Author: Chris Minnick

Chris Minnick is an author, trainer, web developer and co-founder of WatzThis? (www.watzthis.com).

He has authored and co-authored books and articles on a wide range of Internet-related topics. His published books include: JavaScript All-in-One For Dummies, Coding All-in-One For Dummies, Mastodon For Dummies, Beginning ReactJS Foundations, Adventures in Coding, JavaScript For Kids For Dummies, Coding with JavaScript For Dummies, Beginning HTML5 and CSS3 For Dummies, Webkit For Dummies, CIW eCommerce Certification Bible, and XHTML.

In addition to his role with WatzThis?, Chris is a winemaker, painter, novelist, swimmer, cook, and musician.

Margaritifer #3

Margaritifer Winery’s 3rd Wine is in the Bottles!

This morning, Molly and John came over and helped us bottle The Canali Cab 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon. It all went very smoothly, and we managed to finish before the weather got stinky hot. I had a couple sips of it, and I think it’s going to be good! We’ll drink more tonight! Pictures will be posted to www.margaritifer.com soon!

After the bottling, we drank some other wine, and Molly said it was similar to, but not as good as the Margaritifer Phoboshine Apple Wine. That’s nice. I cooked some sausages and almost burned down the house because the bbq was so filty with grease from previous barbeques. That frightened me, and so I spent some time this afternoon cleaning it up.

Thanks Molly and John for the help. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Miracle Drain Opener!

So, I came home a little tipsy last night and dumped a bunch of vegetables into the garbage disposal. Like A LOT of vegetables. Way more than was good for it. The sink became totally clogged.

First thing I tried was sticking my hand in there and then running the garbage disposal for a while (after taking my hand out). Still clogged.

Then I got out the plunger and started plunging. This seems to have moved the clog further down the pipe, because now water was coming up in the other sink (without the garbage disposal).

Then I poured in a bunch of liquid plumber and followed the directions. Still clogged. So I went to bed.

This morning, the water had drained out, but the sink filled up when I turned out the faucet and the water sat there going down very very slowly. So I poured in more liquid plumber. Didn’t work.

As a last resort before calling the “solid” plumber, I decided to check with my good friend “the Internet”. I found all sorts of people telling me not to use chemical drain openers, and I found lots of people telling me the correct way to use a plunger, but not to use it if your sink is full of chemical drain opener (which mine was) because you’d probably splash the junk all over you and burn your skin off. Some people said to pour in boiling water, which I tried too. Still clogged!

Then I found one smart fellow, who suggested that if your drain is filled with vegetable junk, you can pour salt into it along with hot water and the salt will wilt the vegetation and allow water to flow. So, I said “heck, I’ve tried the most horrible chemicals I have in the house…I’ll try anything!”

So, I poured in a couple cups of salt and started running the hot water. A couple minutes later, the drain cleared and I was extremely happy.

My first yogurt!

Ok, remember how I told you about fermentation a few posts back? Well, we did some more fermenting last night and made some Yogurt! The directions we followed are here, along with some excellent information about what exactly yogurt is and what you can do with it.

If you don’t feel like leaving my site (and I don’t blame you!), here’s the basics: when you introduce the right kind of bacteria into milk, they go crazy and convert sugar into lactic acid. The lactic acid lowers the PH and causes the milk protein to thicken. Hot damn, you’ve got yogurt.

I’ve never been a huge fan of yogurt. However, when we tasted the result this morning with some granola and strawberries, I have to say, it was the best I’ve had.

Stay tuned for my next chemistry experiment…cheese!

Me? Overextended? Nah.

I’ve been an insane ball of energy lately. I’m reading about 20 books and 10-20 magazines now, I’m learning 2 different programming language, making wine, planning events and more events, blogging and updating a lot of personal sites, running a growing business and a couple fun businesses, taking golf lessons, planning to start making cheese, swimming, practicing chess, trying to get a band together, trying to learn guitar, and some other stuff I’ve forgotten about.

I often enjoy having a million things going on. I’ve been trying to move at least one thing measurably forward per day. This isn’t always easy, especially with things like learning guitar where measuring progress is sometimes very difficult from day to day. But, that’s my strategy.

Lately I’m a bit worried that I’m not paying enough attention to my health, though. So, that’s the thing I’m starting to think about now. Now, here’s the big catch…I think I’d be healthier and less stressed if I worked just as hard as I do now, but on a lot fewer things. Is there anyone out there in blog-reading land who has gone from being a scatterbrain to being a focused person and found it less stressful? Can it be done?

Fun Fermentation Facts

I’ve been learning a thing or two about winemaking lately. I will now share one of those things with you.

The process that converts grape juice (or other fruits, or grains) into wine is ethanol fermentation. Here’s the formula:

C6H12O6 –>2 CO2+ 2C2H5OH + Energy Released (118 kJ mol-l)

At the most basic level, that’s all there is to it: sugar gets converted into carbon dioxide gas, ethyl alcohol and energy.

A little bit more specifically, though, here’s what happens:

When yeast come in contact with a high-sugar liquid, it starts multiplying. As it multiplies, it secretes enzymes — 5 of em. It’s these enzymes that actually do the work of breaking down the sugar to glyceric acid and glycerol and then to Pyruvic Acid (through a process called glycolysis) and then breaking that down to acetaldehyde + carbon dioxide (which bubbles away), and then converting the acetaldehyde into ethyl alcohol. What exactly are glyceric acid, glycerol, pyruvic acic, and acetaldehye, you ask? I don’t know yet, but I’ll find out.

Interestingly enough, another kind of fermentation, Lactic acic fermentation, happens in muscles of animals when the muscles need energy faster than the blood can supply oxygen.

Another interesting piece of info is that the exercise/>lose-weight-exercise/>weight of the carbon dioxide that’s produced is almost the same as the exercise/>lose-weight-exercise/>weight of the alcohol that’s produced. So, if you start with 10 lbs of sugar in your juice, you’ll end up with 5 lbs of alcohol and 5 lbs of CO2 that will have escaped. So, the crazy thing is that the wine weighs less than the juice did, but you still have the same volume. So, what changed? The density!

Specific Gravity is the ratio of the density of a liquid in relation to water. The grape juice that you start with might have a specific gravity of 1.081, and the wine you end up with might have a specific gravity of .990. From knowing how much less dense the wine is than the juice, you can figure out how much alcohol it has! Crazy.

My first wine, the Martian Red Australian Shiraz was made from juice with a specific gravity of 1.080. When it was done, it had a specific gravity of .995. One formula for calculating the alcohol content is ((Starting SG *100) – (Final SG *100)) / 7.36 . So, 1080 – 995 = 85 / 7.36 = 11.548%!

I’m going to update this article as I learn more. There’s a LOT of misinformation and conflicting information out there about exactly how fermentation works and exactly how winemaking works. I’m hoping to clear some of that up here as I learn more and make more wine.

Margaritifer #1!

We bottled the first Margaritifer wine a couple weeks ago: Martian Red Australian Shiraz (23 liters; from a kit). We acually bottled it a week later than I had originally planned because we went to Boise for my Grandpa’s funeral. In honor of him, I’m calling the wine Spencer’s Martian Red Australian Shiraz.

We’ve drunk a few bottles already. It’s good! I’m curious as to how it’s going to develop over the next few months. Actually, we haven’t had any in about a week now, and I’m pretty curious as to whether it’s still the same now. We’re going to be showing it off and sharing it with our friends Saturday night, so I’ll find out soon enough!

Winemaking is really interesting. Sometimes I think that I do too many things and that there’s no place in the world for a generalist like me, so I try to focus on something…but then something else that’s incredibly fascinating to me pops out and I have to chase after it.

At any rate, I’ve started on my second wine now: a Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon. I’m really excited about this one. I learned so much from the last batch and I’ve aquired so much more general winemaking knowledge and much better tools since then.

Announcing the Sursiks

It’s one day old and the debut release by The Sursiks is a huge hit!

The record label my brother, David Minnick, and I created to facilitate the release and distribution of our own music released David’s latest CD, The Sursiks: I Didn’t Know I Was Singing, yesterday to incredibly good reviews. CDBaby loved it so much they’re going to feature it on their homepage next Tuesday, and they gave it the following incredibly good review:

For entertainment value alone, this album is worth mentioning. It’s one of those novelty albums you need to play at a party to impress your friends, new and old. But that’s not where this album ends- not even close. The concept of taking answering machine messages and turning them into music is only the first level of playful ingenuity in “I Didn’t Know I Was Singing.” Beyond that idea kernel, The Sursiks play with and tweak each message in a unique way, whether by breaking them down rhythmically or melodically or inferring genre styles and emotional qualities as diverse as hip hop rock to folk to jazz to funky R&B. Each message-turned-song is so cleverly woven that it brings to mind the notable contemporary classical composer, Steve Reich, and his work “Different Trains” which beautifully demonstrates the great musical potential of human speech. The Sursiks, with a similar end in sight, give us yet another way to appreciate this phenomenon with humor and fun.

You can find out more about The Sursiks at Crabid.com, and you can request to be notified when the CD is back in stock (which will be early next week) at CDBaby.com.

While you’re waiting to get your hands on a copy of I Didn’t Know I Was Singing, check out Oven Mitt Johnson’s 2005 release, Hot Guitar!

What is Web 8.0?

As some of you might be aware, I’ve been planning a conference which will hopefully take place in Sacramento sometime within the next 12 months. The basic idea of the conference will be “Ideas (mine in particular) about the future of the Web, and also ridiculing the concept of giving version numbers to the Web”. The name of the conference is Web 8.0.

While thinking about what I see as the steps between now and Web 8.0 (and beyond), I’ve come up with a few different theories about what makes the Web change and I’ve tried to oversimplify my ideas so that they’ll seem brilliant enough to warrant a conference. Well, the problem now is that I have a few theories that all seem fine, but what I need is a single theory that’s so simple that the people who think “Web 2.0” means anything will buy it.

In very short and simple bullet points, here are my current theories:

1. Every Web version is a reaction to the previous one.
example: “bottom up” Web 2.0 is a reaction to “top-down” Web 1.0

2. Web versions happen when people stop worrying about the things they worried about in the previous one.
example: Ruby on Rails, the programming language of Web 2.0, won’t work without cookies.

3. Web versions happen when people start adopting the technologies they made fun of in the previous version (but give them new names)
example: everyone is using “Push” technology now. Just don’t tell them that.

4. Web versions happen when the technology advances beyond the understanding of the previous versions’ creators.
example: some knowledge of shell scripting and apache just won’t cut it anymore if you want to develop serious Web apps.

So there you are. By using any one of these theories, you can predict the next several “versions” of the Web. I’ll post more theories as I come up with them.