of her long day ..priceless !! The unit is in excellent condition.."

Speechless!

Ponzi Schemes....

So there I was reading some stories on Neatorama about the infamous ponzi schemes directly related to the current Madoff incident. This reminded me of a similar deal that happened down in Costa Rica. The CR thing was an interesting story, collapsing just previous to my arrival. I never really knew the whole deal but I was surrounded by the people effected. Retirees. Older women, the ones who came down with their complete saving to drink margaritas amongst the young surfer beach dudes and relax in the sun. Fail. They all lost it all.

As the wiki article here states:

"The Brothers was a large investment operation, eventually exposed as a Ponzi scheme, in Costa Rica from the late 1980s until 2002. The fund was operated by brothers Luis Enrique and Osvaldo Villalobos. Investigators determined that the scam took in at least $400 million. Most of the clientele were American and Canadian retirees but some Costa Ricans also invested the minimum $10,000. About 6,300 individuals ultimately were involved. Interest rates were 3% per month, usually paid in cash, or 2.8% compounded. The ability to pay such high interest was attributed to Luis Enrique Villalobos’ existing agricultural aviation business, investment in unspecified European high yield funds, and loans to Coca Cola, among others. Osvaldo Villalobos’ role was primarily to move money around a large number of shell companies and then pay investors. In May 2007 Osvaldo Villalobos was sentenced to 18 years in prison for fraud and illegal banking. Luis Enrique Villalobos remains a fugitive."

Yikes. All this makes the idea of real estate pretty strong. Im hiding all my money in foreign cars in the driveway. Should work well over the long run I think....

Interaction Distraction....

In addition to doing mega mapping and design for the holidays, Ive become preoccupied with self-education. Not the fastest at this process, I need to take breaks for backyard pond development and mud research, rain gutter approach and installation, snow ball application towards agilty training in a special ruddy broken eared dog, and more server based coolness that I was previously unaware of as of last night.

I have only built one such website previously, in Oregon, long since gone. Now I tackle myself with uploading and hosting my own business site, as business is looking fair for the near future. You can check out the specs here: X and remember that this is continually a work in progress.

Of course I am open to positive and negative criticism, as well as help and pointers in HTML via MS WORD.

All I can say its an ugly fugly road in the beginning.

Note: As the router has changed so has the IP for the ftp server. To avoid this problem of changing all the time, paste in "geographicsinternational.hpshare.net" to your ftp client and all should work better, if at all.

On the Economic Crisis....

I was out of work before the collapse, so the crisis doesnt really affect me...

- Me

Robocop.....

I didnt know this before but rbc IS awesome!

Anatomy of a Raft Guide....

Digging in the Dirt....

You might think that was a literal title. Its not. But considering how the dust accumulates here, it seemed fitting as I dusted off the gear I found. Heres a taste of the coffee induced weirdness from this mornings dig-around. The weird part is why I took the photos. The really weird part will be in the next post. Unfortunately I had to be the main model, as Kona cant wear a lifejacket efficiently.

haha lmao.....

Speaking of Beer....

The crystals made by beer after a sweet super freezing method at Florida State University....

Instructionals....

Today were going to learn about the keg, how it works and why its sweet.

First you need to know why:

"Beer is Proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy" Benjamin Franklin

Now that we have that out of the way....the parts that make the whole, or fill the glass.

First and foremost this needs to be recognized as a system.

In the center you have the keg (beer containing unit), CO2 unit on the right (pressure), and the faucet (dispensing apparatus), and the thanksgiving turkey base (soup).
You can disregard the soup for now. Before you even get a keg you need the ability to serve it. A hammer and a screwdriver might work for an evening, but that rash and inconsiderate to your guests. So a delivery system can be tight, like a CO2 tank and regulators and gauges, that start looking like space shuttle components, you know the fun is about to begin.

The gauges represent the volume in the tank and the pressure in the line to the keg. 10+ psi is sufficient to get the beer out without power spraying the drywall out. You're going to want a nice cool temp from 40 to 30 degrees F. Note: big knob is the on/off and the little flat screw is the psi to the keg line.

Now once the non volatile gases reach the keg and pressure it, it can squirt the goods out the other side. Remember the reason this is cool: Price and Longevity. At about half the price of pint at the bar, and a really long shelf life due to the inert gasses that don't spoil the goods, the potentials are endless.
This piece is called the coupler, and depending on what continent you keg is from decides the type of coupler needed to really hook into this beast. Sometimes called a sankey.

The faucet is the most recognizable part. Responsible for the beer-glass transfer. Depending on the beer and the gas, faucets determine the pour. Nitrogen gassed beers like Guinness require a spinny thing to release the gas during the pour giving that thick rich head we all love. The one pictured is a standard pour.

So to pour keg beer you need something to push it out (CO2) and a pour jobber (faucet). Simple, efficient, fun.

We can go more into detail next time

Polls Me Along....

Get over there and VOTE!

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If you havent noticed yet, youll be seeing some nifty and strange polls on the right side, updated about every 2 weeks or so. Enjoy.

Because its Shelving me Crazy....

Heres the idea: Lots of books require lots of shelves. But these shelves need to be neat. Most neat. Below you will see two sites for planned shelving, one a sketch and one a photo to help imagine the thing. Ideas and suggestions welcome.

The media room:

The office walk:

Note: Hutch seen in pic is for sale!

Dogfish Head....

I present you here an excellent excerpt from an article in the New Yorker about a crazy good brewery and some beer history:

'The seductions of drink are wound deep within us. Which may explain why, two years ago, when John Gasparine was walking through a forest in southern Paraguay, his thoughts turned gradually to beer. Gasparine is a businessman from Baltimore. He owns a flooring company that uses sustainably harvested wood and he sometimes goes to South America to talk to suppliers. On the trip in question, he had noticed that the local wood-carvers often used a variety called palo santo, or holy wood. It was so heavy that it sank in water, so hard and oily that it was sometimes made into ball bearings or self-lubricating bushings. It smelled as sweet as sandalwood and was said to impart its fragrance to food and drink. The South Americans used it for salad bowls, serving utensils, maté goblets, and, in at least one case, wine barrels.

Gasparine wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but he had become something of a beer geek. (His thick eyebrows, rectangular glasses, and rapid-fire patter seem ideally suited to the parsing of obscure beverages.) A few years earlier, he’d discovered a bar in downtown Baltimore called Good Love that had several unusual beers on tap. The best, he thought, were from a place called Dogfish Head, in southern Delaware. The brewery’s motto was “Off-Centered Ales for Off-Centered People.” It made everything from elegant Belgian-style ales to experimental beers brewed with fresh oysters or arctic cloudberries. Gasparine decided to send a note to the owner, Sam Calagione. Dogfish was already aging some of its beer in oak barrels. Why not try something more aromatic, like palo santo?

Calagione was used to odd suggestions from customers. On Monday mornings, his brewery’s answering machine is sometimes full of rambling meditations from fans, in the grips of beery enlightenment at their local bar. But Gasparine’s idea was different. It spoke to Calagione’s own contradictory ambitions for Dogfish: to make beers so potent and unique that they couldn’t be judged by ordinary standards, and to win for them the prestige and premium prices usually reserved for fine wine. And so, a year later, Calagione sent Gasparine back to Paraguay with an order for forty-four hundred board feet of palo santo. “I told him to get a shitload,” he remembers. “We were going to build the biggest wooden barrel since the days of Prohibition.”'

See the rest of this enormous and great article here at the New Yorker!

I like....

I cant believe that the state actually did this....

The Ultimate Frisbee....