Pumpkin Ale

I began making a pumpkin ale featured on this website.

Ingredients

1 lb Vienna Malt, 4L
1/2 lb Crystal Malt, 40L
1/2 lb Malted Wheat
6 lb light malt extract

1 oz Mt. Hood hops (60 min)
1/2 oz Hallertaver Hops (15 min)

Wyeast American Ale

(At end of boil)
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp all spice
1/4 tsp mace
1/4 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 cup corn sugar (bottling)

I bought a pumpkin below, not sure the weight. Probably 11-13 lbs and cut it up into small square-like pieces. I soaked and left a bit of the pumpkin seeds and slimy stuff in there as well. I steeped the pumpkin and grains at roughly 155 degrees F for approximately 30 minutes.

Afterward I removed the grains, strained the pumpkin (well most of it) and added the malt, 1 cup of brown sugar and 1/2 cup of table molasses. Afterward I brought the wort to a boil (212 degrees F) and added 1oz Mt. Hood Hops. At 15 min left of the boil I added the finishing hops, 1/2oz Hallertauer.

I cooled the wort by using ice packs and water in the sink. During which I added my spices.

Below are some photos

Windows Vista Defrag - Fail

Yet another stupid user interface design by Microsoft. This time I attempted to defrag a machine. The last time I remember defragging a system was with windows 2000/XP. I recalled it would give you a screen showing you a percentage of the disk that was fragmented, so you could evidently make a smart decision on whether you need to degragment the disk.


Well unfortunately simply going to the defrag UI in Vista is not the same. When I loaded the defrag utility from the start menu (which is another pain in the ass UI I won't discuss) I was presented with the following.


Yet another User Interface designed for apes! I am really tired of Microsoft hiding advanced options to avoid confusing their users. I didn't think that a simple color chart showing the fragmentation on disk would confuse people. Hell, they went even further and took the easy route and didn't display a progress bar. Instead it simply says

"This may take from a few minutes to a few hours".

I don't know about you, but whenever I ask my computer to do something I like for it to have somewhat of an accurate time frame on when its going to complete the task.

Who is Microsoft hiring these days? Who is overlooking these design decisions? Does Microsoft even care anymore or are they more focused on making a new search engine to compete with Google (which is a total piece of crap)?

If anyone knows who the developer for the defrag UI please have them contact me. I hope to god it wasn't more than one developer, similar to the shutdown menu, if so Microsoft is in trouble.

Goodbye defrag!