Troll Echos

This particular topic is one that I’ve always been interested in, but frankly it also tends to be one I avoid talking about.  Simply put, people tend to be obnoxious about it.  The number of people out there that accept the tidbits of “evidence” provided by Al Gore and his friends is staggering and that tends to put people like me at odds with the masses.  My stance on the issue can be summarized as being that of a proper scientist.  I no more accept that global warming is simply a given than I believe the Earth is about to become little more than a nearly spherical ice ball winging through space.  My basis for this stance is information and an understanding of the scientific method.

In trying to be accurate to the nearest half a billion years or so I will, for the sake of conversation, accept that the Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old.  I will ignore that the place wouldn’t have been much fun to hang out on while it was still cooling down into a vaguely solid blob of rock, and that dinosaurs that would eventually call the place home failed entirely to keep good records of the weather while they were here.  For them it probably seemed like the 165 million years or so they wandered around were just a lovely time indeed.  I’m going somewhere with this, I swear.  It is commonly accepted that the temperature on Earth was way higher when they were around than it is now.  I don’t mean when they were busy getting extinct either, I mean when they were thriving.

By comparison, us silly little bipeds that for all evolutionary evidence seem to have jumped out of trees, have only been hanging around for a mere handful of hundred thousand years.  If you are a big fan of cavemen that aren’t specifically homo sapiens, we could say the number is pushing 4 million years.  A mere drop in the pail next to dinosaurs’ stay.  People in some form or other have experienced several climate changes, in both directions.  Everything from mini-ice ages to warmer phases.  Looking back on history, both human and geological, it’s pretty easy to determine that as a species we do way better when the climate is warmer than we do when it’s colder.  For that reason, global warming, as people like to panic about, is not in fact so bad at all.

Add to this story the part where our little blob of cooled rock which, on a cosmic scale, cooled down like yesterday, is in orbit of an impressive ball of fusing hydrogen.  We like to call it the sun, and it has all sorts of funny patterns it follows with everything it does.  Loads of somehow detectible sine wave like patterns all superimposed on each other.  These include an apparent 11 year cycle of sun spot activity, a magnetic cycle that is around 22 years long, cyclic changes in the radiation output of the sun include a whopping 27 harmonic cycles lining up in a 273 month parent cycle, and several others falling into 87, 105, 131, 210, 232, 385, 504, 805, and 2300 year patterns.  In other words, the sun is practically random in its layering of patterns.  When several patterns line up on the same side of the sine wave the resulting change can be pretty impressive.

At the end of the day, the sun, for better or for worse, powers basically everything that happens on this planet.  Weather, planetary cooling, global warming, etc.  There are people jumping around about 0.2° C changes in one direction or the other and claiming that means something important.  In a statistical light, there are 3 time periods that people are using to determine whether or not global warming is happening.  Geological evidence duration appears to be able to reach back with any level of accuracy to around 10,000 years ago.  Human instrument records of weather and almost countless other things are limited on the outside to around 100 years worth of data.  Recent global warming panic can be traced back to 15 or so years worth of information. Go ahead and divide each of those numbers by 4.5 billion and see how statistically important the results are.

Human beings are proud.  We like to think that driving cars around powered by dead dinosaurs has a massive impact on the planet.  We also like to think that cow farts from Oklahoma have an impact, so it stands to reason that you may not be able to go by our opinions on this matter.  In truth, the planet has been here for a very long time, and us, not so much.  I certainly don’t discount that people can change their environments for better or for worse, but I also take that amount of change with a grain of salt when compared to local impact of things like a sun that pours out 3.86 decillion watts a second.

All I ask of my readers is to imagine for a moment the wicked number of influences that control something as complex as planetary climate.  Whether you take a couple of soggy ice caps to spell impending doom or sunspots failing to show up on time meaning we will all be popsicles, you should consider that no one really knows.  To pretend that you can take a nearly nano-scale piece of the curve and extrapolate an opinion is funny to begin with,  but to consider it more than an opinion is practically heresy.  Action taken to “correct” the perceived problem is downright dangerous.  We are almost equally likely to make the problem worse as we are to fix anything simply thanks to the fact that we are making decisions based on a system we do not, and likely cannot ever, fully understand.

The first step in making your own wine is as simple as sterilizing everything you own, expect to own, think may pass near your wine, things your wine will pass through, sit in, be near, or be able to see from inside large glass containers. It stands to reason of course that if you are trying to give one kind of microbiology the chance to thrive in your grape juice, you should be pretty sure that none of the other kinds you don’t want are hanging around. There are loads of things that can happen to wine with other little baddies growing it it. The least impressive perhaps involve the addition of less desirable flavors to the wine. Some other fun ones include the inadvertent creation of jelly like you would consider putting on your toast in the morning, or simply wine that outright goes bad before you’ve managed to drink it. Thankfully, you have to do some serious work to make wine toxic thanks to the nature of alcohol itself being very effective at killing things off. However failure to deal with cleaning agents properly is about as likely to make poison as it is to destroy the wine entirely, and that’s relatively likely.

Every kit of wine, every book about making wine, and every container of sterilizer stuff known to man will mention, probably repeatedly, that sterilization is so important that your mom being hit by a bus shouldn’t be used as an excuse to skip or interrupt the process. Personally it would stop me, but I may be an oddball among wine makers for that reason. Being relatively well prepared to make wine, or so I thought, I set forth to start making my first wine kit. I read the instructions from top to bottom, as the instructions themselves of course informed me I should do. Upon returning to the top to start actually doing the steps I’d recently read about, I managed to make it as far as step 1.

I read “Sterilize […a small list of wine making stuff…]” and panicked having not done what most wine kit makers likely consider the easiest part of the process, even if the most tedious or time consuming. Now, I fully knew this was coming and I dug out my convenient little pouch of sterilizer stuff, and switched gears to reading its directions instead. “Add 1 Tablespoon to 1 gallon of warm water.” That’s all it said.

Well, that’s really not especially helpful to me. There is an expectation of understanding being made by the funny bag of white powder in my left hand, and I entirely fail to meet that expectation. What comes next exactly? Do I leave it in a jug on the counter and stare at it funny until everything in my house is made magically clean? Do I soak things in it? If so, for how long? How about my big ass plastic primary fermenter? It’s way too big to put into anything else, so perhaps I simply fill it with the stuff and add just shy of 7 tablespoons of my cleaner to it. What about the lid though? Clearly a lid intended to fit on a bucket will not fit into the same bucket, so how can it be sterilized? My brain ran around in circles with all these questions.

After much hopeless thought on the subject, I decided I needed to wait longer before starting. Ask more questions of people that have done it, read more books and web sites, and generally continue to be afraid to start. Perhaps someday I will feel prepared enough to actually proceed.

In the world of high powered computing there are almost as many creative ways to squeak a little more out of your computer as there are people out there to think of them. Some people happily put their computer at risk by forcing its parts to operate faster than they were designed to in a method known as overclocking. Others take the road of simply spending huge amounts of money to stay on the bleeding edge of hardware. With the latest generation of CPUs running as high as $1500 a pop, that can become an expensive pattern to follow very quickly. Truly creative users see ways to stay within the bounds of reason financially and while maintaining some amount of hardware stability.

One way to go about that is to simply add a second video card, assuming you have a motherboard that allows it. Another is to upgrade your hard drives to some form of RAID array to make the load times of your games or your overall throughput of data way higher. A RAID array is basically just a collection of hard drives working together as one. An expensive alternative to RAID would be a relatively new device known as a solid state disk drive (SSD). They are way lower in capacity but make up for that shortcoming by being both way faster and way more expensive. To RAID some SSD’s together would be terrifyingly fast, but may exceed the national deficit in purchase price. Today’s story is about my RAID array.

Not feeling especially wealthy at the moment, and thus not inclined to run out and drop $800 on a wimpy 32GB of SSD even if it is way faster, I decided to pick up a pair of 750GB hard drives and build them into a nice RAID array. The goal was a single 1.5TB striped volume for only $240. My motherboard supports up to 6 SATA devices and has build in RAID support for those devices. Prior to adding the 2 new drives I was using only 3 of the 6 SATA devices I could support. This seemed to me to be the easiest and most cost effective way to beat a little more horse power out of my computer, with the added advantage of huge amounts of extra space.

Installing the drives was the typical pain in the butt that comes along with the process of trying to make all the wires in a computer lay in friendly places without being eaten by cooling fans. Once they were in though I figured I was only a few minutes away from enjoying my new speed and storage capacity. I fired up the BIOS, enabled RAID for the new drives, saved my settings, entered the RAID config, created a striped volume, saw on the screen a nice new striped 1.5TB array that was reported as healthy, exited the RAID program, and saw a gray blinking cursor.

That’s all I saw. Ever.

Wait for a while. Reboot over and over. Repeat every imaginable permutation of the configuration steps. It didn’t matter what I tried, my computer finished it’s power on self test (POST) and left me staring at a blandly colored short horizontal line blinking at regular intervals. The theory was that Windows itself was getting confused, but that was really hard to prove since I couldn’t even get the computer to boot.

Eventually, frustrated that I would never in fact stumble on to the pattern of configurations that would allow my computer to work like a computer again, I decided to turn off RAID and see how it all went. No problems, all the way into Windows, but with 2 extra 750GB hard drives. While this clearly worked at giving me more hard drive space, it failed miserably at getting the speed improvements I was looking for. So I began downloading improved drivers for Windows and new BIOS for my computer to attack the problem from as many sides as ended up being required. New drivers installed and BIOS tucked away on a USB thumb drive, I rebooted a few times to see if I could make Windows happy with RAID enabled.

More with the gray blinking cursor of extreme sadness. Well, at this point it was time to bring out the really big guns. Time to flash the BIOS to see if there was anything I could do from that perspective as far as making this project reach its finish line. Using the BIOS flash utility conveniently built right into the BIOS, I confirmed my BIOS, confirmed the BIOS I was about to install, let it install, successfully validated it, and watched happily as my computer rebooted. Except it didn’t come back.

Nothing happened. The computer didn’t POST, it didn’t beep, it didn’t show anything on the monitor, just nothing. I rebooted a bunch of times. I tried to turn off the power supply. I even popped out the battery. I was stuck, and my computer was now better at being a doorstop than a computer. This adventure in sadness had just taken an unexpected turn to downright terribleness. I was left with no choice. I called up Asus and waited on hold for over 30 minutes to ask them what to do. They provided me a specific pattern to follow involving the power supply, a jumper, and the battery. I followed it to the letter, and powered up my computer again. This time with it doing things it was supposed to do and the newly installed BIOS was there waiting for me.

Even with RAID enabled I no longer got stuck at the gray blinking cursor of death. This adventure however isn’t over just yet. Windows would boot up, but the RAIDed drives were simply missing. There were only a few unknown devices in the hardware manager to indicate that the computer knew they existed at all. Thus, the fancy new RAID drivers had proven to be somewhat useless, and entirely not fancy. More surfing the net, but on a computer that was unbelievably unstable thanks to a very confused SATA bus, more downloading of RAID drivers from other places, all to no avail. At the end of the day, I was forced to use the version of the drivers directly off the motherboard DVD, but I had to install them through Windows and find them on the disc manually instead of using the supplied driver install tools.

After a few more random reboots, a bit more instability, and some formatting of a drive that looked to be 1.5TB I decided to run a quick hard drive benchmark to see how I did. Thankfully, for comparison purposes, the hard drives I had in the computer before this experiment were almost identical to the ones I had just added so I had a solid basis for comparison. At the end of the day, the RAID array was almost exactly twice as fast as the drives were when not RAIDed together. I would call this a victory, even if a stressful and drawn out one.

In the on-going efforts of preparing my house to sell it, I’ve recently procured a fairly massive dumpster. I discovered that Home Depot offers dumpsters one day while wandering around at the Home Depot where I’ve spent thousands of dollars during this project. I ordered one while walking around in their parking lot from my cell phone and a couple of days later it arrived in my driveway. While placing the order I had a small flier with pictures of dumpsters in it and information about how big they are, but nothing more than that. Almost at random I chose the middle of the 5 sizes, a 15yd dumpster. It was $535.00 for 1 week, and the option to extend it for a second week at no extra charge if needed.

When it arrived I immediately began to think I had managed to get a dumpster that was way bigger than I could ever possibly fill. It sat in my driveway collecting bits of springtime tree pollen and other random dust on the wind for almost a whole week. By the time I was feeling dejected about having wasted $535.00 and decided to call for the extension by a week, I had only managed to place about 3 things in the dumpster. I was using about 1/50th of a cubic yard.

Over the course of the next week, I moved a bunch of other things into it which seemed to fill it very quickly due to poor arrangement. I was beginning to realize I would need help and tried to figure out what best to put into the dumpster in the time I had left. I called on my fiance, and the work began with me climbing into the dumpster to shuffle everything around. What was a nearly full dumpster once again become a dumpster with almost nothing in it. Then the fit hit the shan.

What followed was a bit of a blur honestly. It was an entire weekend of working on the house, cleaning out storage bins and trunks, throwing away everything that wasn’t important, chopping up furniture, tearing up carpet and padding, and carefully arranging new additions to the dumpster to optimize space usage. When it was over the dumpster was packed full, my fiance and I were exhausted, and my house was way emptier. This effort left both of us sore, tired, and frankly, feeling like we’d gotten a heck of a work out.  Imagine pushing a solid wood coffee table up over the edge of a dumpster that is as tall as you are if you can’t figure out why. It’s a work out I would recommend to anyone with a house to clean, but only if you own a Sawzall.

Imagine with me for a moment the simple pleasures of a kid learning to program his computer.  Using whatever language his brain can get around and only the least complicated parts of that language that are needed to “make the computer do his bidding” he sits around for hours programming silly little programs that output noise that imitates songs or draws pretty shapes on the screen.  There are no concerns for code maintainability, there is no need to worry about his brother coding something that breaks his code, there is no concept of his programs running on any computer besides the one he’s sitting in front of.  Even such basic programming concepts as looping and conditionals are foreign.  It’s a care-free world of exploration, playing around, and experimentation.

Literally decades later, that same programming kid is still programming.  Instead of writing programs that live in a single file, and would eventually grow up to include multiple subroutines instead of line numbers, he spends his days and nights crafting massive projects that involve dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of files.  His tinkering has become his career and code that was once just his is now created by teams of people.  The ideas for projects are seldom his own and are often supplied by people that appear to have no idea how to even use a computer.  What was once a passion has become a job.  What once held the amazing mark of “I can’t believe someone is paying me to do what I enjoy doing” has become “They don’t pay me enough.”

With the passage of time the glorified dreams of programming games for a living has gone by the wayside and have been replaced with the life of a web developer.  Code has become a chore for a paycheck, and the motivation to work on side projects is low due to the old stand-by excuse of “I just spent all day in front of a computer, why would I want to continue that now that I’m at home.”  Well, the simple reason is to try to keep some form of the passion for development alive and kicking in the rough world of a paycheck earning geek.  To that end I’ve managed to eek out a couple of partially completed pet projects that almost no one has ever even heard of, and even fewer care about.

To all my programming fellows out there, keep plugging along, keep earning that paycheck, and the the love of all that’s holy…  Don’t stop your pet projects.  Leave them unfinished if you must, but don’t let the spacing between them get too great or you may just find that you have lost the passion.  Without that passion these funny little boxes full of ones and zeros would stop being interesting, and that I fear, would suck indeed.

I’m sure there are people out there that are hoping this blog is about news crews, or religious groups, or government agencies, or angry mothers attacking the game for being evil, dirty, violent, disparaging, or otherwise just plain bad. Or perhaps others are looking for this to be a post about the game being amazingly, awesomely, frighteningly great, perfect, terrible or whatever. This is not the blog you are looking for.

This is a blog about a technically awesome game. From that perspective I present information about a game that is graphically beautiful, technically amazing, and even has a pretty cool storyline so far. I own the version of the game for the XBox 360 so can’t speak of the PS3 version here. I don’t know how the versions are different or how they are the same and I can’t tell you that one is better or worse than the other.

As a developer I find loads of things about this game interesting that not too many others even notice. The first thing that jumped out at me was the cinematic opening story, but not that it was pretty or that the story was craftily fed to me right along side the credits for the game. Instead that once control was mine, there was no difference graphically. As some of us remember about Grand Theft Auto 3 for the PS2, the cut scenes were pre-rendered and had a style entirely different from the game itself. Once control was handed over to the player for the first time, the graphics kinda faded into a car on a bridge that very closely resembled the one we were just watching in the cut scene, but not quite. In GTA4 however, the cut scene ended at a car that I was sitting in and I waited for a shift in quality to indicate that it was my turn to play. It didn’t come. I pressed the gas, and to my surprise and joy, the “cut scene quality” car I was sitting in began to move under my control. It was nice to experience quality of game in the realm of cut scene quality.

Many reviewers of games in this series are quick to mention the “sandbox” style of play. This means any number of things to different people, but commonly it can be summarized as follows: the game can be played indefinitely without advancing the story and the world runs on its own without you. In GTA4 this effect has been maintained and I daresay improved. There are still loads of things to do (including bunches of mini-game style things to do with friends or even while on a date) and loads of things to not bother doing if you so desire. The world itself is far more “dense” than in previous incarnations of this series. Things are going on everywhere following their own rules. There are drug deals, and traffic jams, and random events of crime, and if you wander into the right places, there are even bowling games going on.

Graphics amaze me in general for many different reasons. Perhaps the game is doing something to make the graphics look way more amazing than the horse power of the system seems like it should be able to handle. Another possibility is that the system is being used to its maximum and the graphics are both great and are filled with nice little things that add polish. The worst case is of course when the system has loads of power and none of it is used, and that fact is pretty obvious. GTA4 is the one with polish.

The game is full of beauty. In some cases it’s the natural beauty of a sunset over the river, the amazing effect created by waves actually coming in at the beach, the streets getting shiny when it rains, or fog that wafts out of sewers. In other cases the content isn’t necessarily beautiful but the effect is. Walking the streets you occasionally see bits of leaves or garbage caught in a breeze, or someone walking by sends a text message to a friend, or a beaten up car that’s been abandoned has exploded with tremendous visual flare.

The story too is a fun one. Instead of a kid looking to make a name for himself in various crime circles like it was in GTA3, this game places you in the shoes of a Russian immigrant lured to the streets of America by a cousin that tells some very tall tales about how great life is. From the little I’ve played I’ve managed to learn that the main character has been a soldier in a war and has done things he’s not proud of, but that he honestly seems like a good guy over all. Trying to survive and carve out a place for himself in America places him in the path of crime in Liberty City, a place where crime is the norm.

Overall, I doubt I would rate the game as high up the rating scale as so many others do, but I do enjoy the game for many reasons and there is something to be said for the stress relief provided by stealing a cop car for the exclusive purpose of running down hookers and old ladies alike as they innocently wander the sidewalks of Liberty City. I think the game is both fun and visually appealing and grants the user an assortment of abilities to do things any good upstanding citizen would never, and should never, even think of doing in real life.

In the realm of digital photography there are tons of things that can change the quality of the picture the camera takes. Most of these things take place right within the camera. To start with, if you’ve got a lousy lens, it doesn’t matter if everything else is great because light hitting great stuff will have been ruined before it got there. From the other direction, the same problem can exist. If your sensor sucks, it makes no difference how pristine the image is when it hits it. Besides that, the quality with which the camera plays with the data it gets has a huge bearing on the final output as well. That can mean how well the camera does its ISO noise reduction, how good the JPEG compression algorithm it uses is (or if it’s used at all), methods of analog to digital conversions, and so on.

The two main types of sensors in a digital camera are CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) and CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor). The differences between the two are huge, and arguments about which is better abound. The basic idea of both is to collect light and spit out a bunch of data in the form of a photograph. The similarities between the two almost stop there.

A CCD typically has a single “drain” point. Through that spot all of the data for the entire picture must be passed. The kicker is how that data ends up in that spot to be drained and the form the data is in when it is drained. Each row of the image actually cascades across the entire sensor into a holding row (which is sometimes the last row in the image itself) and then across that row to a single dot. All this shifting of charge is done as actual voltage signals based on massive input from a battery and signal strength data from each pixel of the image. Also, as voltages are shifted across the sensor, data of previous pixels can remain slightly and end up added into the latest shifted row. This can result in smudging within the picture or famous side effects such as “purple edges.” The advantage is that all data is uniformly interpreted through a single drain which has what I like to call a “single opinion” about how each color looks. The disadvantage is that to access any single pixel the whole sensor must be flushed. When the data leaves the chip it is no where near ready to be stored in an image file destined for a printer or computer as all we have is a stream of voltages. These voltages need to go through conversion chips to handle all the steps of converting them into digital data.

A CMOS sensor on the other hand has a drain for every single pixel in the image. The side effect of this is that there are loads of bits of circuitry for every single pixel. As it turns out, this is ok due to sensor creation processes that are identical to the creation of the processor in your computer. In some cases, each pixel has it’s own amplifier to further complicate what is happening at each pixel. The advantages are that data never needs to be forced across the whole sensor to be drained (effectively eliminating any problems of smudging) and that each pixel can be accessed individually (meaning the whole sensor need not be flushed to access it), and the power consumption is usually on the order of 1/100th of a similar CCD. The disadvantage is that every single pixel in the camera can have its own opinion about how it looks. Meaning, what is blue to one pixel may be a vaguely purple shade to the one next one down the line. This means seriously complex noise reduction must be done to end up with a clean image. The output of a CMOS sensor is data that can almost directly be stored as an image since all of the conversions take place right in the sensor. This also usually means there are very few required supporting chips and you can expect tremendous battery life.

Every camera I’ve ever owned has been a digital one. Every digital camera I’ve owned up until now has been a point and click style with a CCD. My current camera marks my first steps into the world of dSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) and my first CMOS sensor. To the uninformed dSLR represents the “professional” grade cameras that are bulky, support interchangeable lenses and have amazingly high price tags. To me it is the flexibility to choose my own optics for each situation. It’s exciting times from the perspective of photographic freedom, but I’m still learning the finer points of how to use the camera. Some would call this user error, but I think it’s actually more along the lines of user perception. With big complicated lenses comes new photo characteristics and that means that in general I’ve found fewer things to be in focus when the picture is taken.

Standard point and click cameras tend to be equipped with a lens that produces pictures with massive depth of field. With better lenses on a dSLR comes control over depth of field. The reality and learning curve required to identify that which is muddy looking and that which is simply out of focus due to not being in the depth of field is part of what I’m coming to terms with now as I adapt to my new photographic potential.

It all started with an innocent purpose of a late night pizza from a local pizza place. Local out by me means a 6 minute drive through hilly, curvy, back roads with loads of forest and an occasional small farm. A nice little drive for a delicious pizza dinner.

I have always been careful when driving in this area because there are deer everywhere. On my own street there is an equestrian club with sprawling fields that I’ve seen as many as 20 deer at a time during springtime evenings. Almost every night when I go anywhere I see at least one.

On this particular night, no amount of careful driving, swerving deftly or slamming of breaks managed to save the trip. The deer, while playing the role of an animal content in standing still on his side of the road, didn’t fool me even with the fact that he was tucked away in the opposite lane. There was an instinctive slamming of breaks and dodging to the outside edge of my side of the road at a mere glance of the beast. Apparently in an animal with such an amazingly dense body, the brain matter fails to be quite as capable because it saw a swerving, slowing vehicle coming down the road well away from its position and immediately thought “Wow, cool! I should run in front of that.” And so it did.

The actual event happened remarkably quickly. I would even argue that it happened about as fast as a deer can run, roughly. I freely admit a potentially skewed bias as the observer from inside the car and behind the steering wheel, but this was definitely a large deer. The good news in that is that it wasn’t a fawn, the bad news is that it was both more massive and tougher. Since the back roads have a speed limit of 30 mph and I was honestly going about that when I saw the deer, the impact was destined to not be a horror show. The anti-lock breaks were buzzing away and the car was slowing fast when the deer managed to get in front. I’d estimate 10 to 15 mph was the final impact speed.

Simple physics tell us how much energy a 3200 pound car has at even 10 mph, and how much velocity that translates into in an average 150 pound whitetail deer. The deer flew out of sight above the car and landed to the side of the road in a heap. I believe the translation of energy in an upward direction may have saved both the deer’s life and reduced the damage to my car. Picture shoveling snow for an understanding of how ramps work. My car was still running, now completely stopped, and both headlights were still working. I decided my evening did not need the view of a potentially nasty bit of carnage, so I drove off to complete my drive home.

Once in my own driveway, I walked around my car and thankfully discovered that there was no blood on my car. In its place was a very cracked and damaged driver’s side headlight dome complete with a mangled turn signal light inside, a slightly bent license plate, a bent and banged up hood, and bunches of deer fur wedged in as many places as the front of my car could offer to wedge it into. The good news here is that the damage wasn’t all that bad, and that the pizza had survived the rapid breaking.

The next morning, I drove down that same road on my way to work and was rather happy to see no deer on the side of the road. I firmly believe that while I may have beaten it up pretty badly, and that it may die sooner than was in its original plans, I didn’t kill it on the spot and that makes me pretty happy. Since there aren’t all that many hungry wild animals out in the suburban landscapes of Connecticut, I suspect it wandered off under its own power after the daze wore off.

For some time now I’ve been a member of an excellent wine club called 4 Seasons that costs me around $750 per year and adds loads of interesting varieties of wine to my wine rack. Each shipment is a case of 12 bottles of wine that includes 2 bottles each of 3 types of white and 3 types of red. They are shipped to me one per season, which is slightly misleading since there are actually 5 seasons in a year through this club. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Holiday, and Winter. Thus, with pretty simple math we can figure out that my wine club is 60 bottles a year at roughly $12.50 a bottle.

Several friends of mine enjoy the hobby of making beer or wine at home. This fact got me seriously thinking. Even as a guy that doesn’t care for beer I have to admit that it sounds like fun. I can imagine an infinite variety of beer types since most of the rules of beer fly out the window when you take control of the entire process. I tend to enjoy activities that are slower but the output is of a finer quality. Beer making and bonsai are prime candidates.

I repeat for good measure that I’m not a beer guy, and also that I am a wine guy. Since you can make both beer and wine at home (with a pretty seriously overlapping list of required equipment for those that are considering it) and I like wine, I saw the direction I wanted to go. After a couple of days of research into prices and lists of equipment I finally felt ready to take the plunge into another new hobby.

Like all hobbies this one has a pretty steep initial purchase curve, but unlike many hobbies, it has the potential to save obscene amounts of money in the long run. My initial purchase of things from my local beer and wine hobby store called Brew & Wine Hobby clocked in at right around $340. That purchase however will produce around 60 bottles of wine. Although I will need a few more bottles and corks when I get to the 2nd kit’s completion, those will only cost me right around $36. So the same math as before leads to the conclusion that for the patient and the passionate the price per bottle is a mere $6.27 and that number continues to drop with each kit I make. With the equipment I now own taken out of the picture, a kit of wine tends to produce 30 bottles at anywhere from around $2.25 to $5.00 per bottle.

The best part is I can now cancel my wine club and that within barely more than 2 shipments from my wine club I will have paid off my purchases. The second best part is the ability to make wines that I would never be able to afford or could afford but have a hard time accepting the price. Beyond that there is control and flexibility in what I make. If I find a kit I like, but have an idea about how it might be better, I can tweak to my heart’s content.

As I sit here at work taking in the views provided by my cubicle, I glance over at the lone source of greenery on my desk.  A very young crabapple tree in a pot.  It arrived in a bag from the Arbor Day Foundation, sat ignored in a bucket of water for way longer than it should have, and somehow managed to survive long enough for me to feel guilty about it and buy a pot to put it in.  A cheap and simple glazed pot that fits the drab decor of my cubicle, a short drive to work, and hopeful watering combined to produce what is now a somewhat healthy looking tree in a pot.

Now before you let your mind wander to images of ancient bonsai trees the likes of which can be found in Mr. Miyagi’s quaint little shop, let me assure you that a two year old tree in a pot looks nothing like that.  It’s gangly, almost 30″ tall and thanks to a sad life in a bucket of water, quite lopsided.  The hope is of course to reduce it in height over the next few years, but for now I’m just happy that it survived being planted after being soggy for so long.

The specific species of crabapple of this potted tree is Malus Sargenti or Sargent Crabapple.  If it ever actually manages to produce fruit from the limited nutrients provided by the miracle gro potting soil in the pot, they will almost look normal on a bonsai thanks to the relatively small size of crabapples.  For the bonsai purists out there taking notes, yes, I am fully aware that miracle gro potting soil is both the opposite of desirable for a bonsai and potentially harmful if not managed properly.  I chose it in an attempt to inspire the tree to take proper root (due to it’s young age) and to provide enough energy to hopefully end up with branches that are lower on the tree so I can reduce it in height effectively.