History of the term “Telephone Sanitizer”

Now, for a socially aspiring middle class family, it wasn’t quite the thing to have a truck parked in front of their house marked “Kensington W.C. Cleaning” or “Brompton Crapper Swabout,” broadcasting the messages: (a) we don’t have staff, and (b) our W.C. is dirty. So some enterprising toilet cleaner stencilled “Telephone Sanitizing” on the side of his truck. Carrying positive associations of modernity (telephones were new and expensive) and of fastidious cleanliness (even our telephones are sanitary) the discreetly marked trucks were well-received by housewives and the euphemism quickly became universal in the trade. – Trevor Blackwell

Fermenting: “GnomeMower” – Biére de Garde

After a three batches of beers with 6+ month fermentation timelines ( “Marley was Dead“, “Out Like a Lion” , “Sour Suburbanite” ) I wanted something with a slightly, faster turnaround.

And – less, um, experimental.

So, I pulled together this Biére de Garde Golden Strong Ale.

Simple and straight-forward ingredient list.

  • Original Gravity: 1050 ( ~6.5% ABV though, I’m pretty sure that’s a low reading)

Update 1 April 2011
After a day of being quiet – re-attached the blowoff tube last night. Woke up this morning to a hose full of new krausen. Golly.

Update 7 April 2011:
I moved it to the secondary today. Kinda flat. Hmmm.

Update 3 May 2011:
According to the Hopville’s Beer Calculus – I completely missed both Golden Strong & Biére de Garde. Not off by much on the Bier de Garde – and that’s what I’m really in the mood for any way right now.

Update 16 May 2011:
Bottled tonight.
Final Gravity: 1.002
Tasting notes from bottling: medium body with a sugary grapefruit notes in the nose and aftertaste. I’ve also renamed this ‘GnomeMower’ since it’s so far form a Golden Strong.

Update 23 May 2011: Fantastic. The carbonation gives it a perfect head – and it lasts for the entire pint. The grapefruity-ness has subsided considerably and the body is much more forward. There’s a little off-sweetness on the nose but the finish is clean. Turned out to be quite the nice beer.

Fermenting: “Sour Suburbanite” – A Bitter Lambic

  • Original Gravity: 1050

Update 22 May 20100
Bottled today. Final Gravity 1004.
Pre-carbonation tasting notes: Amber in color. Tastes like pure 100% grapefruit juice. Real sweet & citrusy nose. Just the faintest hint of a body. Both a sour and bitter finish. Definitely not what I was aiming for. Once carbonated – I suspect this will be very refreshing. Though – definitely not what I was hoping for.

Speedtesting Qwest’s Heavy Duty DSL

After a decade with Speakeasy, I switched to Qwest for my DSL.

From what I understand, Qwest has fiber running to the my block with copper the house. Additionally as I understand – this switch from copper to fiber means Qwest is no longer compelled to make bandwidth available to resellers like Speakeasy.

The copper turns into WiFi once it gets inside my house, then down the basement to me. I’ve got sneaking suspicion that I could squeak out a few more Mbs and shorten the ping times by moving the phone jack downstairs and running ethernet to my primary machine.

The first few days, the throughputs were highly erratic but everything seems to have stabilized quite nicely.

AT&T Also Betting on WiFi?

I’ve got a long bet that WiFi will take over our telecom. Voice, video, everything.

It’s cheap, it’s unlicensed, it’s nearly ubiquitious and both 802.11[a-z] and the wired broadband to those wireless points is getting faster and faster.

For years now I’ve been a fan of T-Mobile’s HotSpot@Home program where calls originating within a WiFi network don’t count against the monthly minute plan. I found this program to have an interesting side-effect:

“Additionally, if I’m not within a wifi network, I’m probably driving or otherwise not able to talk.”

Cringely says this mixed network technology is why AT&T acquired T-Mobile.

“Clever use of other people’s bandwidth can add an order of magnitude to AT&T’s connectivity and backhaul for no marginal price at all. Suddenly the network expands, coverage gaps go away, yet backhaul bandwidth actually drops. Look for it.” – Cringely

Like Fail

Emphasis mine.

“The Refresh Project accomplished everything a social media program is expected to: Over 80 million votes were registered; almost 3.5 million ‘likes’ on the Pepsi Facebook page; almost 60,000 Twitter followers. The only thing it failed to do was sell Pepsi.“

“It achieved all the false goals and failed to achieve the only legitimate one.”– Bob Hoffman, CEO of Hoffman/Lewis Advertising

Hat tip Dan Woychick.

Working at it

“In fact, to the extend that the future is shaped by human action, it is not much use in trying to predict it – it is much more useful to understand and work with the people who are engaged in the decisions and actions that bring it into existence” – Saras D. Sarasvathy

“The instant somebody goes from playing their guitar in the bedroom and at parties to wanting to make money off of it, they are no longer an artist, but an entrepreneur and a business owner. The same rules apply to them as to every other entrepreneur on the planet: They need to provide something which somebody else is prepared to pay for.” – Rick Falkvinge