Tea and IRC: Autumn again.

I'm sitting on a couch, with cushions and a blanket, wrapped in pajamas with my favorite black sweater, thick burgundy over-the-knee socks, and long grey arm warmers. I have a mug of PG Tips and some peanut butter toast. It's about 8 pm and in an hour, some of us are going to play handball. (We played until 3am last night, against the big Art Museum wall; I still had on most of my pirate clothes from the scavenger hunt.) Autumn life is slow, full and slumbersome.

In the last two days, I've found two things at Digital Ops that I'd thought long lost: my favorite fountain pen, an Ohto Tasche with Noodler's Nightshade ink, and my camera. While I've missed photographing most of this gorgeous October, I intend to make up for that starting tonight. Ann Arbor's October is the best month anywhere. Here is my soundtrack.

I've managed to spend a lot of my time this autumn outside, and as the light dies, I'm staying out of the hackerspace more to savor its last golden dregs. We've been hashing out bylaws for the organization, and figuring out where we want to head for the future. In the meantime, I'm learning to program IRC bots in Python.

This deeper exploration of IRC, or chatrooms-plus, is my latest attempt at getting presence logging up for the 'space. I tried with QR codes, but my hilariously convoluted scheme was thwarted when I couldn't find free webhosting that still lets you just type HTML in a box and have done with it. Things have come a long way since 9th grade, I guess; everybody has fancy templates and drag-and-drop GUI-based widget tomfoolery.

I've been learning Python from Nate, and stealing bot code from Nima and Noam. My current setup includes:

• My old iBook, plugged in at home - a moody server full of caprice, which at random begins holding down the comma, m, or space key. It's great to be able to use this computer for something, as it's taken a couple of flying leaps and now has to be opened with a shoehorn.

• Traumbot - my first functional bot, built from Nima's Prozacbot. When it's active in your channel, it appears as another user. If you type "!present", it will note that you are present at AHA!, appending your username, the date, and the time to a tab-delimited text file stored in my Dropbox. I can open up this file in Excel and see columns "user", "daet", and "tiem" with the relevant information. My next task is to rewrite Traumbot to make it sleeker and more extensible. Traumbot can also record people's fetishes (work-safe).

Traumbot is really "Traumbot ibn ibnGruem"... for a while, I named all the test bots according to the one they branched off of - hence, Merlinbot ibn Prozac, Grumbot ibn Merlin, [Presencebot] ibn Gruem, then this one. If you'd like to drop in and watch the testing, check out #merlinpanic on irc.freenode.net (a popular IRC server network).

Tea and a blowtorch

Note: Blogger is being a jerkface, so I've put metal-patina photos up on Posterous.

Last week was a good friend's birthday, and I wished to make her something... however, the risk is always making it more of a "you are cool and deserve something unique" thing, rather than "oh look, see what I made". My current solution is to take something I already know they like and tweak it a little. In this case, she's been into rooibos lately, and the local PFC has many excellent tea ingredients in stock (for cheap!). Thus: Rooibos Dream Tea!

Rooibos has a kind of gentle, nutty flavor that is best accentuated with something that cuts the softness; in the past, I've used lemon juice, but I'd rather blend dry flavors. I bought some ingredients that sounded like they'd go well with it: rosehips, hawthorn berries, licorice root, and hibiscsus flowers. It all came to about $5. I first tried hibiscus in tea after having a dream where some friends and I were eating hibiscus flowers, dancing on the moonlit shores of a stream that was lighted from below. Hence, dream tea. The hibiscus imparts a gorgeous, deep red color and delightful tartness to tea, but too much of it is harsh (many commercial teas get this part wrong). Licorice has a strange sweetening effect that comes on as you swallow the infusion, which I find pleasant mostly as a mixer; it doesn't taste like licorice candy. I didn't know beforehand what the rosehips and hawthorn berries would do.

Brewing a little of each ingredient in its own cup, I sampled them along with a mug of the rooibos. The hawthorn berries were disappointing; they imparted almost no flavor (or color). The rosehip brew also didn't taste like much. The licorice was potent and too intense in proportion to the water, and the hibiscus was perfect. I poured some of these last two into the mug of rooibos until I had something delicious, then blended approximately proportionate amounts of raw ingredients, et voilà. A blend to warm the autumn.

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Of course, cold weather also calls for fire. Last Christmas, I came into possession of a butane-powered cordless soldering iron, and since then I've been searching for fuel for it (it came empty). A recent flash of inspiration led me to the local smoke shop (Smoka Hookah), and I spent the afternoon experimenting!

Apparently, since high school FIRST Robotics, I've lost any soldering ability I had. I improved after a couple of tries, but got bored of waiting for the tip on the iron to heat up and cool down. So I took the tip off and took the mini-blowtorch to some scrap copper wire, putting a patina of color on its surface. I'm going to experiment with finishes and see if I can seal the color in. I had an issue with thicker copper losing its color as it cooled down, which seems to not happen if I quench it in water once I've got a pattern I like.

•••

Finally, I have long sought an online source for free classical sheet music, and now my friend Murphy has introduced me to Musopen! They also have lots of recorded public-domain music for download. <3