Tiny baubles, and the wine!

Those of you out there with a compatable browser and Sherlock Holmes’ eye for detail will have noticed a tiny addition to the location bar for this site. One of the great little perks about my job is that sometimes I get paid to experiment with really cool things.

And speaking of perks, the carboy full of pumpkin wine is perking away quite nicely!

Yeah, I know that’s kind of an awkward transition, but I’ve got two totally unrelated things to talk about and I wanted to use the same title for the blog entry.

First off, the location bar icon. Technically, it’s called a “shortcut icon” and I learned how to make them for a couple of client sites on our server. The best way to learn, of course, is to practice. So I made two icons, one for my site and one for my Fiancee’s blog.

If you’re on a browser that doesn’t display icon files, they look like this.

This is mine…	This is hers…

Guess which one I spent more time on? It almost looks like it was done by a professional…

Hee…

In a lot of ways, creating these icons reminded me of creating sprite-based graphics on the old Commodore 64 that I’d bought with my paper route money when I was a kid. It’s a lot easier than it used to be.

Now for the wine. If this batch of pumpkin wine makes it to the bottling stage, it’ll be a freakin’ miracle. I’ve done just about everything I could to screw things up.

First off, I filled the carboy with too much must (that’s the juice that becomes wine) before adding the yeast. I woke up on Tuesday with the sudden premonition I hadn’t left enough room at the top of the carboy, and the yeast couldn’t get enough oxygen. Wine sometimes needs a bit of air to get started, but you eventually need to cut off it’s air supply so that it’ll produce alcohol instead of vinegar. You can tell if it’s working right because it produces a huge amount of carbon dioxide, usually enough to foam right out of the carboy. Sure enough, the carboy was sitting there without a single bubble in it. I poured out a small bowlful and hoped that it’d be bubbling by the time we got back from work.

Fortunately it was. I let it run over night and put the water lock on it after work on Wednesday.

A water lock keeps air from getting into the carboy, and also provides a nifty show as the carbon dioxide bubbles out. The ones I like have a little inverted cup on a tube inside a bigger cup full of water. The CO₂ makes the inverted cup float up until it can leak out from under the edge, then in clicks back down. It’s very relaxing. float-click… float-click… float-click…

Thursday morning there was no float-click. There was no water in the lock. When I’d put it in the stopper I’d managed to crack the outer cup ever-so-slightly, and it’d drained over night.

Fortunately, I had a spare in the cellar. I quickly washed and sterilized it and carefully slid it into place. I saw the comforting float-click start up again and went off to work.

When I got back from work on Thursday, it was still working fine. But this morning I looked and there was no float-click. Again. This time, the water lock was fine, but the cap was just a touch loose. It’d work fine if I held it down lightly with my fingertips, but it had a tendency to wobble loose. This could be a problem. Wine takes a long time to work, and I really didn’t want to discover sometime in November that the cover had wobbled loose in May. Fortunately, once again, I had a spare.

When shopping for wine supplies, I’d picked up a couple of stoppers to see if I could use them with an older carboy I got from my uncle. One of them was a bit too large for that one, but it’d work perfectly in the one I was using for the Pumpkin wine. So, out with the old, and in with the newly sterilized new.

Float-click… float-click… float-click…

Ahhh….

It was still working when I got back from work. We’ll see about tomorrow.