I ended up picking Hurrican Reef Raspberry Wheat Ale form the Florida Beer Company.  Its pretty good, I’d drink more of it especially in warmer weather.  It reminded me a bit of Sam Adam’s Cherry Wheat, but less sweet and Raspberry and not Cherry of course.  I think it had to do with the finish pronouncing the flavor of the fruit.

The beer was excellent and I highly recommend a visit.  Just don’t be too scared off by the exterier and neighborhood.

One of the parts of the beer that really warmed my heart was the handle on one of the urinals.  It really showed what I feel to be the true hard of good old American macrobrew light beer…  See for yourself…

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If you look at this image closely, you’ll see the size for this costume is for 8 to 10 year olds.  And maybe I’m just become a grumpy old man, but should an 8 to 10 year old really be dressing as a pimp?  Don’t get me wrong, my pimp hand is strong, but I am not 8 to 10 years old.

A smelly rotten-egg gas in farts controls blood pressure in mice, a new study finds.

The unpleasant aroma of the gas, called hydrogen sulfide (H2S), can be a little too familiar, as it is expelled by bacteria living in the human colon and eventually makes its way, well, out.

The new research found that cells lining mice’s blood vessels naturally make the gas and this action can help keep the rodents’ blood pressure low by relaxing the blood vessels to prevent hypertension (high blood pressure). This gas is “no doubt” produced in cells lining human blood vessels too, the researchers said.

I could survive for 1 minute, 13 seconds chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I became interested in the book after hearing an interview with the author on Slice of SciFi. Its an easy read and goes into just enough depth on the physics you need to know to discuss why certain science fiction stables are possible and why others are impossible.



Fun and educational read.


View all my reviews.

Playing for Keeps by Mur Lafferty

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I started with the Podcast but ended with the paper edition that was just printed. A fun read playing with the superhero genre. The creativity of the “useless” powers and their use in the story by the author made this an enjoyable read.


View all my reviews.

“If you haven’t been bookmarked, retweeted and blogged, you might as well not have existed.” - Will be part of the next Found Things.

Which, for some reason inspired me to parody Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything:

I don’t want to blog anything, tweet anything, or podcast anything as a career. I don’t want to blog anything tweeted or podcasted, or tweet anything blogged or podcasted, or podcast anything blogged, tweeted, or podcasted, or retweet anything blogged, tweeted, or podcasted. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

[Update: Evo explains the origin of his comment.]

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 146 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 240 people with Sarah’s name in the U.S.A.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 3 people with Dinah’s name in the U.S.A.

Dinah’s the clear winner here. However, I was suprised to learn that there are 10,677 people in the U.S. with the first name Dinah. The last name is what makes her stand out.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 21 people with Evan’s name in the U.S.A.

I was really shocked that Evan clocked in so low.

During the time I was waiting with the hood up two other commuter trains stopped, people unloaded, got in their cars and drove off. Not one stopped to ask me if I needed some help. I probably would have decline as Sarah was on the way, but I was still a bit suprised.

Anyway, after having lots of trouble trying to jump the car (the Odyssey didn’t give enough juice to turn over the Vue?) the kids were starting to freak out, so Sarah and the kids bailed to go get dinner.  I called my mom and she was coming over to help me, or at least schlep me off to buy a new battery.  I left the hood up while waiting for my mom because I wanted to give it one more ago.

While waiting another train stopped.  Again, no one stopped.

Anyway, mom showed up, car got started, NTB replaced the battery, all is good.  Car started again this morning, crisis completed.  But its got me thinking…

I understand the desire just to go home, how many times have I not stopped to ask someone if they need help?  I’m not running off to do a transplant surgery or something else time sensitive like that, it’ll only cost a small bit of time to be a non-crappy human being.  Today, I’ve mentally committeed to not being that guy anymore.

Every weekday at 5:17 p.m., the bar car on Metra’s Milwaukee District West line becomes the place where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came.

With beer and wine cups in hand, a cast of characters that seems straight out of “Cheers” tries to make the daily commute home as merry as the sitcom.

“It’s happy hour on the rails,” said Kevin McHone, 40, an information technology engineer from Gilberts and a bar car regular.

But just as every TV show eventually ends its run, this Friday will be last call aboard what Metra officially calls its “refreshment cars.”

I never took advantage of the bar cars, but I might have to this week before they are gone forever.  I suppose you can still beer up in the station and bring it onboard, but something about buying in the bar car is different.

Of course, living around Chicago for most of my life seeing Buddy Guy is almost a requirement.  I’ve seem him at his place at least twice, and I keep meaning to make it more.  In the Tribune today was Buddy Guy helps Yahoo! music make its mark talking about Guy’s concert as part of a Yahoo! Music series.  In the article they talked about what Guy brought to the show such as walking around and interacting with the crowd as he plays.  This should be no surpise to anyone who’s seen him perform.

What spured me into writing a blog post was the last paragraph of the article.  For me, it really is a perfect example of what I think every passionate musician feels about his craft.  Really, I think it can be expanded to fit every person who is passtionate about whatever craft they do.

When Guy was asked to cite the best solo he’d ever played, he turned the question back on the fan: “What’s the best love affair you ever had?”

This reminds me of a post on usenet my friend Anne made in 1998.  To quote:

So I am left not bitter just tired of this whole meeting people, emotional ties, finding a compatible person and then having them yank away.

It is just an emptiness right now.

From what I have observed from my male friends, though, this is exactly the climate required to learn Linux. Without a full and happy lovelife or distraction of soft lips and a reason to kiss them, there is enough room to grasp the intricacies and nuances of such a fine operating system.

It has already begun to happen. As I walk down the street I am not thinking of emptiness, kising, nathan or any other previous SO’s, I am thinking of penguins, rm -rf / and lilo.

I am already convinved that linux will dull the pain better than heroin.

I still loves me some linux hardcore, though.

I don’t think i’ll bang out long posts this way, but you might see lots of smallish stuff since it’ll be so easy to add. Especially some on the fly photo blogging. Heck, it might replace my use of Twitter for some thoughts. Especially those thoughts over 140 characters.

As and added bonus, here’s Vik’s cat, Inky.

[non iPhone Update: Looks like Declan had the same idea on his blog.]

I hearby claim those are my catch phrases!  Until I come up with something else new and lame.

Behold the unnatural love between a gnome and a turtle.  Saw this in Walgreen and just had to take a picture.  Probably due to the influence of the Gnome meme happening on the Slice of SciFi voice mail show.

With a tip of a hat to jwz, in response to reading Dr. Horrible’s twitter feed, Dave said

Some people, when they are having site availability problems, think, ‘I know, I’ll put up status on twitter!’  Now they have two site availability problems.

And one should not forgot Skottie Young’s post from yesterday on twitter.

In any case, the other day I was delayed in getting to work by a traffic jam on the river.  I thought taking the water taxi was to help me avoid this stuff.

I decided to look at the XML-RPC API to see if I could get it done that way, and then write a script to be called out of procmail to create the mail.  There is a function there that will do what I want, wp.uploadFile aka metaWeblog.newMediaObject.  The specification for that call says that the file being uploaded must be Base64 encoded.  No problem, a few line of ruby later and I have everything ready to test an upload.  The file goes up, but its unviewable in a browser.  A quick check of the file on the server and its revealed to be a text file filled with Baes64 looking data.  Somewhere along the line it wasn’t being decoded.

After about an hour of screwing around, I determined it wasn’t anything obvious in my code, so I thought I’d look at the code for WordPress 2.5.1 to see if I missed anything obvious.  In reading their code, I found that the WordPress folks forgot something obvious, their code never Base64 decodes it before it writes it to a file.  A quick one-line change later, and *boom* I’m off.

Here’s the patch in case its useful to anyone else. I’ll have the script up when I’m done with it.

(Also, in a small bit of embarrassment, I must admit fixing this took me 10 minutes longer than it should because I forgot ; is end of statement in PHP.)

Index: xmlrpc.php
===================================================================
--- xmlrpc.php  (revision 7840)
+++ xmlrpc.php  (working copy)
@@ -1880,6 +1880,10 @@
                        $name = "wpid{$old_file->ID}-{$filename}";
                }
 
+                # The specification says that this is base64 encoded,
+                # we should really decode it.
+                $bits = base64_decode($bits);
+
                $upload = wp_upload_bits($name, $type, $bits);
                if ( ! empty($upload['error']) ) {
                        $errorString = sprintf(__('Could not write file %1$s (%2$s)'), $name, $upload['error']);

Inspired by the Wingin’ It beer photo stream and my visit to the Brickskeller last night, I’ve decided to start doing a similar thing here. I forgot to get a picture of the Orval Trappist Ale I had last night, but luckily, I can snag one off their web site.

I also had an Oskar Blues Ten Fidy again, mostly because I thought I’d never get that awesomeness again. The guys at the table next to us suggested a Maredsous Dubbel or Triple. I went with the Dubbel. It was awesome.

On a geek note, right now I’m just uploading this into wordpress. I’m not sold on using flickr, but I’m not sure why.

Yes, hopefully its a lot more than 4 more years, but the title brings the funny to me.

Basically, Mark Kirk got his panties all up in a bunch because Second Life have some adult stuff going on and in his opionin its too easy for minors to get into that area. While I understand his concern, I disagree that the government should be stepping in here, even with something as minor as an FTP consumer alert. Parents should be monitoring what their children are doing on-line. If you can’t take the time and/or education commitment to do that as a parent, disable your internet access.

The part that really chaps my hide is the following (quoted from the Tribune):

Kirk said he knew of no cases in which children were targeted by sexual predators on Second Life, but he said he considers the virtual world an emerging danger.

So…there’s been no reported problems, or at least none visible to him, but OH MY GOD! RAISE THE ALARM BELLS!  THE CHILDRENS!  WON’T SOMEONE THINKS OF THEM??!?!?!!!  I hate election year fear-based  attention-getting pandering.

For the record, I have no particular love for Second Live either.  I’ve played with it a bit but I don’t get all the hype around it.  I must just be getting old.

Just to show it off, I present to you some random ruby I wrote the other day when I was working on something. I’ll leave it to you to guess what I’m doing and why with this code. (And I also think I could do it better than using a while loop, but I was able to bang it out quickly for what I needed.)

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#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'fileutils'
 
srand(Time.now.to_i)
offset = 214
 
files = Dir['*']
 
count = 1
while !files.empty?
  file = files.delete_at(rand(files.size))
  extention = F