Baby Ryan is doing great - he's gaining weight and looking a lot healthier. His Jaundice has gone right away too. If only he'd sleep more than 2 hours! He's also starting to look around a lot more and follow us as we walk around - he has a strong neck already, much stronger than you'd expect.

Yesterday I scored 100 long neck beer bottles with crown seals for $20 which is awesome. I blasted half of them out yesterday and they're now sitting submerged in Napisan to kill anything that's living in them and to loosen any crud that's in them. I'm curious to see how they come up, I haven't tried Napisan before.

I did end up brewing today. I moved my APA into a clean fermenter to condition - hopefully this will reduce the sediment a bit. I put down a batch of Blackrock Miners Stout with some steeped grains and extra hops. I'm also trying out the Nottingham yeast for the first time.

The kids had a great time zooming up and down the drive while I brewed and Liam sampled the different ingredients, he liked the light malt extract, but pulled all sorts of faces for the hops and spent grain (I don't know why he wanted some of that but anyway - I bet he doesn't any more!).

The kids had a great time today out in the yard playing with their sandpit. Liam terrorised Emmy a bit and tried to seal her in the sandpit (it's a clamshell design) - she wasn't impressed and lots of screaming ensued.

I put a tap in the hot water system today so I can get hot water outside for brewing. My first attempt failed as I was using a T piece as a joiner with a plug in one inlet. I thread taped it and removed it all and then re-thread taped it, it still leaked - on closer inspection I found there was a fracture on one inlet... I replaced it for an elbow, which looks a bit odd - but it doesn't leak!

brewbox keeps crashing for some reason. Today I pulled it down off the fridge and booted it with a screen. I disabled all the unused stuff in BIOS and also removed a lot of useless crap like IRDA and Bluetooth. The system is now running an even more minimal set of services. Hopefully this nails it and it will be reliable - otherwise I will have to junk it and use the other NEC 1U server which isn't as suitable for the task (no DB9 serial, no parallel, more power usage)

My plan for tomorrow is to throw the APA that's in the fridge into a second fermenter to condition. I've read a lot about this method - hopefully it will help reduce the sediment in the bottle for me. As I'm bottle conditioning the beer I can't run it through a filter before bottling, otherwise there won't be any little yeasties in there to carbonate the beer for me...

To brew or not to brew as well... hrm... It's nearly as much work, I've got to wash the gear anyway to do the transfer!

Off to work as usual. Hope I get a seat. I'm keen to do some more work on my invoice parser/query tool.

It's a tool used to parse ACCPAC for DOS invoices and stick their contents in a database in a sensible schema that I can report on. Once I can reproduce an invoice, the most basic function - I can move to phase 2, integrating parsing of the payments report and collating that with the invoices in several management reports. This involves porting one of my previous scripts from PHP/MySQL to Python/Postgres. Phase 3 is integration of internet orders data into the bargain. (Python, PHP, Javascript)

Once at work, I'm on a customer job. Writing a database synchronisation script thats designed to replicate a MySQL database into Postgres based around a FIFO table in the MySQL DB. FIFO Records are created by triggers in the MySQL database. The script needs some smarts because of the convoluted way that the developers of the software based around this database do updates. Apparently they didn't know about update - or weren't prepared to plumb in the necessary mechanics to allow the software to decided that it's updating. Their solution: DELETE the record and INSERT every time... Joy.

brewbox (fridge control server) seems to be working away happily - although I haven't connected the controller yet. I need to test the compressor lag routine in the control script. I want to make sure it works before I plug the fridge into it, in case I damage the fridges compressor by turning it on straight after it's been turned off.

Today we set up the pool on the patio for Liam and Emily to play it. What a hot day it was!

Emily loved it, she was content to sit there and splash with her feet - usually nothing keeps her occupied long. Kel found a cute pink hat for her to wear.

Liam stayed there for hours hopping in and out. He got pretty upset when it was time to go inside. Big, big Tantrums!

I bottled my Pilsner - I'm not sure how well it's going to go. It does taste a bit odd. Hopefully the yeast hasn't gone into autolysis... It was in the fermenter a week extra. Very very cloudy too - probably due to me dropping the spent grain from the flavor pack into the boil. The sieve I was pouring the steep mix through fell into the fermenter.

I took the day off today. I had acrued extra hours last week.

We bought Liam a little Roary the Racing Car toy that came with a DVD. That DVD has been on repeat for hours!

I bottled my APA (American Pale Ale) - It should taste really good. It's still a bit cloudy though. I started off a Pilsner as well. It's bubbling away nicely now.

I came across a weird file on the server. 78 PETA Bytes! Yes. 78PB. 87,806,822,618,104,772. Pretty impressive since the partition is only 800GB.