I started building my mash tun tonight by purchasing a 48qt cooler that will allow me to do 10 gallon batches. The cooler was $19.99.

I am also assembling my own nozzle which cost me $23.74. I could have bought one from a home brew shop online, but this gives me something to do with my hands.

I am going to go with a manifold design. This way I can start out with batch sparging, then later try out a fly sparge in the future easily. Still debating on cpvc vs. copper at the moment.

I recently bought an iPhone, so recent that it was just three days before Apple released the 16 gb version.

When I first approached AT&T about exchanging it for the new version they they told me there was a 10% restocking fee. I waited so long to buy it…more on that some other day. Well I took it back today, ready to pay the 10% and the luck of the draw gave me a salesperson who did not charge me the fee! I don’t know if she just didn’t know any better or if she felt my pain. Regardless, I am a happy customer.

I love my iPhone, in fact this was posted from it… While I was pooping. Sweet.

I have never done much backing up, and I have never had any major failure of a critical drive. A good backup plan seems like a good thing for me to have. It seems as though I must be due for one.

Here is my plan, based on the advice found here.

A good backup plan must be redundant and automatic, therefore I am purchasing two hard drives, and two external enclosures. One 250gb which will back up my iMac’s internal drive, and one 500gb, which will back up my external media drive that holds my music and photo collection. I will do a SuperDuper backup each night of each drive, which will essentially mirror the drives. The idea being, that if my iMac’s drive fails on me, I can just add in the drive in the enclosure and pick up right where I left off.

This is in addition to backing up off site to Mozy and Time Machine.

Next month I will buy two more of the exact same two drives so I can do the exact same thing, only I will take them to work every month and switch. That way I always have a drive off site in case of a fire.

Again, this is addition to my off site backup to Mozy. Like I said, I am due for a major failure.

These guys have created a iPhone version of the WordPress interface. Well done.