fri nov 1
The other day, a weather system swept across the state and we were hit by torrential rains. A couple inches overnight, and culverts everywhere were washed out. Yesterday, a windstorm replaced the rain, and the power went out. It didn’t look like it was coming back on any time soon, so I set up the generator and looked for an outside chore to work on.
I decided to prune some of the apple trees. Usually, when I cut a big branch and it ‘starts to go,’ I back off and hunker down until the noise and the rain of twigs and leaves stops, but at one point, the rumble kept rumbling, and the falling debris just kept falling. And when I finally looked up, I saw that a tree behind me had blown over and fallen 30 feet away.
A tree fell in the forest and only I was there to hear it.
It made a lot of sound.
sat nov 2
Uh oh.
A few days ago, I grabbed a new bottle of cider out of the closet, and it was … ‘stiff.’ Like it’s under pressure. As in ‘gone bad.’
”Huh,” I thought, and I just grabbed a different bottle.
The other day, it happened again, but it seemed that the whole batch-code of bottles had gone bad. I made a mental note of it, and grabbed a good bottle from a different batch.
Today, I had a hard time finding a bottle of cider that hadn’t gone bad. I poked thru batch after batch in my inventory, and they’re mostly stiff. I finally found a good bottle, and I grabbed it.
This is not good.
I need to think this through …
sun nov 3
I did a little debugging.
It looks like the batches I sorbated are the batches that survived.
The batches I didn’t sorbate are the batches that died.
(sorbate is a preservative)
I was using sorbate in the first half of the season, but I noticed it was precipitating out at low pH, so I stopped using it. And now I have experimental data showing that sulfites alone are not good enough for soft cider, because most of my 250+ quarts of cider have gone bad.
Bummer.
Well that’s Murphy for you.
Yeah, I’m pissed, I’m disappointed. I’m embarrassed. All that. But mostly, I need to understand it and get it right next time, so now I’m all set.
Better luck next year!
But here are two things that I don’t know:
1) How much pressure builds up in a bottle of bad cider?
2) What is the bursting point of the bottles holding the bad cider?
I’m guessing 1) 50-100 psi and 2) 60-110 psi.
Not a single one of them has leaked yet, but I’m not sure if it’s wise for me to be storing 200 quart sized, pressurized cider bombs next to my desk.
tue nov 5
You can not make my life up.
Last night I had a heart attack.
At least, that was my best guess at the time.
I was sitting at my desk doing email, when I got really sleepy, really fast.
I mean rrreeeally sleepy, rrreeeally fast. Repeatedly.
I moved to a lower chair, which I couldn’t fall out of, and I watched a wave of wooziness wander right over me. Something wasn’t right.
I tried to close up for the night, but I couldn’t do it, and I wound up dazed on the floor. I managed to make it upstairs, where I felt alert enough to google ‘what to do in a heart attack.’
It said: Take aspirin and call 911.
I searched in nine hundred and eleven places, and I could not find a single fucking aspirin in the whole god damned house. Not that I was thinking straight…
Google gave a long list of heart attack symptoms, and I only matched the woozy one, so I decided not to raise an alarm at this time. I laid down fully clothed, but all I could think was that if I’m gonna die, then I want to brush my teeth first. It took me two tries to get to the bathroom, but I got it done. I tucked in and wondered what was going to happen.
If and when I woke up.
In the morning, I was fine, but you can bet that I was on high alert.
Every cough, sneeze, fart, and wheeze got reviewed and filed away: Is it part of a pattern? Part of a problem? Phooey. If it’s something serious, then I’ll know soon enough.
Or, it could be this:
Reid’s sitting at his desk doing email. He is 60 feet and 3 right turns away from the nearest door or window. The room is still. He’s surrounded by 5 glass carboys of fermenting hard cider, and each one burps an occasional slug of CO2 into the room. Behind him there’s a closet full of 200 pressurized quarts of cider gone bad. None of them are leaking liquid, because they’re all right side up, but they’re all leaking a steady little stream of high pressure CO2 into the room. I bet if I could hear better, I could hear them leak!!
According to Google, if you breathe air with 1000-2000 ppm CO2, you will get woozy or worse. That’s equivalent to a 1/8″ thick layer of CO2 on the floor, dispersed into the room.
I think my cider tried to kill me!
All it takes is one bad apple.
Sun nov 10
Mary had cataract surgery in her left eye last week, and It went well. She’s taking it easy (doctor’s orders) and today I cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Get well soon!
mon eleven eleven
The last time I talked about c3pr was in July.
Then I spent a month on my motorcycle.
Then I cidered for 2 months.
And by then, I’d pretty much forgotten where I’d left off. But I’ve dusted it off, started solving problems, and I’m pretty sure you’re going to hear more about it.
Like for instance …
My 7i76 and my proNet don’t talk to one another, so I had to hack up an interface. It’s not hard, but you need the right parts, and that can set you back a week or more, plus some bucks.
I remember doing something like this back in the 90’s, so I rummaged through a couple of cardboard boxes full of electronics, and I found exactly the right optocouplers, exactly the right resistors, a proto-board, terminals, standoffs, … Everything I needed!
In no time flat, I had it built, and in 2 days, I had it working, and it cost me zero dollars.
Speaking of $zero …
A couple years ago, I bought an adjustable table at an auction for $15. I threw out the table, but I kept the linear actuators from it, and they gathered dust. Today, I mounted one of them between the joists over the robot and used it to suspend Charlie’s body while I replaced the motor in the base. It was like having a gantry crane, but without a gantry.
It’s been a long time since anything worked this well for me.
thu nov 21
I used to do math with a pencil and I made occasional mistakes.
Now, I do math with a computer, and I make a lot of them.
I spent the last 5 days updating my robot kinematics module and – man, oh man – the math was bad. Transposed matrix transforms, euler angles, rodrigues conversions and lots of trigonometry. It all dimly rang a bell, and it all eventually fell into place, but it was hard.
It’s Greek to me too, thanks to phi, psi, and theta.
fri nov 22
Every autumn, we have a fruit fly problem in the house.
Usually, we just get religion about keeping the compost bowl clean, and they disappear after a week or so. Not this year. This year, there’s a lot of them, and we can’t seem to get rid of them. They’re annoying, and you gotta ask yourself: what’s different this year, that they’re so much worse?
And then it dawned on me: 250 quarts of cider-gone-bad in the cellar.
Bugs like carbon dioxide. And although I’ve lowered the CO2 level so it’s no longer toxic to humans, it’s more than enough to attract fruit flies.
So I have to ask myself: Am I going to throw out all my cider (and fix my fruit fly problem) or am I going to hang onto it, just in case it turns out to be good for something some day. I hear apple cider makes good vinegar! And I know that vinegar and dish soap kills weeds! So maybe I could ….
Dump it, Reid. Just fucking dump it down the drain.
So I started dumping it down the drain. I’ve got 6 shelves at 40 bottles per shelf, and my sink only holds 8 at a time, and that gives you a lot of time to think about what you’re doing. And how much effort went into the stuff you’re dumping down the drain.
And I stopped.
Maybe I’ll dump it. Maybe I won’t. Fruit flies be damned!
fri nov 29
Thanksgiving is over.
Eleven of us went to Charon’s and I found the appetizers, helped myself, and then had dinner. I was briefly uncomfortable, but I’ve been worse. A good time was had by all.
C3PR is sputtering.
Sputtering to life like a pull-start engine that finally coughs.
Two years ago, I set aside some serious software for which, to use it, I needed a robot.
Fast forward to today, and now I’ve built myself a robot, and I’m learning how to use it, and I kinda have a plan.
What can go wrong?