Assignment: Improbable

So yesterday evening I submitted my final assignment for this year's OU course, M301 Software Systems and Their Development. This course has a rep for being wrought from pure evil, which is not entirely unmerited, and this last assignment fit this profile perfectly. This was probably the most wide-ranging of the year's six assignments, covering cryptography, security, project management, ethics, and various aspects of the use of Java and UML, which made it tough enough, but there were quite a few flaws in the way the questions were worded, which made for some real ambiguities.

Anyway, it's finished and submitted on time, and to keep my grade average up all I need to score is 60% -- fingers crossed. Now it's time to start preparing for the exam, which is in a little over two weeks' time.

Rosehips

So I'd been eyeing up all those rose bushes near our house and watching these big, fat rosehips ripening nicely, and planning the next batch of wine, when some sod went and trimmed all the bushes, leaving naff-all fruit behind.

Luckily, after an hour's wander a little further afield, I'd got myself a bag of hips, only to realise that we were nearly out of sugar. D'oh!

Anyway, last night, after aquiring some more sugar, <3 and I chopped up our kilo of rosehips, stuck them in a bucket with sugar and boiling water, and stirred. The mix is currently being munched on by a dose of pectinol (hopefully breaking down the fruit and destroying pectin that could leave the end product cloudy), so this evening the yeast can go in for a couple of weeks of fermenting in the bucket.

The mead it still fermenting along nicely, after 2 weeks.

First Winemaking Steps

A couple of months ago, a friend convinced me of the worthiness of winemaking as a hobby, recommended a book (First Steps in Winemaking by CJJ Berry) and presented me with a couple of demijohns. The book cost less than a fiver, so I bought a copy and had a read -- it does a good job of explaining the basic theory, describing the essential equipment as well as the less essential but useful kit, and has many dozens of recipes for country wines, from nettle to elderberry. More recently, I decided to give it a go and ordered some equipment, yeast, sterilising powder, and so on from the excellent Art of Brewing, and last week I started my first brew. The first effort is a mead based on a recipe in Berry's book, with 3.5 lb of honey, and my little modification: I boiled some rosemary in with the honey and water, hopefully giving it a more interesting taste. Nearly a week later, we have a steady fermentation, and it's looking good. According to the recipe this should be drinkable by Christmas, which is extremely fast for a homebrew wine. We'll see... The plan is to raid some local rose bushes for rosehips with which to make my next batch -- slightly more advanced than the mead.