Got a bunch of new photos up. This new camera sure takes beautiful pics!
This week the Great British Beer Festival has been on at Olympia, which is very close to our house. I think my favourite has been the dark German wheat beer I had last night. Delicious! Might see if I can make such a beast.
And if my head is anything to go by, steer clear of the (12%!) barley wine.
I bottled the Canadian Blonde last night. Should be a nice, light beer with loads of hop aroma. I bottled with 100g glucose priming and a handful of Fuggles hops boiled in for a few minutes. Tasted pretty good when I took a gravity reading. 4% or so alcohol.
Looks like the UK is finally getting a propaganda booklet about terrorism and emergencies. As usual, the poms are years behind everyone else. What's more, it doesn't sound like it's going to be a fridge magnet. And as my mate Kev pointed out, they'll probably plagiarise it from someone else's out-of-date information.
I want my fridge magnet that tells me how to duck and take cover!
Phew. Mammoth photo upload session and here they are.
So has summer finally arrived? BBC weather forecast has five days of sunshine. First time I've seen that in a long time! We're going cycling on Saturday, so some sun would be good!
So now Mr Latham is trying to prove he's not beholden to US policy. So where's the condemnation of Howard voting the US policy line with esteemed suckhole company of Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau. Now I wonder how much of those countries' economies ride on US aid...
If Latham condemns, I'll eat this blog entry.
I've used allmusic.com to find out information about musicians, albums and songs for years. It's always been a clunky, slow web site. The most annoying thing was that they used Javascript instead of a href for links, so you couldn't open another window to explore something else later, couldn't bookmark individual pages and it was difficult to send a link to a friend.
Well now it's got even worse. Their recent "upgrade" to the site has made it slower and even dodgier. They now state that they only support Internet Exploder on Windows platforms. Outrageous!
So does anyone know of an alternative that is as good and comprehensive as allmusic.com for information about artists? I can imagine some online project like IMDB for music would be great. A Wiki type thing would be perfect, with strict templates.
I brewed a Coopers Canadian Blonde kit on Sunday night with 500g glucose and 500g pale malt. This morning the yeast foam was all gone and I was worried something was wrong, so I chucked in another dry yeast packet just to be sure. Tasting it tonight, it actually seems to be completely fermented out. Amazing!
I guess the glucose really is easier than sugar for the yeast. This is a 48 hour fermentation. Incredible stuff, and tastes alright too. I guess doing a nice big yeast starter helps too.
Now I have to find enough bottles to get it into bottles.
Spoke to a very helpful woman at the AEC and it turns out Holly and I are enrolled to vote, just not at the address we expected. I'm sure we enrolled and registered as overseas voters from my parents' address, but it turns out we're enrolled at our old place in Stanmore. This probably means that all our previous votes were discarded.
The good news, however, is it means our votes are a bit more use in lower house elections. At my parents' place, it's super-safe Liberal whereas Stanmore (Grayndler) is somewhat less safe Labor.