May 2004

The past few days have been filled with endless amounts of unpacking and cleaning, sorting and organizing. My apartment is really starting to feel a bit more “homey” now that there aren’t as many boxes gracing my living room and dining area. As soon as they’re all gone, I’ll post some pictures.

I finally found a Wal-Mart yesterday. It’s about 12 miles from my apartment, but in the DC area that translates to a 40 minute drive (in non-rush hour traffic!). I bought some patio furniture for my balcony, and last night enjoyed a Guinness out there waiting for the storm to roll in. After about an hour sitting out there, with lots of lightning in the distance, one hell of a storm pushed through and was gone in less than five minutes.

Speaking of Guinness, I ordered my kegerator yesterday. I actually found the same model on Amazon for the same price, but with free shipping. Also, Amazon has a local distribution center near to Northern Virginia (it’s actually in Northern Delaware). Interestingly, their websites are probably hosted at the data center where I’ll be working! Anyway, shipping should take only a few days, which is much less time than all of the California vendors I found. The Guinness hardware will arrive a bit later, so I was thinking about tapping a domestic (or microbrewed) beer first, any suggestions?

I was supposed to go to an Angie Aparo concert tonight in Richmond with but unfortunately it was canceled. I’m probably still headed down to Fredericksburg to hang out, should be fun!

So much has changed in the week since I last updated. Luckily most of the changes have been quite positive and all is currently going well!

I graduated from RPI on Saturday morning. I remember everything feeling quite surreal, kinda like I was dreaming at the time. When I took my degree from President Jackson and shook her hand, I felt what could best be described as an out-of-body experience. Of course, it could’ve been the heat, and the fact we had been standing out in it with our black robes for more than 2.5 hours at that point.

There was no time to spare, and directly following graduation and a quick lunch with my folks at Brown’s (formerly Troy Pub) we picked up the moving truck and started loading the belongings of my small 15th Street apartment. It took a little while, thanks to a large couch, desk, and a few downpour thunderstorms, but we finally got the truck loaded. My mom and sister headed back to Ohio (my sister had classes that Monday) and my dad, Minnie and I set out for Washington DC. I was a little distressed at first about leaving so quickly and not being able to hang out with friends one last time… but I realized that in the few days before graduation I got to spend time with the friends who really count and that was awesome

The first stop was Time Warner’s office in Albany to return the cable box and modem. Of course by the time we got there they were closed. I still have the stuff, not sure how I will get it back to them at this point. Driving went pretty smoothly, and we ended up spending the night somewhere in central New Jersey. We set out early Sunday morning and made it here by 2 PM. Dad paid a couple of guys here to help us unload the truck, and after two hours the truck was empty and my new apartment filled with boxes.

Let me say the apartment is really nice. I was expecting carpet but found wood floors instead, which is fine with me because I think that adds a bit of character to the place. I was happy that my apartment looked just as nice as the model I was shown a few weeks ago when I visited. The appliances are all less than one year old, the walls freshly painted, and there is plenty of space to do whatever I want. For those of you who saw it, my apartment in Troy is only slightly bigger than my new living room! I’ll get photos posted soon I promise! We went out Monday morning to furniture shop (and ended up buying a nice bedroom set, new matress, and dining room set!). So for now there is a lot of unpacking, putting away, and organizing to be done before this place will feel like home.

I took dad out to Dulles airport yesterday for his flight back to Dayton, I’m hoping that they will come visit me a bit more often than they did in Troy. I think it would be cool for them to come down for July 4th… we could take the metro (there’s a station 1 mile from my apartment) into DC and watch the fireworks over the Capitol. If anyone else wants to visit for any reason at any time, stop on by! I have a spare bed

All righty, back to unpacking and such.

I took the keg back today from Saturday night’s Yuengling party. I’ve spent the past few weeks researching home brewing, kegerators, etc. I am definitely in the market for some sort of kegerator. Initially I looked for kits I could use to convert a mini-fridge into a complete Kegerator. Unfortunately I had a hard time finding a mini-fridge big enough to support a full size (1/2) keg. I’m thinking about spending a little extra money and buying a real kegerator that is designed for just that purpose, and can hold a variety of kegs (one 1/2, two 1/4’s, or 2 5 gallons).

I’ve been interested in home brewing for a while (since meeting Bob McCouch), but haven’t done too much research on the subject until recently. While there are many intricacies involved, it seems to be a lot like the challanges of cooking where a slight variation in ingredients can drastically change the finished product. It’s just that with home brewing the time scale is slowed down significantly. If I ever want to get seriously into home brewing, I will need a way to tap the kegs.

The added benefit of having a kegerator around is that I can tap my favorite commercial beer should I choose (e.g. Guinness). Both of these are possible thanks to having utilities included in my rent at my new apartment. For home brewing, it’s the heating, water, and refridgeration that make the brew and that would all be free. The only expenses I would have would be the CO₂ (nitrogen/CO₂ mix in the case of Guinness) and the ingredients.

Going into this I thought that tapping a keg of Guinness would be pretty expensive because of all the custom equipment required, but in fact it turns out that it would be an extremely good deal! I just wanted to type this out so I would have it as a reference, and in case anyone else out there cared. For reference I will use a can from a 4-pack I bought recently at Price Chopper. Including taxes and deposit, the 4-pack cost $7.23, which is $1.80 per 14.9 oz can. That works out to $1.93 per pint.

A 1/2 keg of Guinness from Norm’s Beer and Wine goes for $130. Unlike the New York mandated $130 deposit on kegs, Virginia has no law like that! Anyway, each keg serves up 15.5 gallons of beer, or ~124 pint glasses-worth. That comes out to about $1.05/pint of Guinness, a savings of almost $0.90/pint, or about $111 for the same volume of beer! In fact, since I’m saving almost half, I could almost afford to buy two kegs for the price of the same volume of canned beer.

I also asked about some of my other favorites, shown below:

Boddingtons $115
Yuengling $73

I called a few other stores in the area, and they couldn’t match Norm’s prices. Anyway, as if you needed another reason to visit exciting me, you can come for a few free quality beverages!

Before I end this, fellow Guinness fans will be just as baffled as I about this fact (straight from the Guinness homepage):

The UK is the biggest consumer of GUINNESS® followed by Ireland in second place, and Nigeria in third, and the USA in fourth

Saturday night the guys at 162 10th and I threw a Yuengling keg party. This was significant for many reasons, but these three specifically:

1) Most college parties feature cheap cans of beer like Miller Gold Draft (MGD), Natty Light, Coors, Milwaukee’s Best (Beast), Ginny. For those unfamiliar with the product, Yuengling is a far superior lager that is a little more classy than the typical college party beer. Very tasty stuff, and not too much more in price per keg than the cheap stuff. With the tap rental (and excluding deposits) it only cost about $70 for a full 1/2 keg.

2) We’ve been talking about doing this since the middle of last semester, specifically mentioning the Yuengling part. A little initiative and no homework was all it took to get the ball rolling!

3) Since just about everyone (to include most of the underclassmen) have departed RPI for the summer, this was both a great way to get together with a lot of seniors we haven’t seen in a while, and a refreshing end to the Senior BBQ that lacked the aforementioned underclassmen who tend to lose control of their alcohol intake at parties.

It was definitely a good time, something I wish we had done a while ago! Maybe sometime down the road I’ll throw a Guinness keg party for the folks I work with, alumni/friends in the DC area, etc. Mmmm… Guinness

“Folks in the Netherlands have started piercing their eyeballs…and here’s a photo.”

I think we may have reached the “this has gone too far” point with body piercings with this one. Here is some feedback from folks in this soon-to-be hotly contested concept.

I know the eye doesn’t have many nerve endings for pain sensation, but why risk damaging your vision for a piercing that few people may ever notice? I wonder if you can feel it against your lower eyelid everytime you blink, similar to a mis-aligned contact… I would be curious to hear more about this if anyone has tried it.

I just added , a news feed from NewsForge about Linux and open source efforts. They feature a lot of good business news about the industry. I think it’s a pretty good read!