Jeremey's Weblog

Dogfish Head 90 Minute Imperial IPA

This is a fantastically good beer. It's a wet-hopped IPA (and dry-hopped too, apparently) to the extreme, but it also has great malty character and thickness. The floral complexity of the hops is amazing. Wow. This might be my new favorite.

The brewery: http://www.dogfish.com/

Technorati Tags: beer, drink

CHOW

I'm liking CHOW. Not just because it was developed with Rails. ;) It's a cool food site, good articles, and it's pleasant to use.

Technorati Tags: chow, food, rubyonrails

Coffee Factoid #3

More about CO2... coffee really likes ditching the stuff. It will lose most of its CO2 within a couple weeks of roasting... so buy beans from roasters that label bags with the roast date and use within 2 weeks of that date! It's much better to frequently buy a little than to stock up. Also gives you a chance to try more coffees. :)

Technorati Tags: coffee

News of the Astonishingly Bad

Oh my. Well I've now finally seen at least the first half or so of the Star Wars Holiday Special. You really can't imagine quite how bad it is. There just aren't words. But this will give you a taste... the setting for most of it is in Chewbacca's house where you meet his wife, Malla, his dad, Itchy, and his son, Lumpy. Yes. ITCHY and LUMPY. It's downhill from there.

But the Holiday Special is actually only the 2nd worst thing I've heard or seen this week.

Not to be outdone, Twisted Sister is releasing a Christmas Album. Yes, the 80s metal band. Yes, the drag queen makeup. Yes, the tattered clothing, leather, and metal studs. Yes, the 3-power-chord riffs. But there is at least one thing new: Dee Snider can't hit the broad side of a barn in terms of pitch. How can you resist?

A Screeching 180: Capture One PRO

Well... it's been a strange couple days on the photography front. For some reason I decided to give Capture One PRO another whirl. Maybe because of its reputation, maybe I was reading something, I dunno. In any case, I decided to do some comparisons between Lightroom and C1PRO. WOW is there ever a difference! C1PRO's images are so much cleaner and the tones are so smooth. They're jaw-dropping good. So now my workflow world is reeling... and so will my wallet be, I'm afraid. I'll post alot more details later on, but here are a couple images I took tonight:

Technorati Tags: DAM, photography, RAW

Why Ruby Rocks

I love Ruby. Here's one of a thousand reasons why:

song.__send__ "#{msg}=", token

The value of msg is the name of an attribute, so this code sets that attribute (well, calls the method attribute= where attribute is the attribute name, where an attr_accessor or attr_writer exists) to the value of token.

That's equivalent to calling song.foo = token if msg has the value foo.

Technorati Tags: languages, programming, ruby

Life with endo

Aaahhhh... how sweet it is. Managing RSS feeds was becoming difficult in Safari, requiring far too much of my time to keep track of even a fairly small number of feeds. The difficulty also forced me to be very picky about what I read... maybe not a bad idea anyway, but I wanted a more efficient way to keep up (and more importantly, to ignore or skip).

So I looked at NewsFire, NetNewsWire, Vienna and endo, and settled on endo (NNW is a bit clunky, NewsFire is fine but not as efficient, Vienna is open source but not as pretty and again, not as efficient for me). My RSS life has improved dramatically. endo has a nice Inbox, good display options, and lots of per-feed options, but most of all it's pretty and it's very efficient to use. And very fast. Safari's external RSS reader support works well with it, clicking the RSS icon subscribes you in endo, and brings up that feed's options. You can do nothing, or adjust options as needed. Thus it's really efficient to subscribe to feeds and I'm not discouraged from doing so because it's efficient to keep up with what I care about.

It also makes a very convenient way to track Flickr groups that I care about. Screenshot below (click for full size).

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogging clients, endo, macosx, software

Joe Unleaded

I took some pictures of a local band that are friends of mine... here are a few works in progress:

The Boys

newbg_20061005_055
Originally uploaded by jeremey.

Playing with new background and softbox.

Coffee Factoid #2

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is a major flavor carrier for coffee, i.e. its release in the water during brewing brings with it significant and important flavor. So what? So... ground coffee loses the vast majority of its CO2 within the first 60 seconds of being ground. Thus you want to brew immediately following grinding. Heat your water first! (you don't want boiling water anyway) Or if you're using drip, turn the sucker on the instant you've loaded the ground coffee.

See, the other post was called #1 for a reason...