It’s been a while since I posted a Quick Tasting Note, but the Drie Fonteinen Oude Gueuze merited a note. Blended, as all gueuzes are, from multiple lambics—spontaneously fermented beers—the style is usually a little sour, a little acetic, and wild. This one is no exception, except that it’s a lot sour, a lot acetic, a lot wild: as a taster on BeerAdvocate notes, the beer has a “raw yeastiness that allows me to finally comprehend…the term ‘barnyard’ to describe a beer’s nose…” And it’s barnyard in a good way. The most amazing thing is that it’s appetizing. It makes me hungry. This one was a 2004 bottle that turned up in Warehouse Wine and Spirits in Framingham. I might have to go back and pick up a few more.
Day: April 5, 2007
Problem = opportunity
If one feels schadenfreude when reading about the IRS’s problems with missing computers (or rage, for that matter), consider this: there is really no excuse today for laptops simply “going missing” and no one finding out about it for months or years. Any asset management technology worth its salt can scan for laptops and raise all sorts of alarms when they don’t check in.
Thinking about this sort of issue systematically is one of the benefits that process frameworks like ITIL bring. Once one gets beyond the basic service desk processes, and starts thinking seriously about configuration and change management, it becomes apparent that intelligent application of the tools in this market segment is important for so many more reasons than simple fixed asset management. Consider:
- Intellectual property control
- Change auditing
- Sarbanes Oxley compliance
- Software license management
- Hardware/software upgrade planning
- Protecting customer data
…and on, and on. Pretty soon the organizations that have not made the proper investments in configuration management processes and tools are going to get some very public black eyes—not just for embarrassing issues like this but also for their lack of management and foresight.
You might notice something different today…
Today is CSS Naked Day 2007, a day when some thousand-plus web sites have cast off their styling to illustrate their semantically-beautiful bones beneath.
Which is why my site looks, um, weird. All the normal styling has been stripped out.
We do this to illustrate that the Web ain’t all pretty colors; at its root, it’s about markup that is easy to read and portable across multiple devices. It’s all about separating style from content, baby.
Hat tip to Zalm, who turned me on to this concept, and whose markup is just fine.