Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at July 31st, 2006

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while may remember a post about making wine.

In it I imagined the horrors likely to result if Kristen actually followed through on her idea of making wine as a hobby. I’m more enthusiastic about the idea now.  This is largely because the wines have been drinkable–good, in fact.

So far Kristen has made:
Concord Grape Wine: We have concord grapes growing in our backyard. Thus, this was inevitable. Oddly enough, the year that she decided to make wine for the first time, we had a mysteriously small number of grapes, forcing her to buy the majority from the store. Last year, we had more grapes than we needed (by far). Thus, I’ll be able to taste wine from our own grapes for the first time in a few months.

Spiced Apple Wine: This one turned out a little oddly. Made from a mix of apples picked at Crane’s Orchard near Fennville, it had a hard time beginning to ferment. When it did finally start fermenting, it really went. It had a slightly sour flavor, a high alchohol content, bubbles in the glass, and the cork popped like it was coming out of a champagne bottle.

Sweet Mead: As someone who read Norse mythology as a kid, I always wondered what mead was and what it tasted like. It turns out that there are various types of mead and that its pretty easy to make. With grapes after all, you’ve got to crush the things. With mead, you just have to pour honey out of a jar. Personally, this has been my favorite so far.

Coming up this year:
Strawberry wine
Concord grape wine
Peach brandy
Metheglyn (possibly): It’s mead, but with spices.

Posted by Jim at July 28th, 2006

I ran across a test that allows a person to rate their geekiness relative to others who take the test. Does this improve my life? I’m not sure.

That being said, one of these days I ought to write one of these online surveys. As someone who did a masters that included significant amounts of training in survey design and analysis, I can’t read one of these things without critiquing them the whole way through.

Posted by Jim at July 28th, 2006

Even though this has been out for a little while, here’s a link to David Hasselhoff’s most recent music video Jump In My Car.

Posted by Jim at July 25th, 2006

A fair number of people reading this blog have probably heard of programming frameworks used in web development. The rest of you, of course, could happily live without this knowledge.

This won’t stop me from writing about them.

The idea behind a programming framework is that by following conventions you can let the framework handle certain details. As a result, you’ll presumably develop programs more quickly.

The framework people seem to be most excited about among people I know is Ruby on Rails. Another that people might want to look into is CakePHP. Inspired by Ruby on Rails, CakePHP has one advantage for PHP programmers–you don’t have to learn a new language. Not that learning Ruby is a bad thing, but sometimes you want to use a language that you already understand.

ThinkingPHP is a blog that sometimes includes CakePHP related material.

I’ve been thinking of developing two versions of an application–one in CakePHP and the other in Ruby on Rails. That might allow me to compare the two and decide which I like better. It might also be something of a waste of time. I’m not sure yet.

I’m curious about both frameworks and that might motivate me to learn more about them. On the other hand, I’ve limited amounts of time in my life and I want to do other things too.

We’ll see what happens.

Posted by Jim at July 23rd, 2006

Apparently some group in Germany is sticking miniature flags with George W. Bush’s picture into piles of dog poop.

The police are looking for them, but apparently there’s no law against that sort of thing so I’ve no idea what they’ll do if they find them.

Posted by Jim at July 21st, 2006

Via Urban Planet’s Grand Rapids forum…

Take a look at the this old map of Grand Rapids. In addition to streetcar lines and a general sense of what Grand Rapids looked like early last century, you’ll find that each part of town has been labeled with the ethnicity of it’s residents.

For more, take a look at the thread “Grand Rapids Then and Now.” If (like me) you’re looking at it as a guest, you’ll have to click on the pictures to look at them. Members get the pictures within the messages.

Posted by Jim at July 16th, 2006

Whitecaps Game

A couple weeks ago Kristen and I went to a Whitecaps game. While it won’t win any attendance records, we did have good time. The Whitecaps were behind (Visitors 1, Whitecaps 0) until the 7th inning–when someone managed to run home, making it a tie. In the 8th inning, they scored three more runs.

Hollyhock Lane Parade
The Hollyhock Lane parade is 72 years old this year, making it the longest running (without interruption) neigborhood Fourth of July parade.

Abby and Rebecca rode their bikes in the parade while Kristen and I walked next to them, pushing as needed.

Last year we just went to the parade, but this year we learned that the parade includes gathering in an alley (originally referred to as Hollyhock Lane) in the neighborhood for a speech by a local politician and eating cookies and popsicles.

Death of a Cat
A couple weeks ago we put one of our cats to sleep. He’d been having problems for around 6 years now. Always prone to getting infections of the bladder or ureathra, he now appeared to be on the way to kidney failure.

Rather than have him experience a death accompanied by pain and vomiting, we opted to have him put to sleep.

He’ll be remembered for many reasons. First of all because he loved attention from people and would jump on laps and stay even when you tried to get up. Second, because he was terrified of anything that resembled a guest, fleeing doorbells and visitors and hiding in remarkably inaccessible places.

Finally he’ll be remembered for places (outside the litter box) he peed (cats do that when sick). Babe is the reason that this blog often ends up being number one hit on Google for the words “cat pee toaster.”

It is, I admit, a dubious honor.

Still, I enjoyed having him around–most of the time.

Posted by Jim at July 9th, 2006

So anyway, I’ve got a list of stuff that I want to blog about in the near future, some of which I’ve been meaning to blog about for a couple weeks now:

1. Putting to sleep one of our cats
2. Watching a Whitecaps game
3. An amusing project idea that I’ve had
4. RPG’s–haven’t blogged on that for far too long
5. A restaurant review
6. Programming with Cakephp and Ruby on Rails
7. Ajax experiments
8. Attending the Hollyhock Lane parade on July 4

We’ll see if I get to any of it.

Posted by Jim at July 4th, 2006

Fourth of July started early this morning. At 2:40 AM, someone in our neighborhood started shooting off fireworks. I had been asleep before the fireworks started. Afterwards, I was definitely awake.

Though I’m not someone who typically does this, I decided that I was going outside to find out where it was coming from–half considering the possibility of calling the police, hoping that I could just ask the person to stop.

I walked down the sidewalk barefoot, in my pajamas, and more than a little grumpy.

Just a few houses down from us, I found the source of the problem. A man stood near the sidewalk while a woman and a young boy were sitting on the porch. I’m not sure precisely what he was saying, but it sounded like he was rhapsodizing about setting off fireworks alone with his son.

I’m guessing that that might have been the cause of the ridiculously early timing. There’s something about being the only person awake on a street in the summer.You can feel the breeze, see the darkened windows of the houses, and be awed at just how quiet it is.

I can imagine that it might be a great time to set off fireworks and feel like he’s setting them off alone with his family.

The trouble is, he’s not setting them off alone with his family. He’s setting them off when everyone else in the neighborhood is trying to sleep.

I told him so–sort of. I told him that I’d been sleeping and that it was nearly three in the morning. He took over the conversation from there, saying that all the really loud ones were done, that he was almost finished, and that it was, after all, only once a year.

I left. I didn’t want to discuss it. I just wanted him to stop.

By the time I went to bed, he had exploded the last one and the night was once again quiet, but, to be honest, I’m still grumpy.

Posted by Jim at July 3rd, 2006

In college, I remember hearing that someone had calculated that all humans living today were descended from everyone who lived before 1200 A.D.

That statistician (Joseph Chang) is referenced an article I recently read that points out some flaws in his ideas and mentions that currently statisticians guess that humanity’s most recent common ancestor lived during the Golden Age of Greece (and probably lived in Asia).

The article’s interesting in that it describes the logic and methodology the study followed (to a limited extent) and describes some of the obvious consequences (today’s Klansmen are undoubtedly descended from Africans).