Memorial Day Activities

I can’t say that I’ve been really busy this memorial day, but I have gotten some stuff done. Probably the biggest thing was brewing 10 gallons of Witbier, at least half of which will go on to become Mango Mama” witbier (a fruit witbier with… uh… mangos). The brew day went resonably well, although I did stick the sparge pretty good after about 3 gallons. More hot liquor, a good stirring, and a second vorlauf later it sparged flawlessly.

I also am getting activities queued up for next weekend, when I will brew 10 gallons of belgian pale with – Wyeast’s Canadian Belgian Strain!!! WOOOT! I stopped by Joe & Marlana’s shop (HDYB) on Saturday, only to discover that they had another (expired) package of this stuff in the fridge. Since I do starters, that didn’t slow me down one bit – I was so thrilled to get another pure culture of that strain. I brought it home, smacked it, and within 16 hours the package had started to swell. It is now downstairs on the stirplate propogating to a good sized volume for next weekend. I will then take the slurry from my 10 gallon batch and use it for 20 gallons of Travellers & Tourists Belgian Red in a few more weeks. YEAH!!! Next time that strain becomes available, I will probably get 2 or 3 of them – LOVE that yeast.

I have also been doing some work on the user interface program for the sculpture… but you all are probably not terribly interested in that. I’ve been trying to zero in on what the design behavior would be like for setting the screens up, etc… and I think I’ve arrived at a fairly user-friendly method. It will be mostly drag & drop, with many of the properties being set by simple mouse clicks. I’ve got the drag & drop working, and have the point control working pretty well for a number of different things. The drag and drop turned out really nice – I managed to get the images to show up partially transparent – looks much cooler than the “outline” style. Right now I’ve got control point manipulations drawing just the outline because it started to look a little jumbled with the translucent style. Screenshots are below.

My hope is that this stuff can be used as a development platform by other folks who want to do something similar for their sculptures – they won’t have to struggle as much creating the user interface and can focus in on all the more fun stuff, like the electronics and piping.