Matthew Kocsis

I decided to do another ride today. The route included breakfast at the Marion airport for the 2007 Fly-In/Drive-In Breakfast. There were some neat planes and there were takeoffs and landings almost every minute. Again I wish I would have taken my camera along. Afterwards I headed north to Central City, got some Gator-aid, and then turned west and biked the 13 miles to Center Point. There was an easterly south-wind so this was the best part of the trip. At Center Point I turned into the wind and fought it all the way home. Total 46 miles in about 4 hours. My body was not ready for the trip today, so I’m really hurting.

Route Map 

In preparation for RAGBRAI in three weeks I’ve been *thinking* about cycling a bit more than usual. For me the hardest part is leaving; once I’m on the road I’m good. Anyway, today I did a 44 mile loop north of Cedar Rapids going through Alburnett, Center Point, Palo, and then back to Marion in just under 3.5 hours, including breaks.

Gmaps Route

Overall the trip was good, There was a minor wind from the east but it wasn’t too strong. As usual, I got attacked several times by little red and black birds that either liked or hated my also red and black helmet. One neat part of the trip was passing the Palo Nuclear Power Plant. Unfortunately the trip ended rather poorly due to Blair’s Ferry road between Palo and CR. It is 2 lanes, no shoulders, and even though most drivers went out of their way to give me ample space there were those select few who liked to get as close as possible to me. I see why Steve’s dad carries ball bearings on his motorcycle.

I spent a few hours last night cleaning up my basement and sorting supplies. I’m planning on setting up my test station for the DRINK system this weekend. I have the physical workbench set up, however I need to build my water-feed system to simulate flow through our Vision 2000 flowmeters (I also need to add thank-yous to the teamdrink homepage for the companies that gave us free or discounted products).

In addition to the flow simulation, I have need to take a serious look at the code for our ezLCD-001 module, and well as figuring out how to get our bioscrypt biometric module working… I’m still having trouble even getting it to speak to me over a serial connection. I might take a step back and try to get it working using the provided C API instead of trying to cypher the protocol manually. To accomplish all of this, I’m probably going to have to re-build many of the wires that we made for the unit do I can improve reliability and give myself a bit more room to move parts around. Right now the interior of the unit is so cramped that I had to tape the LCD controller to the inside.

Well, the flights might not have all worked out, and I didn’t get all the pictures and wine that I wanted, but overall I just got back from a great trip to San Jose/San Francisco/Napa Valley. I got to see Brian, Ian, and John, and see an amazing city. I’ve posted pictures on my picture page here:

California Pictures

Included are pictures of my flight over, San Jose and area, San Fransisco (including the newly collapsed bridge section), and some of Napa Valley. Enjoy!

So I’m trying to browse the internet, and my new PC is really slow. This shouldn’t be the case, so I open up Task Manager to find out what’s going on. Hrmm, my pagefile is 1.9 GB. That’s a bit high, especially since I have 4Gb of RAM. So, I look at individual tasks, and what a suprise, firefox is using up 1,337,608 KB of RAM. That is unacceptable for any software. I haven’t even browsed through that much internet content yet using it. Great work guys, good job writing crappy code. If this software would have been submitted in my ECE 264 class, it would have gotten a zero.

Well, it’s the first brew of the season for me… or rather the first brew of the year. Come to think of it, I haven’t brewed beer since 2005. Anyways, It’s time to start again. Today’s goal: a full flavor ESB.

I searched the BrewBoard online and came up with a reasonable recipe – a good malt/grain/hops combination. I decided to go with an extract recipe this time so I can get back into brewing without too many new things.

The Recipe I picked:
10lb Maris Otter malted barley
1/2 lb malted wheat
1/2 lb Crystal
1 oz Goldings @60m
1/2 oz EKG @60m
1/2 oz EKG @30m
1 oz fuggles @2m

I found a place down in Iowa City on 2nd street that sells beer making supplies, however unfortunately it’s only a small selection of ingredients and supplies that another shop brings by weekly. Since they had nothing on my list, and wanting to start the next day, I decided to make the recipe up as I went. Here it is :)

3:00 PM Sunday 4-22-07
Cleaned carboy, started water on the stove.
 

5:16 PM
Mashed grain at 161F for 30 minutes (out at 5:46PM)
1/2 lb Briess 60L Crystal Malt, 6 Row
1/4 lb Briess Black Patent Malt, 6 Row Lovibond 480
I didn’t have a mill, so I used my blender. This was a mistake, it made it far too fine. Next time I will use a rolling pin or something similar to crush the grain instead of making it into a puree.
  

8:03 PM
Added malt extract.
3.3 lb Muton’s Light LME
3.3 lb Muton’s Amber LME
1/2 lb Munton’s Wheat DME
 

8:46 PM – Hop Schedule:
60m: 1 oz Kent Goldings pellet (alpha 6.9 %) – 8:46pm
60m: 1/2 oz Saaz pellet (alpha 3.6%) – 8:46pm
30m: 1/2 oz Perle pellet (alpha 7.6%) – 9:21pm
02m: 1 oz Cascade Leaf (alpha 6.0%) – 9:45pm
 

I cooled the wort by putting it in a cold water bath (which I refreshed periodically) and using a fan to blow cold air over the pot. Yes, there was a lid.

2:00 AM Monday 4-23-07
I transfered the wort into my carboy and pitched Wyeast 1056 American.
 

There was something wierd about the iodine I used for the airlock, but then again, it’s iodine. I think it was cloudy doe to temperature or a small amount of starch that somehow got in it.

The wort did not begin to show signs of fermentation until thursday 4-26-07.

More Pictures

Updates will follow…

I finally went shopping and installed the basics for a workbench to continue developing the DRINK system. I have my development PC, 2 lights, networking, and some work area rigged up. My plan is to hook a bucket-fed water system to simulate beer for the rest of the development process.

A picture will be linked to shortly.

Another fun storm rolled through tonight – but this time I had the random idea to grab my camera, a tripod, and brave the weather and shoot aimlessly into the sky until something came out. Actually, I tried to time it a bit more, but I still ended up with over half of my pictures black. Oh well.

The only issue I had was keeping steady – while shooting out my back door (it was raining, so I needed to be inside) the tripod didn’t fit, so I held the camera. Since I was shooting at 1/10 sec, some blurred. Sorry, I still think they look cool.

Well, let’s see if I can get this published before the power blinks. Gotta love midwest weather, eh?

(click for larger)

Very loud thunder, green skies, tornado watch until 9pm tonight. I just took some video on my camera, but I had to take it from the back of my place due to the front being pounded with water. I am the located at the big mark on the map just north-east of Cedar Rapids.

I’d also like to add a great image from last fall in West Lafayette.

Well, It’s becoming impossible to use my desktop – mainly because of a 2+ year old Windows XP install, however still partly due to slower overall hardware. I decided last month that I ws going to purchase a new computer, and today that time came (as long as Visa lets to charge go through). Here’s a little comparison.

What I had (15,000 ft view):

• Antec Case
• AMD XP 2100+
• 1.0 GB PC2100
• Matrox 32MB dual head (VGA + DVI) graphics
  -note: I already purchased a new video card for this computer, It will be installed when I install Linux
• SB Audigy (yes, the original)
• MSI Mainboard with onboard RAID 0/1
• 2 40GB HDD (mirrored)
• 2 160GB HDD

Overall it’s a great computer, it just can’t handle XP and Virus Scan anymore. It will be a very good Linux workstation

What I bought:

• Antec P180B case
• Intel BLKD975XBX2KR Mainboard (RAID 0/1/0+1/5)
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.4GHz
• 4GB DDR2 800 (PC 6400)
• EVGA 640 8800GTS Graphics (DirectX 10 compatable)
• Seasonic 650W quad rail power supply
• 7 Segate SATA II 320GB Hard Drives
• External Sony DVD Burner
• Belkin 1500VA UPS

And for other PCs in the Apt:

• 2 Intel PCI Pro 1000 NIC
• Netgear GS108 10/100/1000 8 port switch
• Belkin 900VA UPS

I will be keeping my 2 VGA 17″ Samsung SyncMaster 710N LCDs until I’m ready to buy a pair of 24″ widescreen LCDs

wow, lots of money. The good thing is that this PC will last me quite some time just as the old one did.