A New way to spam?

So, I don't know if y'all noticed a couple of weeks ago, but this blog had a few posts about windows 7 and Viagra. Maybe one or two more advertisement type posts.

I did not post those.

Someone out there (maybe several someones) figured out the email address I use for posting blog posts. When I post a blog from my phone, that is how I do it: I simply send an email to my "super secret" email address and some sort of BlogSpot program takes my email and attachments and makes a blog post out of it. It is a real cool feature of BlogSpot. One of the many reasons I am blown away about all the free stuff Google provides.

But, since someone (or several someones) figured out how to spam my super secret email address, total strangers could post to my blog. So far, they have not posted anything I wanted on my blog.

To "fix" the problem, I changed my settings to put those emails into a draft status instead of posting immediately. After that, I got a couple of "draft" spams, and then, it seemed that they had given up on my blogspot email address. However, after I sent a draft post about Tyler's science fair, I got a bunch more in my draft area of my blog. I do not know if these evil spammers were able to monitor my email or if was just a coincidence that there was a period of non-activity before I used the feature again.

I searched the blogspot help to see if this is a common issue (hopefully with a solution) and found one post about it from back in September which was never answered.

So, I'm going to leave my setting to keep my emails in draft and have to manually post them. I will probably change my posting email address too. Obviously, letting those emails get posted automatically is probably not a good idea. I certainly don't want to risk the Viagra posts coming up on my blog again. At some point I may just disable the email feature completely, although I hate to let those spammers have that much control over my life.

Spammers really suck.

Erupting Monsters

Well, my 2nd grader entered the science fair this year with his project "Erupting Monsters": a model of a volcano along with a display full of fascinating volcano facts. He worked really hard and it looks really cool. You can learn interesting things on his display.

Monday night we went to the school to discover that all the hard work paid off with a blue "top honors" ribbon. This (as the name suggests) is the top prize given out at the fair. Tyler and two other 2nd graders got this ribbon. 2 or 3 of each grade seemed to get one. So, while it was not as if he made THE best science project in his school, he did get the highest award they gave out. Outstanding work by the young man. I am proud that he got the honor, but I am even prouder of the effort he put into it. He did work very hard. He probably put more effort into this than I ever put into anything when I was in grade school.

Gets the brains and work ethic from his mother, obviously.

40

I turned 40 yesterday.

40 is an interesting number.

In the bible alone:

• Rain fell 40 days and 40 nights wiping out all life on Earth minus those on Noah's little boat.
• Moses lead his people around the desert for 40 years.
• Moses ended up on Mt. Sinai a few times for 40 day / night periods.
• Jesus was presented at the temple 40 days after his birth.
• Jesus fasted 40 days and 40 nights before the devil tempted him.
• It was 40 days after the resurrection of Jesus until the ascension of Jesus.
• Lent is a period of 40 days before Easter (not sure this is Biblical ... this is my blog and I'm putting it in a biblical category)
• The are many many other references to 40 not only in the Judaic / Christian faiths and other major religions. I am not (cannot) list them all.

40 is an octagonal number, and as the sum of the first four pentagonal numbers, it is a pentagonal pyramidal number. Adding up some subsets of its divisors (e.g., 1, 4, 5, 10 and 20) gives 40, hence 40 is a semiperfect number. [those last 2 sentences were copied directly from wikipedia]

One issue with turning 40 is that it brings me to the realization that my life is almost 1/4 over.

I used to think 40 was old, but I do not anymore. I do not think I feel any older now than I did 10 years ago. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to "be" when I grow up, so I cannot be too old. Although, as I am 1/4 aged, maybe I should figure that out. I'm thinking maybe something in computers. I just am not sure there is a future there. My nickname is still "Sheppy". Does that sound like the nickname of an old guy?

When I came downstairs on my birthday, my beautiful wife was making me breakfast. This is not a normal occurrence on a weekday. I got 40 kisses each from my wife and 2 kids right before I got my breakfast (120 total kisses). I even got a candle in my omelet. I blew it out like a champ and made my first birthday wish. I cannot tell you what the wish was, but I will say it would make my wife blush if she knew.

Of course my wife and I had to go to work. The kids had to go to school. There was nothing special about the work day except I got a bunch of "happy birthday" messages via email and on facebook.

Getting home was great. It is always fun to see the kids excited and they were very excited to give me gifts (various pieces of artwork) and shower me with love. I'm a lucky guy. My wife got me "Brewing Classic Styles" by Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer, which is a book I've been considering buying for myself. Now I won't have to. She also got me a get-away weekend starting later today. The kids are staying with their friends Miles and David, and our neighbors (all with multiple fire arms and other weapons) will be watching the house in case random Internet thugs come across this blog entry.

Tyler and Connor tricked me into thinking we were going out to get birthday candles and batteries when, in fact, we left to go to the Outback Steak house where I had a very nice meal. Then we came home for cake and ice cream (yummy). I was so busy being showered with love and attention, I did not even have myself any SheppyBrews yesterday.

My sister and her family sent me sheets of their middle child's math homework on them. As far as I could tell, he got all the answers correct. They were not graded, so I hope that he doesn't get in trouble for not turning them in. Actually, the homework came on the back of sheets of paper talking about the other thing in the package: Crafty Caps -- bottle caps that say "Sheppy Brew 40" with a tiny little picture of the mountains that are on the back of one of my label styles on them. So a few of my next beer batches will have some of these customized bottle caps on them. I'm not sure if the homework or the instructions or the bottle caps are the actual gift that my sister was so proud of. By the way, sis, you can let people know now what you got me, they were in the mailbox last night.

It looks like this:

only smaller.

So, as you can probably tell, I had a great 40th birthday. I am a lucky guy with a completely charmed kind of life.

SheppyBrew 2009 Stats

So, I went through my SheppyBrew nano-brewery records.

Last year:

• I made 29 batches of beer.
• Of that 29 batches, there were 18 completely different recipes (note... most of my repeat recipes had significant changes, but I still considered them the same recipe ... see Eric's Red, Phat & Tyred, and Girly Berry).
• That comes to approximately 65 gallons of home brew.
• All of my beers were ales.
• 26 of the batches were SheppyBrew recipes. (meaning I came up with the recipe myself. lots of them were based on other recipes, but I made enough of a change to each of these that I can consider them SheppyBrew recipes). These were of 15 different recipes.
  
• 27 of my batches were good, very good, great, or oh-my-god fantastic. If you cannot do the math, that means 2 were not good (the yucky ones were Maple Brown and Girly Berry batch #1).
• 0% of the beers were so bad that they could not be drunk.
• 100% of the beers were consumed (0% thrown away).
  
• 5 of my batches were partial mashes (2 recipes ... Phat & Tyred and Blackhawk Black)
• 6 of my batches had no Mr. Beer ingredients in them (3 recipes ... Phat & Tyred and Blackhawk Black and Fools Gold Ale)
• 3 of the batches were started in 2009, but not finished conditioning until 2010 (Wetta Blonde , Phat & Tyred and Blackhawk Black)
• The favorite beer of all the people who drank SheppyBrew seems to be Wetta Blonde.
• My favorite beer is Phat & Tyred.... or maybe Blackhawk Black ... or maybe Eric's Red.
• My sexy beer model's favorite beer seems to be Girly Berry (batch #2 , batch #1 was one of the two yucky beers).
• The SheppyBrew brewing assistants have never had any of the SheppyBrew beers.
• The person who has consumed the most beer of anyone (other than the Brew Master) is Tracy Shepard.
  

Most (if not all) of these stats are pretty impressive for a first year home-brewer.

I expect that in 2010:

• SheppyBrew nano-brewery will brew more beer.
• A higher percentage of SheppyBrew beers will be completely formulated from non-Mr. Beer ingredients.
• All the recipes will be SheppyBrew original.
• SheppyBrew nano-brewery will brew a couple of lagers.
• SheppyBrew nano-brewery will either do start doing 5 gallon batches or some all-grain batches (or maybe both).
• I'll do more dark beers.
  
• More people will drink SheppyBrew beers.

So far in 2010:

• I have mixed up 3 batches, 3 different recipes (this puts me on pace for more beer than last year).
• 2 of the 3 batches have been completely non-Mr. Beer ingredients (Tweedle Beetle Stout, Fools Gold)
• All 3 batches have been SheppyBrew original recipes.
• No lagers yet, but I have purchased some lager yeast.
• 2 of the 3 batches have been Stouts (Tweedle Beetle Stout and Leprechaun Stout)
  
• Tracy still drinks more SheppyBrew beers than anyone in the world (except the Brew Master).
  

Anyway, the only one who is interested by any of this is the Brew Master at the SheppyBrew nano-brewery ... and maybe my sister who was nice enough to get me started ... and perhaps my wife who drinks the most SheppyBrew of anyone in the world (except for the Brew Master). And just quite possibly you (but probably not).

Laughing Baby

I cannot help it. This video had to be one of the best I've ever seen. Of course, I've lived through scenes like this several times when my boys were babies. Even now sometimes they go into hysterical belly-laugh modes, but I've never really captured a video like this one.

Connor was being just a cranky-pants pain in the neck at the dinner table a couple of nights ago. I got on the smart-phone, and brought up this video. The boys were in good moods the rest of the night.

hi

Nothing hotter than a woman drinking a SheppyBrew.

Boys' Weekend

My wife left us again this weekend. She flew to Wisconsin to participate in a bachelorette party for her sister. While she was off doing God-Knows-What with a bunch of wild and crazy women, the Shepard boys were partying at home. No strippers for us. Most of us didn't even get to drink any alcohol.

But we did, go play basketball....

and ... hung out on the roof.

and went to the Colorado Mammoth game.

We also watched hockey and football on T.V. We watched Dawn of the Dinosaurs on DVD. We even put up a new garage door opener (after taking down the old one which died on us this past week).

I taught Tyler how to make a frozen pizza this weekend, and he made the family dinner tonight.

Anyway, we had a fun time, but we are extremely glad that Mommy is now home with us.

TB

Hmm... never noticed it before, but my sister pointed out today that she has the same initials as Tweedle Beetles.

Coincidence? I wonder.