Category Archives: Randomness

5 Holiday/Winter Beers For Your Enjoyment

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About a month ago, a friend (John) mentioned that he was on a mission to try 20 different holiday/winter brews before the New Year. I happily accepted his challenge and so began our journey. Over the past month, we have hunted near and far for the worlds finest holiday beers. So far I’ve managed to try 15 different ones and all of them have been really good beers but the following five are special beers that you should definitely try this year.

First, the runner ups:

###Jubilale###

**Brewery**: Deschutes **ABV:** 6.7%

I’m a huge Deschutes fan. I really like their Hop Trip fresh hop ale, Mirror Pond and Black Butte Porter. Their winter brew, Jubilale, is a decent choice as well and would have made my top 5 last year (had I actually tried more beers last year).

###Santa’s Little Helper###

**Brewery:** Port Brewing **ABV:** 9.5%

I was recently introduced to Port Brewing (and the lovely Pizza Port chain of pizza “joints”). Let me tell you, this company creates some _excellent_ beers. Santa’s Little Helper is a fair example of their talents. It’s an imperial stout with a lot of kick. It has a slight taste of alcohol at the end, but it’s a tasty little bugger. If you really want a good beer (and like extra hop), try their Hop 15!

##5. Winterbraun##

**Brewer:** Lost Coast **ABV:** 6.5%

Lost Coast’s label are always entertaining. The beer is usually always tasty and the Winterbraun is no exception. This is a nice brown ale with an excellent malty taste that’s easy to drink.

##4. Celebration Ale##

**Brewery:** Sierra Nevada **AVB:** 6.8%

From my _alma mater_ hometown of Chico, CA. Their Pale Ale is one of the beers that brought the ale back into main stream in the early 90s. Every year Sierra Nevada makes the Celebration Ale to celebrate the holidays and it’s great every year.

##3. Old Jubilation##

**Brewery:** Avery **ABV:** 8%

Avery produces some very tasty ales. Old Jubilation is definitely one of them. Very crisp. This is the type of beer you want to have with you while sitting next to a fireplace on a cold winter’s night.

##2. Yule Smith##

**Brewer:** Ale Smith **ABV:** 9.5%

The first bottle I purchased of Yule Smith happened to be the summer version so be careful when looking for this beer. The summer version has fireworks on the label while the winter (holiday) version has a nice little wreath. Not that the summer version isn’t good (it was and I’ll look for that this summer for sure), but the holiday version was especially tasty. It slightly hoppy but not overly so.

##1. Delirium Noël##

**Brewer:** Brouwerij Huyghe **ABV:** 10%

This is an excellent beer! It’s a Belgium style ale with an extra kick. Despite its high ABV (Alcohol by Volume), it doesn’t have the alcohol taste. It’s smooth, flavorful and full bodied. It goes down easy and a pint full will definitely put you in the holiday spirit. Careful, this is a _potent_ beer and will sneak up on you. Especially if you buy a 22oz bottle and enjoy the whole thing in one sitting.

In all fairness, all the beers I’ve had this year were excellent examples of what todays smaller breweries have to offer. Sure some where tastier than others, but overall, I was never dissatisfied. I’ll post a full list when the _competition_ is over.

Leopard: Preview Sucks (Literally)

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I just noticed that my MacBook Pro’s memory usage was rather high. I’m not working on anything memory intensive (Vmware, Photoshop, etc). So I opened up Activity Monitor to find this

Preview, sucking

Why the hell is Preview taking up nearly 350 MB of ram with NO windows open? I don’t remember opening any large files with it. I’ve been gone all day. I smell a leak!

How Old Is Your Login?

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See here, Bullet point number one:

Logging in with an account originally created in Mac OS X 10.1 or earlier that has a password of 8 or more characters.

Mac OS X 10.1 came out just over six years ago in 2001. If you’ve been using the “upgrade” option every time you update your OS X version, I think it’s time you performed a fresh install. Especially on such an old system (what do you have, an original Quicksilver? No? Older?). If you’ve made it this long without having to do a clean install, congratulations. You’re one of very small number of people. Hell, I haven’t kept a computer for longer than two or three years.

I bought my first Apple in 1997 — PowerPC G3 300Mhz (of the Beige kind). I bought my second Apple in 2000 — Quicksilver 733Mhz (non-shiny doors). Sold the G3 in 2002 (or so). I bought my first Powerbook in 2003 (G4 1Ghz Titanium) slightly used from a nice girl (with buyer’s remorse) in San Francisco. It took a dump about two years ago and I succumbed to way of cheap x86 hardware and Linux. But I redeemed myself about a year and a half ago when I bought my second Apple laptop (Macbook Pro 2.16Ghz).

I digress. What I’m saying is that, even if you’re lucky enough to have the same computer for the last six years (or more), I doubt you’d be as lucky going through four separate system upgrades (assuming you upgraded every version). Even if you didn’t and you went from 10.1 directly to 10.5, I highly doubt Apple spent much time testing that upgrade path (if at all).

Radiohead & In Rainbows Release

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Radiohead is free from their EMI contract and free to do what they will with their latest release. Sell where they want, when they want and charge whatever they want for it as well. Which is why it makes sense to do what they are doing now: Sell it for how much YOU, the listener, thinks it (or the band itself) is worth. I imagine it’s akin to jumping down a rabbit hole; you never know where the idea of leaving it up to the consumer to pay for your products will end up. I’m not quite sure how it will pan out, but I’m fairly confident that Radiohead will make out O.K.

I’ll admit that when I first read of the It’s up to you pricing scheme of the new release, the first thing that popped into my head was, “Sweet! Free music without the guilt.” But then I stopped to think about what Radiohead was actually doing. They could charge whatever they wanted for the digital download of In Rainbows (even if it were only a few bucks for the album). They spent the better part of two and half years working on this album. Even if they didn’t work 40 hour work weeks writing/recording/mixing, it’s still a chunk of someone’s life. What’s that worth?

I know Radiohead could probably afford to just give the download away, but then the album would loose it’s worth. A friend of mine told me a story about this rather nice office chair he wanted gone. It was your average office chair and was in pretty good shape. He had put it out on the sidewalk in front of his house with a sign that read “FREE.” The chair sat in the same place for a week. No one wanted it. After a week, he put a different sign on it. This sign read “$5.” The chair was gone by the time he got home from work. It’s like the word “Free” has a neutral connotation (maybe even negative for some people) where it means, “Oooh, it’s FREE!” or “It’s free? Why?” I suppose it also depends on the “what” as well, but there are a LOT of people downloading free music everyday (just ask the record labels).

For me, I’m much more willing to shell out a ten-spot for an album when I know that most of that will end up directly in the pockets of the artists. In fact, I was “this” close to pulling the trigger this afternoon on the pre-sale, but I was either too lazy or too busy to pull the wallet out of my back pocket to get my credit card. I will buy this album. I won’t say for how much.

The only possible downside of this pricing scheme maybe the guilt factor of paying too little over paying nothing at all. It’s easier to just leave the field blank than to have to quantify the value of the album/artist. Even when you really like the artist and have complete faith that the album will nothing short of stellar. However, that said, I also believe most people are honest (maybe I’m naive). I predict more people will pay something than nothing. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Thom, if you’re reading this, drop me a line in 6 months and let me know how well this business model works out.

Work, Ruby, VMware, Cable vs. DSL

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Work Politics and the Stationary Career Path

Work has been a pain. There’s really no other way to describe it. Everyone is getting pissy because of tight deadlines and it’s only a matter of time before the finger pointing begins. I’m OK with that. Finger pointing doesn’t affect me as much. I just shrug it off and laugh. Usually in front of the person doing the pointing.

One of the things that really bugs me though is the fact that my career there feels stagnant. I’ve asked for a title increase once and been shot down. It’s not the fact that I was shot down that upsets me. It’s the response I received from upper management. Something about “implications” surround the idea of promoting me. I’ve been told by several people at the company that my name comes up often as the “go-to” person when it comes to getting things done and picking up where others left off. I’ve been told by higher paid employees that I am far more knowledgeable than they are and that I am highly regarded.

I don’t get it. I think they want me to quit. I’ll ask again, but I fear I will either get the same response or worse, no response.

Ruby

I was all gung-ho the other night about diving into Rails. I still am. I am just running out of steam these days. Between the nine hours at the day job and a couple hours after on the side gig that doesn’t pay, I just can’t find the time.

It is going to happen though. It is. Shut up.

VMware and Unity

Is it me, or is VMware really giving Parallels a run for their money? I’ve been using VMware Fusion as my virtual machine of choice for the past several months. I’ve always felt that VMware has had a slight leg up on Parallels in the performance department. Now with Unity, I think VMware has a solid lead in the VM race. It is just an awesome product. I highly recommend trying it out. It’s still in beta, but so far, I haven’t had any issues running XP or Ubuntu (Feisty). Best of all, if F R double E whilst in beta.

Cable vs. DSL

We’re cutting back on the spending around the house lately. One of the things I’ve chosen to sacrifice is Cable to DSL. As much as I hate the pone company, I’m willing to save $20 or so bucks per month for (what I thought was) a slightly slower interweb. Slightly was a total understatement. While downloading the latest VMware, I really felt the pain. First off, my download speed was a measly 68Kb/s and then to top that off, the transfer died 50MB into the download. Luckily, I just hooked this all up tonight and have not canceled cable just yet. I pulled out the cable modem and finished the download in four minutes (averaging ~700Kb/s). Pathetic. I think if I do a cost per bandwidth, I’m actually getting ripped off by DSL.

There was a whole host of other mishaps with the DSL order, but, I’m not going to get into that.

A Thought

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I hate it when people don’t wash their hands after using the restroom1, yet think it’s perfectly fine if I don’t wash mine.

Is that wrong?

Let me just clarify things: I do wash my hands after #1. It just wouldn’t bother me if I didn’t from time to time.

1This only applies to #1. I always wash my hands after #2.. that’s just ultra gross.

IE 7 Hates USB Mice

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I’ve half assedly (yes, it’s a word, I made it up) followed the IE 7 development. I’m a web developer, it’s my job to be aware of such things. So, when it was still in beta (about 2 or 3 months ago) I installed it at work to see what it was all about. First impression: bloated piece of crap that does the exact same shit that Firefox has been doing for years; tabs, RSS, popup blocking, add on’s (extensions for the < 2.0 users), et al. The interface was horrible (still is) and it just wasn’t that interesting to me. It had a distinct Vista feel for XP and we already know how I feel about Vista.

So when the release of IE 7 was final earlier this week, I thought, “well, maybe the polished version is better.” Well, it wasn’t. Still the same bloated piece of crap I installed a few months ago. Not only that, but one of the first things that left a really bad taste in my mouth was the “Windows Genuine Advantage” bullshit during the install. This has to be the worst move Microsoft could have made. Not only is it annoying (not that it took a long time to verify that the version of Windows I was using was authentic), but it’s extremely insulting.

“We don’t trust you as far as we can throw you, so, we’re going to need to check your license to make sure it’s legit. Hope you don’t mind.”

Horse shit. If they want to check the license against a database of known compromised keys, so be it. Do so unbeknownst to the user. Don’t tell them about it. If it’s an unauthentic key, notify them and let them know how to purchase a valid license. It’s extremely rude.

The second thing I did was to open IE 7 and create a new tab. “Woohoo,” I thought, “IE has tabs.” One second later, the application completely vanished. Yes, vanished. No crash reporter deal; no popup telling me everything is cool (which it’s not), the application just crashed. Nothing. I could reproduce this every time. Open IE, create a new tab, POOF!

So, I set out to figure this out. Why the hell is this damn thing crashing every time? Honestly, I normally would have just uninstalled the damn thing and went about my merry business. However, I learned from our Help Desk at work that they are forcing the update on everyone’s workstation. Why, couldn’t tell you. The application was out for a day and the ever so helpful Help Desk was walking around installing IE 7 for everyone.

I spent half the day searching for answers and re-installing the software with no luck. The shit just wouldn’t work. Typical. At some point, I told one of my colleges about the problem I was having. I had already started with the add-on’s turned off and disabled a bunch on them that I didn’t need. He asked me if I was using a USB mouse.

“Yes, why?”

“Try using the USB to PS/2 adapter. Joey [the ever so helpful Help Desk guy] said to use it when I was having issues one time.”

Are you shitting me? “OK”, I thought, “nothing else seems to be working and I guess one more reboot wouldn’t hurt.” So, I shut down the machine, unplugged my USB mouse and plugged it into the PS/2 port. Mind you, this is a Microsoft mouse running Microsoft drivers. Well, when I rebooted, fired up IE and created a new tab, guess what; no crash.

So here’s my question, Microsoft: Why the hell does your mouse cause your software to disintegrate into thin air?

In the end, I’m trying IE 7 out for a day or two to see how it behaves. So far, I’m unimpressed. Like I said before; it does the same thing Firefox has been doing for years. It seems that the best Microsoft could muster up in the past, what, 3 years, is to play catchup with the rest of the internet world.

Way to go Microshit! You just earned a C- in the school of web development.

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