bloviation extrordinaire
Cara Dan and Erik are sharp non-programming friends of mine. We share life’s trials and tribulations with each other. So I shared a little bit of my recent programming stupidity with them. Oops.
When you try to explain basic things developers take for granted, you realize that they aren’t always intuitive. :-)
Watch Illana and Abbi find their comedy-gold groove working through zero-production webisodes up to full Amy-Poehler-backed big-time-HBO speed. WARNING: FUNNY ASS SHIT COMING YOUR WAY…
Sub-5-minute response time! Try it yourself some time! :-)
Gary and I headed out for a minor adventure last night, into the mysteries of Raleigh Beer Week. How big would it be?
We got started around 7pm and had a couple concrete events off raleighbeerweek.com – here we go! First to Tyler’s tap room where there were 12 brewery reps on hand. We were hoping for the cavernous place to be filled with sample beers, but all we found was a recommendation from a rep from Victory brewery in PA. I almost always stick to local dark beers but because the rep was cute I ended up with an Ale that was so spicy we didn’t finish it – I NEVER don’t finish a beer! :-) Tasted clovey and cinnamon-ny. Meh.
We gave up on the crowded place after watching two or three poor barkeeps pulling as fast as they could. There were two highlights: watching the girl pull a brew into a hot glass and watching it crack and explode in her hand (she was ok and seemed somewhat entertained by it as well, ha); and another barkeep explaining the mechanical tap that pulled the precarbonated beer from the keg like they did in the 1500s.
Next it was off to Foundation for a new local brewer’s keg getting tapped before it was officially available. Now, I love Foundation, Jane and Larry and I watched their barkeep work drinks for a mesmerizing hour and I developed a serious mancrush on the guy (that’s four, Green Gartside, David Beckham, Sam Rockwell, should I be worried about switching teams?)…
So… the board in front of a long line of bearded hipsters read “Belgian Dark Stout”… omg I’m pumped… we chatted with the brewer, a nice fellow with a generous smile and a massive beard, he explained that the brew process was extended to let bacteria consume the extra sugar that was “unused” by the yeast. And we recognized that it was described as a “Belgian Dark SOUR”, not stout. Sour. Remember that.
My man was reduced to pouring a thousand glasses for the thirsty crowd, wasted talent. The place was packed. So we headed to the entrance where there was a small space left. By the time we got there, we started to realize that something was up. By the time we focused and figured out what it was, Gary was puckering and shaking his head wildly. Bless his honest soul. The rest of the bar, myself included, continued to make polite smalltalk and work very hard to avoid puckering as to reveal the big fat sour elephant in the room. The way-worse-than-lemon-juice-concentrate-level-of-sour elephant. Eventually he convinced me to abandon my post and stop the posing, and we headed out feeling like someone had twisted the life out of us.
As a final effort, we headed to the roof of Raleigh Times to cleanse the palette of the evening’s misadventures with a single good old fashioned Canadian ginger ale. It never tasted so good. :-)
All in all, I have to say I have never had so much fun drinking such disappointing beer.
UPDATE: Raleigh Beer Week has been deadly. Monday with Gary, Tuesday with Bill and Stephen, Wednesday drinking a big Tripel bottle with Jon, and off to Tir Na Nog on Thursday with Stephen and Bill, with Stephen and me staying to finish off the strange perversions of the TNN staff – they took two Lone Rider minikegs and polluted Sweet Josie with cocoa nibs and coconut, and destroyed some Peacekeeper with some horrific rum thing or another. Ha. MORE BAD BEER ohs nos… and here comes the weekend…
Oh and I actually started beer week early… as in 9am Saturday early… after the Raleigh 8000 run with Gary…
UPDATE UPDATE: I took Friday off! Whew I needed that! :-)
We reap what we sow, and now these three big-lobby colluders are proposing to dismantle all climate legislation (NC Senate Bill 171). Yes I said all. The fact that they could even sit down and come up with this bill is evidence that they are not interested in the good of the people, only the coffers of their sponsors.
These extremists are crafting our laws here in NC as we speak. Take a look at the bill proposals and voting records (Jackson, Davis, Brock) if you want more evidence. We have a lot of work to clean up NC politics, and it doesn’t end with just these three. Mike Hagar is sponsoring House Bill 298 (along with others), to eliminate requirements for utilities to provide even a small portion of power from renewables. Let’s pay careful attention here, this is not what we want for our children and our future. Please take enough of a role in politics to help keep this extremism at bay, and keep these extremists out of our government.
Arrested Development proved that the human brain enjoys tracking a dozen unique and hilarious characters simultaneously, and Modern Family continues that tradition in style. And they have a fun dad, a sexy mom, and troublemaking kids, just like us! ha!
PAX 2009 flew by like a sonic jet. Dan and I met out in Seattle again this year (we did it once before in 2007) for the Penny Arcade Gaming Expo. In my quest to find work, I picked up a pretty nice Macbook Pro so I can do iPhone development. It turns out that it has a nice dedicated GPU, can boot into Windows, and with the latest Bootcamp set of Windows drivers that came with the latest OS X (10.6 aka Snow Leopard), it fully supports Windows 7 RC, to the point where I was ripping it up with all the latest games. What a deal! Dan kept the party rolling with a new laptop purchase in the 11th hour, so that by the time the games began on Friday morning, we had covered half of Seattle on foot but managed to be fully geared up.
On Friday we spent a lot of time in BYOC setting up the shiny new rigs. Saturday was a full day of joyous fun, from 10am ’til 2am (that’s 5am EST, for those keeping score). We played Legions on a local instantaction.com server (I was happy to place in the middle of the pack in the deathmatch tourney), a 100+-player Trackmania Nations Forever contest, Call of Juarez, Fallout 3, Eve Online, Marble Madness, board games including Puerto Rico, and most of the PAX 10, including Tag, Osmos, Puzzlebloom, etc. And we caught a minute here and there of the excellent panels, incliding watching Gabe and Tycho put together the strip for that day. Sunday we kept plugging away while managing to collect over a dozen t-shirts – LOTS of Tribes loot! On Monday we gamed the most, with our homebrew LAN-out-of-a-suitcase setup in the hotel, shooting each other endlessly in Juarez, and still managed to get to the mall to buy the wives something. And there was so much good food… Red Fin tempura, Cheesecake Factory, cyber-dogs… the Teriyaki rage of 2007 has been replaced by Pho on every corner (HOT hot salty yummy soup). When you get it to go, you get a vat of hot water and all the ingredients to build it yourself. And of course, literally, Starbucks on every corner. In central Seattle I had a triple-shot latte that made my day. Too much fun. Thanks Danno!!
I feel irresponsible for not pumping this a long time ago. It’s on season 2 now, and worth finding all the old S1 episodes (and old albums and the original BBC radio show and youtube goodies and…) if you have any appetite for beautifully droll humor or oldskool casio keyboard voices. Mine is insatiable.
The world’s greatest practical joke site was created recently. It’s called NiceCritic, and I got victimized today at work. When I sat down at my computers this morning, my inbox had this to say:
Now I received the message at work, so it had to be from a coworker. But seriously, there are very few practical jokers left at my work after years of attrition. And when you receive your first “nice criticism” out of the blue, it’s a whole new experience in paranoia. I was wracking my head ALL DAY LONG trying to figure out if someone saw me biking to work in my bike shorts and mistook them for a failed attempt at putting my (sexy) clothes on in the right order.
Well, after getting crank-emailed on my college buddies’ email chain (they are pros at this kind of thing – before I noticed, they had planned a full-blown reunion in my attic – people were buying airplane tickets thinking I was begging them to come see my “renovations” – but I digress…), I figured there’s no time like the present for a little revenge. So – fair warning if you read this my pals – you’ve been nicecritic’ed today…
Hurry up and use the site, I’m sure it won’t be long before some disgruntled hacker DDOS‘es the thing into oblivion because he was told his feet smell one. too. many. times.
UPDATE: Wow, that was scary fun. I might need therapy…