Several Updates..
Thanks to a really good friend of my fathers, we spent a weekend building a deck in my backyard. The process wasn’t so bad, and it really opens up the backyard. Special thanks goes to Bill F. for helping me carry the ton of wood in a UHAUL from home depot.
The beer that I helped Patrick make came out excellent. It’s a chocolate porter. Rather than putting in chocolate liqueur as per the recipe, we used a cup of coco powder, which seemed to work great! 
I am also working on automating my hydroponics setup, and wanted to mention my trial at using a 3.5″ floppy disk drive stepper motor to push a syringe. After some time tweaking it, it turns out that it just doesn’t have enough torque. The AVR STK500 just drives the pins in the right sequence, the breadboard contains a simple dual H-Bridge. Email me if you want further details..
Finally, my HD DirecTV receiver (DCT210) died. I left it unplugged for a few months, and it caused the power supply to go bad. When I plugged it back in, it would just cycle on and at a rate of a couple Hz. I pulled the supply, and it’s busted (it should be a flat output, not the sawtooth pattern). I found references to other people having this happen to them after leaving it unplugged for a period of time. I can get a used one cheap so it’s really not worth the time to debug it, but if someone has an idea why it’s happening, I would love to hear it. I’ve decided to upgrade to the HR20 anyhow, so it’ll be moot. 