danconley.net

I know what you’re thinking:

Dan, you post too much!

I know, right? Well, because my activity on this site is so fast and furious, I thought I’d spread it out more. I’m now writing on two other sites. I never claimed to have good judgment…

Gaming Shenanigans is a new site being run by my future-brother-in-law-in-law Dave and me (the same due that’s been doing The Riot for over two years now). We’ve branched out and want to talk about all sorts of games. Board games, card games, video games, games of tag, you name it. As we’re just getting started, the site may be a little sparse, but bear with us. I think it’s got the potential to be a really cool place for obscure things… though I suppose that’s obvious. ‘This site sucks!’ isn’t really something I’d be thinking as I dedicated time to writing on it, would it?

Beer O Vision, on the other hand, has been around for quite time. Ethan knows a hell of a lot more about beer than I do, and is a much more experienced brewer, so collaborating with him will be a great learning experience. He’s also the mastermind doing the planning for the Buffalo Homebrewing Collective, which looks to be a very cool idea. I’m not altogether sure what I’ll be writing about for BOV, but that’s part of the challenge, isn’t it?

Now then, if tiny decided to throw another Blog War at me, I’m thoroughly hosed.

(side note: I’m giving up and getting ecto; hopefully it will be the last you’ll have to hear about it)

In talking with my boss yesterday about brewing in Buffalo, she reminded me that the Erie County website has a map of Buffalo from 1894. You can click on the red numebrs in each section to zoom in, and there’s a surprising amount of detail provided: the type of building, number of floors, business name, etc. I think I was most surprised that the city has been essentially unchanged in the past 114 years… there’s just so much more stuff! My street had one house on it, and my mom’s had none. Some street names are different, and some had alternate names (Colvin was also ‘Niagara Falls Boulevard’? Really?)

To keep this slightly brewery related, we followed some of the directions on Peter Jablonski’s Edifices of Buffalo Breweries and found quite a few on Plate 34 (a little over halfway down on the lefthand side, by Washington and Burton).

(Don’t care about Buffalo? St Louis has a similar map from 1875)

I’ve talked about it before, but I really can’t stress how great Amazon’s mp3 service is: in addition to generally being cheaper than CDs and iTunes (and being DRM-free), they also have a deal of the day. I’m currently downloading Synchronicity by the Police, which I just purchased for two dollars. It’s really hard to see the downside in that transaction (and remember, I’m a contender for the title of Cheapest Bastard on the Internet).

There’s a post or two itself in the train of thought of how I get here, but for now just accept that we’ve arrived.

I’ve recently started reading Shut Up About Barclay Perkins. I really should have started when I was linked to his post on whether Kolsch was an ale, but for some reason I didn’t add it to my Bloglines section (creating the ‘Beer/Brewing’ category) until Ethan recommended it.

It’s great reading if you’re interested in some of the aspects of brewing that most people would consider dry. He has tables of historical original gravity comparisons! Who would be interested in that?

Oh, right. Me.

I realized that, while I want to get better at brewing, I also just have come to love beer. As I have a bachelors degree in history, I also sort of like reading about the history of things… why not combine the two? We went to Barnes and Noble tonight and I figured I would pick up a book on something beer related: the history of brewing in the US, maybe something a little farther back, European, Belgian, German, whatever.

Except that Barnes and Noble doesn’t have any of that in stock, with the exception of Ambitious Brew, which seems a little more… mainstream? Than I’d like. I know stuff is out there, though, so when we got home I left Elizabeth to enjoy her new Nora Roberts books while I looked around. From SUABP I found AbeBooks; it didn’t have anything I needed, but it seems like it could be useful for the future.

Well, what would I specifically be interested in? Buffalo seems like it could have a nice brewing history… and a quick Google reveals that I was right. There’s an entire book about the city’s brewing history, Rushing the Growler. It’s out of print, but parts of it are available online. ‘Crap,’ I said. ‘How am I going to get it? Oh right, I’m a librarian.’ Luckily, the central branch has three copies. Hopefull I’ll get to read it soon… and maybe they have more on the subject!

One final link that I need to look at more: Buffalonet’s brewing ‘unindexed picture archive.’ There doesn’t appear to be much else to the Buffalonet brewing site, but the old beer ads and photos could contain some nifty gems.

I think I have a new sub-obsession.

Edit: In case anyone is interested, I’ve set up a del.icio.us feed of links I’ve found about brewing history in Buffalo. Most of the links seem to be fairly old (linking to pages that no longer exist, in some cases), and as this post is on the second page of Google for ‘buffalo beer brewing history’ half an hour after it was written, it appears that there isn’t much, at least online.

If you want me to download your browser to set a world record, perhaps you should let me download it. Almost two hours after it was supposed to be available, the servers are finally on… about half the time. And then when I tried to download it…

The Saturday before Memorial Day, while Elizabeth worked, I drove to the farmer’s market on Bidwell. I haven’t been there since, as I’ve been busy for one reason or another, but I’ll probably go back again this week. I’ll bike, most likely, because going to a farmer’s market isn’t quite ‘pretentious faux socially conscious’ enough as it is.

My mom goes to the market regularly, so I recognized a lot of the products. Hell, half the things I bought were on her recommendation (though I didn’t go to ‘her’ meat person, a mistake I’ll rectify the next time I need a slab of beef). One of the people sells various salsas: I’ve had his ‘Texas caviar’ a few times and loved it. It’s various ingredients chopped up, like onions and corn and black beans, with little to no actual sauce. It tastes damn good on a tortilla chip.

He had samples of all his products, and as I tried the hot tomato based one (as opposed to the hot chopped one, containing habeneros which I’m sure Dave would love to watch me eat) I said that my wife would never like it. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘that means there’s more for you.’ I couldn’t refute that logic (and we have a large container of Wegman’s salsa in the fridge), so I smiled and bought a tub of it before continuing on and buying some sausage and peameal bacon from a person a few booths down.

Here’s the thing: the salsa was wonderfully spicy when I had a small chip’s worth at the market. I quickly discovered that when eaten with any degree of concentration, even with only a square centimeter or so on an entire chip, there quickly develops the sensation that a distraught lover has set several large fires on your tongue. At this point I initially stopped eating, but after I realized that nothing I could do would make the pain go away, I accepted my fate and would keep eating.

My face turns red and I start to sweat a bit. My breathing gets heavier, my nose runs and I occasionally say, ‘hoo’ under my breath. It’s the most work I’ve ever put into eating (and I’ve been in a burrito eating contest). Yet almost every day I would open that damn container and subject myself to its torments. There was less than a session’s worth of it left tonight (I do eventually give out and stop, or switch to nacho cheese instead), so I sent it off while reading The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (which, by the time I finish, will no longer refer to the current year). I’m free! No more pain, no more tongue flagellation.

I think I’ll try the chopped this week.

Today I dragged Elizabeth out to Eden (she still wants to move there and plant a garden) for a workshop on cider and perry. I’m not sure if the host is a member of the Niagara Association of Homebrewers (or the Sultans of Swig), but there were definitely some NAH people there as well, and the day was focused on making your own as well as commercial examples.

It started with a tour of part of his 50 acres of land. Yeah, 50 acres. That was pretty cool, especially to see an orchard in the making. Then we ate some great food and got down to business… tasting.

I’m still very much a novice when it comes to tasting, but I think I’m definitely whipping my palate into some semblance of shape. We started with ’spiked’ examples, and I was proud to nail the diacetyl example right off the bat. Of course, it tasted like the cider had a few tablespoons of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and three or four Werther’s Originals in it, but catching it at all is reason for celebration in my book.

While I’m not at all well versed in styles of beer, at least in my mind I think I identify more with British styles than American. I assumed it would transfer over to cider as well, but the British examples were my least favorites. Elizabeth and I liked a sparkling cider from Quebec the best, and in general I thought the sparkling examples tasted better than the stills. I assume that’s more because of being sparkling than a trend in quality, but it’s good to know for the future.

I had never had perry (fermented pear juice) before, so it was a good learning experience. They didn’t taste as much like pears as I thought they would, though the host pointed out that most people equate ‘pears’ with ‘Bartlett.’ Some had definite pear aroma and flavor, and one had a great balance of not being dry without being sweet. It seems like it’s fairly hard to find perries, so while any chance to try multiple examples of a style in succession is a great learning experience, I may not have this sort of chance again for a while (if ever).

The downside, of course, is that I’m going to take a sip of my next cider (which I really need to transfer to secondary) and say, ‘Oh god, that’s mousy!’

I’ve been struggling with how to handle my laptop. I want all my music on it, but I’d also like to upgrade to Leopard and use Boot Camp to play the Sims games I got at Circuit City last week during their sale. I decided on Sunday to get an external USB hard drive to store my music on, and then change the location of my iTunes library. As an added bonus, I can partition off 80 gigs to use for Time Machine once I upgrade (which will hopefully be in the next few days, depending on when I can get to the store).

With moving, copying and backing up over the past week, there were a few times when I overtaxed my Macbook and did things I probably shouldn’t have. I’d be running late leaving work, so instead of waiting for it to finish its FileVault stuff I’d ‘fat finger’ it (apparently that’s what it’s called when you hold down the power button?). Generally this is ok, but sometimes I lose some of my preferences.

I imported the 200+ pictures I took at the Toronto Zoo yesterday into iPhoto, and then noticed the bottom of the window said ‘227 pictures.’ The rest of them were gone. I checked in Finder and they were still there, thankfully, but not showing up in iPhoto. I did some searching and found how to rebuild your library, but that didn’t work. Since it wasn’t on an external drive, deleting the /Volumes data wouldn’t work either.

Eventually I realized that I had screwed up. I had a backup of the library on my external drive, but reformatted it yesterday to make a partition for Time Machine. Before I did, I copied that library’s AlbumData.xml (which I think was right) to my desktop. That was smart — it’s obviously not a problem with the pictures themselves — except it’s not the right file. I actually needed Library6.iPhoto, which is now long gone.

So, it looks like it’s time to manually re-import the library. I haven’t done any tagging, which is good, but I did rotate a bunch of photos, and I may have to do that again. All things considered I got off lucky, sure, but as I was already looking at needing to browse through the 200 from the zoo and rotate/delete… bah.

Make backups, kids. Another reason why I need to get Leopard post-haste.

Tiny, you gave me one hell of a run for my money. I was scared that you were actually going to be able to pull off seven posts yesterday, leaving me to find eight today. The sad part is, I probably could have.

This has been a ton of fun, and has forced me to think and write like I haven’t since, most likely, I was majoring in Journalism. The problem is that now I have two to three things I want to write about: you’ve unleashed a monster!

I say that the next Blog War can be declared any time a person makes two posts in a day, or if both parties agree to the escalation of hostility. The problem, of course, is that I’m about to make a post after this, but please have mercy.

I’ve gathered a fairly decent collection of sites that offer a discount on something for one day only. In the interest of posting something actually useful, I thought I could pass them on. Some are fairly well known, but one man’s trash is another’s ‘wow I’ve never seen this Rick Astley video before.’ I’m not saying these are the only ones there are, but they’re the ones I check daily.

• Woot: If you don’t know about it, GTFO the internet (did you know they Twitter?)
• Sellout.Woot: Not actually them, but it’s where I got my bluetooth headset (and an FM transmitter is on its way)
• Amazon Goldbox (no RSS, but they do Twitter)
• Amazon Video Game Deal of the Day (generally sub-par, but eh; also, I couldn’t find a decent url)
• Amazon mp3: A daily deal on DRM-free mp3s as well as the ‘Friday 5,’ five albums for $5 each (Twitter!)
• Morebeer: They give a limited number of promotional codes on an item, and once it’s sold out you can’t see what it was

Also, even though I don’t check them, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Shirt.Woot and Wine.Woot. Have I missed anything, or any of the above’s Twitter accounts?