Lady Gray and the Great Garage Clear-Out

We had a productive weekend, sorting out assorted domestic chores like mowing the lawn, trimming the hedge and clearing a load of junk out of the garage -- to be rewarded by finding a pair of unopened wedding presents. To be fair, these presents arrived late amongst a pile of stuff brought over from Ireland by the inlaws a few months back, and which we just hadn't got around to sorting through. A nice surprise there.

There is now also yet another batch of wine on its way -- made with Lady Gray tea and a pile of raisins (which apparently improves the end result almost as much as adding grape concentrate). This is currently going through first-stage fermentation in a bucket, which makes for great fun as a loud "THUD!" is periodically heard from upstairs when the lid blows its seal under the pressure of CO2.

It's a Tech's Life...

From a support request today...

The colour laser printer ... has developed a fault. It has said that it is low on black toner for some time, but yesterday it said that it was out of black toner and would not print at all. There is no sign of it being short of toner. I switched it off and back on again. It worked fine, even though it was complaining about being low on toner. This morning it stopped again, complaining of the same thing. After switching off and on again, it is again working, and there is no sign of there being any problem with the print quality. I think it is inevitable that this problem will recur soon.

Indeed. The solution? Replace the toner.

Walk Of Shame

This weekend was the second Cardiff "Bootie Camp", an informal spin-off from STACK UK's annual Boot Camp for aspiring sports kite flyers. I'm not aspiring to compete any time soon, but what little team/pair flying I have done, I have enjoyed greatly, so I persuaded I'll Wager to come along as my partner, and much fun was had -- particularly working on a kite ballet routine to Toccata by Sky, and the "stick precision" competition held due to the fact that the weather conditions were not good enough to fly in at the time.

An excellent weekend marred only by the loss of an item that meant a lot to me. It's more-or-less replaceable, but that particular one was treasured. Nuts.

Of Examinations and Fermentations

Quite a lot to report now...

1. My rosehip wine is now happily bubbling away in a demijohn. It was a pig to strain the fruit pulp from the must, and still a little got through, but it's settling OK and is showing the first signs of thinking about clearing.
2. On an unrelated matter, I had my OU exam this morning. It was a tough exam, with some of the questions on concurrency and OO design finding fuzzy points in my knowledge. I think I did OK, but I'm not confident I hit my target grade. It's possible though. As celebration after the exam I got back to a bit more winemaking...
3. The mead has been clearing and had developed a thick sediment, so I racked it off into a new jar, taking the opportunity to have a taste (not bad!) and try out my new hydrometer. The gravity I measured was pretty much bang on 1000, meaning the majority of the sugar is now alcohol. There's still some more fermentation to go – this is going to be a nice, dry mead, and should be worth drinking by Christmas.
4. I now have a gallon of Ribena wine on the go too (yes, Ribena – why not?). This looks like it should turn out to be a sweet (possibly too sweet -- next time use less sugar!) pink wine. Nice and different to the others I'm making up.
5. PS. Knock me down with a bubble, I got 93% in that last assignment. Just born lucky, I guess.