Beer, it kicks ass!

5/16/2008 – 7:48 am

There is an awesome bar in in Washington, D.C. called the Brickskeller. Its my kinda place.  Hell, even their domain name is lovethebeer.com. They claim to have the world’s largest beer selection and it certainly looked like they did. Unfortunately, due to season rotation and popularity, some of what we tried to order wasn’t available.

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.

Orval
Maredsous Dubbel
Ten Fidy
Sign outside the Brickskeller's

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.

By Keith Garner | Posted in Bars, Beer, Entertainment | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

What is with me this week?

5/16/2008 – 7:27 am

For the first time in about 11 years, I’m seriously considering using another nickname on IRC.  I think we can actually blame twitter for this.

By Keith Garner | Posted in Geek, Omphaloskepsis | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Random Observation

5/15/2008 – 7:09 am

When you’re listening to Nine Inch Nails and your speakers get GSM interference from your phone…  It just fits in as part of the music.

By Keith Garner | Posted in Omphaloskepsis | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Sunday fun

5/11/2008 – 6:11 pm
  1. Shutdown
  2. <install new/replacement disk>
  3. fdisk
  4. mkswap
  5. umount /boot
  6. dd
  7. e2fsck && resize2fs
  8. mount -o remount,ro /
  9. dd
  10. e2fsck && resize2fs
  11. mount -o remount,rw /
  12. pvcreate
  13. vgextend
  14. pvmove (wait a long long long time for 174 GB, especially with disk read errors, to move)
  15. vgreduce
  16. shutdown
  17. remove old and busted, put new hotness in as primary disk
  18. boot into rescue disk
  19. mount / /usr
  20. grub-install /dev/hda1
  21. ms-sys -m /dev/hda
  22. vi /etc/fstab
  23. shutdown -r now
  24. Party like its 1999 or, if you like assembler better:   GGB
By Keith Garner | Posted in Geek, Linux | Tagged , | Comments (0)

4 more years! 4 more years!

5/7/2008 – 10:16 am

Dinah is 4 years old today. She’s lived her toughest year to date having to adjust to a younger sibling who’s become mobile and takes her stuff now. Here’s a picture from her princess makeover and photo shoot at Disney World.


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

By Keith Garner | Posted in General | Tagged | Comments (0)

New panic in the streets!

5/7/2008 – 9:50 am

I read this in the dead tree edition of the Tribune yesterday and forgot to make a post bitching about it. Luckily, Chicagoist was there: Congressman Says Second Life Could Expose Kids To Porn, Predators.

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.

By Keith Garner | Posted in General | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Great syntax highlighting plugin for Wordpress

5/6/2008 – 9:38 am

At times, I think I spend more time writing about using wordpress than actually using it sometimes. I’ll need to fix that. Today, thanks to Wordpress’s dashboard, I came across the WP-Codebox plugin. THanks to GeSHI, it can color up a lot of languages and fixes some problems I’ve had with other plugins. Honestly, I’ve never been satisfied with any of them. I think this could change that.

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.)

?Download random_number_name.rb
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

#!/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 = File.extname(file).downcase
  name = sprintf('%d%s', count + offset, extention)
  puts "#{file} -&gt; #{name}"
  FileUtils.move(file, name)
  count += 1
end
By Keith Garner | Posted in General | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

For future reference….

5/5/2008 – 4:27 pm

And so Google knows this in the future…

16:23 <@spruance> what the hell is PFOTQ? even google does not know

PFOTQ stands for People Fucking On The Quad.

This post brought to you by the UIUC Quad Cam.

By Keith Garner | Posted in Entertainment | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

The best a man can get

5/1/2008 – 12:36 pm

Let me get this out at the beginning. I suck at shaving, I’m no good at it. Part of the reason is a lack of practice. Why do I have lack of practice? Because as a man-child, I cannot grow facial hair on a schedule that men do. Unlike my buddy Greezy who needs to shave about every 30 minutes, I can generally go two days, and sometimes three, without shaving. This is just fine with me, as in general its a time consuming exercise. A necessary one, but still time consuming. (A situation that can probably improve with added practice, but bringing that up makes this paragraph circular.)

Due to my infrequency of shaving, when I buy shaving supplies they last somewhere around 5 to 6 years. I just hit that magic time where I needed to re-up.

Like many, I laughed when The Onion mocked the practice of adding more and more blades to a razor. Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades is a classic article, or rather, would have been a classic piece of comedy if it wasn’t in fact prophecy. Yes, enter the Gillette Fusion which made 5 blades a reality. Now, for most people, this is old news, and to me it is as well.

Since it was time to rebuy, I thought I’d give the whole 5 blade thing a try. I have to say, its the closest/best shave I’ve ever had. It makes me feel like a shaving pro without any required effort on my part. Its strange I find myself gushing about a razor, but its that much of an improvement on my shaving. I don’t even have the Fusion with the vibrator build in, just the regular old blade. I’ve had the vibrating one is even better, but my face doesn’t need pleasure while I’m shaving.

So, yeah, I’m a product loving dork.

By Keith Garner | Posted in Useful! | Tagged , , | Comments (5)

Wingin’ It

4/29/2008 – 10:21 am

While I was in AZ for work last week I once again got to stop by the Draco Vista studios. This time it was for a recording of Wingin’ It 3D. I had met Mike and Lorrie before, who are awesome people, but I also got to meet the awesomeness of Debbie, Eliza, Chris Kris, Scott Thomas, and Doug. Thanks to all of them for their hospitality.

One of the things I’ve always thought when listening to many of the Farpoint shows has been “I could hang out with these people.” What was nice about hanging out for WI3d was the realization that I was right. These are my kind of people. If I lived in the Phoenix area, I could see myself stopping by quiet often. (If they would have me, of course.)

It was a great time for me, hopefully the feeling was mutual. There was great beer (some of which I brought,) great food, and great people. I highly recommend it.

The show should be up today and tomorrow, I’ll link them when I have time.

[Update 4:14PM: Voicemail Show]

[Update 5/1 12PM:  First, Regular Show #36.  I realize I should have titled this post "Wingin' It, they be bringing it."  But also, it was pointed out in the comments by Brian that I forgot to mention him and Tim and teh aw esome they bring as well.  Not sure how the hell I did that.  I blame alcohol.  Also, I said Scott above when I meant Thomas and horked Kris's name, those were just plain super-dumbness.]

By Keith Garner | Posted in Entertainment, Geek, Internet | Comments (2)