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There is no constitutional power that allows congress to really, absolutely force a sitting president to do anything. They do however determine funding, and they can impeach(which isn't on the table), which gives them a VERY big stick.

So if the Miers/Justice dept scandal is really that big a deal, use the fucking stick. Start defunding things.

The executive has, imo, usurped wayyyy too much power over the past 50 years. Bush has followed in the footsteps of his predeccesors and finally, really pushed it over the line. So congress needs to grow a pair and rein the branch back in, or shut the fuck up about it.

All of congress's oversight is basically based on the premise that if they don't get to do it, they won't fund it. Because while it's a tradition, it's not a power.

Originally posted on Multiply:
This has probably become a sort of joke, because I've been talking about doing it again for a very long time. Anyway, I haven't brewed beer in a very long time. I used to do all-grain, which as anyone who does it can tell you, is a royal pain in the ass. You have to sanitize a fuck ton of stuff, then keep water temperatures constant during sparging, while varying them depending upon the grains you've added at what step in the process(yes, process, to get the best character in the end product you might for example only add your pilsner malt after X amount of time of sparging your malted wheat, and thus vary the temp). It's not hard to do it and get something highly drinkable out of it, but it's really fucking tough to get consistency.

To make things interesting, I took a general vote amongst my beer drinking friends as to what type of beer they would like. After realizing it was just increasing in difficulty the more things I vetoed, I settled on a hefeweizen. I was hoping for something like a stout or porter, because it's really tough to mess up a stout or porter(and if you do, you just up to gravity to get the ABV up to 12%, then it only bothers you for the first one).

So we go, pick up all the stuff. This will be a 100% pure extract brew, which means it'll lack character. Oh well. To try to make up for this, I pretty much just winged it.

First off, they didn't have any ready to pitch german wheat yeast at the brew store. So, alas, I had to get a propagation culture. Wyeast 1010 if you're interested. This means before I could start, I had to make a starter culture. I activated the yeast, boiled a liter of water and about 1 lb of light malt extract for 20 minutes, waited for it to cool down to room temp, and tossed into a beaker covered in foil. 3 hours later, I pitched the prop culture. 24 hours after that and it's gotten beery, so it's ready to use for reals.

To begin, I put 20 liters of water into the "king of all pots"(seriously, it's really tough to find something bigger than a homebrew/sparging pot, you end up going up to Turkey friers after a certain point), put the burner on high, and kept myself occupied watching the last hour of the propagation culture burping. Boiled for 20 minutes. I then added in my extracts. I used 4 lbs of malted Wheat extract, 2.5 lbs of light pilsner, and 3 lbs of light amber. Immediately added in 8 AAU of Hallertau hops. Boiled for 45 minutes. Added another 8 AAU of Hallertau hops. Boiled for an additional 15 minutes. Allowed to cool(this took forever...) and tossed it into the glass carboy(pails are for sissies).

Target Original Gravity: 1050-1060
Original Gravity: 1054
IBU: 20
Target Final Gravity: 1012
Target ABV: About 6%
Color: Light Amber - I don't feel like calculating this.

Checked on it this morning. Gravity had dropped to 1042. So it's at about 1% alcohol after just over 24 hours. Which is good, means I didn't kill the yeast. 13 days to go before I find out if it sucks or not.

Once it's done with the initial fermentation, I'm going to keg it, toss in 2/3rds of a cup of corn sugar, and store it in a mini-fridge I'll try to keep at 50. It should be drinkable, and if it's not all gone within 4 weeks, it'll be cask-conditioned and ready for bottling.

Couple more batches after this, and I'll start trying the crazy stuff(like Gluten free brewing).

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The target ABV, IBU, and SRM will put this somewhere between a weizen and a weizenbock. Using American Wheat yeast as opposed to a german wheat yeast, and all extracts should keep it nice and crisp. Light on esters and phenols. Hopefully it turns out as planned.

So, we have a projector right, which means the Wii sensor bar cable is wayyyy too short.

New cables/extenders don't come out until January. Unacceptable says I! But unlike Tycho over at Penny Arcade, I decided to do something about it. Little digging into the Wii reveals that all the Wii provides to the Sensor Bar is power. The Warnings in the manual and various info online, plus the fact that calibration picks up tungsten bulbs, means we know it's IR, and the sensor is in the Remote. A few pics of it taken apart and boom, know how it works. Junior High-School shop class level project.

So, we need a new sensor bar that's independant from the Wii, and i don't want to have to change batteries or deal with any of that, so I browse Radio Shack's online store for IR sensors. Find a 1.2V 100mA High-Power IR LED they sell. The sensor bar pics I've seen show 2 sets of 3 LEDs, seperated by a foot. So we need 6 LEDs. Our power supply needs to be able to supply 600mA. We dig around in the boxes of geekdom, where all old AC-DC converters go to rot and find a 5.7W 1000mA AC-DC Adapter. Score!

So, now it's just a question of figuring out how much resistance we need. It's an easy formula, R = (V - FV)/FC in Ohms(V is the adapter voltage, FV is the LED, FC is the mA in amps). Quick calc R = (5.7 - 1.2) / .1. 45 Ohms(and it doesn't have to be precisely 45 ohms, it just needs to be around there). So it's off to radioshack. Who only carry 10 ohm and 47 Ohm resistors. No big, nab 8 10 Ohm resistors, some PC-board, wiring, and the 6 IR LEDs. The circuit is brain dead simple, each positive/negative on the adapter, through 4 resitors each, to the LEDs in series. Solder, solder, curse at the fact that I shake, hand project off to trmj(who will have more details). Put the thing into it's case(which consists of cut pieces of a blister pack and electrical tape, sue me for non-prettyness.)

One hour later, we have a working sensor bar that actually works better than the stock one, and isn't tied to the console. Awesome. Total cost: $10.

So for anyone else complaining about this, it's not too hard to whip one up. Of course my electronics knowledge isn't so hot, but the thing barely gets warm so far(only been 3 hours though), and it works like a dream.

So, I dumped my VC games to SD, plugged it into my smartphone(Windows is being wonky on the work laptop and won't mount SD(among other little quirks), I blame mucking with multiple versions of Tomcat, Active Perl, and dev crap trying to get an App working *over there* on an OS we typically don't use for it. Need to reformat it when I get back to work on monday), and dumped em.

I verified that I can do the following:
1. Copy from system memory to SD
2. delete from system memory (game vanishes from channel, leaves a blank spot)
3. copy back to system memory from SD (game reappears, works fine)
4. Goto 1, skip 4, copy to PC via hackish smartphone setup.
5. Delete from SD.
6. Copy back to SD from PC.
7. Goto 3. End.

The files are stored in private/Wii/titles/4Letter HASH. Game saves are data.bin, virtual console games are content.bin. I cleared the SD card completely, and copied over just the data for FZero. I then compared the size to a ROM of the game. It's bigger, almost like the emulator is included and it's a wii binary, which is my guess. I'd also guess that it stores your store information in system memory, to prevent just copying those .bin files over to another consoles system memory. And it's probably RSA secured as well. Dunno if it stores a hash/md5 sum to prevent you from doing what I'm sure many are thinking(buy N64 games, rip the rom out, pop in Goldeneye and/or Conker, go to town). Tada, modless VC trick. I'm sure smarter hackers than me will start tinkering here soon.

So yea, odd things about the VC.
1. Can not play games from SD.
2. The selection ain't so hot right now, I suspect more games this weekend. No gunstar heroes, no dungeon explorer, no Link to the Past yet.
3. No mechanism to tell you new games are available that I've seen(of course no new games have been added since 1am sunday, soo...).
4. Aspect ratio doesn't autoshift for you. So, since our Wii is in 16:9, all the games are in 16:9. They don't look terribly stretched, and it's just a minor annoyance though.

All told, the VC works pretty well. The emulation is spot on, I just wish there was a bigger selection. Prices are sort of high as well ($5 NES, $8 Genesis/SNES, $10 N64), but that doesn't bug me too much, I'm used to being a tad hosed for *on demand* content, and it's still early yet.

Oh, and it's frickin' impossible to find a classic controller in Boston atm. I had one preordered, but they didn't arrive in time for the midnight release, so I'm SOL.

In case anyone else got one at launch, I'm posting my system code.

It is: 7074 1870 9399 9464

There's not a whole lot to do with it yet, except harass people via Messages(e-mail, but slower), and trade Miis. But meh, in case anyone cares.