Dan Conley » Useful sites

I’m the map, I’m the map, I’m the map…

Dan — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:48:23 +0000

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)

Legal music on the cheap

Dan — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:45:57 +0000

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).

Brewing in Buffalo

Dan — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:19:16 +0000

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.

Deals of the day

Dan — Sat, 31 May 2008 04:22:46 +0000

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?

Always the last to know

Dan — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:44:36 +0000

I’ve considered using Google Reader for my blog reading, but ditched it because (at last check) you couldn’t order entries oldest first. I figure that there may be updates and so on, so I want to read things in the order they were posted.

The only thing I didn’t like about Bloglines is that when I start reading a site, every post is marked read. This means if I don’t have time to read everything Jessamyn West has had to say over the past week I won’t read, which leads to me not reading a bunch of blogs I’m otherwise interested in.

So why has no one read my mind and told me that the Bloglines Beta (the first ‘B’ is an uppercase beta: I see what you did there) does exactly what I want? If there’s a post I have to hit j to highlight it to have it marked read, but eh. Definitely worthwhile.