If you want it done right, you have to brew it yourself!

gak and Paris have invited the Rackers, SOBs, and ALEs to their palatial estate in Oshkosh for Oshtoberfest on October 12 at 1:00 P.M. Bring beer, food, chairs, etc. They are hoping that the three clubs can make this their regular meeting. gak will do a "malts and mashing" presentation. More information, including directions, will be in the next newsletter.

I'm still not certain where we will have our next club brew. Additionally, Kurt emailed and said that he will not be able to brew. Hopefully I'll have some more news on that very soon.

Chuck Goluecke needs help! He has once again volunteered to do a brewing demonstration at Heritage Hill, but he would like some assistance from his fellow Rackers. It is this Saturday, August 17, from 10 A.M. until about 3 P.M. If you can help, even for just a little bit, email him ASAP!

At Saturday's meeting a couple of major announcements and decisions were made. It appears that we will not have access to the Musicians Union Hall for much longer. Thankfully, Brent and Paul at Titletown Brewing have offered to let us meet there for our Saturday business meetings, either upstairs or in the Frost Room, depending on which is open. Thanks to the folks at Titletown for the offer!

We decided to move the club brew day back to Tuesday nights since that actually seems to work better for most people. Unfortunately, we need a place to meet. Our club officers are looking into our options. Our next club brew will be on Tuesday, September 10, at 6:00 P.M. The exact location will be announced later.

Kari Hinkens has volunteered to be our new newsletter editor! Thanks Kari! Send any items for the newsletter to her. The results of the State Fair Competition have been posted. Congrats to our own Bob Franklin for winning a gold!

Meeting today! Musicians Union Hall! Be there!

I've recently been made aware that people are also receiving email with my personal address in the "reply" field. These emails, unfortunately, contain and are sent by the Klez worm. So, if you get an email from my address (marnold@ez-net.com) and it has "marnold" as my name instead of my full name (Matthew Arnold), delete it unread. For more information, go to the above link and look for the section entitled "Email spoofing." Either somebody in the club has Klez or someone who has viewed our email address page has it. I do not and cannot have Klez since I use Linux on my computer and this worm only affects Windows-based machines.

I received some bad news from gak last week. Citing "personality conflicts" he has been removed from employment at Fox River Brewing in Oshkosh. If I hear anything further, I'll let you know.

Updates three days in a row? What's this world coming to? I got a report the other day that someone had received the Klez worm with the info@rackers.org address as the sender. One tipoff that it wasn't from me is that it had "info" as my name. If I send an email from that address, I will always have my full name in addition to the address. Plus I will never ever send an attachment to anyone unless a) you ask for something or b) I inform you first. Otherwise, delete all emails with attachments unread!

In other news, Kurt sent me some nice pictures from our picnic a while back that I hope to get online soon. I also have the May newsletter which I need to convert to HTML. Stay tuned.

Mike sent email that Mike Fairservice and co. are planning Mead Day 2002 for October 5. Unfortunately, that's the same day as our Oktoberfest meeting. Drat. One of these years I'll get down there for Mead Day.

This just in: beer is good for your bones.

Don't forget! Next Saturday, July 13, is our club brew day! Chuck Golueke will be our brewmaster at the Musicians Union Hall.

Sorry about the lack of updates recently. At the end of May, my family was involved in a car accident while on vacation. Thankfully no one was hurt (unless you count the car, but even that's fixed now). Plus I took on a couple of extra hats for my "real" job. OK, I'll stop making excuses now :)

I've also been fiddling with some of the fancy new web standards. Actually they aren't really "new." Most of them have been around since 1998. Thankfully there are browsers now (like Mozilla, Netscape 6 and 7, Opera 6, and Internet Explorer 6) that support the standards reasonably well. With that in mind, I have redesigned my personal site using XHTML 1.0 and cascading style sheets (CSS). What does that mean for you? Well, the layout is nicer and it will look more uniform across a wide variety of browsers and devices. It's really nice for me because it is a lot easier to maintain. Check it out here and let me know what you think! If you have a really old browser (like say Netscape 4.x), the site will look like garbage. Maybe it's a good time to upgrade your browser!