Boing Boing posted an article about a pub inside a living tree in South Africa.  This would be the perfect place to drink a beer brewed to the sounds of Jethro Tull.

Over at The Mad Fermentationist, Mike Tonsmeire provides instructions on how he created Bourbon and Cognac infused barleywines.  I found that pretty interesting, since I also put liquor in the two barleywines I made.  I am not sure why, but I think it really affected the flavor, even though I only included 1 ounce per 5 gallon batch.  The first one, bottled on December 1, 2007, included an ounce of Benedictine.  The second, bottled on June 22, 2008, included an ounce of LaChouffe’s Coffee Liqueur.  Each tastes a little different.

There is one difference between how I did this and how Mike did it.  It looks like he added the liquor during fermentation, while I added this at the end of the boil, like finishing hops.  I’m not sure if this would make a difference, though I guess the alcohol would have been burned off.

So I have subscribed for the couple of years to Foreign Affairs magazine, which I love.  Subscription also entitles you to get one year of back-issues online for free.  The magazines come out every two months, and normally cost $10 a pop ($60/year).

I just got an offer to get two subscriptions for a total of $44.  Does anyone reading this want to split the subscription with me?  If so, shoot me an email.

So it looks like friend of the journal, nicerobot, has had too many problems with WordPress or something and destroyed his “Just for Friends” community blog in a fit of rage.  He has suggested the handful of us who frequented ( or infrequented) there should start up Friendfeed accounts and keep in touch that way.

I don’t know Friednfeed, but it seems kind of Twittery to me.  Nothing against Twitter, but I just can’t get into massive quantities of one sentence phrases coming in fromall directions like an attack of locusts.  It seems like the logical progression of online Attention Deficit Disorder.  Maybe it’s just me – maybe I Just Don’t Get It.  But it seems likemore and more data is coming in with less and less information and context.

I think that’s my biggest issue here – lack of context.  I guess you can make your own context with very short messages. I think I will start a messaging service with a message length limited to one character:

• nicerobot says: “A”
• caroliner says: “C”
• n8 says: “G”

etc.  If enough of these feeds are coming at you at once, I am sure you will begin to see the patterns in the traffic.

Oh, I forgot to mention that you will now need to register to post any comments now.  The SpamBots were too much for me.  If I get a bunch of Spam registrations, I may require you to send me a personal email pleading for an account.  That would make me feel so powerful.

(Thanks to nicerobot (as opposed to bad SpamBot) for help on the setup)

I know I have been lax in posting here lately.  I’m not going to make excuses.  But I am working now on enacting some positive daily habits, and I will include daily posts to this diary as a part of this.  So expect to see a coming deluge of mostly meaningless musings on a variety of subjects that will probably only have meaning to me.

One of the reasons I want to start writing regularly here is to try to organize my thoughts on a few initiatives and thought processes I am trying to get started or continue.  Getting started is the most difficult thing for me, but hopefully I will get the ball rolling here and get some good work in motion.

The first initiative I am trying to focus on is reworking and relaunching my Commercial Voice Over business.  I finally have a working set of recording hardware and software, and I am planning to record some additional demos and send out some mailers.  I have been pretty inspired by my wife Laura’s cloth diaper and stroller bag business, Andromeda’s Attic, which is starting to take off.  Those of you with kids should check it out.

Another initiative is to get back on track with composing.  2007 was the first year that I did not finish a composition since 1999, and for some reason right now I’m struggling to get back to it.  I may decide to post some of the many half formed ideas I have for some compositions here in order to get some order around them and hopefully get them finished and recorded.  Also, it wouldn’t hurt to start finding a way to more widely distribute the works I have already completed.  To this end, I have plans to remaster and possibly remix some of my older compositions, especially softshoeballet and tones(a)tones.  Collecting some of these recordings into cohesive albums (with album art, or course) would be a part of this initiative as well.  I’m also thinking of ways to sell my music while still distributing the audio files for free – but I think this part of the modern issues with monetizing recorded music.

On another note, I recently found some papers from high school and found my old ASVAB test scores.  There was a question asking what my expected profession would be, and in that totally high-school-artsy-know-it-all way, I simply wrote “Writer”.  I had forgotten how badly I wanted to be a writer in high school.  This was when I was just starting to read William Gibson and feeling super inspired.  There is some speculative fiction rattling around in my brain these days that I may or may not end up committing to writing.   I am most hesitant about this initiative – it’s just so easy to write this type of stuff horribly – but I think writing in general is something I miss and posting to the journal will help here.  But whether I write stories or not, I just can’t help but create worlds in my head.

There are other things I think about as well that I plan to post – mainly philosophy (especially the current zeitgeist of intellectual property concepts and the “copyleft” movement) and history, which is what I was actually trained in (especially the history of corporations and technology, but also general world history).  Current events and brewing beer are on the table as well, of course.

So hopefully in the future there will be more frequent posts, but not quite this long.  I am sure all the multitudes reading this journal have been waiting with baited breath.