We are making Riesling this year. There were a bunch of grapes still left on the vines, and it was just too tempting to pick them. The bunches came off easily – we didn’t need clippers, just a good tug.

So I don’t forget it, here are the details about our 2010 Riesling:

• Picked on 11/13/10.
• 17 crates, about 30 pounds/crate.
• Crushed on 11/13/10 late afternoon.
• Pressed on 11/14/10 late morning.
• Yield – 25 gallons

Some additional info on sugar content:

Started out with Brix of 20,
Added 10 cups of corn sugar which brought the brix up to 22
Added 20 teaspoons of Yeast Nutrient
and the starter yeast was Lalvin, kv1-1116 a good all around white wine yeast. 

Tags: Riesling, wine making

I installed eight 5″ recessed can lights in my living room about five years ago. I haven’t yet had to replace a single one of the bulbs I first installed. The GE Reveal R30 flood lamps have lasted a long time, and provided a really pleasant, pure white light.

In my new kitchen can lights, a cheap contractor pack of Sylvania 65W flood lights didn’t even last one year before all 13 bulbs burnt out. I’ve replaced them all one-by-one with the GE Reveal bulbs, and none have burnt out, over one year later.

I’m sure the performance has a lot to do with having dimmers. I’ll bet it’s a lot more gentle on the filaments when you turn on a light with the dimmer down to begin with. Even still, these Reveal bulbs are great.

Tags: flood lamps, GE Reveal, light bulbs

Funny, from www.despair.com:

Tags: humor

As much as I hate David Stern and the NBA for moving the Sonics, I still enjoy watching the best players during the playoffs. Since I don’t have cable TV, and am often too busy on weekends to catch the network television games on ABC, the last two years I’ve purchased the playoff games online to watch on my PC. Forget about it this year, as the NBA Download Store is closed for business.

To turn this off is just plain stupid for them. It’s like refusing royalty checks for music or books you’ve created. The last two years, each playoff game was available for download one or two days following the live game. To offer this service for a fee simply extended their revenue generation from each game.

The NBA really does have a flawed business model. I hope David Stern continues to screw it up and run it into the ground so everyone can see what an idiot he truly is.

Tags: NBA

Every year but this one, I seem to catch the TV when the movie The Ten Commandments is on, and I’m always reminded how much I like the story of Passover. It’s such a fantastical tale, so far out of reality in so many ways. I always wonder what the hell really happened at that time, because so much of it is over the top.

Lots of questions such as:

• How could a mass exodus of over 600,000 people not leave a single piece of archaeological evidence?
• Just where was the Land of Goshen? Nobody knows.
• Which pharaoh was the oppressive one in Exodus? He is never named, and no one knows for certain. Seems like an important detail.
• Why would the Jews start worshiping a golden cow (an ancient Egyptian goddess/god, Hathor/Apis)? Weren’t they JEWS?
• How could slaves, who only knew how to make bricks, immediately begin fighting battles with Semitic tribes in Sinai and win?
• How did slaves have gold to make a golden calf? The bible also mentions that the slaves had slaves themselves. Huh?

Over the last year I’ve read a few books dealing with Egyptology and links between ancient Egypt and the ancient Hebrews, which have painted a more realistic picture of what might have happened. There are of course some books, such as this one, which try to explain the miracles/plagues in the Exodus with natural causes, but the books below take the bible less literally, and combine to describe a much more plausible scenario.

• Secrets of the Exodus – The Egyptian Origins of the Hebrew People
• The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran

What I Believe Probably Happened

Based on my readings, I believe a more likely account of what happened is the following:

• In the 18th Dynasty, Pharaoh Akhenaten (Akhenaton) turns Egypt upside down:
  • He moves the capitol to a brand new city (Akhetaten),
  • disbands the ancient priests,
  • destroys old gods and statues in the ancient temples,
  • creates a new monotheistic religion worshiping the solar disc Aten (Aton),
  • establishes a cult following that flocks from far away lands to live in the new capitol.
• Akhenaten’s religion is more approachable now that the leadership hierarchy is abandoned, making for more avid followers. Sexuality is not oppressed, animal sacrifice is banned (implying tolerance to living things), art of this time is more emotionally expressive, and individuals can take a more active role in their own spirituality (houses at Akhetaten have been discovered to have prayer niches in entry ways to worship the Aten).
• Akhenaten’s capitol becomes a multilingual, cosmopolitan hub, attracting people from Persia, Babylon, and more. Everyone wants to see this utopia.
• With his focus on the new capital and religion, the rest of Egypt is neglected and becomes bitter and estranged. The priests who once had much power are angry.
• Akhenaten’s right-hand man, the grand vizier Ay (also revered as a god), is placed in charge of the rest of Egypt, travels the country, and gets an earful from the disgruntled Egyptians.
• Akhenaten dies after a rule of 17 years, and is succeeded by Smenkhkare (possibly his brother) for just a few years before death. Smenkhkare attempts to continue the religion of Aten.
• Tutankhaten (King Tut) is too young to effectively rule, so vizier Ay acts as the real leader.
• Ay understands the current state of affairs in Egypt. Much of the population is angry, the border lands are being attacked by invading tribes, and he needs to do something about this strange cult (that still reveres him) occupying this newly built city. The other Egyptians are ready to attack and destroy the heretics and their city, and Ay does not want civil war.
• His solution is to give the Atenists their own territory, in Canaan, and use them as a proxy army to help reinforce the Northern border that has been under attack.
• They need to leave quickly, the city is to be abandoned.
• Possibly under the direction of generals Horemheb and Ramesses (future Pharaohs), the Atenists are led north, across the Red Sea, and into Sinai. They are given military aid, supplies (manna? quail?), and training.
• While in the desert, some Atenists revolt and desire to return to ancient Egypt (the Golden Calf episode).
• Tutankhaten changes his name to Tutankhamum, moves the capitol back to Thebes, and abandons the new religion, reinstating the old gods and priests. Ay declares Akhetaten a “cursed city” and it is abandoned (not destroyed), lost and forgotten, much of it buried under sand, until the 1700’s when finally rediscovered again.
• Time and distance begin to separate the Atenists from their Egyptian past. The strange blend of multinational Atenists evolve their own language based on Egyptian. Lack of knowledge to train scribes in hieroglyphs leads to Hebrew as a shorthand version of Egyptian. Monotheism is continued.
• More time and distance. The Babylonians destroy the Jewish temple, battle and push into Egypt, and exile the Jews to Persia.
• Under Babylonian rule, where it is not permissible to speak favorably of their Egyptian past, the Jewish scribes are forced to alter their stories. Figures from Babylon (Abraham) play a more prominent role in history, and Egypt’s role is deprecated and made negative.

Justifications

The justifications for this are numerous. A few are listed here:

• Tutankhamun’s tomb contained several artifacts similar to Hebrew ones:
  • An ark, with wooden poles, similar to the ark of the covenant. One inner box contained gold foil panels with angelic figures having wings facing each other, similar to the angels on the ark of the covenant.
  • The ark was covered in a fringed shawl, similar to tzitzit.
  • The mummy had a golden skull cap, similar to the Kippah. The mummy also had a headpiece, bracelets on the arm, and rings covering the middle two fingers, similar to Tefillin.
• Ay and Aten (Aton) are linguistically related to the words for God in Hebrew. Ay is spelled with two reeds in hieroglyphs , similar to the word God spelled in Hebrew with two Yods י י . The yod is the “Y” sound, and so God in Hebrew is essentially unpronounceable (“YY”). In order to make it audible, it is pronounced “Adonai” instead. “Adon” means lord in Hebrew, and is very similar to Aten/Aton. Adon-Ay (Aton-Ay) is a natural fit here (Lord Ay).
• Many linguistic similarities between Hebrew and Egyptian (e.g. “Ra” the old polytheistic sun god means “Bad/Evil” in Hebrew).
• Similar mythology (Adam and Eve’s snake (similar to snakes in Ancient Egyptian mythology), the tree of life (lots of references in Egypt to sacred trees, including at Akhetaten), parting of the red sea (parting of the primordial waters myth), Moses and the basket down the Nile (predated by a similar Egyptian tale).
• The Copper Scroll of Qumran – An account of buried treasure, inscribed on copper, and found with the Dead Sea scrolls, has generally been seen to describe treasure possibly hidden after destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, although no treasures have ever been found where described. Makes more sense if you assume that the treasure came from Akhetaten as the Atenists fled, and was buried while leaving the city.
• Similarity between the Great Hymn to the Aten and Psalm 109.
• Similarity between the tablets of the ten commandments and royal cartouches.

 

When you start to follow this line of thinking, it seems that more and more evidence can fall into place and support this.

Tags: Akhenaten, Egyptology, Passover, Religion

I just finished wall mounting my HP TouchSmart IQ800 series, and wanted to write it up to help others who are interested in doing this. There is another great post about this with pictures here, so hopefully looking at both will give you a good solid understanding of the process. The other poster mounted with a swivel arm mount, but I used the fixed mount that you can purchase directly from the HP site when you buy your TouchSmart.

Overview

When we remodeled our kitchen a couple years ago, I envisioned a television or other media device wall mounted in a particular spot opposite our refrigerator. When I first saw the TouchSmart, I knew exactly what needed to go there.

 

During the remodel, I wired ethernet/phone/coaxial ports up the wall near the light switches in anticipation of this.

Note: Quick word of advice – mounting this thing is not for the faint of heart. If you have any hesitations about attempting this, I’d recommended enjoying your computer and its warranty on your desk . For the brave, read on…

Planning

Remember the old saying, “Measure twice, cut once”. Okay, some things to keep in mind:

1. You have to mount this into a stud. Don’t try to use drywall anchors, the unit is too heavy for that.
2. If your stud very far off-center from where you want to mount, you’ll need to consider a swivel mount instead of the one HP offers.
3. If your stud is slightly off center, you may be OK, as you can put the VESA hanging bolts off to the right or left a bit (I’ll show that later).
4. At first glance, the mounting bracket looks uneven, but don’t get concerned. The flange on the left is shorter than the one on the right. However, when you slide the bolts into the holes, they slide back to the left and everything is centered.
5. Lay everything out first and do some dry runs, seeing how everything will fit together.

Some things you’ll need:

1. Corded power drill with 5/32” drill bit
2. 7/16” socket and ratchet
3. 7/16” hex stainless steel lag bolts (2 1/2” long)
4. Level
5. Philips and Regular screwdrivers
6. Measuring tape
7. Short ladder
8. Stud finder

Attaching the Mounting Plate to the Wall

Using your stud finder, locate the stud and mark both sides at the approximate height where you want the center of the unit to be.

My stud was about 2 inches off center from my ideal spot for the unit, but after laying the mounting adapter out, I realized I could place the mounting bolts on the adapter off to the right or left instead of in the center, which would help bring it closer to where I wanted it. The pic below shows the six holes you can use. You can either use the four corners, or the group of four to the left or right.

 

Using a level, hold the mounting bracket up to the wall so the holes in the center align with the middle of the stud. Use a pencil to mark each hole on the wall.

Get on a ladder or chair and using the 5/32” drill bit and power drill, pre-drill the holes as straight as you can.

The mounting bracket came with Philips head screws. The directions show a person manually using a screwdriver with force to screw these in. This might be fine on newer homes with softer studs, but my house has 80 year old fir, and that stuff is hard as rock and doesn’t budge. When I tried to screw these in, it was too tight a fit. I re-drilled each hole to ream it out and widen the hole a bit. I tried again and stripped one screw, and a second one actually broke in half inside the wall, just from using the manual screwdriver.

Frustrated, I took a trip to McLendon’s Hardware, and purchased 5 stainless steel lag bolts with a hex head. These are much stronger than the chincy zinc ones they gave me, and won’t strip if you use a ratchet.

With the broken screw still in the wall, I had to move the holes down a little and re-drill. The lag bolts were much better and went in so much more easily.

  

Attaching the Mounting Adapter to the TouchSmart

The VESA mounting adapter from HP comes with some great instructions on how to add the adapter, remove the legs, etc. I just followed to the letter, and marveled at how well the whole computer was designed and engineered for this. Grab some towels or a blanket, and place your TouchSmart face down on them on a flat surface.

 

When it comes time to put the mounting bolts on the adapter, you use the shortest and smallest screws it comes with.

You can mount these in four holes either left-of-center, right-of-center, or four corners. I chose left-of-center to bring the unit closer to the center of the wall space, since my stud was off-center to begin with.

Finally, get someone to help you hold it, and mount it up.

 

Wiring

The power supply brick is absolutely huge, and needs to be considered. If you only have power at an outlet down near the floor, I’d recommend fishing some wire and putting an outlet on the wall behind the unit.

Luckily I have some light switches below the unit, so I can tap into the power from there and run a short cable up for a new outlet. I’ll post another picture of cable management when I’m done with that.

Reaction from my Wife

So after all this work, and finally getting this thing up with no major screwups, what was my wife’s reaction?

“I can’t reach it, you put it up too high.”

Oh brother…

Tags: home repair, TouchSmart, VESA, wall mount, wiring

I just received my HP TouchSmart, and wanted to write down some of my first impressions. First off, this is one sexy computer (if a computer can be considered sexy). The screen is gorgeous, the design is very appealing, and the whole unit appears to be very well thought-out.

Configuration/Purchase/Shipping

I purchased the computer from HP directly (http://shopping.hp.com) because I had an employee discount through the EPP program. It saved me about three hundred dollars, and gave me nice discounts on the optional wall mounting hardware (I’m going to mount this in my kitchen). The computer was built, shipped and received in 7 total days, which was sooner than the estimates that HP gave me during the ordering process.

I made a custom configured model (IQ-800t) rather than going with the quick-ship options. The configuration wizard was slow but very clear. The only real change to the configuration was an upgraded graphics card. I cheesed out and did not get the BluRay player to save a few bucks.

Size and Weight

This computer is heavy, make no mistake about it. It is probably heavier than a similar sized 25.5” flat screen TV, and weighs about as much as my black lab, ~40 pounds.

The computer is pretty thick too. Without the stand on the back, it is around 3-3.5 inches thick, so if you are going to wall mount this thing, it may stick out as much as 4.5-5 inches from the wall with the mounting plate and adapter. Make sure you have studs to screw into if wall mounting.

 

The power supply brick is huge. Certainly an issue if you are wall mounting, and you don’t have an outlet high up in the wall. You’ll have to run the wire down the wall and figure out how to hang the brick somewhere.

The keyboard is very lightweight, compact, and thin. It’s thinner than my BlackJack phone with the extended battery in it. The mouse is a standard size for a wireless mouse.

Setup

The computer and accessories are configured very well to “just work” out of the box. I set it up on the dining table, plugged it in, turned it on, and it started a configuration wizard. I wanted to avoid the keyboard and mouse and just use touch, but the very first Vista configuration screens did not support a tablet/touch interface for the text boxes for typing the username, password, and computer name.

I grabbed the keyboard, which already had batteries in it. All I had to do was pull out a sheet of plastic on the keyboard (it covered up the contacts on the batteries) and the keyboard was activated and recognized right away. No headaches with Bluetooth or anything.

Once through the wizards and at the login screen, the tablet input keyboard appeared and I could begin working almost exclusively with touch.

TV Tuner and Radio

I tried to configure the TV Tuner through Windows Media Center for over-air digital or analog signals but got no reception (digital) or just static (analog). I was hoping the unit had a built-in amplified antenna, but it looks like it will need rabbit ears or a separate wire attached to the coax input. I’m going to try to hook it up to the non-functioning cable TV connection in my house and see if that can be used as a suitable antenna.

One bummer, there is apparently no FM tuner. I read that the IQ7xxx series had an FM tuner, but the IQ8xxx series doesn’t seem to have one. Not sure why they left that out, so it looks like I’ll need to get a separate USB FM/AM tuner, as I do listen to the radio quite a bit.

DVD Player

I grabbed Toy Story 2 and threw it in the slot-load DVD player to see how easy it would be to just fire up a DVD for my son. I had the TouchSmart software up, and nothing happened when I loaded the DVD. I scrolled the list of applications and started the TouchSmart DVD application. This was an adequate app for playing the DVD, but didn’t have other features such as skipping to the menu, so I had to skip tracks to get past the trailers and into the main DVD menu. It was nice to touch the “Play Movie” link on the menu screen and have it start right up. Video quality was excellent. I think in general there will be some confusion on whether to use the TouchSmart applications for multi-media, or just use Media Center instead.

Games and Applications

There aren’t very many games installed, but one game, Purble Place, is just right for my three year old. There is a memory card game which my son picked up right away, and a fun game to create made-to-order cakes by touching the right color filling, icing, and packaging.

The TouchSmart shell has some nice applications. The Photos, Notes, and Weather apps are solid. I couldn’t get the calendar to sync with my Google Calendar though.

Usability of Touch

Overall I’m finding the touch aspect very usable. Resizing windows, clicking on buttons/hyperlinks, drag/drop all work really well.

Right-clicking within Vista is a little frustrating, as is copy/paste of text. There are some text boxes not well suited to touch input, for example:

• The text boxes in the setup wizards (you’ll need the keyboard)
• Some text boxes in Media Center (setting up your TV prompts you for your zip code, but no tablet input appears, so you have to use the keyboard or the remote control).
• The Live Search box in the installed HP browser toolbar in IE doesn’t show the tablet input.

My son plays an online 3D game called Jump Start on our other desktop, and uses the arrow keys and mouse to move the character around. Using touch with this is very frustrating, because when you touch the screen the character moves around wildly, as opposed to the smooth movements with the mouse/keyboard.

 

So far I’m pretty impressed. My next step is to wall mount this thing…

Tags: tablet pc, touch screen computing, TouchSmart

When I was a kid, I remember my doctor really taking care of me. There were just things that doctors did that were expected of them, such as:

• If a wound was dirty, the doctor would clean it
• If medicine needed to be prescribed, and the doctor’s office had some, they would administer the first dose in the office
• If a sibling looked to be suffering from the same ailment, they wouldn’t have to be setup with a separate formal visit
• Multiple prescriptions might have been given at the same visit (e.g. “try this first, if it doesn’t work then try this”), saving multiple office visits

After taking my son in to be looked at for Pink Eye, I was amazed at how much things have changed.

We didn’t clean his eyes before the visit, to make sure that the doctor saw the discharge. She looked at his eyes which were all goopy, and didn’t even clean them out when she was done.

I guess they didn’t have any eye drops on hand to offer the first dose onsite, but even if they had, they wouldn’t have done it anyway.

His sister’s eyes were also starting to get goopy, and it was a good bet at the time that she got what her brother had. Of course, the doctor couldn’t offer any suggestions for her, she needed a separate visit because “she was not in the system yet”. Along those lines, she told us that his sister couldn’t use his drops because she was under a year old, and they typically use an ointment instead of drops. I guess I just wondered why she couldn’t have prescribed both meds for him, and let us use the ointment on her, since she was clearly progressing along the same lines as her brother.

I don’t know what the reasons are, maybe it’s fear of lawsuits, maybe it’s financially motivated to increase office visits, maybe it’s just a shift in expectations that’s occurred as a result of limited time and budgets. In any case, it ain’t what it used to be.

Tags: doctors, medicine

We needed to add a couple existing phones to my account and bundle them as a family plan, and it should have been a very easy thing to do but took quite a while.

Apparently when my account was setup, it was on a particular “network” in the AT&T accounting system, and the other phones were in a newer different “network”. In this case, network has nothing to do with the physical wireless network, it is like a sales/marketing territory or something. They are trying to convert everyone to the newer network, and so they couldn’t move my older account into the newer network without giving me a new account number.

The devil is in the details though, so I asked about the corporate discount I get through my work, and if that would still apply to my new account. It wouldn’t, and it would take up to three months for it to apply again. I also asked about my automatic scheduled payments, and if I would need to set those up again from scratch. Of course I would.

Anyways, I fought and should receive a credit so that my corporate discount doesn’t have any lapse. The phone assistant was nice enough an helped us through fixing that once we complained about it.

What a pain to have to go through, just so AT&T can clean up its internal accounting workings.

We just had a gas fireplace insert installed, and used Bassett Home Heating to install it. John, the owner, is a no-nonsense, very helpful and reasonable guy, and runs a nice family business (his son comes along and helps him out). We used them when we installed our gas hot water heater, and he did an OK job.

I was missing a part before the installation, and he was nice enough to stop by the stove place in Lynwood and get the part.

Both times I had to ask and make sure that they caulked where the gas pipe enters the house. But they were much more reasonable than the installers that Rich’s Stove and Spa recommended.

I’d certainly recommend if you need that kind of service in the Seattle area.

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