as we may blog

Time is of the essence if your homebrew hasn’t started fermenting within 48 hours! If you don’t have backup yeast on hand to pitch into the fermenter, follow these handy steps to try to revive your beer.

1. Apply to several graduate schools
2. Review offers and attend the school that offers the best combination of research expertise and professional training opportunities
3. In your first year, join the community informatics group in your program
4. Purchase a Nalgene bottle at their fundraiser
5. Acquire a packet of dry beer brewing yeast—don’t worry about details like yeast type, age, or provenance
6. Boil your community informatics bottle for a couple of minutes, just long enough to convince yourself that there’s an outside chance it’s sterile after sitting in your cupboard for the last year and a half
   
7. Fill the bottle ¼ to ½ full with the boiled “sterile” water
8. Cool the just-boiled water and bottle as rapidly as you can in an ice bath until it hits 80 degrees or so
9. Pour the yeast packet in and wait 15 minutes
10. While waiting, boil a teaspoon or so of sugar on the stove in a little bit of water (I had light malt extract on hand, but you could probably use priming sugar or plain granulated sugar if you are in a tighter pinch than I)
11. Cool that mixture down to 80 degrees in the ice batch as quickly as possible
12. By now you’ll know if the dry yeast is viable—if you see some foaming in your CIC bottle, you should be good to go
13. Pour the sugar water mixture on top of the yeast, let sit for 30 minutes. I covered mine with aluminum foil and a rubber band in order to maintain my illusion of a sterile environment.
14. Finally, carefully pour your possibly sterile and definitely ghetto yeast concoction into the primary fermenter

With a little luck, fermentation should take off within a few hours, provided your fermenter is not too hot or cold. With a lot of luck, you might have kept everything sterile and your yeast might be close enough to the original strain to render your beer drinkable.

Check back in a month for the final results. Prost!

Related coverage:
Explosion at teh brewery! (3/29/2004)

me:
Morgan and Robert do a Book Report: Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

rlthomps:
?
where did you get that!

me:
the super-secret alumni watchtower

rlthomps:
:@
it was the foofiest book report I’ve ever delivered

me:
did you read Polar Bear Book: Ch 1-2 or not have time for that?

rlthomps:
didn’t have time
WHERE ARE YOU GETTING THIS INFORMATION?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!

me:
next week’s book report should be great
how buildings learn is fantastic
it should be required reading at SI

rlthomps:
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

me:
MOO HA HA

rlthomps:
you S.O.B.

me:
now i will blog about it

rlthomps:
:@

I think a lot about how people do stuff. I think about their motivations for doing something, the way they actually do the thing, and how they feel about it when they’re done (if they ever finish).

So imagine my delight when I came across this Microsoft tutorial today (incidentally, this came up when I searched for "cursor" in Visio Help): Plan a vegetable garden with Microsoft Visio.

My first thought was "Who the hell would ever do this?" As a newly-minted member of the workforce my immediate second thought was that the poor sucker who put this together probably had to endure a meeting or two about planning gardens with Visio.

This whole post is pretty much a strawman argument against designing around features instead of experiences. Just because one could conceivably use diagramming software to plan a garden doesn’t mean there’s any customer need or desire to do such a thing. I guess I should be happy there isn’t a Plan My Garden wizard.

All that said, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to share with my loyal blog readers my new knowledge about how to plant a garden. Good luck!

How to plant a vegetable garden

1. Set up the drawing page orientation
   Remember to go to your garden’s Page Setup if it is wider than it is tall!
2. Set a drawing scale
3. Outline the garden plot
   Don’t forget to use the Pencil tool on your garden if you want curved lines!
4. Create vegetable shapes
5. Store the vegetable shapes for later use
   Store those perennials in your Vegetables stencil! Remember that eggplant is Master.0.

Just a quick post to resources about CHI2006 in Montreal, where I’m at right now.

• CHI2006 flickr group
• The Other CHI Blog
• The real CHI blog

Those of you who liked Where’s Waldo? will enjoy playing Where’s Mattbot and Where’s Apete? with this photo. (Hint: we’re wearing white.)

Montreal is beautiful though the weather is ugly. Me and this last free Budweiser are wishing you a happy, user-centered week to come. Off to dinner and grabass with iv*rsys.

vs.

"Reificative connections can transcend the spatiotemporal limitations inherent in participation." –Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice

*sigh*