Month: June 2007

QTN™: Dogfish Head Fort

When a beer is made with crushed raspberries, it can be either very good or very bad. I’ve had some fruit “lambics” (you know the ones) that tasted like Koolaid. True to form, Dogfish Head’s Fort is not among these. I’ll be lucky to articulate what it is among, given its fairly high alcohol content: 18% (higher than some Zinfandels).

The name could stem from the Latin for strong (most likely) or from its resemblance to the word port, which the beer somewhat resembles. The intense raspberry aroma of the beer gives way to an incredibly well balanced sweet/malty/yeasty/alcohol flavor combination that makes it very easy to forget that you are drinking the equivalent of three normal beers by volume.

The beer was an outstanding balance for grilled pork tenderloin that was covered with a sweet, gingery spice rub.

Safari for Windows, and for the iPhone

Steve Jobs’s keynote today at WWDC is the sound of the other shoe dropping. All that griping about whether the iPhone would be opened to third party apps just went out the window. There is a third-party platform in the iPhone, and it’s called Safari. Which, incidentally, will now be available for Windows.

As a product manager, this sounds like my supported platform matrix breaking wide open. As a Windows user at work, this sounds like trumpets from heaven.

As a Mac user, it sounds like it did when iTunes and the iPod first came to Windows. New audiences for technologies on the Mac are a good thing because they tend to drive attention, and resources, to those technologies.

Back to the iPhone thing: this sounds strongly like Apple is making a bet on web application development being the future, at least for phones. Based on the explosion in Dashboard widget development, I’d say they may have a point. Being able to code in HTML+CSS+JavaScript has its advantages for a large number of tasks. Interestingly, games are not among the tasks that the AJAX stack has historically excelled at. I wonder if that means that the iPhone will be a games free platform, or if the partnership that Apple announced today with EA will bring further developments in that direction?

Music articles for June 11, 2007

Nice crop of reviews and other music related pieces today:

Blogaversary VI

Six years ago today, I sat at a computer in the Seattle suburbs and updated this site, thinking I would manage to update it again only under extreme duress; hence the optimistic title Quarterly Update (I). A funny thing happened shortly thereafter, and I got the blogging bug. And I haven’t been quite the same since.

Oh, this blog and I have had our ups and downs: three redesigns in the first three years; periods of six posts a day and periods of a post every six days; posts about my family, technology, music, and beer; and our dogs and our house. And occasionally I might have written something worth linking to.

I’ve been through periods where I watched my hit counts and my referrers several times a day. Where I despaired if my month over month readership fell. Where I treasured reciprocal links like signs of friendship.

These days? Well, last year I was a little bummed over the fact that my frequency of posting was falling off. In retrospect that was an inevitable fallout of the Sony Boycott blog period, when I was updating two blogs several times a day. But I also think it was a year ago that I first decided that the important thing wasn’t post frequency or readership, blogrolls or PageRank. It was the writing.

So from here on out I think I’ll just keep writing. One post at a time.

After all, this blog isn’t a sprint. It isn’t even a marathon. (For one thing, no one’s kissing the writer in Wellesley.) It’s more like breathing.

Links for June 7, 2007

Salon: The CIA’s favorite form of torture. Sensory deprivation for fun and questionable intelligence. Remember, kids, true love leaves no traces.

CNET: An electric Porsche at MIT. Going for the full electric with a little appreciated consumer grade sports car. Could the Porsche 914 be the next Delorean?

Since the soundtrack it comes from isn’t on iTunes or eMusic yet, I’m keen to hear this tribute to Zidane from Mogwai.

WSJ: Pen Pals: Letters Laud Scooter Libby, Fail to Spare Him. My favorite excerpt is the one from Deborah Tannen, a neighbor of Libby’s, who “described how Mr. Libby once offered to lend her family a tool to fix the problem with a septic drain field and then fixed it himself.” Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and Scooter Libby is from the septic field!

NY Times: In Tennessee, Goats Eat the ‘Vine That Ate the South’. Now who’s going to eat the goats, I’d like to know.

MoreConsuming

I finally bit the bullet today and pulled the plug on my old manual system of tracking what I’m listening to, reading, or watching at any given moment. There were all sorts of reasons to do so, but three factors combined to make me make the change. The first was the eleven step manual workflow needed to update each of the entries in that list. The second was an honesty factor; I don’t need to show a movie in the list all the time if I only watch movies once a month. The third factor, though, is how easy AllConsuming makes it for me to track the information. Now all I have to do is tell AllConsuming that I’m listening to, reading, watching, or eating something and it will show it on my site automatically with a single line of JavaScript.

This, of course, flies in the face of what I said two years ago about blog related services. What’s changed is that I don’t have the time to maintain some of the more manual parts of the blog any more, and there are better services available now than there were then.

Links for June 5, 2007

MacOSXHints has a hint on how to create a hidden administrative login in Mac OS X, so that you can have a separate account with root privileges and have it hidden from the user selection list when you log in.

The ITIL blog at Evergreen Systems has its take on ITIL version 3: it has been written in such a way that it may now be easier to make a business case for adopting best practices in IT Service Management.

Great article in New York magazine discussing the profit margins for different industries and businesses in New York, from a meth dealer to Goldman Sachs. My favorites: Samuel Pekoh the Yellow-Cab Driver and Random House, for the insights the article brings on the unique challenges of the businesses each is in.

The Wall Street Journal gets online presence right

For once, a major publication says something profoundly right about the relationship between one’s online identity and one’s future prospects. In Real Time in the Wall Street Journal, Jason Fry points out the following:

  1. The Net has left regular people grappling with issues of privacy and public lives that only celebrities used to deal with
  2. Kids are much more savvy than their parents about the ways in which identity shifts depending on context
  3. The older generation—the “series of tubes” folks—will not be around to dictate the ways in which personal information on the web is interpreted and used, at least not forever
  4. In the end, it’s about making choices about how you want yourself to appear on the Web, rather than letting other people make those choices for you.

Fry is also right to point out that it’s broader than just Facebook or MySpace; it’s also blogs, Flickr, Twitter, and on and on. And the article presents a nifty example of the culture clash in action: while Fry’s article is sensitive to the finer nuances of online identity, his editors appear less so, since the caption under the embedded video trumpets “Jason Fry shows us some online examples of how personal videos could ruin your chances of landing your next job.” OMG! Better stick your head under a rock now! Teh Internets are going to get you.

Full disclosure: the scattered threads of my online identity are pretty widespread, as my FAQ page shows on its right hand side.

Watch out, he just rubber banded that guy into bricks

There is one kind of Lego play, the kind I indulged in as a kid (and intermittently since), that consists of making models of things—for me it’s spaceships, but it could be houses, cars, boats, Hogwarts castles, whatever. There is a whole other kind of Lego play, the art of making models that do things. Cars that drive. Robots. Cranes that lift.

None of them are as cool as the Ultimate Lego Chain Gun. Built by master modeler Sebastian Dick, this thing humbles me down to my 1x1s. 64-shot capacity with 11-shot-per-second fire rate, the gun can “carpet a room in rubber” in less than six seconds. You have to see the video to get just how cool this thing is.

And the scary thing is, Sebastian isn’t the only brick munitions maker out there. Check out the Lego Minestorms Aegis missile launcher, which uses a camera for visual targeting of its missiles.