GrumpySmurf

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2389286139&category Especially like the comments about France.

I've seen starter kits (equipment plus ingredients to make first batch) for $60 or so - that includes a primary fermenting bucket. Add in a stainless steel boiling pot (which you can find at any department store), and enough bottles to put your results in (around $10 per dozen of 22 oz capped - of course you can re-use any dark non-twist top bottle to store it in) - and you are set. If you want pay a little more, around $80, you can pick up a primary fermenter, and a secondary - typically a 5 gallon glass bottle, a carboy. The benefit of the secondary is that you can leave the brew in there as long as you want, as long as it is kept somewhere dark and relativly cool - you can't do that with the primary, after 7 days the beer must come out of it. Else you risk it going bad (there is pretty decent sized ecosystem thriving in there after a week) The hardest part of the whole process (next to the waiting) is just being really anal about making sure everything is squeeky clean before letting it touch the liquid. After the inital outlay of cash for equipment and ingredients, ingredients run about $20 to $30 for a cheap batch of ready to make - and if you want to experiment with grains, hops and malt, the costs can go up. But considering that after the inital cost, $20 to $30 for 5 gallons (about 50 16 oz bottles) of decent Euro style beer with the typical alchohol content running in the 4 to 6 percent range - sounds pretty cheap. I went through these folk www.makebeerandwine.com - since they came highly recommended by one of my sub-ordinates. Another supplier that has been recommended is http://www.midwestsupplies.com/ due to the size of thier selection - of course both are local for me, so recommendations for your area will be different.

Patience: racking your first 5 gallon batch of home brew beer and knowing the longer you let it sit, the more bang for your buck you're gonna get out of it. Now where to store the 3 cases of 22 oz bottles when finished.

"Any of you doing triple-digit speeds on a regular basis?" Did. Then moved to an area with one of the highest rates of vehicle-deer collisions in the country and figured it wise to tone it down a little - it's a virtual roadkill buffet out there some nights. Still haven't tried above 130, though the factory claims it'll do almost 165. "Do you get pulled over often?" Not successfully, yet.

Started pre-med, started the app for med school (it was the last year you could apply without having completed an undergrad degree), figured out I didn't really want a career listening to people whine, had a nack for PCs, jumped into CS - found it a bazillion times easier and subsequently picked up Business Admin along the way as well. My motto the whole time was, 'I'm here for the women, I'm just getting a degree on the side'

~315 miles - from Winona. Not allowed on freeways with the learners permit, else I could roll the trip down into dropping by the dealer in Madison to get my 600 mile servicing done on the way back. Man, do I ever hate living in the middle of nowhere. From the Twin Cities, it's just 94 down to Rockford, then 39/61 to 80 East to Ottawa. Watch out for law enforcement near the Dells, just before Madison and on the border into La Salle county in Illinois.

1. Whats your name? Mark 2. How old are you? 29 - sometime in June 3. Why did you decide to start jumping out of airplanes? Family is all pilots, figured I'd be the Black Sheep and do the unthinkable. 4. Are you single or taken? Married? Single, soon to be married - once I convince her parents of the custom of giving a dowery. 5. Do you have kids? No - thank gawd. 6. What do you drive? 2001 Porsche Boxster / 2003 Ducati 620 Sport 7. Have you ever done a kisspass? No 8. Where do you live? Middle of Freakin' nowhere Minnesota 9. Do you have any pets? 2 ferrets - Lindo and Loco. 10. How many jumps do you have? 260 some odd. 11. What color eyes do you have? Blue/Green/Grey - depends on ambient light. 12. What is your nationality? Newfie. 13. Have you ever dated someone you met off the internet? Yes - none of the locals have all thier teeth. 14. Favorite Movie? Aliens. 15. What do you do when you arent skydiving? Slave away on automotive ECUs. 16. Have you ever BASE jumped? No 17. If not... do you want to? Yes 18. Do you have siblings? 1 sister - she's the smart one. 19. Where do you want to travel to the most? Anywhere quiet. 20. What's your favorite color? Blue/Silver 21. Where was the last place you flew to ( not skydiving )? MoTown.

Aural Sex?

"I have not had one friend affected by the dot com burst, why because they were all adaptable, ready to change with the times and not blame the foreign nationals for there problems. " I've had a few friends/co-workers who got nailed due to the dot-bomb - but likewise, the ones who were willing to move found work in a matter of weeks or months. The old timers who were settled down took, in some cases, years. I had a feeling something was up after the first round of layoffs, started hunting and found a new job out of state 2 weeks before they shut the office down. It's the new economy of high tech - you have to constantly prove your worth to your employer, because all they care about is the bottom line. Plain and simple. If they can get better quality work for less, why wouldn't they go elsewhere. Just like if you want a decent pay raise, staying at your current job is the worst way to go about it. The Indians are the grunt programming work, my job and that of my inhouse sub-ordinates, s be domain experts. I'm the architect, the Indian contractors are the construction labour. Oh yeah, I'm one of them nasty H-1Bs too. Oddly enough when I offered to take a Design Resident Engineer position for my employer back home at GM's design center in Oshawa, Canada, they said not a chance in hell, as I wasn't replacable - even though it would be cheaper for them to hire a semi-qualified US local and not have to pay legal fees for my visa and Green Card. Again just a matter of cost vs. benefit to your employer - a few tens of thousands of dollars extra per year with the pay off of the success of programs worth hundreds of millions.

Heh. I was wondering who was going to point this out first - that it's the land down under, not the one up north. The Auzzie situation has been a constant topic of discussion for the sword collecting community for the last while, if you don't like the laws, either elect officals who agree with you, run for office, or move out. I think the lock and key thing a little silly, if you don't have kids, that is - since the Bujin sword bags do a wonderful job for transport, and a shinken does no good if you can't display on a proper katana-kake. That ad on QVC always cracks me up - a really good example on why 440 stainless steel blades from Taiwan are a real bad investment for anything other than wall hangers. Iaido dojo are not too hard find (though I guess compared with the psuedo sword arts in kendo and aikido, they could be considered hard to find) - if one looks hard enough - more a matter of being willing to drive a fair distance. If one is set on learning to handle live steel - variants of Toyama Ryu Batto can be found scattered across the country, along with Obata Sensei's Shinkendo. Then of course there are the more traditional iai instructors who feel you can train with live steel from day 1, if you want - I suspect the logic is that the only way to truely respect the blade (and thus your practice) is to cut yourself a few times - so long as you don't get blood all over the mat.

Not much at all - Ducati was offering 0% APR on 2003's and after all was said and done - $6,900, delivered. The biggest problem was finding a Dealer in the US that had one - Ducati is no longer importing the 620 Sport to the US, only the 620 Monster. Mine is the 128th 2003 620S imported to the US. So there might be, like 150 of these in the country, total? The Superbikes and ST's are the pricey ones, the Supersports and Monsters are the more reasonable (and after the 2 year warrenty period ends, it gets cheaper still, since I can then do my own valve adjustments and not worry about a warrenty to void).

Another rig? Or the first rig? What they got you jumpin' now, I means by now I'd guess you to be at like 500+ jumps - so I'm figuring like a Stiletto 90 or the likes? It's a tall bugger - I think a 31 or 32 inch ride height. My feet just fall flat sitting on it. I got Chi-Li to hop on it and her feet were a few inches off the ground.

700 foot openning in the air is ok, not so ok across asphalt, eh? Heap doing well - 70K + miles on it and still running fine. It made it across the continent at XMas from Minn to Vancouver, BC and back - including through the massive snowstorm that shutdown I-90 in Montana - driving 70 mph on a highway of solid ice while dodging 2 foot high snow drifts and trying to avoid the troopers patroling said shutdown freeway is an enlightening, if not stressful, experience. Hope all is well down in the land of warmer weather (than here)

Yeah, yeah - the F-word. I know what I owe. Now to make the 5 hour trek to SDC when the weather turns a little nicer. The more time I spend in Horn-head country (Minn) - the more I miss the convience of Madison. " You be careful boy. " Tell me about it, I now know what a town full of terrible drivers is like, cuz they all live in Winona.

Time to transition from off-road to on-road (plus the woman has my car pretty much all the time). Got bike - approx. 60 hp. a little on the high side, but they don't make ones with any less - and that whole ego thing gets in the way of buying US or Japanese. Euro-snob, I be. Got signed up for the MSF Basic. Got my collection of Proficient Motorcyling and More Proficient Motorcycling, good reads by the way. Got a whole new wardrobe of leather, kevlar, and composites. Now if only the snow would go away. Go away snow!

Aye, work can be cruel - across our parking lot is the municiple airport - so one gets to watch the students from the flight school, the odd National Guard chopper and the once in a while private jet come and go.

Given that the straight folk don't seem to do all that well with marriage, why not let the non-straight folk get a shot at it - can't possibly do any worse. And given all the messed up kids in the world that are a result of straight parents, why not let the non-striahgt folk have a shot at that too - perhaps they could adopt a few of these kids and possibly turn thier lives around - giving the kids the attention thier former parents either couldn't or didn't want to give. They all go on about destroying the 'Insitution of Marriage' - that was already destroyed long ago by us hetero folk.

The talk of assembly jobs moving to Toluca because of cheap labour is always entertaining - the big benefit of moving work there may not be so much the salary reduction as it is the pension reduction - warrenty and pensions are the two big killers of profits. Salary is means to an end, it gets you revenue - warrenty and especially pensions eat that up really quick. Gotta love that new Durango, eh? Doesn't matter how cheap (or not) the labour is, the pair of recalls like it has out are gonna dig into those margins.

"I agree, but that problem is not limited to companies that outsource. You can bet that as soon as even a US car manufacturer can replace ten workers with a welding robot, they do it. " While touring one of our plants (OEM supplier for the autos), I asked a similar question about the dependancy on humans - and why not have the MBD put together robots for all the assembly lines - appearantly in alot of cases, the capital outlay up front for development of a robot for a line that will be torn down after a typical 5 year production run far exceeds the cost of even unionized labour, unless its a high volume task that would take a significant amount of time or too high risk for a human to do - such as frame assembly. The robot becomes even more costly if the market starts to soften - labour can be laid off when times are tough, a robot cannot - so you're stuck with the bill for poor forcasting. Ironicly, overseas programming in India has helped us (our company) alot, we have alot of trouble drawing qualified people to our middle of nowhere part of the mid-West - I interviewed unemployed folk from large cities who turned down job offers simply because they didn't want to move. Right now we are using the Indians strictly for Windoze work that is not our core business - but with the way the market is going for autos, who knows what else might have to be sent over, due to a lack of qualified people who don't mind leaving the convience of the larger cities (why anyone would want to live in Detroit is still above and beyond me). My job is to gather requirements from the customer, design the system, and see that it is delivered to the customers expectation - including alot of field time during test drives of the vehicles. Though I can and do, write embedded C code, that is a very small part of my job description - sending it overseas would alleviate that burden and free me up to do what I am paid to do. Programming for an S/E is like construction for an architect - while I am sure they can do it, it is not the primary task for what they were trained to do.

Taken from the dealers floor - will be in the garage in less than 2 weeks. Destined to be alone, in a sea of Hogs.

Aye, you'd probably have better luck exploiting loopholes than getting the laws changed. Gotta love the US o' A, eh?

Aye, Uncle Sam - an interest-less annual savings account - now downpayment for an entry level 2003 'Duck' - with the whole 0% APR thing, how can one go wrong, plus woman pretty much has the car all day with her volunteer translation gig and her karate.

I'm surprised there was no mention of WMD on the red planet though?

That might not be all that far off the mark.

In northern BC in 1990, it was cold enough that I had a pretty nasty case of frost bite on my ears within 2 minutes of being outside, with 0 winds - was peeling for a week afterwards. They would cancel classes at the schools at -50 or so C, but not close them for fear that some parents might miss the notice and drop thier kids off and have the kids die from exposure. The land of perpetually falling powder. That's why I moved to Wi/Mn - for the warmer weather