Back from Boston, New Year's Day (or the lack thereof), beer making, first day back in the office.

So, Wednesday of last week we went to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, which is a really interesting (the same meaning as in 'this food is interesting') place; no pictures allowed though, so I'll have to leave it at the fact that the neatest exhibit was a VW Beetle which had all its parts exploded out in three dimensions so you could see how it was made. Later that day we went walking around, saw the Harvard campus, and then we visited a local homebrew shop. 

While I was there, I picked up a Cornelius Keg, for use in my homebrewing beer. While I don't have a CO2 tank, pressure regulator, or any other supplies needed for kegging properly, the kegs there were about 40% cheaper then buying one in the Montreal region, so it was worth it to pick one up (and in retrospect, I almost wish I had gotten two). 

We didn't go to New York for New Year's finally, though, it was too damn cold. Instead, we drove home Thursday and took it easy that evening. Not being a very big fan of New Year's in general, I didn't mind not doing anything this year. 

Saturday was a pretty big day. I brewed two batches of beer, one Coffee Stout (which, should it come out well, I will christen "Dark Energy"), and my second batch of a coriander hefeweizen ("White Dwarf") which was great the first time I made it. They're bubbling away nicely in the brewery (I'll attach a picture as soon as I get home), and should be ready for bottling in a week or two. I do have one other batch, an "almost stout" (Porter?) which'll be ready for taste testing in a few days. Typically, bottle conditioning lasts 2 weeks. 

As for work today, I've put the finishing touches on my latest build code for my FPGA project. At slow speeds (serial) I should be able to count and read out the number of signals on one of 7 channels (corresponding to the 7 pixels of my camera). If this works, then I only have to pipe the stored values into the board's onboard DDR, and then fire it off in large bursts to my readout computer. This corresponds to the memory buffer being filled up and then read out (and wiped) via gigabit Ethernet in one burst. 

Anyways, I'm off to read about memory controllers and such. Tomorrow morning I'm going to do my first program tests, I want to have as much functionality ready as possible before I try working with the hardware.