Author Archives: markn

About markn

Mark is the owner and founder of Timesheets MTS Software, an mISV that develops and markets employee timesheet and time clock software. He's also a mechanical engineer, father of four, and a lifelong lover of gadgets.

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AFL Tipping Spreadsheet – Round 7 Results

One real upset this round (Port failing against the Lions), and a 50/50 game that went against all the systems and my own tips (damn you Richmond). My own tipping is leading all the systems comfortably now.

Results Round 7

My Tips System 1 System 2 System 3 System 4
7 5 5 5 6

Current Leaderboard (Round 7)

My Tips System 1 System 2 System 3 System 4
44/63 34/63 37/63 38/63 40/63

Brew Day 4 18 May 2015 – American IPA

I’m having a go at an extract brew today. My aim is a simple hop forward American IPA. I used the Kit & Extract Beer Designer from the Aussie Home Brewer forum to design the beer. The beer includes the following ingredients.

1.5KG Briess CBW Golden Light LME
0.5KG Light DME
0.3KG Brown Sugar
Briess Light Crystal Malt 0.25KG
21g Simcoe @ 60 mins 14%AA
21g Simcoe @ 5 mins 14%AA
48g Simcoe dry hopped after 4 days for 3 days.
11g SAFALE US-05 Dry Yeast

Brew Type : 3 Gallon Extract

Simcoe hops pellets, Bairds Crystal Malt, Bairds LME, Brown Sugar

Simcoe hops pellets, Bairds Crystal Malt, Bairds LME, Brown Sugar, Yeast

OG: 1.068
FG: 1.014
ABV: 7.4%

I chose a single hop recipe with a decent late boil addition and dry hop to bring out the piney/fruit aromas of the American Simcoe hop. It was a little expensive ($12 for 90g) but I think it’s better to go for quality.

Method:

1. Steep the crystal malt in 1L of 65-70C water for 30 minutes.

Steeping the Crystal

Steeping the Crystal

2. Drain into boil pot and sparge with 1L of 65-70C water.
3. Make up boil pot to 5L and bring to boil switch off and add 400g of DME mixing to make sure it dissolves fully.
4. Put heat back on and bring to rolling boil. When boiling make first hop addition. Boil for 55 minutes and make second addition. Boil for a further 5 minutes before plunging pot into ice bath to bring down to 20-25C.

First Hop Addition - Smells Good!

First Hop Addition – Smells Good!

5. While wort is boiling bring 2L of water to boil and dissolve remainder of DME and brown sugar and cool rapidly in ice water.
6. Pour cooled wort, cooled sugar/DME solution and LME into FV. Add cooled water to bring volume to 12L.

Aerated wort at 24C prior to pitching yeast.

Aerated wort at 24C prior to pitching yeast.

7. Pitch yeast at 20-25C, seal FV, put airlock in place and commence fermenting.

I ended up getting the wort to 24C in the FV. I took a gravity reading (1.071) which wasn’t too far off target and pitched the yeast. After the FV was sealed I put the airlock in place and moved the vessel to my temperature controlled refrigerator. Set temperature was 18.5C.

Fermentation Notes

I’ve only used the US-05 yeast once and it was slow to start. The reading I’ve done suggests that’s fairly common and that it can be sped up by re-hydrating it before pitching. This brew showed the first signs of active fermentation after about 12-18 hours with the barest hint of a krausen ring appearing on the inside of the vessel. The airlock became active sometime between 24 and 36 hours after pitching the yeast. The fermentation fridge smells like pine trees!

24/5/15

Made up a muslin bag, sterilised it and half a dozen marbles (for ballast) in StarSan. Put 48g of Simcoe hops and the marbles in the bag tied it off and dropped it into the fermentation vessel. You can see the hop bag sinking in the image below.

48g of Simcoe pellets sinking into the beery depths.

48g of Simcoe pellets sinking into the beery depths.

Took sample at same time and measured gravity at 1.018, four points above target. OG was 3 points above target so I wonder if I got more un-fermentable sugars from the crystal than expected. Will measure again when bottling. Drank the sample, it had a lot more odour and flavour from the hops than I was expecting. Very piney/resinous on the nose without much fruit. Will be interesting to see if the dry hopping adds more fruit. Not unpleasant at all for a warm, flat half glass of beer!

Current plan is to fine with gelatin on 28/5/15 29-5-15 and cold crash for three days before bottling on 2/6/15.

29/5/15 9:00AM – Mixed half a teaspoon of gelatin into 100mL of 70C water and stirred until completely dissolved. Dropped the lot into the fermentation vessel. The FV was at 14.5C. I’ve turned on the refrigerator and will cold crash until next Tuesday (2/6/15) and will bottle then. I need to work out the bulk priming rate before then.

Bottling

3/6/15 – After 5 days of cold crashing I bottled this brew today. Mixed 65g of brown sugar with 250mL of water and brought to the boil to dissolve. Add the sugar water to my bottling container and then racked off the FV to the bottling container ensuring a good swirl so that the sugar was well mixed. Bottled into 12 750mL PET and 1 500mL glass bottles, with about 400mL left over for SG testing and drinking! Yield was a bit under 11L which isn’t great. Final SG was 1.018 at 5C, which included the priming sugar. Once corrected for temperature and the sugar the FG was 1.015, only two points from estimate, so things have fermented out nicely.

There was a huge passionfruit aroma from the dry hopping, even my young kids who hate the smell of beer commented on how strong the passionfruit was. The sample was a dark amber with a strong mouth feel, strong malt, which tempered the lingering bitterness. It was, in short, delicious. Easily the best brew I’ve done to date! The beer had no real clarity so I don’t perceive any benefit of using the gelatin to fine the beer. However, this could be due to the fact that when I steeped the crystal malt I only strained it with a fine colander which could easily lead to fine particulates in suspension. Next time I’ll make sure to steep the grains in a muslin bag and see if that helps with clarity.

As an aside I harvested some of the trub and put it into a sterilised glass jar with cooled boiled water. I’ve put it in the fridge to keep the yeast dormant. I plan to make a starter from this and pitch this into my next brew. As a note to myself I’ll make the starter from 1L of water with 100g of LDME. You can see an image of the jar below.

Harvested Yeast/Trub

Harvested Yeast/Trub

And here it is after 12 hours in the cold to settle out:

Harvested Yeast after 12 Hours

Harvested Yeast after 12 Hours

AFL Tipping Spreadsheet – Round 7

An interesting round of tipping this week. On the surface there’s a few obvious games but closer examination suggests 3 games this round could go either way. ESS v NM, CAR v GWS, RIC v COL are all up in the air. At first glance NM, GWS, and COL seem like simple picks. However, NM has only beaten quality opposition once (GEEL in Geelong), GWS has had one good win (last week v HAW) but other than that hasn’t beaten anyone of quality, and COL and RIC are both diabolical. COL has had a few wins but last week showed their real colours when they came up against a decent team (GEEL) that pantsed them. That all being said I can’t bring myself to tip Carlton or Richmond at all because they are rubbish. And Essendon is surely due for a massive down game after WADA announced the appeal to the 2012 Essendon doping program earlier in the week.

Game My Tips System 1 System 2 System 3 System 4
Essendon vs North Melbourne North Melbourne Essendon Essendon Essendon Essendon
Adelaide vs St Kilda Adelaide Adelaide Adelaide Adelaide Adelaide
Hawthorn vs Melbourne Hawthorn Hawthorn Hawthorn Hawthorn Hawthorn
Carlton vs GWS Giants GWS Giants GWS Giants GWS Giants GWS Giants GWS Giants
Sydney vs Geelong Sydney Sydney Sydney Sydney Sydney
West Coast vs Gold Coast West Coast West Coast West Coast West Coast West Coast
Western Bulldogs vs Fremantle Fremantle Western Bulldogs Western Bulldogs Western Bulldogs Fremantle
Richmond vs Collingwood Collingwood Collingwood Collingwood Collingwood Collingwood
Brisbane vs Port Adelaide Port Adelaide Port Adelaide Port Adelaide Port Adelaide Port Adelaide

AFL Tipping Spreadsheet – Round 6 Results

Another fun round of upsets. GWS getting up over Hawthorn is one of the biggest upsets of recent times. Brisbane doing the deed on Carlton helps emphasise how truly crap the Blues really are. I’ll have to think long and hard before tipping them again this year.

Results Round 6

My Tips System 1 System 2 System 3 System 4
4 4 5 4 5

Current Leaderboard (Round 6)

My Tips System 1 System 2 System 3 System 4
37/54 29/54 32/54 33/54 34/54

No Time. No Time. The Prequel.

Here’s my original post on Reddit that spawned what I wrote here.

I’m a 40 something guy who has been doing “try before you buy” software for more than 10 years. I have several products, but one has been my bread and butter for several years. I’ve also got a SAAS product in the same field. Now, my “business” is essentially me, my better half helps me out with bits and pieces but, essentially it’s me doing everything. Development, support, marketing, SEO, website maintenance, blogging, planning. My products do ok, with many thousands of sales and 200 or so new customers each month and monthly sales still good (low $xx,xxx each month) but not what they could have been if I’d kept up my growth curve. Recurring income is not what it should be because when I got started recurring income wasn’t the done thing in online software sales.

I’ve been trying to remove myself from certain aspects of the business and “out-source” work. Namely, blogging, social media, and some SEO. I’ve been trying for 2 years and have burned $30,000 on either free lancers or businesses who have either completely failed to deliver, required so much direction that I may as well have done the work myself, or delivered work of such poor quality that it was valueless.. My most recent experience is with a large company whose principal is well known in web marketing circles. I spent $6,000 in three months for NOTHING despite there being a well defined plan of action in place. Honestly, I have no idea how businesses can behave so poorly. It’s very demoralizing.

Anyway, I work long hours at tech support and product development and it continually eats away at me at the work that isn’t being done. The things that need doing every week, blogging for my users, doing keyword research for new articles, posting to FB and LinkedIn and Google+. Plus I am overloaded with ideas for new tools and link bait for my sites, nothing that requires much expertise but work that takes time. I know the type of person I need, and I only need them for a day a week. But I am out of places to look and perhaps I don’t know the right questions to ask to find the person. I’ve tried various online forums, freelancer sites, and local VA’s. The people I’ve found have been poor at best and require so much management that it’s not worth the money.

I am sick of wasting time on this, and wasting money and watching my online ventures fade away because there’s only one of me. Help. What do I do NEXT!!!!

No Time. No Time.

I’ve been struggling to find someone to do some work for me so that I’m not doing everything myself. I posted up something on Reddit about it a few weeks back and got a message today. I thought my reply was worth posting here.

Hi Tom, No, didn’t find anyone. To be honest I don’t really understand how I can really out-source much of my work without building a strong on-going relationship with someone, and that’s really only ever going to happen with an employee. Right now I can’t afford an employee.

I’ll give you an example. I post weekly tips for using my products better to Facebook. I can’t outsource the selection of the tips, it’s something that someone who does tech support for my product needs to do. So, that means I do it. So I spend a couple of hours every month writing tips. Then I could outsource the actual posting to FB and Google+. But you know what, that takes about 2 minutes. So no real point. Another example is writing user guides. I’ve tried outsourcing this multiple times and the outcomes are just rubbish, it needs someone intimately familiar with my products for it to work. And that’s only going to happen with an employee that spends multiple hours working the products and supporting them. I’d love to find someone to create flash demos for my products too, but I have exactly the same problems.

I’ll run a task past you and see if it’s something you think that fits within your skillset. My products are HR/time tracking/payroll based. B2B 100%. I have multiple free resources available on the websites that are designed to bring quality traffic to my site. Generally they are “inspired” by other free resources I find around the internet. For example, right now I am building a simple employee shift schedule tool in Excel. As I basis I use other templates I find around the internet, improve on them, put some smart formulas in Excel to automate some of it, and hey presto free resource. I am careful that they are “inspired” by other free resources rather that slavishly copied. I then write a 500-1000 word keyword targeted article on the tool, publish in WordPress, link to it from a few relevant internal pages on my website, post an update to FB and Google+ and job done. All up about 4-6 hours work.

If I provided you with a link to another tool along those lines that I need done would you take a look and let me know if it’s something that would fit in your skillset? Right now I’ve got three more of these tools I need developing and I’d happily pay someone to do so. However, what I am not happy doing is spending 10 hours explaining what I need done and then 10 hours doing it again because it’s rubbish. And that’s been my experience to date. Here’s a tool I’d like created:

*link removed*

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Thanks for taking the time for reading all of this. I’d like to hear your thoughts.
By the way, I take a long time to respond to things on Reddit as I’ve locked myself out of accessing it during office hours (it’s a terrible yet compelling time-waster). Also, your PATH link isn’t going where it should I think. I am not sure at all what PATH is and would appreciate some more information.

Mark

AFL Tipping Spreadsheet – Round 5 Results

Again this week I think we’re seeing the weakness of systems that use ladder position and do not weight for the quality of teams played. Late in the season this will not matter so much but in early rounds the weakness will be apparent. I do not believe a sane tipper would have selected GWS against West Coast in Perth, a couple of the systems did. Similarly, choosing Richmond over Geelong was not (in my opinion) a sensible pick. My own tips are leading all the systems by a considerable margin now.

Results Round 5

My Tips System 1 System 2 System 3 System 4
8 5 5 6 6

Current Leaderboard (Round 5)

My Tips System 1 System 2 System 3 System 4
33/45 25/45 27/45 29/45 29/45

Redirecting Adwords by Operating System

My desktop software products run on Windows. I spend a significant amount each month on Google Adwords to drive traffic to my websites, which is problematic as Adwords does not allow you to filter traffic by operating system. It does allow you to reduce bids on Mobile traffic but it bundles Desktop/Full Sized Tablet with Browser traffic into one segment. In the last few years the amount of non Windows OS traffic I receive via Adwords has grown steadily and now makes up slightly more than 50%. I’ve been struggling for a while to work out what to do with this traffic as clearly users from non Windows devices cannot use my software. Yesterday at 4AM I hit on a possible solution and spent the day implementing it. Basically I’m now intercepting the clicks on my “Download Now” buttons/links, checking the client operating system, and if it’s not a version of MS Windows then redirecting them to a page targeted at my online SAAS products. Those products WILL work on their non Windows devices. Sure, it’s an obvious thing to do but I work in isolation and sometimes it takes me a while (years) to reach the “obvious” solution to a problem.

Here’s how I did it:

1) Installed the PGWBrowser plugin for jQuery. This plugin allows you to detect the OS, browser and viewport of web clients.
2) Enabled the plugin in WordPress by enqueuing the JS file:

wp_enqueue_script('pgwbrowser',get_stylesheet_directory_uri().'/js/pgwbrowser.min.js',array(),false,true);

For non WordPress pages (my Adwords landing pages) I used the following (making sure it came after loading jQuery):

<script type="text/javascript" src="/wp-content/themes/Divi-child/js/pgwbrowser.min.js"></script>

3) Now I adjusted the onclick call on my download buttons. I know that using the onclick event like this is archaic but I’ve been doing it this way since 2004 and it works nicely so I’m not changing it! I use this event to redirect users who download the software to a “Download Complete” page that allows me to count downloads. Here’s what the HTML/JS looks like now:

<a class="button_class button_icon_download" href="/downloads/some_file_name.exe" onclick="SetUpRedirect('some_file_name.exe',event)">

You can see I’ve passed the file name to be downloaded to the JavaScript function as well as the event (click) object.

4) The final step was to adjust the SetUpRedirect JS function to accomplish my goals. Here’s what that looks like now:

function SetUpRedirect(destination,event_object)
{
		var pgwBrowser = jQuery.pgwBrowser();
		var os=pgwBrowser["os"];
		var os_name=os["name"];
		os_name=os_name.toLowerCase();

		if (os_name.indexOf("windows")>-1)
		{
			setTimeout(function(){window.location='http://'+location.hostname+'/download-file/?file='+destination;},3000);
			return true;		
		}
		else
		{
			event_object.preventDefault();
			location.href="http://"+location.hostname+"/some-landing-page/?file="+destination+"";
		}
	}

That’s all pretty self explanatory. We’re making use of the PGWBrowser plugin to get the Operating System of clients and checking if it contains “Windows”. If it does those users get redirected to the download success page as usual. However, if they are not Windows users we use the jQuery preventDefault method on the event object to stop those users downloading the trial version of my software. They are then redirected to another landing page that says something like “hey we noticed you’re using a non Windows device, why not try out our spiffy web-based product instead?” Neat.

Brew Day 3 – 4 May 2015 English Cider 6 Litre Test Batch

I saw this recipe for English dry apple cider on HomeBrewTalk and thought it looked interesting (and I like cider). It’s a long term brew with people saying the cider only comes good sometime after the four month mark. The recipe itself uses store bought clear apple juice, yeast nutrient, and ale yeast. It also makes use of an acid (lime juice) and steeped black tea for the tannins. The cider seemed like a good (and easy) recipe for a smaller test batch and the only real cost to me would be the apple juice. I am switching out the lime juice with lemon juice (as we have tree in fruit), there’s English black tea bags in the pantry and I have a packet of (unknown) ale yeast from a brew can. There’s no “yeast nutrients” on hand but some Googling suggests that plain old bread yeast boiled in water for 10 minutes works well as a substitute. Finally, it’s coming up to winter here and I can leave the fermentation vessel and secondary outside and not worry too much about temperature control. So, it’s all systems go!

Recipe
6L of store bought clear apple juice
The juice of half a small lemon
2 cups of water
7g packet of baking yeast
1 English black tea bag
Packet of ale brewing yeast

Boil a cup of water with the juice of a lemon for 10 minutes. Turn off heat, steep tea bag in hot mixture for 7 minutes. In another saucepan boil a cup of water with the packet of bakers yeast for 10 minutes. Let both mixtures cool to room temperature and tip both in fermentation vessel. Pour in apple juice making sure to get plenty of air into the mixture. Pitch the yeast, seal FV and let it ferment. Rather than use an airlock on my FV this time I’ve used a large rubber band and several layers of cling (GLAD or Saran) wrap to seal the top of the vessel. Apparently this works well and I can see what’s going on for once as my vessels are all opaque plastic. I didn’t take an SG reading as there’s not enough depth. I doubt I’ll bother except perhaps when I move it to a secondary. Expected FG is 1.000 or a bit less (it is DRY cider after all).

I plan on leaving it in the primary for a month, then into a secondary for another month or two before bulk priming and bottling.

30 May 2015 – I washed and sterilised the juice bottles today and racked off the cider from the fermenter into the bottles for aging for a couple of months. You can see the cider below. The bottle on the left was racked first and is quite clear, the bottle on the right was last and is quite cloudy. I tasted a little of the cider. On the nose it was quite a strong apple scent but had little apple flavour. It was extremely dry and the mouth feel and after taste was very reminiscent of dry white wine. There was a strong flavour of alcohol. I took an SG measurement at 1.004.

Cider racked into original 2L juice bottles

Cider racked into original 2L juice bottles

Update 18 July 2015

It’s been nearly two months since I started aging the cider. I put a bottle in the fridge today to cool and have had a glass back sweetened a little with regular apple juice. It is smooth and has a strong apple flavour. The dryness has dropped off a little and the dry harshness I noted a couple of months ago has gone. It’s also dropped out extremely clear. I guess because it’s flat it’s apple scrumpy. I’ll carbonate the other four liters and see how they turn out.

Apple Scrumpy?

AFL Tipping Spreadsheet – Round 5

Last week was a tough tipping week and this round is no different. I think this week shows some of the flaws in an automated tipping system that doesn’t include some sort of power rating that examines the quality of teams defeated as well as comparing relative ladder position. For example, the Adelaide v Pt Adelaide match sees all four systems selecting the Crows but I’ve chosen the Power. They’ve beaten two quality sides in the last two rounds, sides that played very well. Adelaide lost badly last week, and their three previous wins have been either unconvincing or against a side (North Melbourne) that was diabolical. All four systems are suggesting that the GWS/Eagles and Gold Coast/Lions games will be close ones. Personally I think the West Coast will win easily while the battle of the cellar dwellars could go either way.

Game My Tips System 1 System 2 System 3 System 4
Carlton vs Collingwood Collingwood Collingwood Collingwood Collingwood Collingwood
Richmond vs Geelong Geelong Richmond Richmond Richmond Richmond
Sydney vs Western Bulldogs Sydney Sydney Sydney Sydney Sydney
Gold Coast vs Brisbane Gold Coast Gold Coast Gold Coast Gold Coast Gold Coast
North Melbourne vs Hawthorn Hawthorn Hawthorn Hawthorn Hawthorn Hawthorn
West Coast vs GWS Giants West Coast GWS Giants GWS Giants West Coast West Coast
Melbourne vs Fremantle Fremantle Fremantle Fremantle Fremantle Fremantle
St Kilda vs Essendon Essendon Essendon Essendon Essendon Essendon
Adelaide vs Port Adelaide Port Adelaide Adelaide Adelaide Adelaide Adelaide