Pre-bottling taste test seems to show that it has a very smooth amber-styled ale flavor with the essential hoppie notes. I hope it will taste as good if not better after fermented in the bottles for a few weeks!

One style of bottle

Test and Filter

Some of the final product

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That’s it! Success has been had and I’m definitely going to do this again with everything that I’ve learned from this experience (a.k.a., no candy thermometers).

1. Steeping the Grains
The hard part about this is trying to get the steel pot up to 170F without making it insanely hot to deal with later when I have to make sure that I don’t over boil the silly thing.

And the waiting…. We finally got to the appropriate steeping temperature so now there’s 20 minutes of waiting before we can bring it to a boil

2. Adding in Malt & Extract
Finally finished steeping. Have to let the grains drain and then add in the malt and extract

Added the ingredients and now we wait till it boils

Boil dammit!!!

Just broke the candy thermometer. It is now officially a fiasco.

Finally got to add the hops. Hope I don’t make it over boil.

My stove is having trouble keeping the heat up…moving to the lid.

Brand frickin new stock pot lid started snapping and developing hairline cracks…moving to a beefier lid and walmart is going to get a nasty-gram.

3. Beginning Fermentation
Starting the rapid cooling of the boiled sticky mess.

Adding in the yeast and the cool little air lock thingy.

And the beer has a new home for the next week

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That’s all for now!!! Tomorrow, we’ll have to see if the yeast is actually working the way that it’s supposed to and that will be the tell-tale sign of whether or not we have a chance at success. Stay tuned!

2. Breaking In The Horn
This one is just too good not to post. A family friend wanted to get his song back for an April Fool’s prank. His son had done something to his car, so he seemed it would be the logical point of reciprocation. Steve found his son’s car in the parking lot of the school and wired his break lights to the horn so that every time his son stopped, his horn would go off. Now I have to step back and just say I wish that I could have thought of this (there’s only so much time for thinking evil thoughts though.) because it is just so devious. The best part is that his son hit every stop light on the way home AND got stuck just about 200 ft. from home behind two of the other neighbors that had stopped to talk to each other in the middle of the road (it’s a county thing…).

3. Marked Man
Ingredients required: 1 or more soap marker(s), 1 or more indignant moron(s). People have been soaping cars for a long time. This is pretty simple and people have been doing it for years, but we’re going to give it a blast from our spice-weasel and kick it up a notch. Enter the soap marker. Basically, find your moron … they are pretty easy to find, they generally park in like 4 parking spaces at once, drive erratically, etc … and wait for them to leave their car unattended. Now, being as many morons travel alone, they generally don’t look at the passenger side of the car … they also tend to drive very poorly and in the fast lane … this means that you should try to focus on the passenger side of the car for you message to the world. I’ve come up with a few to get you started:

• Roadrage Test in Progress, please honk
• I couldn’t park, please spit on my car
• Honk if you would like me to be rude

You get the idea. Be creative and let me know what you come up with.

Well, that concludes another posting of evil ideas. Remember, you’re responsible for your own actions … I don’t use the Jedi mind trick like that anymore. Happy eviling .

2. Wire you upset?
This one comes as a response to helping my friend clean up his yard. My friend’s neighbor is a very inconsiderate piano instructor. I can’t count the number of times that she has come over to complain about him taking down a tree that was nearly laying on top of his garage and how now her entire landscaping scheme was completely destroyed because of how much it change the lighting. “Bah!” I say! So for this to work, you need someone who plays piano and plays it often and a screw driver (one with quick bits would be a big help here). Gaining access to their house can be an issue; however, some social engineering should get you in. When you have the chance, open up the piano and just randomly pick some screws that adjust the tuning of the strings and give them a 1/4 turn in what ever direction you fancy at the moment. Try get as many stings as you can, favoring the middle set of chords as they are generally played the most (generally). Your results will vary, but for the most part, you should make the person’s musical ear want to tear itself off his or her head and drown in a pool of bad clarinet music.

3. Emails
For the more technologically inclined, it’s sometimes easier for us to take vengeance upon the mere mortal users of our systems. If you’ve never faked an email, it’s really not that hard. Here are the basic steps (from a high level):

1. Look up their DNS record for their mail server
2. Telnet to the server on port 25
3. Send an email from whoever you want to be to your victim
4. Sit back and watch

Now, I’m not going to tell you exactly how to do this (too many OS and tool choices for brevity). Another thing to keep in mind is that your IP address, which identifies you on a network, will be logged somewhere. There are ways around that, but you’re going to have to find them yourself.

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Alright, that concluded the most recent evil ideas. If you have a specific situation you’d like me to address, feel free to give me an email at wyatt at hackerforhire dot org and I will do my best to help you out from an thinking perspective (no, I won’t help you do anything to anyone, I have my own aggenda)

2. Soggy Socks
Here at Hacker for Hire, we are all about the cheap thrills, and this is just that. Take an ordinary water pistol, fill it with warm or cold water (or hot if you feel like being a real bastard). Wait until a hapless victim or someone just annoys the bleedin’ crap out of you and water down their socks thoroughly. If you’ve ever had wet socks, and I know you have, you know just the kind of annoyance this person is in for during the rest of the day. It’s even better if you get them to chase after you because you know that running in wet socks just sucks.

3. Cube Wars
Now this is not a cop-out; but I think that these people have done a great job at showing how to stick it to the cube dwelling morons/jerks in your company. The is called Cube Jinx! and it’s a blog of what people have done to take spread the vengeance around. I think that Katy should submit “Operation Posty” and “Operation Punk’d” to them. I would, but I don’t have her permission and she can tell the story much better than I.

There you have it. If you think the last one was me taking a break, come to me and I’ll name your kid something horrible like “Maya Wood” (real name of the guy at works daughter) so you can have a lifetime of evil pleasure. As always, feel free to comment, suggest, improve, or submit your own ideas, props are always given. Till next time, keep the evil.

(Hint: This is another user participation thing )

2. Wallets
This one is mainly for the girls, but guy can take advantage of it too, though it would be crossing some lines guys weren’t meant to cross. If you are a girl and you don’t know how particular guys are about their wallets, you must have never had a date in your life. So to get the point across, guys are particular about their wallets. Now I know if you are a guy you are saying “No, no no.” But inside your really saying “God no! No! No! No!” cause you know how right I am. Seriously, when is the last time you got a new wallet? And if it was recently, how long had you had your previous wallet? Twelve years for me personally. Now the evil part. Take the wallet (no, don’t keep it) and rearrange everything it it. Move all the credit cards and change the bills around and all kinds of other crazy things. Put in out of date cards and information, old receipts and stuff like that. Be warned though, it is a good chance the guy will either cry or kill. Update: Apparently this will only work on me.

3. A Bad Tip
Credit where credit is due. This idea was sent in by Steve “something or other.” He’s the guy that was at Dave’s birthday part with the wonderful cop stories. Anyway, the setup. You’ve gone to a resturant, you’ve had a horrible experience with your server(s) and you want a little retaliation. Obtain a glass of liquid approximately 1/3 full. Drop in your tip. Cover the glass with a piece of paper or the drink menu or something similar. Flip the whole thing upside onto the tableand pull out the paper/menu and let surface tension do the rest.

That’s all for now. Remember, I am not responsible if you try any of these things and a person in a black robe with a small novelty hammer will inform you of how personal responsiblity works if you get caught.

2. Smoking
I was browsing the internet when I found these. The website pretty much says it all (until the link goes down so I’ll digress “ab ovo usque ad mala”). If you’ve ever seen a WB cartoon from back in the day, (this guy is so wrong) you’ve more than likely seen the exploding cigar. Well, these cigarette loads allow you to be your own animated character for bargain price. I can almost imagine how entertaining it would be to stick about 12 of these buggers in one cigarette and watch the persons hair singe as the cigarette erupted into a magnificent snow storm of tobacco and carcinogens falling lightly too the table. I can even imagine how much more fun this would be if the person were going to the airport….

3. Hand Sanitizer
So as always, I’m generally scraping the bottom of the barrel for the third thing, but technically I count the cigarette loads as two because one is at home and the other as the airport. Basically, I feel no shame for the cop-out on this one. It’s been a while since I’ve seen anyone use the hand sanitizer stuff, but we had some of it in the office and being as my job is horrible and I had nothing to do, my engineering curiosity got the best of me. I’ve noticed that it has just a slightly thicker consistency than the KY warming liquid you see the girl rub on her fingers in the commercial. Go find the commercial here and watch it if you don’t believe me. So enter the idea, find some jerks hand sanitizer and replace it with KY warming gel. Notice I said gel and not liquid, you don’t want it running out all over the place. But the instant it hits their hands, they will know something is up … so will anyone who shakes hands with them the rest of the day. Now that, my friends, is making sure the evil is evenly distributed.

4. Poof! I had another.
Well, I just happen to have one more that I thought of in a parking lot (don’t good ideas always come to you in strange places?). Apparently, you can rent these ‘flash boxes’ used in photography studios. You can also swing by any Walmart and get a power inverter for your car. Aim it out the rear or back passenger window of your car and attach the remote trigger near your horn. Wait for a dark night. I can just hear the conversation with the officer later at night:

Victim: Everthing was going fine, I was on my cell phone and then there was just this bright flash from no where and I drove into the wall.
Cop: Yeah, sure buddy, a flash from no where. And where did you say the aliens left Jimmy Hoffa’s body?

That’s all I’ve got. I’m not responsible for any of this if you try it and all that other fun stuff.

1. Screeching Horn
OK, so this one came from having to drive around in the Rookwood Commons parking lot on Saturdays and Sundays. If you’ve never been to Rookwood, it’s basically an outdoor shopping mall for overpriced crap that a bunch of self indulgent nincompoops buy. If you’ve been to Rookwood, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Well, a couple of somethings these nincompoops do that annoys the crap out of me are walk outside of the crosswalk and drive really, really stupid. The average person would sit and curse under their breath in the car saying all sorts of mean things; however, the over aspiring engineer sees and opportunity for invention. Solution: The Screech Horn 100. Again, keeping with the idea of simplicity, this is nothing more than a 100 dB horn with a slight twist. Instead of creating a sound in the key of F (if you have an American car), the horn would produce the sound of screeching tires, at 100 decibels. I just picked 100 cause it was a nice round number. But imagine the joy that it would bring. You are sitting patiently at a stop sign, two people stop to chat in the middle of the crosswalk, and SCREEEEEEEEEECH!!!!. Just the thought of some soccer mom being scared so bad she can’t carry her 50 pairs of shoes from DSW is enough to put a smile on my face.

2. Door Handles
The common punishment for driver who do not obey the laws of the road is a fine or a revocation of their license. The problem is that this isn’t effective enough. Well, sometimes taking the license away is good, but a fine just doesn’t have the long standing impact that you like it to have. So instead of fining individuals, we do something much more annoying. We take their door handles. Not just the outside, but the inside ones too. So now you go to get into your car, you have to jimmer-jammer the door open and closed every morning when you get into your car, when you get off from work, cause you know exactly how frustrating it is to ‘miss’ the door handle in someone else’s car and spend 5 minutes looking around for it when all you are thinking is “Let me out of this damn car!!!”

3. Magnets
Yeah, I can see you over there thinking, “Wyatt, that is stupid.” But not when you apply it to good use. All computer cases, have some metal in them, it’s just a matter of where. Simple enough trick, add a magnet to the outside of the system case, preferably a magnet from an old SCSI hard drive or something of the like that is super strong. It probably won’t be enough to completely trash the computer’s hard drive, but there is a good possibility that just random portions of the system will develop sporadic behavior that is generally not desirable.

That’s all for now, stay tuned for more evil ideas as I think of them. Oh yeah, I’m not responsible for anything you choose to do with this information or anything else you decide to do. Consider it a lesson in PERSONAL RESPONSIBLITY.