This weekend we climbed Mt Adams. The weather was perfect and the views were spectacular. It was a bit busy, but on a mountain this big, things never get too crowded. Sam, Joe, and James hauled their butts up to the peak with me and did spectacular. At the top we drank a few well-earned […]

WordPress is an incredible platform for building full-featured, customized web applications. Every beer on the planet is made from the same four ingredients: hops, water, barley and yeast. Similarly, WordPress is built around a small feature set (posts, pages, media and tags), but from these you can build anything from a single blog to a […]

You may want to start by reading: Growing hops from seed, Hop Breeding (2014) The seedling grew rapidly in their first year. 18 plants produced significant amount of hops by the end of August. For comparison purposes I decided to pick, sort, and catalog all the cones at once. No doubt this means that some […]

This is a continuation of the hop breeding experiments that I first wrote about in 2013. If you are wondering why someone would bother growing hops from seed – go check out that post. Hop pollen Last year, I was fortunate to start a few plants from native neomexicanus seed obtained from plants growing wild […]

Buildings and parking aren’t the only locations that people need to find on your campus. Why then, are they the only items marked on your maps? The technology to create beautiful, interactive maps has been around for a while. Unfortunately, many colleges choose to only include a limited amount of information. Often, it’s not a […]

MAKE is an awesome magazine published quarterly by O’Reilly. Each issue focuses on DIY culture and contains dozens of projects that you are encouraged to build yourself. I have been a fan since Volume 3, when they featured plans for a potato cannon. So, when Mark Frauenfelder spotted this humble blog post and asked if I […]

Take a quick look around the web and it becomes obvious – users really do create the best content. The articles of wikipedia, the videos of youtube and the LOLcats of the cheezburger network- all examples of platforms based entirely on user generated content.Now think about your students, faculty and staff. Given the opportunity, what […]

We just got back from a week of backpacking with our 14 month old. Living in the Pacific Northwest, there are so many wondrous places to go that we had a difficult time deciding. However, the Three Sisters is one of our favorites. It has a bit of everything from alpine streams to obsidian lava […]

Anyone want to join in on a brew project? My good friend Jamie picked up a full size Bourbon barrel. Now the plan is to fill it with Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Ale (clone) and let it oak age for a year. If you haven’t tried Rasputin, you really should – it’s a smooth, delicious […]

Last week I met a bunch of friends to hike/climb Mt. Olympus. This is one of the least climbed peaks in northwest; simply due to it’s remote location. It was a two day hike in and another two out. Before we could even start, there was a several hour drive to drop off our cars […]