Woah, what happened to today? Quickest day of the week, that’s for sure. I’m just glad it’s Friday. Have a nice weekend everyone!

A few weeks ago I had a problem with my hard drives nearly all filling up. The biggest problem was that the drive my web server is on was completely full, which actually caused Apache to shut down. Turns out I had a really large error.log file from Apache. So once I deleted that file, reconfigured the log file settings to output less, and restarted the server all was well. But I figure it’s only a matter of time before I start running out of space again, so I just bought a new 1 TB hard drive from newegg.com. I’ve been watching both slickdeals.net and fatwallet.com for the last couple of weeks and finally decided this deal was good enough.

I had another hockey game last night, and guess what? We won again! That’s two in a row, which is now our longest winning streak of the season. With the win we moved to 5-13-0 (with two overtime loses) and actually moved out of last place. The team we beat is just ahead of us in the standings, but with 7 wins it may be hard to catch them. Currently we have 12 points, and they are tied with another team with 14 points. I’m hoping one of these teams loses next week during our bye week, and that we can continue our climb up the standings. We only have one more game before the playoffs, so it’s a good time for our team to get hot.

Despite my efforts last week to restart the fermentation of my homebrew, I opened the bucket last night to find it still stuck at 1.020. I decided to give up on any additional fermentation and decided to bottle the beer last night. To do this I used a racking tube and hose to siphon the beer from the fermentation bucket to the bottling bucket. Before starting the flow, I added a dissolved corn sugar mixture to the bottling bucket. I accidentally stopped the siphoning a little early, and only ended up with 4 gallons of beer in the bottling bucket. I tried restarting the siphon, but just ended up stirring up the sediment and decided to discard the remaining gallon.

With the beer transferred over to the bottling bucket, I reattached the hose to the spout on the bucket and attached the bottle filling wand to the other end. Filling the bottles was pretty simple, but a little messy if I accidentally overfilled them. Instead of using the sanitizing mixture provided with my kit, I sanitized the bottles using the dish washer. I didn’t add any detergent or sanitizer to it, just let it run with water and the sanitizing is actually done via the heat of the dry cycle.

When all of the bottles were filled and capped, I put them back into the boxes they arrived in, which should provide enough darkness for the carbonation stage that should last the next few weeks. I’m not putting them back into the same closet I used for fermentation and instead trying out a warmer corner of the house. Since I didn’t have the full 5 gallons transferred, I ended up with just over one and a half cases of beer. Not bad for a first attempt, now I just hope it carbonates and will taste good.

This past weekend was the best powder days we have seen so far this year. We headed up to the slopes early on Saturday morning with our friend Tracey who was visiting from Chicago. After a rather sketchy drive over Vail Pass we eventually made it over to Beaver Creek. There we met up with Tracey’s brother Jay who joined us last year in Steamboat. The snow never seemed to stop the entire time we were there, and the conditions were mostly ideal. There was some thick patchy fog at times, that really made it hard to see the terrain, but we had many great runs!

Originally we planned to drive back over the pass to Breckenridge after our day in Beaver Creek, but decided that might not be the best idea with all of the snow that was falling. So we opted to switch to a new hotel on the western side of the pass. One lesson we quickly learned as we pulled out of the parking lot was that there is a place called Eagle-Vail that is close to Beaver Creek and another place just called Eagle that is 20 miles further west. Unfortunately the hotel we booked was way out in Eagle and not in the nearby Eagle-Vail. I wonder if this is a common problem?

After an uneventful evening in Eagle, we woke up early Sunday morning to make the drive back closer to Denver with a stop for a day on the slopes at Keystone. We ran into a few traffic issues along the way, but eventually arrived around 9 am for an early start. On one of Tracey’s prior visits we took her out on the snowcat rides to the Outback Bowls, which she (and everyone else) wanted to do again. We immediately worked our way out there, and even though we discovered that the snowcat was not running, we decided to make the short uphill hike so we could drop down into the bowls anyway.

I was so glad we decided to hike, as the powder was incredible! I’d say at the top we were in close to a foot of fresh snow and later in the trees we found spots with at least a foot and a half! We had so much fun there we decided to take the lift and subsequent hike once again to do it all over. Unfortunately this run didn’t turn out to be as much fun for one in our group. Tracey snagged a rock on her way down, twisting her leg, ripping off her ski, and as we later found out breaking a bone in her ankle. We were as far out as you can possibly get and she couldn’t stand. Fortunately a nice local stopped and alerted ski patrol to her exact location. The remaining members of the group still managed to have a few more awesome runs on our way back to the parking lot, before we met up with Tracey at the medical center to receive the bad news. She was planning to come back out in a month for some more skiing, so let’s hope for a speedy recovery.

Despite the unfortunate accident, we had an amazing time. There was so much snow I’m not sure how you couldn’t have love it. And as they say, if there wasn’t a little danger involved than it wouldn’t be any fun. Here are some pictures Kim snapped throughout the weekend.

Beaver Creek on Dwellable

Keystone on Dwellable

For over a week, I’ve been battling with Bloglines to get my site feed to update properly. According to them, it hasn’t updated since before the start of the year. At first I thought this was related to the WP Super Cache problems from last week, but I’m pretty sure that’s no longer the problem as I have actually disabled the plugin trying to get things working again. I emailed Bloglines a few days ago to seek assistance and have heard nothing back. I’ve forced pings and still nothing.

I feel bad because I know some people are subscribed through Bloglines and I hope they don’t think that I’m not writing. If they aren’t handling my feed correctly, I wonder how many others are not updating either. So I exported my entire list of subscriptions and imported them into Google Reader. And I must say that so far I am really happy with the switch. Google Reader updates faster than Bloglines does, and I actually enjoy their layout and added features. I haven’t found a good way to list everything into a categorized blogroll, but that’s a minor issue. I think this switch may be permanent.

I was hoping to bottle my homebrew this week. However, after I opened up the fermenter I took a specific gravity reading of around 1.020. I was hoping to be in the neighborhood of 1.010 according to the directions. It appears that my beer is a victim of a stalled fermentation, likely due to the temperature being too low. I figured the basement would have definitely been too cool, so I placed the beer in a first floor closet off of the office. I was hoping that this would keep it around 65 degrees, which should be a satisfactory temperature. However, I noticed that the thermometer on the bucket read under 60 degrees. I guess I should have watched it a little closer.

So, I managed to bring the temperature back up to around 65. I also spun/rocked the bucket a little bit to stir things up, and finally wrapped it up in an old blanket. I then put it back in the closet and I’m hoping after this weekend that it fermented a little more. The temperature seems to be warmer than it was earlier, so that’s a good sign. If this doesn’t work, I guess I’ll bottle it anyway, though the alcohol content won’t be as high as it should. Currently it is around the level of 3.2 beer.

Something strange happened last night, not only did my hockey team win but we beat the third place team in the league. For those of you not following along, my team is in last place and has been struggling the whole season. Even after the win, we are likely multiple games from moving up in the standings. I’d know for sure if they posted any of the scores from last night on the website. One thing that definitely helped was a sub we had on our team for the night, who was quite a hockey player. I guess he played at KU, which explains the talent, though I didn’t even know that there was a Jayhawk hockey team. Personally, I had a great game though I’m not sure I came away with any points.

The second that Barack Obama became our 44th president, the official website of the White House (www.whitehouse.gov) officially turned over to a new, fresh design. It obviously has a look and feel similar to the president’s official website that we’ve grown very familiar with over the past months. I’m a huge fan of the design and love that there is now a blog right on the front page (complete with rss feed). The website code also validates, which is great news for a geek like myself. Good to see some that someone involved embraces all of this technology.T

As I mentioned at the beginning of last week, my brother came to town with seven on his friends for a weekend of skiing and snowboarding. Many of the group were the same members from the last time they came out this past March. The itinerary was nearly the same as the last time: out and about in Denver Thursday afternoon/night, followed by an early wake-up call Friday morning to drive up to Breckenridge and get some turns in on the slopes. After that, we checked into our condo (Pine Ridge) and immediately took a soak in the hot tub. Later in the evening we headed into town for some dinner and drinks, and then retired to the condo fairly early to get up energized for the following day.

Though we didn’t get any new snow while we were in town, we did have some beautiful weather both days with hardly a cloud in the sky and the temperature hovering around the freezing mark. The second day ended in a similar way as the first, a trip to the hot tub, followed by dinner (which we ordered in this time), and then from there down into town for drinks. My brother and his friends are notorious for taking advantage of bottle service at the bars, and this weekend was no exception to that rule. Having never been a part of this service, I found it to be highly overpriced (which I already knew), but I fully enjoyed the reserved table for the evening and no waiting in line. Kim and I headed out after the first bottle, but I’m told the evening didn’t end there for the rest of the group. I did get woken up when they returned to the condo, but at least I got to enjoy the late night pizza rolls.

Though most of the group was looking a little rough come Sunday morning, I think they all had a great time. I know that I did and hope they all decide to visit again next year.