Steven@greenius’s personal blog

Last autumn I harvested some wild hops that I found growing locally to use when brewing my beer.

The hops were found growing along the path between South Abingdon and Sutton Courtney. Here is a link to a google map somewhere near where I found them. They were picked on 27th September 2006 and dried using a large cardboard box with lots of holes in the bottom. After drying they were compressed and stored in a plastic bag in the freezer.

This year I am growing hops in my garden. I planted Fuggles and Bramling Cross rhizomes that I got from A Plus Hops as part of a combined order with other members of the Oxford Brewing group. The fuggles currently has two bines growing up, one is already over 2 meters high. The bramling cross took longer to come up, and I only have one bine about half a meter tall so far. They are growing up strings and bamboo canes. I tied two canes together so they can get up to about 3 meters. As this is the first year, I am not expecting a massive harvest.

If you are interested in growing your own hops, then I recommend joining the Grow-Hops group on Yahoo groups.

I have just finished reading Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg.

It follows the progress of the first few years of the development of an Open Source project called Chandler. The project which was intended to take one year was just beginning to get its first features usable after about 3 years, and the project is still continuing now and still only has a very small subset of the original desired features.

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Following a news article on BBC web site about a charity lobbying to prevent children drinking at home, I actually got one of my comments published on Page 35 of the Have Your Say section.

My comment is that I am worried that now the moral brigade have been succesful making smoking in public places socially unacceptable that alcohol will be their next target.

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The Oxford Brewing group is holding a Taste & Swap day at Kennington Village Hall on 2nd June 2007. An invitation is open to any craft brewers who can make it to Oxford that day.

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There was a discussion panel session entitled So simple a child can program it, on a mobile phone at ACCU 2007. We had a similar side discussion at a meeting of the Oxtremists and there was an article at O’Reilly called Where’s the 8 bit revolution for my kids?

This is a few notes about what I remember from the ACCU session.

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Everybody else seems to have one, so now do I….

This will cover several subjects:

• Software Development - I run a software development company, developing software in C++, Java and whatever else is useful to solve a problem. We are focussing on small games devices at the moment, eg. mobile phones and custom made handheld machines, but also develop server/client and desktop applications for Windows, Mac, Linux including a Document Revision Management tool.  I attend meetings of the oXtremists and am a member of ACCU and just came back from attending the 2007 conference.
• Brewing Beer - I make beer at home. Am a member of CBA and the Oxford Brewing Group

My previous personal web site is at www.greenius.ltd.uk/personal/steven/, which contains more information about my hobbies and things… but I never kept it up to date. You can probably find older more embarrassing versions of my site on the wayward engine