Growing Hops, my experience

A guy on the Chicago Beer Society mailing list asked:

I am considering growing a couple of hop vines this year on the back deck of
my condo using a couple of planters and some wood lattice up the brick
wall. I've got the fiancee in on it for the "look", but I want a good crop
come August/September as well.
Has anyone tried to grow their own, particularly in a more confined space
like a patio with planters?
I'm hoping to hear pros and cons of such an undertaking, and I would
appreciate any input.
Thanks,
Mike

So I decided to write up a quick summary of my hops growing experience to date.

Max and I each attempted to grow hops in the city during the Summer of 05. He put his in a small pot on a 2nd floor balcony facing north. He neglected to water, and he got....not much. A few sprouts and a foot or two of vine and then nada. He probably could have done a bit better if he watered some more, but even then the lack of full sun made it a non-event.

I had better success. I grew a couple of shoots out of a single rhizome in a 5 gallon sized pot on the South side of a house on the 1500 block of Walton St. The location got 6-8 hours of full sun a day, and when the plant grew above the railing it got even more. I watered almost daily for the early and mid summer and fertilized a few times as well. At the peak of growth I got 3.5' of vertical growth in a week and about 18' of total vertical growth. In the end though, I only
yielded about 1oz of final product, and the cones I did get were on the small side. Taste was difficult to discern because we had to mix them with other hops in the brew, though I could clearly smell the lupulin.

I chronicled the experience here. There are some good pictures of the final results and you can get an idea of the height.

I have done some reading on growing hops and just about everyone says you don't get much the first year because the root system needs to develop. I was surprised that I got what I did, but if you compare what I got to an established plant, you can see multiple years of root
growth is what is needed to produce decent results, like this guy's.

After the season ended, I moved my pot to a 13th floor condo balcony. I got a lot better sprouting at the start of the 2006 season and I thought I was off to a good start. It started with probably 10-12 shoots and I think i pruned back all but the best 4. However I had nothing for the plants to really grow up vertically. I used a bit of cotton line from the pot to the railing and then I decided to try to grow them back and forth across the balcony railing. This did not
work. Though I got much the same the vertical (er horizontal) growth I got the previous year, I had MAJOR trouble with the wind. And I got virtually zero hops cones. Zero. Nothing for a whole summer of daily watering and coaxing and monitoring. I was pissed. I had to move in
September of that summer, but it wouldn't have mattered because I wasn't going to get anything anyway.

So I moved the pot again. This time my balcony was on the 9th floor facing east. Well, something must have happened while the pot sat there from Sept 06 to March/April of 07 because nothing came up. Not a single shoot. The roots must have frozen too much or rotted or who knows what, but there were no hops in the summer of 07. I doubt if anything will come up this summer, but I guess I can hope.

I think I am done trying to grow hops in planters on balconys. My limited experience has shown me that hops need:

1) lots and lots of sun
2) lots and lots of water
3) lots and lots of verticle room to grow.

If you don't have these, you will probably be disappointed with the results. I don't really want to talk you out of trying something, but just be warned and don't get too frustrated if you see poor results.

Steve and my brother in law both have plants growing in yards out in the suburbs. This summer it will be the 2nd and 3rd seasons for those plants, and hopefully we will see some real results.

Mitt Romney you are dumb

Mitt Romney was recently at the Detroit Auto show where he gave some comments regarding the state of the auto industry in the US. While he was more or less correct in one aspect, that the auto industry in Michigan is an economic indicator for industry in the rest of the country, he was WAY off in another of his comments.

Speaking to CNN on Tuesday, Romney also blasted a new energy bill that raised the fuel efficiency standards for cars to 35 miles per gallon, saying it was an "anvil" that will weigh down the domestic auto industry.

"All of the vehicles that you're making now are outmoded. You're going to have to build new engines, new transmissions, new axles. All of these things have to be changed at the cost of tens of billions of dollars. Good luck. Now, it's a benefit to the entire nation paid for by one industry that's already in trouble," Romney said.

A mandate on higher fuel economy does the following things:
-reduces, however little, our independence on foreign oil
-reduces our impact on the environment
-requires all automakers selling cars in America to follow these standards, thus negating any unfair cost to one country's industry
-enables the American auto industry to compete at a higher level in places where these higher standards already exist.
-forces the American auto industry to innovate, one of the main factors that has caused the industry to lose money as consumers shift toward foreign cars that are more innovative, get better mileage, are better built etc...

Lets take each line of his comment and dissect it a bit more:

"All of the vehicles that you're making now are outmoded."
:Well not exactly, some may be outmoded, but the standard applies to the entire fleet. Meaning you either have to produce one really fuel efficient car or raise the efficiency on the worst car. Either involves innovation which the industry is lacking anyway. And the auto makers should want to continually be making newer and better cars and abandoning their old ways. It is the only way to compete in any market.

"You're going to have to build new engines, new transmissions, new axles. All of these things have to be changed at the cost of tens of billions of dollars. Good luck.""
Sure, goes along with the implications of the first statement, sans the axles part....axles? really? And the industry is going to be spending that much anyway on R&D in the next several years. So are you just stating the obvious for political gain? (answer=yes).

"Now, it's a benefit to the entire nation paid for by one industry that's already in trouble..."
Sure is. In fact when any industry or market is regulated in a manner intended to improve the good of society, that industry has to pay for it. The point is to encourage innovation, lessen reliance on oil, and force the industry to complete better in the world market. Unless their are subsidies, which in this case would only harm the nation and the auto industry in the long run.

Romney seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill and to his own benefit. You may be able to persuade some blue collar workers that they will get their jobs back if they vote for you, but the only way they can get those jobs back is if they industry makes cars that consumers want to buy more than the foreign makers. And there is nothing Romney can do to make that happen. And the fuel efficiency law only helps the industry to make cars people want.

Nobody wants SUVs anymore Romney! You drive a 2005 Ford Mustang convertible, and go figure, you are against raising fuel standards, but offer nothing in return.

Vote Obama!

More Soulja Boy

A few days ago I blogged about the Soulja Boy dancing phenomenon. The videos I posted there were topped by Bo Ryan, Wisconsin's basketball coach, contributing his dancing skills to the world.

Fart Sandwich also blogs

My friend Fart Sandwich also blogs! Well, his xbox blogs automatically it would seem. It keeps a running tally of when he plays, what he plays and such. Written as if the xbox itself was alive and keeping a verbal record of how often he plays.

The real Fart Sandwich does in fact have a blog, but it is really too serious to have a link from this post I think...

The great fart sandwich gets voicemail!

I blogged before about some of the accomplishments of the great Fart Sandwich. Well now he has voicemail! You can leave him a message by using his SayNow service below or on his newly created blog.

SayNow is free, but your cell phone carrier may charge you for receiving text messages.

This.....is a sport!

I was blown away again today at the sport known as.... "Sport Stacking." Yes, this does in fact exist.

This kid is the best at this:


Apparently this is an actual sport...want to learn how to do it? Watch some training videos here. Or buy a stacking kit at Target!

Dancin to Soulja Boy

I think the song pretty much sucks, but just like the Macarena and the dance that went with that, 2007 has its very own. Crank That by Soulja Boy

Here are 4 video's that capture the phenomenon fairly well.

The original video for "Crank That"


Texas longhorns football dancing before a game.


Little black kids dancing at home.


Little white kids in ballet class. (by far the best one I have seen so far)

Top 10 Flash Videos/Sites

The whole idea of flash is pretty cool. You combine elements of animation, multi-track layouts, scripting language, vector objects all into an amazing multimedia design environment. The possibilities are endless really. Here I have assembled my Top 10 list of the best flash Videos/Animations/Sites I have run across so far.

#1 - Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviantART
A fun take on the use of the flash creation environment.



#2 - http://producten.hema.nl/ - Pretty simple animation, but another take on products on a online shopping page interacting with each other.

#3 - The guys over at Neostream are awesome. Some real talent there.

#4 - What list of flash animation would be complete without mentioning Homestarrunner, specifically the emails. The animation is pretty basic, but as a basis for cartoon animation, flash allows the animator to work more on the story.

#5 - Ok, so I only have 4 for now, but I will add more later.

Net Neutrality with Timothy Wu

On Saturday I attended a forum at the University of Chicago presented by The Triple Helix club. The speaker was Columbia Law Professor Timothy Wu, who works in the area of copyright and telecommunications policy, and is currently writing a book about the current state of affairs on the internet related to net neutrality. He spent most of the talk discussing aspects of his book, which basically covered the history of the common carrier; organizations like Western Union and Ma Bell. It was interesting to learn how closely the current debate follows these previous situations. I ask Professor Wu what his thoughts were on the perception that regulation limits innovation. He responded by referring to the fact that we can now plug any device into a phone jack (cheap telephone, modem, anything else) and be connected to the phone network. This was because of regulation and is pretty much why the internet even exists today.

Nobody uses Discover Card anymore

Upon quarterly review of my companies accounting, I have noticed that out of all higher dollar spending customers, nobody uses the Discover credit card to pay us. The last time a customer used Discover card was back in January 2007. And that was a $250 monthly recurring charge. That customer was the ONLY one paying with Discover card out of the XXXXX number of customers we have. In fact, even in the previous year (2006) that customer was still the only one paying by Discover card!

Luckily the cost of accepting discover card is virtually zero. They charge no ongoing fees for keeping an acount open (cough AMEX).

One of our other divisions has a large number of customers paying by Discover card. This division concentrates on services that are more targeted to smaller businesses and consumers in general. I would guess that either 1) Discover prefers to concentrate on consumer spending or 2) people in business dislike using Discover card.

getting screwed....again

More than 3 years ago I blogged about an awesome new practice that Caterpillar was instituting. It is somewhat complicated, so just read that post to understand more about what why this sucks.

This week, I received notices from Caterpillar via email. These notices basically said the following:

---
Dear everyone who pays us money for things we buy from you,

We will now be screwing you in yet another new and exciting way. Some of the big wigs here decided we could fire some people and generally cut down on some of our administrative overhead (read: healthcare costs) by using some 3rd party accounts payable software. We also cut a deal with the postal service so they no longer have to deliver mail to our offices! From now on:

1) If you want sell us something, we will generate a PO and send it to you via email or fax. All electronic eliminates paperwork and the cost of processing the paper. You will actually probably appreciate this aspect.
2) (The best part) We won't accept your paper invoices anymore!!!!

To accomplish this, YOU must PAY a 3rd party for access to this software. You will pay them about 1% of your revenue passed through this system. So remember, like before, if we are your biggest customer (or only customer) you are basically screwed! You are now losing another 1% of your already low profit margins. (By the way, if you are one of our super large suppliers who we really depend on, please just work with us to use this system...the fee structure works in favor of larger companies.)

Also. EVERYONE THAT WE ARE SENDING THESE EMAILS TO IS STUPID! THOSE OF US THAT STILL WORK HERE ONLY WANT TO DO THE MINIMUM AMOUNT OF WORK! SO READ ALL OF THESE 15 EMAILS THAT WE ARE SENDING AND PRINT THEM ALL OUT AND DON'T LOSE THEM!!!!1111oneoneone YOU KNOW WE WILL TAKE OUR SWEET TIME FIXING YOUR PROBLEM IF YOU MAKE A MISTAKE.

Again, please note: This is how it is going to be from now on. We can do this because we are a huge giant company, we don't care about the people we do business with, and everyone else is doing it so we figured we should jump on board.

For those of you that only have very small contracts with us, this will probably be of benefit to you, as you will get your payments even faster. However, those of you that do a large percentage of your business with Caterpillar, you will be screwed in a new and exciting way.

-Sincerely
-The lamers at Caterpillar

---

Reason #2370492 why big business sucks.

New Radiohead album for $1

I just downloaded the new Radiohead album "In Rainbows." A few days ago i "pre-ordered" it, and then today they sent me a link to download it. The best part about this process, was I paid $1 USD for it. (.01+.45GBP). I could have paid $10 or $100 or $1000 or whatever I wanted to pay. I tried to pay 0, but I couldn't seem to get that to work.

As ARS Technica points out...this is the future of music and entertainment. Give stuff away and people will pay for stuff they really want. Radiohead's goal was to get people to buy their $80 "disc box" which included the In Rainbows album, a 2nd disc with additional material, 2 LPs and a bunch of assorted artwork and other crap. Radiohead claims "the free-download experiment is working out very well so far, driving an 11-fold traffic boost to the band's Web site and converting plenty of those hits into sales of premium boxed sets for £40 a pop." That assumes everyone paid .01GPB! I assume that a good amount of people paid $10 or $15 or more for the album.

Anyway...not that I like Radiohead all that much, but I wanted to be a part of the experiment.

Google maps updates street views for Chicago

Google maps just updated its Street View system for the Chicago downtown area. So of course the first thing everyone at the office did was look to see if anyone got 'caught on film.' Turns out, one of my co-works was spotted riding his bike to work early on a weekday morning. I, on the other hand, do not appear (at least not that I found). My bicycle, though, was parked in front of my office building.

up to $50

I just made my second donation to Barack Obama's primary campaign. They are getting really creative in the way they are getting people to donate.

Since I had already donated several months ago, I have been getting messages once a week or so with different political statements from Obama or his campaign manager. Most of these emails contain some kind of plea to donate money. This week's email contained a new tactic that I thought was really interesting. If you are a previous contributor and you donate again, they will match your donation with that of a first time contributor. They give you the option of sending a personal message to that person when they make their donation. It was kinda fun. Within a minute or so I had been matched with another person and I received a nicer personal message back from them.

Another interesting thing that Obama's campaign is doing is you can get on their text message list. Every so often something is happening, Barack is on TV or giving some special speech somewhere and I get a text message telling me about it.

With all of this interactivity going on...how can he not be leading the money race! Yes I think Hillary would probably be a decent choice...but she is certainly no Obama. So anyway...if you are stumbling upon this post...and you want to donate visit Barack Obama's website and make a donation. You can donate as little as $5! Really...it will be worth it to join this movement.

Vista won't use Firefox as default browser

Going along with the theme of my last post, this is my short story about getting Vista to recognize Firefox as the default browser for all applications.

When I upgraded to a workstation with Vista, I had several problems with getting things to run smoothly. I previously blogged about my problems using Trillian. But I could never figure out why Vista would not recognize Firefox as the default browser for things like Google Desktop search, or when clicking a link from within an Outlook email. I spent time several months ago trying to solve the problem, messing with all kinds of settings in the control panel, to no avail. Then a few days ago, I decided to try again. I googled for "vista defaulting to IE not firefox" which returned this result from a cnet forum. The post describes how installing Safari, and then using Safari to manage the global browser preference will make my problem go away. I install Safari, then go into Safari's preferences and set the default browser to be Firefox. Presto! Everything now uses Firefox as the default browser including the two main problems areas of Google Desktop Search and Outlook. Thank you to Safari, no thank you to Vista.

I am sure there are other ways to fix this problem, but this one was quick, simple and painless.

Trouble with imbeding images...InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc...

I have been having a hard time attempting to make a credit card authorization document for use internally to my company. The main problem is that I want to display our company logo inside the document. This is easy enough for a word file, but I want to turn the word file into a PDF. Here comes the hard part. How do I make the logo appear in sufficiently high quality on the PDF? I tried exporting the logo in several different formats, originally from .ai, and then into other formats uncluding .eps, .jpg etc... The best result I could get was with a PNG file...however even that had problems when displayed in the PDF format...jagged edges on the lines of the logo. It looked acceptable when printed on paper...but still I thought I could do better.

I decided it was time to ditch Microsoft Word and attempt to build the document from something more suited to graphics. Using Adobe Illustrator would take too long and I would have problems with text formatting. I decided to use Adobe Indesign (formally Adobe Pagemaker). I have Adobe CS3 Web Premium installed on my computer, and I figured it would be included....but no. InDesign is not included with CS3 Web Premium. Luckily I had upgraded from CS2 Standard...which included InDesign. Unfortunately, I had uninstalled the entire CS2 suite when I upgraded to CS3. I had to reinstall standalone InDesign from the CS2 suite...which appears to work fine.

Then I was easily able to setup the document using InDesign, and import the logo in vector format, which looks really sharp. Now the problem became that the credit card "placeholders" which were in the original word document were generated with "word art" whatever that means. Even though I could copy and paste them into InDesign, it would not translate them onto the printed or PDF versions of the file. In a quick fix effort to get the project done, I took a screenshot of the word document, imported the card placeholder imaged into Photoshop, tweaked them a bit, and then sent them over to InDesign. Should I decide to spend a bit more time on the project, I will re-do these placeholder images in Illustrator and replace the low-rez ones.

RealArcade can suck it

So a guy who sent me an email from yahoo had their standard advertising link at the bottom. For some reason, I noticed it and saw that it was an add to download an updated version of Monopoly to play on the computer. Turns out it was an add for RealArcade. Regardless, I downloaded and started playing the game, only to get about 3 minutes in and have the game stop the free trial...please fork over $20!!! I can get the actual Monopoly board game for $17.66 and have something that I will never accidentally erase or lose interest in.

RealArcade = Real Networks = Real player = all worthless crap...

Do I really look like any of these people?

Trillian doesn't work well with Vista

I have been having a lot of problems with Trillian on my new Vista machine. Basically it refuses to retain a lot of my preferences and history and stuff when I restart my computer or restart the program.

Reason?: From the start I believed it to be some kind of permissions problems or something related to Vista's OMG SOMEBODY IS HAXXORING YOUR COMPUTERZ security features. Reason 32703944 why Vista blows...

Solution?: Install directly to C: instead of within C:/program files. Everything seems to be working perfectly now...did several restarts and it is now retaining everything I need retained!

Now...I love Trillian...but please, please go faster with your new Trillian Astra.

Distractions

I got distracted about a bazillion times today for one reason or another...mostly because I was covering for Sales, who had nobody in the office today (lucky me.)

One of the things I found was this image of what Wikipedia looks like....I think it is probablyh fairly accurate, though you could substitute the yellow circle for Star Wars certainly, or WoW or something similarly enthralling that geeks pursue in their spare time.