Category: Deep Thoughts

Goals past and present

I pretty much failed at 2013’s goal of tasting and grading 50 beers. I did pretty good at the front part of that goal, mind you, but it’s the second half of the process that proved difficult. I did a reasonably good job of exploring the world of Trappist abbey ales and found an IPA that I can tolerate [1]. I tried an oaked beer (bleh), a sour beer (double bleh), and a chili beer (could have been better). I found an awesome session beer in Stone’s Levitation [2]. I never found a roggenbier to try—it’s all Rye-P-A here in the states. I brewed a few beers and tasted the heck out of those too.

Again…just lacking documentation.

Looking forward, perhaps the commitment to try and document fifty beers was a little much for one year. This year I’m pledging to follow through on 25 beers. They don’t need to be new ones. They don’t need to be commercial beers. I just need to drink and document them. I’m going to do this using BeerAdvocate [3] and you can track me there.

To take up the slack I’m also pledging to read 25 books in 2014. You can track my progress on Goodreads [4] which seems to be a place where people I know who read books hang out. It just isn’t any fun unless someone is tracking all the data I’m generating. 😉

Notes:

  1. http://lagunitas.com/beers/ipa/#
  2. http://www.stonebrewing.com/levitation/
  3. http://beeradvocate.com/community/members/nixquips.773588/
  4. https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/27242031-nick-hansen

There’s worse

Started using Everpad [1] on my linux workstation this evening. It’s more responsive than the crapping Thunderbird extension [2] which, in the end, is merely a Mozilla browser window embedded as a tab running against the Evernote [3] site. Using Firefox is fine for that, as far as that goes…which isn’t far at all.

The good:

  • Heavily integrated into the Gnome/Cinnamon desktop
  • Lightweight and highly responsive
  • Supports some of the fancy note formatting available in the Windows/Mac client but not online or in the Thunderbird add-on

The bad:

  • Horrible sorting—no ability to sort notes by tags with a click
  • No ability to select multiple tags
  • No ability to select a tag + notebook combination

The bad things make it almost unusable as a primary GTD tool [4], which is what I use Evernote for. And, yet, I think I it makes a nice addition to the desktop. It’s under active development so here’s to hoping some of these crippling limitations are overcome in the near future.

I also spent a few minutes getting Infinality [5] installed/configured on my linux box. My font rendering is now on par with MacOS. The difference is truly incredible. Font rendering is one of those things that is generally pretty horrendous on *nix and after using MacOS, and I’ll even give Microsoft some love here, going back to a *nix box to plonk around on at home hurts. Infinality addresses this very well with the default settings. I’m not even sure it will be worth my while to wander back into that nest to do any additional tweaking.

All-in-all, a productive night on the laptop. I should do this more often.

[1] https://github.com/nvbn/everpad
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/evernote-tab/
[3] https://evernote.com/
[4] http://lifehacker.com/5952540/get-things-done-with-evernote-using-templates
[5] http://www.infinality.net/blog/

Cranky

Because I’m cranky today…and a veteran of sorts: citizens who are willing to sacrifice other citizens to some nameless enemy to somehow save soldiers because they support our troops are dolts. Actually folks who say all kinds of stupid crap as some way of proving up their “support our troops” credibility rub me exactly the wrong way. You want to support our troops? Vote for representatives that don’t stupidly send the armed forces into meaningless conflicts in an attempt to eradicate nouns. That’s supporting the fucking troops.

Either that or enlist your own damn self…and then fulfill your fucking contract.

I’m fucking intolerant today. So be it.