Monthly Archives: August 2008

New England Apple Ale Recipe

In the next installment of my recipe series, here is my apple ale recipe, which I am calling New England Apple Ale. I wanted to make a full-bodied beer, that made you think of apples (and cider, and apple pie). I wanted this to hold its own as a beer first, rather than a beer-cider hybrid, or a sickly-sweet fruity beer. I think I pulled this off.

The apple notes are strong, but they are balanced by the toasty notes from the roasted barley. The cinnamon and nutmeg in this recipe are dialed down from the last iteration of this beer I brewed, and I think that helps a lot. It still reminds you of apple pie, without completely being one.

This recipe took 3rd place in the 2008 Sam Adams Tour Center homebrew contest.

Read on for the full all-grain recipe.

Posted in homebrewing/beer | Tagged , , | 40 Comments

Outlook trick for picking a conference room for a meeting

If you're like me, when creating a meeting, you hate trying to remember each conference room's name, selelcting it in Outlook, and then trying to figure out a time and room for the meeting. Most of the time, I'm sure I'm forgetting a room. Of course, if the names of the rooms all started the same (eg, Conference Room - Manhattan), it would be easier.

Outlook trick for picking a conference room for a meetingSo, I created a distribution list for conference rooms in my local contacts list. Just click on New->Distribution list, and then add each conference room to the list. This will be the only time that you have to remember and find each conference room's name. From here on out, you can just use the list.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Better support for international addresses

From reading the logs for my mapping site, I noticed that the application was blowing for many addresses outside the United States. I did a little more research, and discovered that the bug was in handling some special characters, like "ø, á, í, é, È, ž, ù, ý".

As a test case, I created a map of points from around the world that I found in the logs. Each of these queries caused an error.

Posted in gmaps.kaeding.name | Tagged , | 17 Comments

Improvements to Google Mapping Site

This past weekend, I made several improvements to my site that allows you to map multiple locations on Google Maps. These improvements were mostly suggested by users of the site, and there were a couple that I came up with after seeing the usage patterns of the site, and trying to improve performance.

Read on to see the listing of new/improved features:

Posted in gmaps.kaeding.name | Tagged , | 8 Comments