Aloha HomeBrewers
Friendly steady bump!

About a year ago last spring, I started a recruitment contest that ran for a couple or three months, and I can't remember which teams competed with us. Seems like there were maybe five teams, all active on the team forum. It was a lot of fun and I think we ended up in second place, having recruited maybe 20 or so new members; I can't remember which team came in first. There was a lot of 'friendly' trash talk that made it seem similar to a sports event -- a real competition. But I have been too busy lately to do much posting here, or much active recruitment other than my sig file that is constantly posted in most groups/forums and with my emails, which includes this text: "Join 'Homebrewers' to Help Cure Disease: www.tinyurl.com/yjlnyv". We also had a friendly race with Team Andrax, IIRC, to see which team would make it to the Top 100 first; Andrax barely beat us, but is WAY ahead of us now.

Anyway, speaking of competitions, what is that "Challenges" feature that I see on the main WCG Team Statistics page? There are two sections: "Most Popular Current Challenges" and "Recently Ended Popular Challenges".

Finally, here's a BIG 'Hello' to all of our recent visitors, too. Thanks for visiting.

Cheers.

Hello .... ? Is anyone home??? Where is our fearless leader? Haven't seen any posts from him in awhile. I guess we all get pretty busy in the summer.

Cheers.

Bill Velek

Am thinking of brewing today. I moved an unopened 50 pound sack of two-row malt, and it inexpicably split open at the seam, spilling a lot onto the floor. My local HBS has switched from Briess to Cargill malt, and this is the first sack of Cargill. It is single-bagged in what I guess is tyvek, whereas the Briess is triple-bagged in paper, with one of the inner bags having a plastic liner. To add insult to injury, the Cargill cost me five buck more than the Briess. Unless the beer improves (which I don't expect just because of a different brand of 2-row), I'm definitely going to voice a loud complaint the next time I'm down there.

As for crunching, I polished up my websites a little bit; if any of you haven't visited yet, I encourage you to do so: www.2plus2is4.com and www.velek.com. Thanks.

Cheers.

From looking at recent stats, it appears that there are a few teams that are threatening to pass us in the next week or two unless we do something to increase our daily points (teams 'Wisconsin', 'BOINC Synergy', and 'BroadbandReports'). Other teams are gaining on us, but they are so far behind that, if we can even moderately increase our points, they will not be a concern. We have been slipping in the ratings -- down from #66 to #76 -- so I challenge all of our team to do the best that we can to try to defend #76 as long as possible. I have several suggestions that might help us, ... and of course help WCG and the tremendous work that we do for medical research:

First, see what you can do to improve the performance of your own computer(s). For instance, I just realized that my antivirus program runs for almost two hours _every_ day to scan the _same_ files, over and over again. See if your antivirus is doing the same thing, and then check to see if you can schedule it for just once per week. While you might think that this places your system in jeopardy, think about it ...! My system scans my incoming emails, and I _always_ scan any 'exe.' program before I load it. So do we REALLY need a full hard-drive scan every day? I think not.

Second, I find that I chronically leave lots and lots of unused tabs opened on my brower, which I'm sure consumes memory unnecessarily ... so I've been more aware of that and 'trim' my browser as much as possible. I'm not sure that will help, but it can't hurt.

Third, we need to try to recruit new members for our team. Please try to mention -- or at least add a link to your sig -- in any post that you make to any brewing forums or groups.

Maybe Captain Fred can come up with some ideas, or urge us on with a friendly competition with another team. Fred ... ?

Thanks.