Monday, February 27, 2012

Removing old stuff from other locations

It is time to complete the removal of old and useless stuff that might have been referenced in other posts in past years.

So ...

... if there is a mention in an old post of myspace pages or tripod accounts or something ... that might have changed over time.

Links are only valid at the time of posting and go away.

I do this from time to time and will be doing some online simplifying in the near future again.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

TEDx Jeff or maybe not ...

I had started looking into the process of hosting a TEDx event, but have moved it into more or less hiatus mode at this point.

It turns out another group under another banner did something almost exactly like I wanted to do here in Seattle just last month, so to do more or less the same thing makes little sense.

So ... unless something else creeps up it does not look like this will have a follow through.

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Give me a B ... Beer experiment one

























I gave birth to a six pack.
God bless Jimmy Carter and his administration getting home brew legalization legislation passed.
Jefferson's Brewery batch one.
Given that it would be ready at Valentine's Day all sorts of names like Valentine Bitter or VD Beer came to mind, all more or less tacky names.
This is not my recipe, it is from a kit, but that felt like the best way to start.
Talking to other friends that have home brewed helped a lot, got some good and useful tips.
Showing off pics of the process was like a proud papa showing off baby pictures.

January 17, 2012 brewing
I had hours to kill, snowed in. I had this kit since last summer, but finally had the real stuck at home time to do it. It took a few hours, I wanted to do this right. The biggest advice I had was that I really needed to make certain about sanitation ... so I really overdid it.
January 20, 2012 capping
Nervous about getting this wrong and it was the simplest part. Really, it is just to create a little pressure but also to relieve it as needed.
January 31, 2012 bottling
This was where a lot could go wrong and I would not necessarily know for two weeks. However, the beer smelled fresh and that gave me cause for optimism. I again went way overboard with the sanitizing, but I do not think that there really is too much you can do wrong by doing extra boiling and sanitizing. I even boiled the cheese cloth. Then I filtered the jug all into a separate container and even boiled the honey. Instead of adding honey per bottle, since I had added a step it was added to the filtered middle step container prior to ladling into each bottle. Having spent the couple buck each on the good stopper bottles was also a good idea as things sealed up nicely.
February 14, 2012 ready ...
February 17, 2012 I took the time to grab a chilled glass, popped the bottle open (in the sink just in case) and poured. It smelled right and looked right in the glass. A sip, then a gulp, and it tasted nice and like a mild beer on tap.

Victory is mine!

Explanabragging and pictures followed ...

Saturday, February 04, 2012

Kirby Krackle video shoot 2-4-12


Video shoot for "I Wanna Live In A World Full Of Heroes" at Nick's Jr. in Everett, WA on 2-4-12

These are some of the heroes ...

Thursday, February 02, 2012

Be the Rays, not the Orioles ...







Seattle Mariners Fanfest 2012 at Safeco Field - January 28, 2012

I got a chance to talk to one of the up and coming young players for the Mariners named Mike Carp. While he was signing my program (using a sweet old lady or a child to get an autograph is a good plan) I mentioned how the M's in the 90s got young, put a group together and they all got good at the same time. He just nodded when I told him I hoped that the M's could be the Rays of the division instead of the Orioles as one has figured out how to be good and young and the other has hopelessly fell into seemingly permanent obscurity and fan malaise.

As always, it is fun to go and take a couple swings off a tee, I hit one over the fence, jogged on the base paths, and saw a couple of players. But, this year really felt slim when it came to the crowd. Years of not merely missing the playoffs but being awful over and over has had a huge impact on this franchise. Although, the guy outside with the picket sign about moving in the left field fence to attract right handed hitters showed a bit of passion.

Archive Project - Wild Bird

In 6th grade I had a paper route. One of the things I did to bide my time while walking the route was to sing to myself.

During this time I recall I came up with the music concept of a band I would call Wild Bird and a song by that name. Something about being a powerful soaring creature and my feelings and this band would have songs about that.

I want to say I imagined a couple albums and remember actually coming up with covers and song titles and a few lyrics, but it does not appear that any of that stuff survived the test of time. I believe my concept of the band included having friends of mine from the time being in the band and us all learning various instruments while I ran things and wrote all the lyrics, etc ... I probably would have been hard to work with.

The purpose of the Archive project though is for stuff like this, so when this stuff came back to me one day recently I wanted to make certain that I jotted some notes down and got it archived here.