Beer Recipe Under Creative Commons
Speaking of "free as in beer" and "free as in speech," this one was mentioned on the HomeBrew Digest tonight.
Yes, beer and geekness go together well.
And, for this homebrewer, it's a good way to wrap up ramblings about Creative Commons, academic freedom, and references. Well, as good as any. Linking to a site describing the probability of seeing a man with a paddle and a jar of Tremclad hitchhiking on the highway would only have been mildly more entertaining. Musing about the effects of a warm bath with sea salt and cayenne pepper would have been slightly more confusing. Ranting about how underused "Twéla" is as an official first name in Quebec would have been too specific. And not posting anything would have been irrational.
😉
Category Archives: Blogging
"Don't Quit Your Day Job" (Brewing as Hobby)
[Oh, my! I do hope I won't get too hooked to blogging! I'm scared!!! ;->]
Thinking about brewing, as I often do. Responding to a message about a post I sent to the HomeBrew Digest about beer and beliefs.
In relation to my previous post on work and debt. And compartmentalization.
"Don't quit your day job"
I have no intention of doing such a thing. I love my "day job" (insofar as I have one). I see no reason to quit it.
[Yup, blogging in my case encourages the use of first person singular pronouns, a habit I try to kill in many contexts. But if it's supposed to be self-indulgent, let's do it the self-serving way…]
Some homebrewers I've met hate their day job and see brewing as an escape. [It might be something of the same for me (doing a bit of
self-analysis here) as I may use it to procrastinate. Although, brewing needs planning. Procrastination I mostly do with thinking about brewing. Anyhoo…]
Those homebrewers who brew to "get away from it all" are oftentimes the same guys (yeah, mostly guys in homebrewing circles, nowadays) who want to "Go Pro" and open a brewpub. Now, that's not silly and it's kind of easy to expect, but it might be ill-advised.
Going Pro means a huge investment on money. Of course, we all dream of having enough money to invest in brewing. Hey, if I win the lottery, I might go nuts with brewing gear and if I win enough, I might even give the brewpub idea more of a thought. But…
Going Pro also means transforming a cool, relaxing hobby into an obligation to perform. Sure, many small brewpub and microbrewery owners do it their own way and the lottery win should imply that you don't need to turn a profit. But still, professional brewing is bound to be more of a pressure. And many aspects of brewing aren't necessarily so much fun. And these are the ones that become very important in the Pro world. Not to mention the whole business side. Some people enjoy it but
these are few and far between.
A well-known homebrew celebrity (!) who became a brewpub owner is quoted as saying that if he were to start again, he might not go pro. Nowadays, he doesn't brew anymore. And even though his pub is often packed, he still struggles to make ends meet. Not a pleasant feeling.
Then, the ideal solution should be collaboration. One "business-type" to handle the business and one crazy brewer. Well, the crazy brewer won't be so crazy when the business guy talks about minimizing risk.
A big important notion, risk. A hobby is fun because the stakes are low. You scrap a 5-gallon batch, so be it. You lost a bit of time, a bit of money. So be it. That's life. And you learned something. You scrap a batch as a commercial brewer, uh-oh!
So that's one reason even the most adventurous brewers end up making a lot of fairly uncompromising beer. Another reason is that what pleases the brewer might attract a few beer geeks but the beer geek market is incredibly small as compared to the swill drinkers. Lots of talk about that. But brewing capacity (volume) is correlated against risk.
Deal Breaker
So it doesn’t do categories?
It’s a rather obvious one. It really should be addressed, acknowledged, solved.
Sure, one can do multiple blogs. But how convenient is that? Plus, it defeats the purpose of putting things together.
Oh well… It’s been fun.
Now, let’s look at the other hosted blogs. Eventually, I’ll get my own server-side blog going but I need server space first, of course.
Dispar -ate, -ition, -u/-aging, -ité/-ity
Have been wanted to blog for quite some time. Had several issues. Time is one, as I tend to be quite involved with things I write. And I rather like mailing-lists. Plus I wanted to have some other type of space where I could put a blog. But this might work. After all, I’ll probably be able to export this blog to some other system later on. Blosxom, maybe? Some PHP/MySQL implementation would be great.
Je vais parler de n’importe quoi, sur ce blogue. D’où l’idée de «disparate» (qui existe en français comme en anglais), mais c’est déjà pris.
N’empêche, «Dispar», ça peut être le début de plusieurs mots qui sont pas liés entre eux. Kind of pseudo-morphology.
Aussi, ça fait «dis par», ce qui est pas vraiment grammatical (ça devrait être «dit par»), mais bon…
Ah oui, j’ai tendance à faire du code-switching ces temps ici…
At any rate, I want to use this one as a sandbox (in the Wiki sense). Yes, I’m a French-speaker, so a bunch of things might be in French.
Mais comme je vis en milieu anglophone, que je travaille en anglais, je risque aussi d’écrire des trucs en anglais.
Je vais me présenter plus tard.
The reason I started this blog today is that I went to a presentation on blogs by UCET (University Center for Excellence in Teaching) at IUSB (Indiana University South Bend).