Well, it’s not going to go down as one of my all-time greatest image hacks, but here we go anyway:
Chicken Gizzard Blizzard™ for y’all.
Blog
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Coopers Ale Yeast saves the day
After adding the Coopers Ale Yeast to my dying beer last night, I was totally stoked (who uses the word “stoked” anymore?) to find it bubbling away this morning, and by this evening there’s a strong, active fermentation churning away.
Coopers rules!
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Fun at Timbers
Fun evening at Timbers South with the other bloggers. Let’s see, who else showed up… Jake, Dane, Jesse and his wife, and Barney. Simone, who suggested Timbers in the first place, never made it.
Some takeaways:
Jake is a pool shark, man, he ran the table. Never shoot stick with him. Ever.
(Well, okay, so I won the two games we played. That doesn’t mean he’s not a pool shark. Supposedly. Or something.)
Dane actually brought half a carton of eggs (expired in May) and a street sign, just as he promised he would on his blog. I guess I just have to learn to take everything he says at face value…
Jesse knows way, way too much about fonts and typefaces.
And finally, just three words:
Chicken Gizzard Blizzard™.
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Another local blogger social
Yes, announcing another exciting Local Blogger Social! Wednesday, August 11th, we’ll all be meeting at Timbers South in Bend, starting at 6pm.
Timbers South is located at 61131 S. Highway 97.
See you there!
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Failed beer?
This weekend I made up a batch of Toad Spit Stout, the first beer I’ve made in probably three years. All went well, I had everything sanitized carefully (sanitation is priority one in brewing), ingredients laid out, everything was textbook perfect. The yeast I pitched was Wyeast #1084, Irish Ale yeast, what seemed like a healthy dose.
I say “seemed like” because three days later, there is absolutely no sign of fermentation activity. None. It’s as though I simply poured a vial of water into the wort instead of yeast. Huge disappointment. I’ve never had this happen before; I’ve had some beers that were slow starts, but nothing like this.
So I stopped by The Home Brewer after work and picked up a packet of Cooper’s Ale Yeast—nice and simple, just to see if I could kick-start fermentation. I pitched it this evening, and I should know for sure if something’s happening by tomorrow evening, if not sooner.
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Bulletin article is out!
It hit the stands today—the Bend Bulletin article on bloggers that I and others were interviewed for. It’s a pretty good article, and I like the layout. Of course, I’m probably biased because my picture’s in it, and my earlier posts about the interview are the lead to the story…
Anyway, it’s the front page of the Community Life section. In a supreme example of irony, however, you won’t find the actual article about the online world of bloggers online anywhere. So I can’t link to it. Maybe I’ll try to get permission to republish the article online here, so it’ll at least show up somewhere online. (And how many times can I work the word “online” into a paragraph?)
Oh, and a little secret: in the photo they have of me, I’m “working” on an Apple Powerbook. However, honesty compels me to reveal that not only do I not own an Apple… but I don’t even own a laptop! Make of that what you will.
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Doctorow on DRM
So, I’m a little behind on this: Cory Doctorow‘s Microsoft Research DRM talk that he presented on June 17 and subsequently made available online for free. Very good. Though I do differ from this opinion he gives on ebooks:
Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who’ll listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It’s bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things….
First, screen resolution is an issue, because I have yet to see a device small enough to be casually portable that has a resolution that I could stand to read for more than a few minutes. (My Clié comes close, it has a decent display, but it’s too small, so you have to scroll a lot more, which breaks the comfortable reading flow.) The resolution on a desktop monitor, or even a laptop? Sure, those are good enough—I stare at one all day and read everything from plain email to colorized snippets of code—but I ain’t lugging my 17-inch CRT to the couch with me to read.
Second, I think the “tactile” argument for real books that he points out here is really about why real books will never go away, not why ebooks will fail. Seems hollow, doesn’t seem to ring true here. Odd.
But then he’s right back on track:
New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list….
Paper books are the packaging that books come in. Cheap printer-binderies like the Internet Bookmobile that can produce a full bleed, four color, glossy cover, printed spine, perfect-bound book in ten minutes for a dollar are the future of paper books: when you need an instance of a paper book, you generate one, or part of one, and pitch it out when you’re done.
Excellent article. Get on over and read the whole thing.
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Street Chicken
So here’s something odd. While driving to work this morning, I noticed a chicken wandering around in someone’s driveway. It was on 8th Street, near the 8th and Revere intersection, and here was this Rhode Island red hen nonchalantly strutting across the driveway, as if this were normal routine.
Can’t say as I’ve ever seen a street chicken in town before (we used to have unintentionally free range chickens growing up, but we lived on five acres out of town). Damn, I wish I had a camera phone.
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Fool’s World Map
Via Boing Boing tonight comes the Fool’s World Map. Brilliant.
This is a project visualizing the world map which many fools in the world imagine. If you can see this map comfortably, you are definitely a fool.
One day, a Texan asked me a question when I lived in U.S…
The question was “How many hours does it take to go to Japan by car?”. (true story)
He didn’t know where Japan is, and even bofore that, he didn’t know that Japan is an island. And then, I thought. “What kind of world map is pictured in his mind?”
This was a beginning to think that it might be fun to gather those mixed up recognitions of countries and visualize it as a world map imagined by the fools in the world.
I love the map, although it’s kind of depressing how dumb the world seems to be in general…
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Bits and pieces
Odds and end, bits and pieces tonight.
Looks like the Bulletin article won’t be appearing Friday (tomorrow). Nobody knows when for sure. I’ll post here when I find out.
Interestingly, the guy who interviewed us for the story on blogs now has a blog: Drunk with Ink. Cool!
Tonight on a whim I set up my old Sega Genesis game system, and introduced the kids to it. They seem quite taken with Sonic the Hedgehog, although they really can’t work the controls very well.