Socorro Springs Bottled Beer Present

In about two weeks, I'll be visiting my friend Norelle in Ridgecrest California. Norelle and I went to New Mexico Tech in Socorro together. While asking Norelle if I can bring her anything, the only thing she wanted was some pumpkin beer from the microbrewery. So, I embarked on a beer bottling adventure, as transporting their growlers through a month of time and 700 miles would not be feasible.

Socorro Springs only sells Growlers (1/2 gallon jugs) of their beer, or pints. I bottle two gallons in total (four growlers).

Growlers leak. The seal on a growler lid bleeds out carbonation, and eventually this leak becomes a gas exchange between the atmosphere and the bottle. Beer doesn't do so well sitting in air. About the longest I feel comfortable drinking a growler would be about two weeks after it has been filled. There are exceptions, and it's good to occasionally cultivate a spirit of adventure, but flat, spoiled beer is no fun. Luckily, my computer science graduate school friend Nate Gauntt is an expert at all things beer.

Nate - Adding CO2 to a keg of his in order to add as much carbonation to the pumpkin beer as possible before we bottle it.

Nate filling up the empty bottles he gave me for the project.

Nate explained we want to keep everything as cold as possible in an attempt to minimize out gasing of CO2.

As an added bonus, the girls were making cupcakes while the guys were bottling beer.

The final output - nicely bottled beer.

I actually did help with the different stages of this process, but being the photographer made it difficult to get any Brian Stinar action shots. Nate helped me understand a lot about making beer, and the entire evening was very fun. Thanks Nate!

After a beer and a cupcake, we enjoyed Harry Potter and some pizza.

My friend Norelle, who will hopefully be enjoying the beer from my bottling project soon.

Tile Table Update

Lately I have been trying to make it to the UNM craft studio on Sunday nights to work on my tile table. I want to finish it up, and I'm only missing a single tile now.

After I finish the last remaining tile, I want to pick out some nice sandy colored grout to go with the tiles. I'm not sure how I will do the edging, the tiles are raised up a bit from the metal edges of the table and I would like them to be flush.

Here are a few in-progress pictures:

Washington D.C. Trip

Over the weekend of August 28, I spent some time in Dulles, Virginia and Washington D.C. One of my friends, Yana Alaekseeko introduced me to her friend Elena Vinokurova (Да, я люблю русских). I decided it would be fun to check out Washington D.C. and visit Lena.

Lena, in her extremely cool apartment complex

While Lena was at work, I took the underground train to Washington D.C. The trip was eerily familiar - I spent a lot of time playing the video game Fallout 3, and all of the underground stops were exactly as in the same but not post-apocalyptic. The DC street scape was all the same as well. The Fallout 3 artists and models did an amazing job.

I like think picture a lot. Notice the guy that looks just like me, in similar clothing, in the exact same pose.

This is the theater where Lincoln was shot.

The gun Lincoln was shot with is TINY.

These buildings look familiar...

I have no idea who Glen Beck is, but he had a rally the day I checked out the mall.

Public transit seemed to be popular.

The other picture of me in DC - taken by Аня Горобец

During my trip, I walked along the entire mall and saw the White House. It was a fun trip, seeing all the historical things that I have read about and studied, but never seen. My favorite tourist type thing was the Lincoln Memorial. Navigating through the crowd of Glen Beck supporters became difficult towards the Lincoln Memorial, as that seemed to be where everyone wanted to go to see the speakers.

Silver City IT Work

I help out with information technology (IT) support in addition to developing software. IT isn't exactly my favorite thing in the world, but it is nice to help out my family and be a part of helping people receive high quality medical care. My dad is a pulmonologist down in Silver City, and his network administrator quit almost two years ago. Since then, I've been picking up the work. He keeps all of his patient records electronically, and I'm the one that makes sure the systems keep running. Plus, more people need help keeping their infrastructure going than they need new, custom, (hopefully scientific) software written for them.

I build a separate, Internet connected, network for his office to use when connecting to the hospital's network (VPN) and looking up information online. This is completely separate from his electronic medical record network, since I was not ready to overhaul that network and securely connect it to the Internet. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) provides all sorts of guidelines for well connected networks that are basic IT infrastructure security guidelines, which are basically simple best practices for securing a network. It is much easier to secure a stand alone network than one connected to the Internet, so I simply build a stand alone network. (Red / Black seperation, for all you spooks out there.)

This system requires regular updates. The major two components that require updating are the virus signatures for the virus scanner, and the operating system.

These instructions have been created in order to help share some of the updating work load, so I can focus on other IT related tasks when I am in town.

Updating AVG
The first thing to do when updating the anti-virus scanner is to open the interface to it. This can be accomplished by double clicking on the AVG system tray icon as shown below.

Figure 1. AVG System Tray Icon

The next step is to actually tell AVG to update. This can be easily accomplished by clicking on the "Update now" button as shown in Figure 2. below.

Figure 2. Telling AVG to Update

After this completes, you can close AVG.

Windows Update
Telling Windows XP to update is even easier than updating your antivirus signatures. Simply click on the "Windows Update" option from within the first level of your start bar menu, as is shown in Figure 3. below.

Figure 3. Windows Update

Then, the easiest thing to do is to select "Express" to download the updates Microsoft considers critical. This is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. "Express" Updating Mechanism

The next thing you may or may not see, is a "No Updates Available" screen. If this is the case, you are finished. Otherwise, follow the on screen instructions for installing the important updates.

Windows update is scheduled to happen every day, but as the Internet machines are not always turned on, the automatic update may or may not happen.

Hopefully these instructions are helpful in describing the steps necessary to update antivirus signature files and the Windows XP operating system.

AI For Video Games - Final Project

It has been almost two years since I took my "Artificial Intelligence for Video Games" course, but the topic still comes up quite frequently. I find myself using my blog as a resource for when I am talking with people about different concepts and programs. As a result of this, I decided to include a post where I actually show what the final game came out to be like.

I realize this kind of messes up my blog's layout. Since I am mostly interested in showing people the game, as opposed to my layout, I'm OK with this.





Click here for a full screen version.


It's been a while since I worked on my sheep herding game, and Jon Bradley is responsible for the code as much as I am (entirely for the sheep behavior). Please leave me a comment if you would like to talk about this.