Dan Conley

All of my posts are essentially ‘Yeah, I’m not posting, because all of my time is going towards Gaming Shenanigans and Beer-O-Vision,’ aren’t they? Well, uh, sorry, because this one is no different.

This post is actually entirely useless except as a guinea pig one, a glorified lorem ipsum, because I’m testing a new theme for BOV. If the site looks different, either I’m still in the testing process or I forgot to change it back. I’m lazy, you see.

This post needs a third paragraph, just because. Beer is good. The end.

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In about an hour I’m going to go pick Elizabeth up and start driving to Boston. We’ll be there for a week, and it should be a lot of fun.

My coworker Brie just asked me if I was ready to become a Red Sox fan. I told her that being a fan of baseball is pointless: it’s like being a proponent of red paint instead of green paint because the red dries faster. Whether or not it does is irrelevant, because at the end of the day you’re still watching paint dry.

It should be noted that posting this is ill advised, as I’ll be meeting with a fan of red paint tomorrow and I’m pretty sure he can kick my ass.

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If there are two things I love, it’s How I Met Your Mother and beer.

Allow me to rephrase before I get smacked when I get home: if there are two things I love besides my wife, it’s How I Met Your Mother and beer.

So during last night’s episode, involving the best burger in NYC, Elizabeth declared that she wanted a burger. Immediately. I wasn’t wearing pants at the time (which was also covered in the episode, giving me yet another reason to love it) and so I promised that we’d go out to the place that had the best burger tonight. Then I set out to find where it was we were going.

Libraryman to the rescue!

The winner, by a hair, as far as I can tell is Grover’s. It gets the Yahoo local vote, one from a local blogger, something called Yelp, foodry.com and — most importantly for someone concerned with authority — the immediate vote of my boss. The issue is that it’s about half an hour from our house and has a tendency to be packed: thinking back, we tried to go here once but gave up when the place was so full we had trouble even getting our name on the board. We’ll need to check it out, but not tonight (especially because I have to be done in time to film something for Beer-O-Vision). Also, for the record, it’s cash only (which isn’t a mark against it, but is good to know going in).

Coming in second, depending on who you ask, is Sterling Place. We love Sterling Place: great food, great beer, down the street from us. As such, it was nice to see it getting recognition as the best from e:strip, Buffalo Homecoming, Buffalo Rising, Buffalo Spree and Bill Rapaport’s Restaurant Guide (with a review for Grover’s saying that Sterling is better). I’ve gotten a burger here once, but generally we come for the amazing fish fry on Fridays. Looks like we need to reconsider our orders, or at least go on non-Fridays. Also cash only, and the burgers can take up to 90 minutes depending on their crowd, but they’re very up front with both. Have another beer while you wait.

Third place came Vizzi’s, which is also fairly close. Though it won the top spot from the Buffalo News (the article itself doesn’t seem to be available, unless you have access to Lexis-Nexis like I do), my visit was marred by their poor beer selection (and from a bar, no less!). A waitress should never say ‘Tell me what you want and I’ll tell you if we have it’ unless the list is long and/or esoteric, and as Vizzi’s highlights are Sam Adams and Yuengling (in bottles; the best draft selection they have is Labatt’s)… the burger was good, at least. Cole’s also got quite a few mentions (including another from Yelp), and I’ve been meaning to check out their beer selection, but that will have to wait for another time.

I feel like a fool for not having realized that one of the city’s best burgers is sitting in the same kitchen next to our favorite fish fry, but there you have it! We’ll be heading to Sterling Place tonight, but will have to choose a weekday we aren’t busy to take the trip to Grover’s and finally see what the fuss is about.

It’s also worth noting that the locals on Twitter were absolutely useless in the compilation of this data.

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I actually have been posting, but instead of random self-absorbed crap on here it’s been stuff about zombies and George Gale & Co, which is probably much more interesting. That, or self absorbed and obscure.

However, here’s a quick today-only special: Firefly the complete series is on Amazon’s Goldbox for $17.99: I think I paid $30 for it and felt it was worth every penny, so if you’ve somehow managed to avoid it until now you really have no excuse. Just buy it already.

And while you’re at it, go spend the $4 on Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Joss Whedon, musical, super-villain, Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion means that it is a scientific impossibility to not be awesome.

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Cleaning up, I found a notepad from what I assume is the CIRRIE ICF conference from last year. There are three lines:

ICF-CY form (Lollar?)

<3

“terminological”

(the first line makes sense; I think the CY is the children’s version, and I recognize the name of Don Lollar, but the rest…)

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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’d be thoroughly hosed.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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