Amazon S3

Amazon recently announced their S3 web service. S3 stands for "Simple Storage Service", and enables a very cost-effective way to store large amounts of data. The cost structure is pretty simple: $0.15 per GB of storage used, plus $0.20 per GB transferred. I currently have about 6GB of photos on my HD, making the total cost to back it up a meager $1.20 to upload the data, plus $0.90 each month thereafter. That is dirt cheap (compared to other online storage sites).

I plan to write a little application to do this, and I'll be happy to share it with anybody who wants to use S3 for storage.

More Beer

I'm going to try my hand and brewing some beer again today. My last batch was quite successful (at least I thought it was). Today's beer should be a nice refreshing beer for the hot months ahead. It's a Bavarian Hefeweizen, with a pretty simple ingredients list:

• Grain (1/2 lb of German Pilsner and 1/2 lb of Carapils)
• Wheat extract (7 lbs)
• Hops (1 oz Hallertau)
• Yeast (Hefeweizen ale yeast)
• Water

Of course, these are the main ingredients for all beers, but this one is about as simple as it gets as far as the variety of grains and hops go. If all goes well, it should be ready to consume in about 5 weeks. I'll keep you posted.

30-second update

Hello faithful readers (all 3 of you). It's been a while. I don't feel like writing much, so here's what's new:

1. With the help of Heidi's dad, I managed to get the Blazer running quite well. We replaced the intake manifold and carburetor. It now stays at idle pretty well (albeit a somewhat rough idle), and no longer spews nasty black exhaust. It's been my daily-driver for the past couple of weeks. It's quite a fuel hog though.
2. I went to England for work - and unfortunately I worked the whole time. I did drink a couple of warm pints of ale and saw Big Ben, but not much beyond that. I'll post some pics when I'm feeling less lazy.
3. I bought an Xbox 360 on the weekend (I finally used some gift certificates that have been burning holes in my pockets since Christmas). It's very cool, but I haven't had much time to use it. I spent a couple of nights playing Ghost Recon, which is awesome (I really suck). Aside from its gaming capabilities, it integrates nicely with any PC on your network that contains music and pictures. It is also a Media Center extender, but I haven't tried that feature yet.

That's all for now. Ciao.