Cameron Stokes’s Blog

I attended my first book tour event a few months ago for the release of my favorite author, Chuck Palahniuk’s, new book Snuff. The event was held at Georgia Perimeter College with a packed house of roughly 2,000 people (rough guess based on me counting seats in the auditorium).

The night was a series of hilarious stories and antecdotes from Chuck’s experience in story-writing, previous jobs, and life in general.  I picked up a signed copy of Snuff while there.

Chuck Palahniuk's Snuff

Towards the end of the night, Chuck talked about the movie adaptation of his book Choke which was released this past September. I saw it opening weekend and was reminded again why I like Chuck’s books so much. The movie was very entertaining and very true to the book. Pay attention to one of the final scenes when Victor is on the airplane. The man sitting next to him is Chuck himself.

The event was filmed and is available in streaming audio and video formats from the Public Broadcasting Atlanta website here. Be forewarned, the book tour, like most of Chuck’s books and the film Choke, are not for the faint of heart.

In email archive size:

Email archive files.

2008 is roughly 75% over, so I’m on track for a 2.4 GB archive file for this year, a 64% increase over last year.  The biggest increase was from 2006 to 2007 which was a 141% increase.

A friend and I decided to take our hand at homebrewing beer. After doing a bit research we found a local wine making and beer brewing supply shop, Wine Craft of Atlanta, and decided to venture over and check it out. The shop owner, Rick Adams (and his wife Peggy whom we haven’t met yet), was extremely helpful and put up with our countless questions on how homebrewing works, what to buy, what not to buy, etc., and we left with a beer starter equipment kit and an English Pale Ale ingredient kit. I’m usually one to buy everything online to save some money, but not knowing exactly what to buy Rick’s advice was priceless and his prices were roughly the same if not cheaper than the stores online, especially when not having to pay for shipping.

Fast forward a couple weeks, the kit had been sitting idle since we bought it and we finally made time for brewing. Making the wort took a couple hours, meanwhile our house smelled delicious and reminded me of all my trips to the Sweetwater Brewery (brewery photos are here).

Wort

After making and cooling the wort (which required an emergency trip out to pick up ice), everything was moved to the primary fermenter and left to ferment. The initial gravity was 1.041. After a day of expecting “vigorous fermenting” I became worried when our airlock didn’t seem to be doing much. I emailed Rick asking for help and then realized that we forgot to add water to the airlock. Rick assured us that everything would be fine we just needed to take a gravity readying to see where we were in the process. The gravity reading of 1.015 meant everything was on course, and we let it sit for another couple days. After about 5 total days in the fermenter, and a final reading of 1.015 it was time to bottle.

Bottling began by taking inventory of how many bottles we had collected and realizing we were short (we needed about 2 cases worth). We grudgingly drank a few more beers, proceeded to sanitize the bottles and equipment, and bottled. We setup an assembly line of a filler, a passer, and a capper. We ended up with 40 12 oz. bottles and 3 22 oz. bottles filled with what will hopefully be some delicious English Pale ale.

I hereby name this brew, The First Stab.

Delicious Beer.(We need some white-label packs.)