December 04, 2008
I removed the cork from the 12USD bottle of Iron Hill Triple Bock this evening.
Tasty. A 13.2% ABV, 31 IBU, dark porter worth the 12 bucks.
Most interesting was its nose and palette. It immediately harkened me back some 10 years to when I brewed my own beer. I never advanced to get the color right, but I got the body and taste to my satisfaction over and over again. This beer took me back immediately. I could smell it on the nose and taste it. Chocolate and coffee. Heavy roasted malts and sweet bite of hops.
Worth 12 bucks? Yes. Would I buy again? Can't tell. I need to see what a more commercial brewer does with their Triple Bock, e.g., Samuel Adams. But I would consider it as a special opportunity, like a good cigar.
Recommend? Yes. If you can get it, worth the glass!
August 06, 2006
I'm just beginning Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America by Russell Shorto.
A great read and I'm only 50 pages in. Great historical non-fiction; kudos to Shorto and the research of Dr. Charles Gehring at the New York State Library! The three pages about the (in)famous purchase of Manhattan by Peter Minuit (Pieter Minnewit), then governor of the fledgling Dutch colony, is alone worth picking this up. It's not as exploitative, or comically absurd, as one may have been lead to believe in American History 101. Without spoiling it for you, just repeat to yourself...context, context, context.
It's great reading about how rough living in the 17th century was.
June 09, 2006
I’m reading Disneywar by James B. Stewart, finally, having purchased it as a gift for my wife. Since she had yet to turn a page, I picked it up instead.
Prior to my life as an internationally known blogger, Java code monkey, and Linux/web/server admin, I worked in film and tv as a location manager, scout, and producer; it’s also where I met my wife, hence my presupposition that Disneywar would be of great interest.
Freelance film work is brutal by the way. Long hours, long weeks, and high-stress; and location management can be a balancing act of doing the right thing by your employer and the people you’re working with on any given shoot day. The Simpsons episode where Radioactive Man comes to Springfield, is spot-on satire of what a location production is like.
Burnout is common, hence, in part, my departure. Notwithstanding that I was a geek at heart, exploiting some of the first, and expensive, laptops to manage the reams of paper and data produced by a location manager.
Anyway, by way of that background, I wanted to say that Disneywar is good reading and I highly recommend it. While the stories told are generally common knowledge to anyone that goes to the theaters, how Eisner’s Disney ever found it’s stride and produced anything of mention is amazing. Stewart’s telling is described as Shakespearean, and I will concur, adding that it is shaping up to be both a comedy and a tragedy.
If you should get Disneywar, consider also Final Cut : Dreams and Disasters in the Making of Heaven’s Gate by Steven Bach. Apparently, Final Cut has been republished as Final Cut: Art, Money and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists. I read the first printing, and admit curiousity about how this new edition expands on the original, and great, story.
May 10, 2006
I’m contemplating a switch to zsh. Thoughts from the peanut gallery?
The zsh seems to be getting a lot of attention of late, or it seems that way. Today, my choice is tcsh on my Mac systems (it was the default in the original builds of Mac OS X, and since DP4 was my first regular use of a BSD system, I built some solid understanding of tcsh).
tcsh’s big drawback is a lack of function/scripting support. Yeah, there are workarounds, but I’ve generally learned to live without it.
I just ordered From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the Command Line. Jerry Peek (is||was) the“ Power Tools” columnist for Linux Magazine, Martin Streicher is the editor of Linux Magazine. Should be a good reference.
May 04, 2008
Horror, as I told a friend just last night, is not something I seek out. If so, it is usually pulp horror (Blade), or campy horror (Lost Boys). I did like 28 Days Later.
I Am Legend is 28 Days++. I was literally on the edge of my seat for the first 2/3.
The last 1/3 though was, well, long.
I think I wanted more closure on the “zombie love story.” Wha? Clearly, there was something about that one zombie’s determination after Neville captured “the girl.” There was something in the passion of the zombie. The trap, mimicking Neville. The dog pack. The “leadership!” And it all boiled down to the zombie just committing suicide, for all the determination to break down the wall, with Neville pulling the pin.
And, I’m sorry, but three years would have exhausted any food supply for the zombies, whatever that food supply was. 28 Days Later was much better about that: the zombies so weak, they couldn’t even stand up.
Unrelated to I Am Legend was the Lost Boys: The Tribe trailer. Here’s my 2 brass pennies on this MTV straight-to-DVD vehicle. It's going to be Crap, because the trailer is painful to watch.
Only one of the Frog brothers? You can't have a Lost Boys sequel with only “one Corey.” Why waste the film stock on this if you’re not going to get both Coreys, Patric, Gertz, and Wiest. They all survived and the actors are all still alive. I think the nod to the original with only Feldman, painfully delivering lines like "...Edgar Frog: board shaper, vampire hunter...," or something like that, say a lot about the reason it won’t have a theatrical release.
April 10, 2008
I'm off with my daughter to the Land of GA. We are visiting family and I'll be spending two nights in the mountains of GA with high school and college friends. Fishing, drinking, shooting, drinking, reading, drinking. Did I mention drinking?
Year Two of the, hopefully, annual excursion.
It's tempting to start playing banjo music and conjuring images of Deliverance and pigs. Alas, while funny, not that kind of trip.
Its been quiet at ACD. It will be quieter still for a few more days.
March 27, 2008
Here's something that was brought to my attention this evening, when I should be working on encounters for a Friday night WFRP game... no, instead I'm working. Literally. On a production problem. For my employer.
Scenario: a badly written stored procedure has a race condition. Instead of fixing the stored procedure, get the web geeks to fix it on the front end with Javascript. Problem: double clicking a submit button inserts duplicate records in the backend. Solution: stop users from double clicking, because fixing the database or the stored procedure is not the place you want to fix this problem. Whatever.
Assignment: get a flunky in a remote production support facility (we haven't left the US, fortunately) to craft a Javascript function that would prevent the form from submitting twice.
var submitted=0;
function checkAlreadyDone() {
submitted++;
if (submitted < 2) {
document.forms[0 ].submit();
}
}
There are a couple of problems with this charlie foxtrot. The first being the zero-indexed variable and the boolean check for less than 2! WTF? is that. Why not a boolean? It's easier to read. Now I have to do math to review the code. It's true or false! The second is I have think about what the variable state is on the round trip of the submission. 0, now 1, or less than 2. It changes to often.
I wanted to cry. And not just because the really broken code: the stored procedure and the database aren't going to be corrected, but because this is just badly written. The flunky never even requested a code review, never tested it because the call to the forms array was submitting the wrong form and creating a Javascript error in the browser! and basically broke the functionality of the page for over 6 million users.
December 05, 2007
I love Fear the Boot, a podcast about “table top gaming and a little bit more.” I listen to episodes on my commute to work. I eagerly await the next episode and #81 was no exception, Explaining RPGs To People That Don’t Game.
When the discussion takes a turn to talk about “blowback,” or how gaming got a “bad rep” in the 80s, Dan, the lead host, perpetuates the “steam tunnel incident” myth with:
...one of the big things that set [gaming blowback] off , was there was this bunch of guys that went down into the sewers behind a university, and a guy got murdered, and they claimed, later, that, oh, this was because of role-playing...
WTF Dan? Your statement actually feels like you watched Mazes and Monsters, mixed it with a little bit of the story of James Dallas Egbert III and concocted a dramatic punch for the point you were making.
So Dan, what exactly was the point you were making? Because you fumbled it badly. I’m still listening, but someone needs to call you out for comment. Hopefully, your forums are alive with debate as well.
December 01, 2007
I was just watching a rerun of M*A*S*H on TV Land. I believe it was Episode T-421, The Young and Restless.
Editor’s note:I’m not a M*A*S*H nerd, but I noted the episode because I thought it very odd, maybe even disturbing that a present day concern , such as identity theft, could reach back almost 30 years to retcon a sit-com! WTF?
The scene, just before the closing freeze frame is Col. Potter sitting with Cpl. Klinger, appearing to finally give into Klinger’s moronic Section 8 schemes, as he begins confirming personal details of Maxwell Q. Klinger. Potter asks for Klinger's “serial number” and Klinger rattles it off, in a practiced monotone, but it gets bleeped mid-statement! Not muted, but bleeped!
I would be very curious if some M*A*S*H aficionados could confirm that the original airing in 1979 went this far, whether the DVD goes this far, or it is just some TV Land artifact. Klinger is a fictional person, what is the concern? Maybe the SSN was real?
November 08, 2007
I am now an Application Architect.
This is my new role within my employer's organization. Excited. I’ll soon be taken off the front lines of development and be allowed to focus on the work of modernization of our presentation and web application layers. I’ll additionally be able to be more of a mentor to the developers directly reporting and working in the web tier.
All this responsibility makes me want to play WFRP.
October 31, 2007
At first I thought it was a Jesuit Priest, or a pagan Jesuit Priest (okay, it was the red and black robes and bronze 20-point star pendant that conjured that imagery, not that such a thing could exist; well, exist openly).
I asked, “And what are you?”
“Evil Minon Minion!,” replied the boy, enthusiastically
Winner! The last trick-or-treater, the best costume.
Should’ve got a picture…
October 26, 2007
About two years ago I launched an OSCommerce site and blog for a friend.
All has been well for a while, but now the site is down, administratively disabled by the host because “spam and phishing attacks” have started originating from the site. The reasons the site is down could have many reasons, from PHP crack (possible) to just poor administration and security protocols on the part of the host. Come’on, who actually still allows Apache ServerTokens to be reported in a production environment!
Apache/2.0.52 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.52 OpenSSL/0.9.7d DAV/2 PHP/4.3.10 Server at www.------------.com Port 80
I’m going to dis on the host here, WebAppCabaret, because they are absent administrators. Emails go unanswered. Phone calls die with no messaging service. Support is shit.
I will never recommend WebAppCabaret (WAC) to another friend. I chose WAC two years ago because they provided J2EE hosting at a reasonable cost.
In the future I will opt for a VPS, like linode, where I can secure the box. WAC has wack service. Stay away.
October 17, 2007
Wired recently featured a HOWTO issue that highlighted the possibility of integrating an iPod into the standard radio/CD unit of any given car.
I own a Toyota Matrix—aside from all of the Matrix puns I get to use— the Matrix is a great car. But Toyota has been slow on the uptake of the idea that MP3 (read “iPod”) integration is not optional equipment. I would go even so far as to say iPod integration is barely on Toyota’s radar.
Taking the Wired article to heart, I yanked the radio/CD unit out and studied its ports and hookups. No options for splitting the input and adding a headphone jack were present.
Not disappointed, I learned that replacing the radio could be very easy: the dash disassembly is very easy and non-destructive. Popping a new unit in with an apropos faceplate to match the resulting void would be very easy.
I’ll have to seriously consider that Alpine unit under 200. I don’t need no stinking CD player. Hell, I could probably sell the original unit on eBay.
May 12, 2007
This morning I read that EJO and KS may have prematurely announced the end of the Battlestar Galactica. Oops. I feel like an ass. Or maybe I don’t.
Let’s face it BSG is a great show. Yeah, you might not like the drama or character development of last season, but it helps provide motivation for story elements.
I stand by my words from yesterday. BSG should follow the natural termination of the story: earth found, cylon threat no more. How the latter develops, I don’t care, but it should be plausible (hints of biological threats, network viral threats and other ways have been provided across the seasons and can be built upon to end the series).
What no fan of BSG wants is Battlestar Galactica 1980. And it can happen: I recall Enterprise using the <sarcasm>novel and unique mix</sarcasm> of time travel, Nazi’s, and technology to fill holes and tie up loose ends. What happened to Enterprise? Oh, it got canceled. Not to my dismay—I hated the series; watched maybe five complete episodes and turned it off when the alien Nazi’s entered stage right—but some people were disappointed.
Save BSG by praying for an end. Please don’t pray for more.
May 11, 2007
/. is reporting via some other outlet, as /. does, that Battlestar Galactica will end as a series with the fourth season in 2008.
Excellent.
I am a massive fan of BSG. So why do I want to see it end? Because the story has a natural termination point. Why drag on a story arc for the sake of more episodes? Why do some fans have to be so militant about continuing the saga?
Before you start waxing on about loose ends and more stories post-Earth-search, consider what always happens to series that artificially extend their story arc: the episodes become contrived, stories insulting to the intelligence of the fans, and worse, the shark will be jumped.
Do me a huge favor BSG fans: do not start a petition for the continuation of the series, do not grovel at the door of USA Networks, do not insult the producers or actors. Instead enjoy BSG for what it has been for the last four years: the best re-imagining of a classic television series since ST:TNG. Otherwise, mark these words, we will be forced to watch Apollo, Starbuck, and Baltar walking the streets of Speer’s Berlin trying to sufficiently advance Earth technology to fight a present day Cylon threat while Boxey (only a mention in the mini-series to date) joins the Boy Scouts, but finds it hard to be accepted because he’s an adolescent homosexual with super-powers on a planet with a yellow sun.
Don’t believe it will happen? Two words and a date: Battlestar Galactica 1980. Remember that piece of shit? Yeah, I think you do.