go-doyle.com

Happy 2010 everyone!  I am terribly sorry for the YEAR w/o posting.  We’ve been putting our noses to the grindstone with work (me)  and work/school (Cheryl).    2009 has been very hectic.  Work was very busy, new products, new customers!   Busy is GOOD in the IT world.

Let’s recap 2009.   We went to FL for weddings, Boston for conferences, work meet-n-greet, and family reunion.  We went to Seattle and did our west-coast trip (and i hit my first deer…ouch!) .  We went to Las Vegas for Christmas !

I have purchased a new (used) car.  This technically counts for 2010! A 2009 Ford Focus.  Pictures will follow.

Adam is engaged to Alex and he moved back to FL.  I miss making beer and firearms with him already.   We will chill out together again!

I’ve been working on some computer projects as well as firearm/machining adventures.  Some of my work has been up on weaponeer.net .    I am currently working on beefing up a 5speed drill press with angular contact bearings so that it can be better  (ab)used as a light-duty milling machine.

Happy New Year, guys! This will be a little short and sweet; more to follow.

back in October, Cheryl and I moved into our new place. We got the place and started moving in on the 15th, taking the next two weeks to move over all our stuff. What ever didn’t fit, got placed into a storage locker in Goleta. In November, Adam Tout moved to Woodland Hills (near LA) and started working in Malibu. We’ve been rocking out some crazy home-brewing. It’s been good to get back into the homebrewing scene. It’s been a little while since I’ve whipped up a batch of anything. We did a 10gal batch of a Bastard Red. He used Irish Ale Yeast; I used American Ale Yeast. We’ll bring the batches together when they’re ready for comparison. In addition to that, we did up 2x batches of MEAD! I’ve got a 5gallon batch of Mesquite Honey Mead (using about 12lbs of Mesquite honey from Trader Joe’s). We both used Champagne yeast to ferment; it’s been rolling like crazy starting 24 hours after pitching. Hopefully will ferment out quickly and pretty dry (and higher alcohol!). I’m looking forward to starting up the NEXT batch once this batch goes to bottle.

Just the other day, Eric Baker from FL, just moved out to San Diego. Him and his brother were sort of stranded in SD looking for a place to live and decided to drive up to Santa Barbara. We did beers over at the City College bluffs, grubbed down some of my home-made lasagna, and had them crash on our futon. They drove back to SD the next morning; good road trip for them, I hope.

anyhow, more to follow…

The ‘Tea Fire’ has now burned almost 24 hours, destroying about 100 homes in the Santa Barbara Riviera area and burning into Montecito.

Here is the most up-to-date map of the evacuation areas.
http://www.countyofsb.org/uploadedFiles/ceo/oes/Tea_Incident_-_Evac_Areas.pdf

For comparison , my office is at 223 E De La Guerra St *(1.6miles away)

I have some pictures that I found online at http://go-doyle.com/images/sb-fire/

**More updates to follow

Wow! Where to BEGIN? I honestly didn’t realize how long it has been since I’ve posted ANYTHING on this. August 2007. It’s almost been a year. I want to try and get us up-to-date as painlessly as possible. I left Edward & Sons Trading to take a tech-support position in downtown Santa Barbara. Starting in October 2007, I have earned a position with SONOS in their Tier1 Support. I’ve really been enjoying my time here. It’s a really relaxed environment, awesome people, and an awesome product. Where else can I get paid to use expensive audio equipment and help people use theirs!? In September, I did a shop-brew with the Maltose Falcons. It was a Belgian Saison Noel. Mellow, dark, and spicy! It seemed to have gotten a little over-carbonated, so Cheryl and I have been giving them a little “burp” since we have already had one bottle go ‘hand-grenade’ on us. For XMas, mom and pops flew out to experience California for the first time! It was a trip!! Good times all around, but it was pretty bummed when they left. For my sister’s birthday, in February, her and her b/f (Eric) flew out! It was awesome to have so much family around in such spread-out time. Cheryl and I will be flying out to FL over the early summer for some weddings, so it’ll be great to see everyone again. In between all of that, Cheryl and myself have been quite the travelers: visiting Joshua Tree and Yosemite and Las Vegas! All visits and travels have been graphically captured in the gallery section

I have had mom and pops send me more of my things: brew and reloading supplies. I have been working to replace the barrel for one of my m91/30s with a Remington 700 barrel in 30-06. So then I’ll have 2 rifles in 30-06 configuration. Another project I’ve sort of completed was the .400 Corbon conversion for the m1911. It consisted of a drop-on barrel (had to fit barrel link and link pin - no real biggie normally, but my tooling out here is waaay limited). I’m waiting for my reloading press to be shipped so I can resize some 45acp brass for .400 Corbon.

Site Updates: I’ve put more pictures up on the gallery area and have put in a live-chat / message application into the homepage.

Cheryl and I are heading back to FL monday night  - red-eye outa LA to FLL.     We’ve been doing laundry and packing much of the day.   Honestly…  we also finished up some brewing and downloaded some MP3s for the trip!

The pLambic (’pseudo lambic’) fermentation turned out REALLY nice.  At first we weren’t sure what to expect.  The crazy-wild bacteria/yeast in the wYeast-Lambic smack-pack was pretty virulent stuff! It was rolling full-boil LESS than 24 hours after pitchin the yeast into the wort.  The week it spent gurgling smelled like fuckin’ DIRTY FEET wrapped in BALL SWEAT!   the airlock was getting clogged with this beige, rubbery, foam; really intense shit!   It rocked away on this steady BOIL of fermentation for a week straight. We had to double-bag it with trashcans b/c the bucket lid kept getting blown off by the pressure inside — even with the airlock (when NOT clogged).  Eventually the gurgling died down and we decided it was time to rack into a clean vessel for some secondary fermentation.  I dont like to let my brews sit on their dregs/lees for too long. i never trust it.     We didn’t add any raspberry puree or raspberry-extract yet, and it really tastes like a Belgian/Trappist ale right now; kinda like one of these:

The starting gravity was 1.080 ;  the gravity at this first racking was 1.023/1.020.   With these readings, we’re approximating about 7.5% abv .   i’m sure if we add some more ‘fermentables’ we can bump-up that #, but i like it slow and natural.  Inside the brew-bucket, malty/tart aromas wafted up from the lip…  yummy

We’re gonna let it sit in a clean 2ndary fermentor for another couple of weeks then add some flavoring (or pitch a berry-puree on it and sit it for another few months) then bottle the shit outa ‘em and let ‘em age for a few months.  Again, my offer stands:  anyone that comes to visit us in SBCA gets to crack open a few of these bad-boys with us!   Although the almighty ‘porch’ is not with us, we have been working to set a second-stage with our ‘balcony’.

For those who will be in FL this upcoming week —   my sister , Jessica, will be graduating from FAU and Cheryl and I will be joining!  We fly tomorrow on the breaths of dreams to go forth, under the cover of night, back to our homelands.   Come thursday night, we will dust off the porch and prepare for a merriment of monstrous proportions.  After her graduation friday, we will have a amazing party — reviving the PORCH to its former splendor!  Who is with me?  Who will join in this taking on this burden?       For SPARTA!!  … i mean, shit!   COME ROCK IT THE FUCK OUT AND GET CRUNK with Cheryl, Jessica, Eric (her b/f) and I…

p.s. there will be punch and pie.  

It’s 330am and i’m not quite tired. I was up reminiscing about the 80s and how awesome (and yet shitty) the TV shows were back then. Spending time on retrojunk.com is a great blast-from-the-past. It’s amazing how many people have NO CLUE these shows ever existed. Searching the internet all over, you’ll see that a few people here/there have posted TV episodes on torrent sites. These tend to be the case for popular old TV shows (M*A*S*H , StarTrek, etc). For more obscure TV shows, you may find a few episodes on YouTube or some other streaming video site. Many of these sites do not allow for you to directly download the videos (or if they’re shitty and you can see their code, you can get the file but not be able to properly view it). I have compiled a nice page that ties together some a perhaps confusing google search would turn up. Some of you reading this may already know this or have your own way of doing it; ROCK ON! For those of you who never knew it possible, but thought ‘gee, it would be nice if…’ - look no further. CLICK HERE to see the video section and download links.

On a different subject, the current brews are coming along nicely. The mead is still slowly gurlgling away in secondary fermentation. The cider just stopped fizzling away in primary. I bought some frozen blackberries, boiled up about a 1/2-3/4 of a pound of em, and added them to the bottom of the 2ndary fermentor vessel and racked off the cider from primary vessel into this one. I’ll let it sit on there for a while and see if i can re-kickstart the suspended yeast to start working on the fruit-bits.

Last night we decided to do a ghetto-bonfire at Ledbetter Beach. Instead of going someplace far away and building a REAL bonfire, lighting, NOT getting caught, getting buzzed, then driving all the way home — we went a little bit across the street. We found a large picnic area with a 4′x4′ cast-iron grill — we lowered the cooking grate, poured almost a whole bag of charcoal on it, doused it in starting fluid, rolled up some newspapers, and set it ablaze. Meanwhile, I have never until this point, had a 40-oz. In Florida, law has it capped at the lame-ass 32-oz bottles (also known as ‘40-8′ bottles) . Pictures of the ensuing shenanigans can be found on the gallery page. Everyone is encouraged to create gallery accounts, and create albums + upload images.  I am physical so far away from many of you, i’d like to see what kind of fun things are happening. That, and unlike MySpace, I don’t really censor my site for graphic content *(well, not yet, that is… you folks always seem to surprise me with the shit you get yourselves into…)

It’s official - Cheryl and I are now members of the Maltose Falcons -  a homebrew club located near Los Angeles.   Last month, Cheryl and I were driving to LA to see Phildo and decided that we can stop and some homebrew shops along the way for me to shop and price-check.  We stopped at The Home Wine, Beer, and Cheesemaking Shop in Woodland Hills, CA (near/around Encino).  The owner/manager invited Cheryl and I to the back of the store to watch the Maltose Falcon’s workshop brew that was being done.  Cheryl and I talked with some of the board of directors and sampled many of their award-winning brews.  It was a great time. What started out to be the first shop of many that day, turned into a 3-4 hour adventure in brewing!  I felt very comfortable with these people and couldn’t wait to hang and brew again.  Their meetings are the first Sunday of the month.  The next meeting for Cheryl and I would have been yesterday.  We got to the store a little before the meeting started (noon) and were amazed to see how many people attend *(I roughly counted 20+/-, and was told that it was a ’small’ crowd this time).  The former president did a presentation on Saisons and we sampled about 6-7 different beers, noting their differences, but enjoying them all just the same.  Next came the club-brews.  Following the saisons were about 13 different beers brewed by club members.  I was partial to some of the ones that used Belgian yeast strains (and multiple yeasts), imparting complex, and often fruity, flavors.  I look forward to being able to bring my mead in for review of the club and being able to take part in the next few shop brews.  The next one is an IPA/XPA.  I’m not really a fan of pale-ales and certainly do not want a 5gal batch of it :-)   Perhaps I can get a group together to do a brown or belgian ale… hmm…

Given that I have a penchant for hands-on hobbies, I have requested that my family send me some of my homebrew equipment so I can do some brews here.  My request was granted and within a week, a big box full of goodies arrived.  I had ordered another mead kit from homebrew heaven and got to work.  I started the batch on 5/17.  I used the dry-yeast that came with the kit:  Lalvin K1-v116 (dry wine yeast), checked starting gravity (1.093), stuck in the rubber stopper for the airlock and waited…  about a week later - 5/24, sterilized a turkey baster and pulled a sample from the fermention bucket.  The mead was reading 1.069 *(about 3% alcohol at this stage — FAR from done).  Seeing that nice change in gravity readings let me know that fermentation was well on its way.  I did a racking from primary to secondary fermentation tanks on 6/2, again taking a gravity reading.  This time it was reading 1.050 (about 5.5% alcohol by volume).  I wanted to rack it off the dross, so as not to impart any off-flavors from sitting on all that dead yeast for so long.  I’m usually pretty anal-retentive about that.    At this time, I also took a baster-full (about 1-1.5oz ) of the fermenting mead to innoculate a 2gallon batch of apple cider I wanted to make for one of Cheryl’s friends.  The friend just moved from SBCA to Kentucky *(but will be back in SB in another week or so; hopefully it will be ready by then!).  Last night, 24 hours later, the apple juice has already started to get bubbly and a nice fizzing sound is coming from the vessel — Fermentation is on its way!!  Check the gallery within the next few days for pictures of the brews-in-progress.

It’s been a while - I’m sorry.   Since my last post, I’ve gotten my new DL and car registration!  This is by-far, the most STERILE-looking DL picture I have ever taken.  I felt like a deer in the headlamps: 

I’ve been searching tirelessly for a job.   I’ve been interviewing like crazy and keeping contact with many companies. I had a great interview with CitrixOnline and was told that I am an amazing candidate for them. Unfortunately, them and many other companies here are under a hiring freeze until after the summer. This is putting the clamps down on me.  Today, I went to a temp-agency called AppleOne and started my search with them.  I keep in contact with CitrixOnline about once a week to let them know that I’m still interested in working for them.  I’m dreaming of the day when they call me, offer me good money and say COME IN TO START!  ::grin:: for the time being, I have set up shop next to this guy, walking up and down State Street:

Working on day 2-3 of ‘ The Great CA Move’.  Today, I drove Cheryl to UCSB and made it back on my own , without getting lost.  I’m on my way to the DMV to inquire about an ID card or a DL.   Many of the job postings require a CA DL/ID; just about ALL of the UCSB jobs require it.   Wish me Luck!