Brian

Any Given Doomsday

2008-11-20T13:01:25Z

Any Given Doomsday by Lori Handeland
My review
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I'm really not sure what this book wants to be. Is it sci-fi/fantasy? Is it inspired by Buffy (the TV series)? Is it a romance novel? I'm almost leaning toward the last option, because half the book is just sex scenes.
I did like the rest of it though: seers and demon killers and half human/half whatever breeds. Those parts were fun to read. Unfortunately, the preview for Book Two (at least it says right on the cover that it's a series) indicates there will be more chasing after lost love and angst, so I don't feel any need to read further in the series.
Next up is Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (yes, What God Can Do For You Now has been postponed indefinitely).

Magic Hat Roxy Rolles

2008-11-18T23:06:22Z

Coppery red color with good head retention and lacing. I actually get a good amount of malt sweetness along with the predominant hop aroma.
Very well-balanced flavor, though tending toward the hop side of things. Pine mostly, a bit of citrus, countered with a caramel undertone. Left a sort of butter coating on the tongue, and I felt the crisp drying hop finish was a nice touch.
Sometimes I think we give too much credit to the extreme alcohol beers and not enough credit to these "low" alcohol brews. This is a good example of packing a lot of flavor and nuance into what many would think is a "simple" beer category.
Overall rating: 4.45

Magic Hat Jinx

2008-11-11T23:29:10Z

I had been a little disappointed with my first foray into Magic Hat beers a couple of years ago, but I decided to jump back in with their fall and winter offerings. This time, I was more pleased with the results.
Jinx pours a scant head with no lacing, but is a fine ruby red color.
The aroma is strong, smoky and malty at the same time. Perhaps even a bit of a whiskey or bourbon in there?
The first time I drank this I thought it tasted almost chocolatey. There's more to it than that. There is a good hop bite to it, peppery really. Underlying it all is a solid malt sweetness. And finishing it off is that lovely warm alcohol ester.
Smooth drinker, and a damn fine beer.
Overall rating: 4.55

Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale

2008-11-09T18:02:59Z

Lovely sticky lacing on a good frothy head.
Not much aroma detected, and the initial feel is watery. But the beer comes back strong, with a nice hoppy bitterness. It is balanced a bit by a bit of malt sweetness, but still is mainly the hops that dominate, and not much else. Still pretty good for all that.

Overall rating: 3.95

Episode 44: A New Hope

2008-11-05T12:07:34Z

I haven't been so excited about the results of an election... Well, ever.

Now, let's get to work.

One for Obama

2008-11-04T13:28:05Z

I got in line this morning shortly after 6am, waited about 30 minutes, and cast my vote for Obama. Not too shabby for what's expected to be a huge turnout.
No matter who you support, get out and vote today.

Twenty Five Dollars

2008-11-03T12:03:00Z

What a fun weekend. On Saturday, we went to the La Maison Française at the French Embassy to see a Czech performer doing a show with bubbles. Yeah, the soap bubble kind. It was really cool, and Ellie and Evan LOVED it. I came home to catch up on the Michigan State game, and promptly scared the kids with my yelling at the TV. It would have been fine if the MSU receivers could have caught the freakin' ball a little more often! Still, a win is a win, and we're unbelievably 8-2 right now, with Purdue at home next, before the big game at Penn State on November 22. It's a pretty exciting time for MSU football, shockingly enough.
We finally decided on Saturday to pull up the old crappy carpet on the stairs, so that we could get rid of the drywall that's been sitting around forever. I pulled the carpet up on Saturday evening, and there were actually pretty nice hardwood stairs underneath! A little TLC, and they'll look really nice. On Sunday morning, I tore down the paneling on one side of the stairs, so I could drop the drywall in. The demolition was fun (Lisa remarked that she's glad I have protective eyewear: there were a lot of splinters flying around!). It was a little frustrating though, just because there always seem to be gotchas whenever we try to redo something around our house. But we ended up managing to get the drywall mostly in place before I had to leave for curling.
Yes, the curling season has begun. For most people, it even started a couple of weeks ago, but I scaled back my schedule, so I'm only playing on Sundays. My team jumped out to a 3-0 lead, then a 6-1 lead, before wrapping up the win at 12-2. It's Pizza League though, so I wouldn't say I played great, or read anything into the results. We could just as easily get killed next week. But it is fun, which is how I like it right now. And it was especially fun coming home and watching the Giants whip the Cowboys. Man, do they need Tony Romo back or what?
So, to the subject of this post. Our local Safeway has a gas station. They give you $0.10 per gallon off for every $100 you spend in the store, or $0.03 just for being a member. We apparently had been racking up the credits and had spent $400 in the past couple of weeks, so we got a $0.40 discount. Off the $2.44 price. So we paid $2.04 per gallon. Wow. We spent only $25 to fill up the tank of our Odyssey, just a few months after routinely paying double that. Crazy.

Bell's Two Hearted Ale

2008-10-31T22:37:14Z

Pale orange color, with a nice head filling to the top of the glass, and retaining well throughout.
Aroma is of pine and very floral hops. Perhaps a touch of lemon too.
The flavor is a mouth full of flowery goodness, grapefruit, and bitter hops. The sharp hop bitterness lingers at the back of the mouth, but is just pleasant enough, though perhaps not so for non-hop heads.
Really nice beer, I could just sit and sniff it for hours.
Overall rating: 4.8 (new record!)

A Fine Fall Weekend

2008-10-27T11:37:18Z

The weekend actually worked out fairly perfectly, all things considered. On Friday night, we had tickets to go to "Boo at the Zoo": trick-or-treating at the National Zoo. It was already pretty crowded by the time we got there, but the lines weren't all that long. Thankfully, there were a few monkeys awake for Evan to see (read: freak out about). And while the pandas were asleep, they are cute when asleep. Plus, we got a lot of candy. I don't think we need to go around to the neighborhood at this point.
It rained pretty much all day Saturday, which was okay because we had indoor activities planned for the most part. Unfortunately, Ellie also had to go to the doctor, but she seems to be perfectly fine now. It was her friend Claire's birthday party that day, so she had some fun playing there, and then we were off to the "Air and Scare" at the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space museum. Not as fun as the zoo, but way more crowded due to it being free (aside from parking). We were lucky to get there early, because by the time we left a little before 6pm, the line to get into the place was insanely long, almost 2 miles backed up onto the road to get in. And there was nowhere to park once you got in either. So lucky us for getting there early. After that, since it was still pouring rain, it seemed like a good night to head to an Irish pub for dinner. I had fish and chips and a Guinness, and they were good enough to put the MSU-UM game on the TV for me, so I got to see the fourth quarter and MSU close out a big win. Loved the look on Rich Rodriguez's face every time the Wolverines made another stupid play. Thankfully, the idiot replay official's call on the first U-M touchdown didn't cost us either.
Finally, yesterday was a beautiful fall day for another birthday party, which wrapped up just in time for us to head home and catch the Giants beat the Steelers. I was so worried that the Giants would dominate every statistic and yet find a way to lose thanks to two big plays by the Steelers, but they managed to do just enough to pull out the victory. It was a big win, as they are about to head into an absolutely brutal stretch of games to end the season.
This should be another busy week for us. The Town of Vienna's Halloween parade is on Wednesday, Halloween itself is on Friday. And curling starts on Sunday! Oh, and Guitar Hero is scheduled for delivery on Tuesday. Aw yeah.

Chimay Grande Réserve (Blue)

2008-10-19T01:55:55Z

Big substantial head. Nice reddish-brown color. The head gives the illusion of murkiness underneath.
Mostly malty aroma. Full-flavored with raisins and maybe even a tinge of dark chocolate in the back of the mouth.
Thin layer of alcohol coats the tongue and there is a nice bite from the carbonation as well.
Tremendous beer, the only disappointment was the aroma, but it doesn't distract too much.
Overall rating: 4.3

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

2008-10-17T13:16:23Z

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
My review
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book probably isn't for anyone. However, it's definitely for me, a Murakami fan and fellow runner (though more of a biker these days). It's kind of a blog-like view into his thoughts as he runs and thinks and writes. Fairly insightful and a brisk read.
Next up is What God Can Do for You Now: For Seekers Who Want to Believe by Rabbi Robert Levine.

TySuiteJ and VLC: A Great Team

2008-10-15T11:42:50Z

I started to write up a whole summary of the various video conversion tools I had tested, but after a while, it got very frustrating because none of them was working particularly well. I'm starting to think that it has more to do with the fact that I was trying to use the h264 codec instead of the normal MPEG4/xvid codec. h264 is slooooow to convert, and apparently my computer is too slow to keep up, which is why I think I was having audio sync problems.
At any rate, I've still got that post written up as a draft, so maybe I'll do a little more work on that another day, this time without h264. For now though, here's the very geeky explanation of how I got things working using TySuiteJ and VLC. Non-geeks are free to move on to something else now.
I started out using TySuiteJ to download my Tivo shows into MPEG2 format on my computer. I would then run these files through the converters and see how they would turn out. One of these converters was VLC. I'm actually using an old version (0.8.2) since the new one seems to not work as well, or at least, it slows down my computer significantly. It's a little tricky to figure out how to use VLC to transcode, but I pretty much followed the guide found here. Right now, I'm playing with some settings to resize the video, but the 480x480 that the Tivo directly outputs seems to be okay, though possibly a little bit stretched.
After getting this working, I tried TySuiteJ's web interface out. See, VLC can not only play a crapload of media files, it can also play (and thus capture) network streams. This is nice because it takes out the step where I have to download the MPG file from the Tivo. Instead, I give VLC the URL of the network stream provided by TySuiteJ, and use the same steps to transcode this stream into an iPod-friendly video.
It all seems to be working pretty well. It takes VLC about 30 minutes to stream and transcode a one hour TV show, whereas most of the converters I was using before took 45 minutes to an hour to convert, and that was after 8-10 minutes to copy the file from the Tivo to my computer. And VLC does all this without pegging my CPU at 100%, so I can do other things while it's converting. And that makes it a big winner in my book.

My Geek Weekend: Occam's Razor

2008-10-13T17:15:18Z

In between two birthday parties and various football games (U-M loses to Toledo?!?! ND loses, Redskins lose, MSU wins, good weekend for football) and other stuff, I hacked away at some computer stuff too.
Last week, I spent a lot of time trying to convert videos to watch on my iPod Touch. I figured that with winter fast approaching, I'd probably be riding the bus more often on those occasions when I wimp out on riding my bike. As such, catching up on all the stuff I have on Tivo would be cool to do while passing the time. Alas, all my efforts were frustrated by the fact that every video converter I tried managed to freeze up my computer.
I initially thought the problem was with a failing hard drive, so I spent part of the week backing up everything on the hard drive. I then checked the hard drive for errors, but it came back with no problems reported.
My next thought was that it was a heat problem. This was partially confirmed when I ran a tool called SpeedFan that monitored my CPU's temperature. During one video conversion, the computer locked up with the CPU at a temperature of 98 degrees Celsius! That's 208 degrees Fahrenheit, 4 degrees away from boiling water. In other words, hot! So, I popped open the case to take a look, and I discovered that every outlet vent of my case was covered in a layer of dust, preventing the fans from pushing air out, and trapping the hot air inside. I cleared out the vents, and while doing so rediscovered the fact that my CPU fan had a knob I could use to crank up the speed a bit higher, thus cooling the CPU even more effectively.
After this cleaning routine, I was able to grab a show off my Tivo and encode it into an iPod-friendly format. It was a little bit jittery, but not too bad. I'm going to play with the settings a little bit more to see if I can smooth it out some, but I'm calling the geek weekend a success as a result of getting it to work once.
It just goes to show you: if your computer is freezing up, the most likely culprit is the simplest one, overheating. Occam's Razor in action.
Oh yeah, and did I mention, I succeeded in the One Hundred Pushup Challenge! On Saturday night, I powered out 100 pushups! I am still shocked that all my hard work paid off and I accomplished my goal.

The Broken Window

2008-10-08T18:40:25Z

The Broken Window: A Lincoln Rhyme Novel by Jeffery Deaver
My review
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The last time I read a detective/mystery novel, I was highly annoyed about the "deus ex machina" ending in which the author just made up new stuff that hadn't been revealed at any point during the book, thus negating any chance for the reader to figure it out on their own. Jeffery Deaver definitely sprinkles plenty of clues throughout The Broken Window and a truly dedicated sleuth could probably figure it out if they wanted. The culprit ended up being a nice surprise to me, and I enjoyed reading the fast-paced story. The story moved quickly, even when the author was filling in the background on the main characters who had appeared in his previous novels, acknowledging that yes, the reader may not be familiar with them.
The plot revolves around a killer who frames innocent people for his murders and rapes by planting evidence. The twist is that he's able to plant the evidence by extracting the innocent person's buying habits and behavior from a massive database. It touches on identity theft and privacy issues in the electronic age in a basic, but still intelligent manner. A fun read.
Next up is What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami.

Annoyances and Triumphs

2008-10-08T11:56:31Z

I'm going to have to take a break from this tonight, since it's getting so frustrating, but for the past couple of evenings, I've been trying to convert some videos into an iPod Touch-friendly format. There are a couple of reasons for this: I could potentially catch up on Tivo viewing while riding the bus; I could get an AV cable for the iPod and hook it up to the crappy DVD player we got (it is very finicky about accepting DVDs to play) and then have stuff for the kids to watch on those long drives to Michigan for the upcoming holidays.
This is not going well. I've tried just about every converter in the book and every single one of them freezes up somewhere in the middle of the conversion. Of course, most of them seem to use the same encoder behind the scenes, so this doesn't come as much of a surprise. But it's still frustrating. I'm beginning to wonder if it's not something where my computer is limited in what it can accomplish. I even thought I heard an ominous clicking coming from the hard drive last night (luckily I backed up all my important pictures and music, as well as our Quicken files, so I shouldn't lose too much of importance if something craps out. Still, my project has now turned into scouring the computer for things that need to be backed up.).
The one bright side of all this is that I discovered a true gem in the App Store: Mocha VNC Lite. It's free, and it allows you to use your iPod Touch (or iPhone) to connect to a VNC server running on your computer. That's all geek-speak for saying that you can remotely control your computer via the iPod. That's pretty cool for when I don't want to sit in front of the screen watching a conversion tick through slowly. Instead, I can connect via the iPod and watch on its screen as it ticks through slowly. Once I get it set up properly, I could even connect to my computer at home while sitting at a Starbucks somewhere.
So while I still have to figure out the video conversion thing, and I'm still trying to work out a way to sync my wife's Palm with Google Calendar, I've still managed to get some fun things working. Oh, and the iPod is also pretty good at playing music.