New York?

Well, I was thinking I should cross New York off my list of places to go. In two weeks I have a week off... and I can get a return flight from here in Edmonton for $615 total by flying through Vancouver or something. I have a friend in New York to stay with in Manhattan, which helps. I just need to find a list of awesome breweries to visit!

Ok, I'm all excited now... more to come later.

Cheers
B

Just a Post

Ug, sorry to the like 5 people who check my blog that I haven't been updating lately... I've been busy...lazy...etc. Unfortunately I've been grabbed by the Lost season 2 bug. It started on saturday... my roomate and I watched the first 8 episodes of season 2 straight through. We've averaged 2 a night since then, and as you can imagine at ~42 minutes per episode you don't get a lot of other things done.

Coming up soon here I plan on having a beer tasting night, I'll hopefully record my reviews of each beer and post them here.

As for other beer news-stuff... hm. I've been drinking a lot of coffee these days instead of beer. I really like coffee... like sometimes more than beer. A nice heavy dark roast or a dbl shot of expresso. I guess I just like stuff with flavour. I went a little crazy last week though when I was programming the scripts below... I had to solve a problem so I went to my local coffee house and had an expresso... then 3 more coffees. To say the least, I felt HIGH afterwards. It was crazy.

Maybe I should start a coffee blog... or at least brew an expresso stout :)
Cheers

Importing iTunes stats into Amarok, Part II

So, after all that work to import my iTunes stats to Amarok I found a bug... iTunes was lazy about keeping the casing on filenames synced with the casing in its database (as windows is case insensitive, afterall). Anyway, that caused some trouble but I fixed it with a new script. Both my old script and the new script to fix the casing bug are posted on a page here. Check them out, and enjoy!


Cheers!

Importing iTunes Statistics into amaroK

So I finally have a nice gentoo system up and running. Of course, I love my music, and I also love my statistics on my music. Seems that nobody had actually written a full script for importing iTunes info into amaroK (which is a pretty awesome media player that runs on Linux). So anyway, I found this link on the amarok forums, and decided to expand on it. I haven't done any programming for like 2 years, and I'm a brewer not a programmer really, so if the programming sucks... well too bad, it still worked (for me...)

Here is a link to the script I created: http://www.jobeus.net/~brian/convert_itunes.txt (rename from txt to pl... obviously)

This script will

• Import user ratings from iTunes
  
• Import play counts from iTunes
  
• Create a percentage score for the tracks based on user rating and play count
• Import date added to iTunes
• Import date last played on iTunes

All that is needed is an exported XML file from iTunes.
So yeah, I'm glad I got this working... enjoy... if anybody else even needs it (I imagine it will be used).
Cheers!

Two Quick Notes

One... when you take your contacts out and are as blind as I am, make sure you find your glasses first, as you may otherwise end up looking for them for a long time.
Two... when you go to the store, buy something to snack on like cookies or crackers.
Thats all thats on my mind right now.

Gentoo Install, Day 1

Ya, so maybe this week my blog
won't be as much of a beer blog as a life blog.
But whatever... I don't really blog that much
about beer anymore it seems. Although I am
drinking a Maudite from Unibroue, which is
owned by Sleeman, which was just bought out by
Sapporo of Japan, where John Sleeman sold all
of his shares, rendering Sleeman as a Canadian brewery to be forfit.
Its all corporate, dorks with MBAs run the big breweries just like any
other company, to make money. Don't expect good beer. That costs too much to produce. I hope Unibroue remains unchanged though.


ANYWAY, so I started installing Gentoo Linux on my computer today. I've done this many a time before...
but that was about 2 years ago. A few glitches, but nothing too bad. I figure that I'm already on
'emerge gnome' which should take all night to compile, so thats a good sign.

For those of you not aware, Gentoo is my favorite Linux distro where you compile pretty much everything
from scratch specifically for your computer to be optimized. Speed gain? Yes, in theory.
Its certainly for the more advanced user though, and there were a few times today where I had to rack my brains for the command I needed.
Oh well. I think this is going ok. If I get pissed off tomorrow for whatever reason I can always just go back to my windows install... btw, I'm posting this with the lynx text browser... as gnome isn't installed yet ;)
cheers!

Week Off!

I awoke this morning to find myself in the back seat of my car, still wearing my suit, with the cufflink on my french-cuffed dress shirt digging into my face. Ahhh yes, I was at a wedding last night, and rather than pay > $30 for a cab, and certainly being responsible enough to not drive home, I had curled up into the back seat and passed out. It was now 6:45 am, and people were arriving at the golf course to get their golf day started. I vaguely recall waking up in the middle of the night to turn on my car to get the heater going, as it was rather cold, and hearing a standup routine from Lewis Black on the radio. Its a good thing I didn't fall asleep with my motor running, as I certainly would have run out of gas.

ANYWAY, the wedding was fun, of course... for those of you who were there I'll make sure to send out pictures.

Week Off
For the first time in... well, a long time I have a week off from work. I'm not going anywhere, just staying around Edmonton. But I do have a list of things I want to get done:
-Do the dishes before my roomate kills me
-Remove Windows and Install Gentoo linux on my desktop... more on this later.
-Paint my room
-Finish reading the at least one of the 3 books I have on the go right now
-Clean my place
-Explore the trails of the river valley by bike
-Look into getting a dishwasher installed into my place

We'll see how much I'll actually get done...
Cheers

Professional Tasting

I've found since I've started brewing professionally (and since its my job to also taste the beer almost daily to make sure I didn't fuck it up) I've found my ability to taste the differences from batch to batch has increased quite a bit. Apparently I may be more critical of my brewing than I need be... apparently the comments of late have been to the effect of "wow, your beer is great these days", and even the owner/brewmaster has said he finds the beer better than usual these days. Woot! Its good to hear that, sometimes I worry that the small things make more of an effect than they do... like not quite hitting the right mash temperature, or missing that hop addition by a few minutes. But I guess there is some give in those parameters.

Anyway, I was thinking I should write a longer post about "Advice On How To Get Into Professional Brewing" or something. I'd include my experiences plus other suggestions that I haven't actually done but heard about. Anybody out there have any specifc questions that might be good to add to this?
Cheers!

Painting Badness!

Basically, I was painting my place this weekend. Everything looks great, except I had this green paint I thought might look good on one side of the hallway.
So, against the advice of a qualified female, I painted the hallway green. Now it looks like an insane asylum, and is horribly ugly.

Luckily it only took two of us 30 minutes to do it. I'm painting it over with light blue.
The end.

Love in the park

Rather than do work on my condo, I decided to instead head out for a bike ride this evening. It had just finished raining and was rather sunny out, twas to be a good ride. As I headed down this very deserted path right by the river, I saw what appeared to be a man lying on the ground, halfway into the path. It startled me at first, but as I rode closer I saw that there was another person laying on top of him, and she (...or possibly he, I didn't see a face) was pelvic thrusting on top of him. Hehe. I laughed as I rode by, the guy looked very shocked (as I approaced very fast) as he just opened his eyes and exclaimed some nonsencical sound in surprise.

I hope they laughed about getting caught having sex :P

Anyway, the rest of my ride was quite nice, until I got to a part on the north side of the river that was very off-road... and the side of the hill had given way, so the path didn't really work for my bike. I basically walked it more than I rode it for that part. Ah well. But at least my bike doesn't look shiny and new anymore!

I still need to get used to my new bike, and start to trust it more. I also need to build all those little muscles that help maintain balance in tricky spots.


Beer... as it is a "beer blog"
On our travels around town today to look at flooring and buy paint/painting supplies we realized we were near a liquor store with excellent beer selection... needless to say I stocked up on a bunch of beers, most of which I can't spell and I don't want to go to the fridge and look it up. But lets just say I spent $50 or so and have increased my selection of belgian beers.
They also had a 2005 edition of our Alley Kat Old Deuteronomy Barley wine there. I thought that was completely sold out (or at least we're out of it at the brewery). I bought a bottle to compare with with 2006 edition.

Cheers

Hard Times

Phew, the last two days were ass at the brewery. The owners were on vacation. The compressor on a refrigeration unit EXPLODED yesterday. I missed like 4 important things. Got chewed out a little today for one of them (but it was deserved). Every 10-15 minutes somebody was asking or telling me something. I ended up doing all kinds of shit at the end of the day until 7 pm that I should have done earlier in the day. Things that were left from thursday ended up being done on friday. Late. As in me doing them at 6:30 pm, 2 hrs after I was supposed to leave.
All in all, a shitty couple of days at the brewery.

However... at the end of the day, I go home and have a beer and think "wow, this is a great beer..." and its all ok again :)

Its just worth it! (besides, last week went like clockwork)

Cheers!

Bike!

Well, I finally got around to getting myself a bike.
I've purchased a Giant Rainer 19" frame. I got more than $150 off of the asking price it seems, and I like the shop that I bought it from (owned by 2 guys, I bought from one of them). I think its best to buy from a small independant shop like that, personally.

Anyway, here is a picture:














Its certainly more of a mountian bike. It may not be the best for commuting on the roads, but I like biking on the non-paved paths and offroad trails. Unfortunately the best route to work is all paved.

I took it out for the first time today and road around the river valley here in Edmonton. I got somewhat used to the balance and such of the bike, although I did fall once going up a steep incline offroad as I was leaning too off to the side. Plus, I haven't really biked since my last bike was stolen 3 or so years ago... although my job is fairly physical-labour intensive, biking certainly uses different muscles.
Anyway, I hope to see how long I can not use my car!
Cheers