Happy New Year!

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Welcome to 2008! For me, 2007 was a year marked by a tremendous amount of personal and professional growth, and I'm looking forward to continuing that trend in 2008. There's a lot going on right now, and I'm trying to figure out how to best balance work and home life.

The holiday season was a lot of fun. Lots of time with family, taking it easy. Lauren isn't exactly hankering to go mountain biking or hang gliding lately, so I've been spending a lot of time trying to get the house in shape, with my old friend Home Depot. (Really, I should just buy stock...) Over the break, I repainted our downstairs bathroom (twice) and put in a new faucet. It doesn't sound like much, but that bathroom was in really bad shape. The bottom half of the room was painted a deep blue, and the top half white. There was a border right on the white/blue dividing line with a bunch of lighthouses and stuff on it. Would have been perfect for a beach house in Fire Island, but this is a main floor bathroom in a 5-bedroom house in Holtsville.

Since the blue was so deep, it needed two coats of primer after sanding. And then it took three coats of paint. Then Lauren decided she didn't like the color, so I put another three coats of a different color on. Then there was the white trim. Lots of work. (BTW, someone remind me not to use cheap rollers next time. There was a lot of lint that ended up on the wall.)

I also did quite a bit of work around the garage - a couple new shelving units and some shuffling of boxes and stuff, so we could put all the Christmas decorations back and accommodate some boxes of stuff from the Wading River house. Really, though, there's no substitute for a two-car garage.

I did a once-over on the truck, too. Wash, wax and vacuum after an oil change and changing out the air filter. Anyone know where the fuel filter is on a Dodge 1500 pickup? I wasn't able to locate an inline filter, and someone told me you need to drop the tank to get to it, but I'm not sure that info is from a reliable source.

Cold Box Rebuild

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When I graduated school and my fraternity was unceremoniously booted from campus, I inherited some junk from the house. Among it was an old cold box that had seen its share of keggers. In case you're unfamiliar with a cold box, basically, it's the same system that bars use to deliver cold keg beer, just in a portable format. My system was set up for two kegs, and it mounted two taps to the front of this ancient cooler. I used it a handful of times, including at the infamous SposBash band parties during the summer. But by and large, this rig had been sitting in my garage, not getting a lot of use.

This past weekend's project was to get the cold box working again, so we could have it for the upcoming Underscore Holiday Party. Thankfully, most of the parts are simple brass fittings and tubing you can find at The Home Depot. The only exceptions are the fittings that go on the kegs themselves and the pressure regulator for the CO2. My pressure regulator was old and corroded, so I ordered a new one here.

The CO2 pressure pushes the beer up a hose, and it travels to a coil within the cooler. As it travels through the coil, which is surrounded by cold water and ice, the beer is cooled off. The coil is connected to a tap, which is where you fill your glass.

My first step was to get rid of all the hoses in the system and replace them. You don't want your beer traveling through hoses that have been sitting around with moldy beer in them for over a decade. I replaced the beer hoses and gas lines, and constructed new coils out of polyethlene tubing. My gas fittings were all good, but just to be safe, I made an entirely new gas system out of brass fittings, including three 3/8" ball valves so I can select each keg or shut the CO2 off entirely.

Finally, I mounted the taps to a new cooler, which I got at KMart for about $15. If you've never drilled into a brand new cooler with a 7/8" Speedbor bit, take my advice - don't. Insulation and red plastic gets all over the place. Thank God for Shop Vacs.

I'll post pics of the system when I remember to take them, but you can see it in action at the Underscore Holiday Party this Wednesday night if you're around.

I Feel an Ebbing in the Force

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...as if the delicate balance has been upset in the network TV ad marketplace, such that we've crested the wave on artificially-created demand. You know how it works - advertisers making commitments in the upfront commit against inflated ratings. Shortfalls against the inflated ratings results in a need to deliver makegood weight, which decreases supply in the scatter market and artificially inflates demand, and thus pricing.

This year, we've got the writer's strike throwing a wrench in the works. MarketingVox reports that makegoods are already going into Q3 2008, and that NBC is issuing cash refunds to key advertisers. Here's a key quote from someone at Carat:

"If the networks are in this ratings under-delivery situation now, it could only worsen in the event of a prolonged strike."

So when does this graduate from "situation" to "perfect storm" where so much makegood weight is owed that major advertisers sweating it out in the scatter market might decide to turn some boatloads of ad dollars toward digital media?