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.
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?
Yesterday, while doing some yardwork I managed to take the hedge trimmers to my headphones cord. This allowed me to become reacquainted with the crappy ipod buds at the gym. I realized that they were a slightly different design from the ones I have left over from the other two ipods we’ve bought over the years. They actually seem to fall out of my ears easier, though I didn’t think a thing was possible.
This morning I plugged them into my Macbook to listen to music while I worked… and found that they didn’t reach. I had an old pair on hand for some reason (‘it seemed like a good idea at the time’ is all I can come up with), so I compared the two. The new model is inexplicably about six inches shorter. I guess that’s nice when you’re jogging, but I like a little extra cord. Except for when it gets sucked into the blades of lawn equipment, I suppose.
I checked Target for new headphones tonight, though I didn’t get anything because I didn’t really trust any of them. While I was there I decided I would also like ten free dollars. It’s a good thing I’m an honest person, because the case containing a ton of 3 and 12 month Live subscriptions and 1600 point cards was sitting wide open. I took two for myself, but there was nothing stopping me from taking a handful, going somewhere isolated and writing down the codes.
I also was looking to pick up Wii Fit, because Elizabeth asked if we were going to get it and there has to be some law somewhere prohibiting a guy from passing up on buying a video game when he has spousal approval. I didn’t see any in the case that would contain their Wiis if they ever had any, so I asked an employee.
‘No, but we’ll have them tomorrow morning. They’re in the back, but we can’t sell them yet.’
‘Oh, did it not come out yet?’ (I really haven’t been paying attention)
‘No, it did, but Target has some weird policies. We open at 8 tomorrow, though. We only have 13, so plan accordingly.’
Apparently their policy is ‘We aren’t a fan of money.’ I have planned accordingly; by the time they open I’ll have left the country.
(That would sound so much cooler if it weren’t just a half hour drive to Canada from my house)
I have tried to play Second Life twice. The second time was only because I thought maybe I did it wrong the first time. It wasn’t boring so much as horibly laggy, but being forced to pick a silly last name really didn’t help.
And yet, for some reason, librarians are fasciated with the damn game. It can be described as ‘a MMO but free,’ the last word of which acting as a can opener to my hypothetically feline ears, but the appeal breaks down once I remember that I don’t have the patience to sit down at a computer for that long anymore if I’m not being paid for it. I hear there are flying penises, though, which does sound interesting (they’ve even escaped into reality).
I understand the appeal in that it makes our profession, generally thought of as antiquated and deprecated, seem more cutting edge. We add ’2.0′ to the end of everything… people do that these days, right? But — and it hurts me to say this, as a geek — just because you can doesn’t mean you should. In library school I once said that we don’t need to be familiar with every new technology when it’s released, just before it hits the mainstream. Second Life is approaching that point now; it may be there, but I’m too apathetic to keep track. I also read Joystiq and Kotaku, so I’m not exactly qualified to judge popular awareness.
Which brings us to the Law of the Game post I saw this morning. It’s about the legal aspects of machinima, which I really don’t care about. I have friends who make it, and I watch their work when they make it, but at this point they’re all captures of character models standing around with voiceovers and jokes. Or if there aren’t jokes, there will be attempts at drama that will probably fail.
The screenshot caught my attention, though. Does that guy’s shirt say somethingabout Librarians? Wait, they cite their reference for the definition of machinima. Oh, look, it’s library machinima.
The sad thing is, I’ve watched some of this before.
Kopyleft 2006-2010 Dan Conley. All rites reversed.
