Yesterday morning I completed the final step of brewing: Bottling! After transferring the beer from the fermenter into the bottling bucket and adding corn sugar, I aliquoted the brew into the bottles. After one week to allow for carbonation (as the residual yeast ferments the corn sugar), I will have a delicious pale ale ready to go! I can say it's ( Read more... )

... feels so good, but why is it necessary? So many other things I want to do.

I cleaned up the garage today for one purpose: to make room for my new BEER BREWING KIT ( Read more... )

Civ 4 has been crashing my computer. I've noticed that my laptop has been getting really hot while playing, so I think the game is causing it to overheat to the point that it crashes. I have actually seen the Blue Screen of Death, something I thought was a relic of a bygone age, dead and buried! I'll try decreasing the resolution so that it doesn't ( Read more... )

Using the gift certificate Jen gave me, I went and bought Civilization 4 on Saturday. I'm hooked.

I think Zilla and Nuku got in a fight. I went to fill up their water dish and Zilla has a huge gash at the base of her tail near her back leg. It's really deep. She also has some minor scrapes on top of her head. I got some advice through LiveJournal and put neosporin on it and put her in her own tank (an ice chest, fully outfitted) to recover. I ( Read more... )

Suddenly, it is getting to be crunch time for Grad School applications. Most applications are due on January 15, and I pretty much have to have everything done by the end of December to ensure that everything is in on time, and to provide ample time to correct any problems. With the Christmas Season and everything that entails now upon us as well, ( Read more... )

It's been a long, long time since I've updated this literary wonder; a lot has happened since then, but rather than summarize the past I'll speculate on the future ( Read more... )

No, not a Harley... this marks the first day of riding my bike to work, and the morning ride felt GREAT! And since the ride was from 7:15 to 7:45am, there was very little traffic on the roads, which was a big plus since much of the route doesn't have a delineated bike path.

Apparently, this was the experiment to condition and test memory retention in fruitflies (thanks John for referring me to the article). Unfortunately I could not access the full article, so here is the summary:

Classical conditioning and retention in normal and mutantDrosophila melanogaster
Tim Tully1 and William G. Quinn1, 2

(1)  Department ( Read more... )