Finally started my rum infinity bottle on 2022-05-21. I'm going to keep track of what rums have gone into it. About 1 oz will be added from each bottle with the most recent addition at the top.

2024-10

• Appleton Estate 8 Year
• Black Tot Finest Caribbean Rum
• El Dorado 5 Year

2024-09

• Mount Gay Black Barrel
• Wray and Nephew White Overproof
• Virago Four Port Rum
• Appleton Estate Signature

2024-08

• Cruzan Aged Dark Rum
• El Dorado 8 Year
• El Dorado 3 Year
• Denizen Merchant's Reserve 8 Year

2024-07

• Appleton Estate Signature
• Mount Gay Navy Strength
• Mount Gay Black Barrel

2024-06

• Smith …

This is just a list of programming and programming adjacent technical books which I have found useful throughout my career. This is a work in progress and will continue to grow as I either read new books or add books I have already read and regularly recommend to people, but just didn't put on the list yet.

• Two Scoops of Django
  The original link seems to be broken, but I'm hoping it's only temporary. I have updated the main link for now.
  This is a great book at going beyond the basics of Django covering ways to set up …

My wife got me a copy of the Smuggler's Cove book for my birthday in January... or it was for Christmas, everything blends together with Christmas and multiple birthdays between Dec 25 and Jan 24. I have always liked rum and had a couple of standards I kept around, but nothing crazy and no special interest in it. This book changed that quickly, though. It told me with 1 rum each from 8 of the 12 or so classifications of rum in the book I could make most of the recipes. Each classification came with a list of anywhere from …

Overview

Overall, this is a great kettle and should be a good controller. I love the kettle and grain basket and find it to be one of the best designs I have seen and they are both well built. The tri-clamp fittings are great and make the system easy to work with. Unfortunately, the experience has been plagued with bad electrical parts and slow, dismissive support.

Initial Setup and Usage

I pre-ordered my Unibrau 10g 120 volt system in May 2021 and received it in the final week of June. Everything arrived well packed and undamaged. The tri-clamp fitting make …

Brewing

A couple weeks ago I brewed a dark mild with 20% beech smoked malt. The fermentation has gone weird, but the samples I've tasted while checking gravity have been delicious. I could possible go with somewhat less smoked malt for this particular style, but I am still happy with the current flavor.

Blog updates

Several updates to blog codebase:

• Upgraded to Python 3.9, Django 3.1.6, and Wagtail 2.12
• Added tags for recipes and batch logs
• Added storing post boil volume and volume in fermenter to batch logs for better stats and ability to calculate real srm and efficiencies …

How did I do on my 2020 goals? Hit or miss, as expected.

1. Stop trying to do so much.... sort of. I did less. Not sure I tried to do less. Any less I tried to do was due to exhaustion and depression.
2. Be ok with not completing everything. Again... sort of. I was better about it, but it still made me anxious and on edge.
3. Talk at a tech meetup or local conference - NOPE. Given that those did not happen, I didn't even try to put something together. I still have ideas for RVASec, though. …

Weeknotes-ish

As mentioned before, I'm keeping the weeknotes style, but it won't be weekly. Here's what I've done recently, though.

ElasticSearch

At work I've been tasked with optimizing performance on a not yet in production Ruby on Rails system (I'm still a Django dev primarily, but I'll work with anything) which relies heavily on ElasticSearch with many large, deeply nested documents. I enjoy ElasticSearch because it allows me to work and think differently than usual and I get the opportunity to really dig into it every year or two at work. This time around I have gotten to learn more …

Not So Weekly

It turns out that adding one more things that I feel I am required to do each week was not terribly helpful, so these fell off pretty quickly. I am still going to try to do this weeknotes idea, but they may really be more like monthnotes at times.

Hacktoberfest 2020

So it's time for Hacktoberfest again. I know I should contribute to real FOSS projects for this, but with a full time job and two young kids, contributing to real projects at any time feels like a pretty high level of commitment. Instead, I take the …

Learning more about AWS and Terraform

This week I got to dig into using Terraform to configure AWS Cloudwatch alarms for their ElasticSearch service. Overall it was easy to configure in a nice reusable manner. AWS even provides a list ofrecommended alarms which makes it easy to pick what to alert on. The only real issue I ran into is that the sns topics for email alerts cannot be configured via Terraform. It's not a huge issue, but means you can't just have Terraform create those, they need to already be there.

I also got the chance to play …

Injury and Healing:

Since my rotator cuff injury riding in Guts, Gravel, Glory 2020 I have ended up with several weeks of physical therapy. With the therapy I have been gaining tons of range of motion and strength. This past week I was given the ok to start running again, as long as I take frequent breaks to make sure my shoulder is loose. I have been able to jump right back in running 6.5 to 8.5 miles 6 of the last 7 days. I stop every mile for a 2 minute break where I roll my shoulders and actively …

Notes for the week beginning on Sunday, 2020-08-16

Blog Updates

Upgraded the blog to Django 3.1 and Wagtail 2.10. In the process I discovered my middleware ordering was all out of whack and corrected it. I also began adding OpenGraph tags. I had removed Google Analytics a long time ago just to do what little I can to stop feeding information into Google, but I did want some analytics, so I am testing out clicky.com for now. I may eventually just host my own Matomo or Fathom setup. As far as I can tell, clicky is not working at all. …

In my spare time over the last several weeks I've been working on a new section of the website, On Tap. This is a new area where I will keep and show information about my homebrewing.

The main page shows beers I've got planned or in progress, currently on tap, or have had on tap in the past. This includes when I brewed the beer, when it went on tap, and when it went off tap. It also links to the actual recipe I used and a brew log page with information about that specific batch.

The recipe pages …

Earlier this month I decided to enter my first bike race, Guts, Gravel, Glory 2020. I lived on a bike in the 90s. Cheap Huffy and Murray BMX bikes and an entry level Raleigh mountain bike with a solid frame and front axle, but I haven't really ridden a bike since probably 1998. I finally decided in the fall that its time to get back on a bike because running is beating me up too much. I started out looking at mountain bikes, still being stuck in my 90s mindset that road bikes were for old people and professional …

I'm not a fan of the new year's resolution thing but at the same time, it is a good time to say "Hey, I'm going to do better at these things starting now" or "I'm going to try to do this thing within the next year".

I meant to post this closer to the beginning of the year, but hey, I'm following #1 and #2 already. I've also managed a few others at least partially already.

Goals

1. Stop trying to do so much
   I'm always burnt out and tired because I take on too much. Things stop being enjoyable and …

Yep, I finished 2019 by doing ridiculous WoW achievements.

I completed Sausage Sampler and my wife started laughing at me and says "What next, one for drinking beer?". A few minutes later she sees the friends or guild chat announcement that I completed Three Sheets To The Wind. Afer that, I figured Shanty Raid fit in well with the theme. By then I was out of achievements fitting that list, so I figured why not collect hidden cat statues.