Bell’s Two Hearted Ale
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Verizon EECB works!
You may recall that a couple of weeks ago, I called Verizon to try to reduce my monthly bill for FIOS by committing to an additional year of service. Naturally, they screwed it up. The next day I found I was being charged for online storage and a security suite I never ordered. Then the following week I got a new wireless router from them in the mail, even though it was the exact model I already have! Still, the packing slip said there was no charge, but I made sure to check my bill when I got it. Oh, did I mention that since I only have internet, no home phone, they cannot send me a paper bill, and they have to bill my credit card automatically? Yeah, nice, huh? So naturally I check yesterday for this month's bill, and it comes to a whopping $194.99!!! You guessed it, they charged me $139.99 plus tax for that router they sent me. The best part was that no one in their billing department could even see the bill that I myself could see, and that I could see was being charged to my bill paying account.
After wasting much of my day on hold with no results, I resorted to the Consumerist playbook: the executive email carpet bomb. I found a list of email addresses of Verizon executives, typed up a quick email describing my plight, and sent it away at 3pm yesterday. At 4:45pm, I had an email and voice mails on my home and work phones from Mrs. Brown, who had taken care of everything for me: the router would be removed from my bill, and my FIOS would now cost me $42.99/month. Best of all, I have her direct line in case anything goes wrong again. The only bad thing is that I still cannot get a paper bill and have to auto-pay via credit card.
The whole experience definitely makes me wary of considering them for any bundling of TV, phone and Internet, but I was lucky to get through to the right person who could actually do something about my problem.
Now, if only they could help me with the pennies that Evan managed to shove into my car's CD player, causing it to short out....
A Weekend with the iPod Touch
Almost a year ago, I had completed my latest freebie spree. Unfortunately, it took nearly all of that year to see any results. But I finally got my $500 Best Buy gift card last week, and promptly used it to order Wii Play, an 8GB iPod Touch, and preorder Guitar Hero World Tour. I was able to pick up the Wii Play at my local Best Buy (Ellie loves the cow racing game), and hopefully the preorder of Guitar Hero will arrive not too long after it's released at the end of October. The iPod Touch arrived on Friday, and I had a lot of fun playing with it over the weekend.
The good: I can use any open wifi hotspot to get online. This includes my house, any Starbucks, and apparently some areas around the Smithsonian. The last two came in handy for getting directions from downtown to a church in Arlington where Lisa had Daisy Scout training. The "find my location" thing is super cool and works very well. It uses known wifi hotspots to figure out your current location and give directions based on that.
The bad: My old iPod used a Firewire connector to charge via the AC adapter. The Touch only uses USB so the adapter doesn't work, and the only way to charge is through the computer. 8GB is good enough for now, but I had to take some music off to make room for apps I downloaded.
I was also able to set up my GMail through the Mail app and used NuevaSync to feed my calendar. The one problem I've run across is that, not having Outlook on my computer, I have no way to get calendar data from my wife's old Palm m100 onto Google Calendar or the Palm. Well, that's not totally true: there is CompanionLink, but I don't know if it's that important to spend $30 on the software. So if anyone has a free solution for me, I'm all ears.
All told, I'm very happy with the Touch, and looking forward to playing with more apps, as I've only had a short time to play in the App Store so far. I'm also checking out how to convert video to the correct format to play on the Touch, so that maybe I can catch up on some stuff that's recorded on my Tivo. So far though, that's been a frustrating experience and the converters I've tried repeatedly crash before finishing the conversion.
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