April 2011
1 post
Moving this thing to wordpress
For various reasons, I decided to move this blog to a self-hosted wordpress. Hopefully all the permalinks and RSS URLs will auto-redirect properly.
March 2011
1 post
1 tag
Supporting Japan through beer
If like me, you’re wondering how you can support the Japanese craft beer industry in recovering from the earthquake. If you’d like to take this opportunity to explore some new Japanese beers, here are my recommendations:
Kiuchi Brewery makes the Hitachino line of beers, which is by far the most available craft beer from Japan. For the most part they are competent and drink-worthy, but...
October 2010
1 post
1 tag
Alphabet Soup for the Soul
The other day I wanted to make a wicked anagram for my name, since all the cool kids are doing it. But the internets gave me crappy “anagram generators” that just spewed out a bunch of gibberish that was impossible to navigate through or customize, so I wrote my own anagram builder.
It’s very simple:
Then you get a clickable list of all the words that can be made from that...
September 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Beer Coaster Framing Project
I collect beer coasters (among other beer accoutrements) and I recently completed a project to display a bunch of them nicely in frames on my walls. Here are some of the things I learned along the way.
I decided I would uses some sort of glue dots to stick the coasters onto a nice artsy textured paper background. They were able to fit depth-wise in any frame (except for the really tall ones).
...
1 tag
Miracle Fruit party report
I threw a Miracle Fruit tasting party, and it was a success of flavor!
I bought 50 frozen berries and kept them in my freezer until the party. The berries come with instructions on how to best masticate for flavor-tripping optimization - it takes about 2 minutes in your mouth to do a good job of recalibrating your taste buds. The effects last a good 30 minutes, tapering off completely by an...
June 2010
6 posts
1 tag
A Beer Snob's Manifesto
Similar to the love of food of the hyper-exacting food critic in Ratatouille, I love beer. If I don’t love it, I don’t drink it. In the US, we’re familiar with wine snobs, scotch snobs, bourbon snobs, and more, but rarely beer snobs. This is not ok.
Arrogant Bastard lobs a good volley with their “you’re not worthy” motto, but that’s not actually true....
2 tags
Boutez en Avant
I recently discovered that I have a family motto I was unaware of:
“Boutez en avant” - meaning “push forward” - has apparently been the Barry motto since there were Barry’s, which I discovered is just after the Normans conquered Wales and right before they got into Ireland (wikipedia tells me the history of the De Barry family). There’s even a town in Ireland...
2 tags
Custom search for buying beer online
I buy a lot of fancy beer. Most of the beers I get excited about now are local to other regions in the US. So over the last year I’ve compiled a big list of sites to look through for certain beers. It’s gotten rather tedious to do all that searching.
So I threw together a custom search engine that searches over good beer stores online!
Because of the nature of such stores, this is...
1 tag
Google services ranked by Google Trends
I’ve worked at Google for several years, and I’m often fascinated by the differences in internal perception of our products and external perception.
As a little experiment, I used Google Trends to rank all Google services that I could think of (starting with the “even more” page). It was somewhat difficult because you can only compare up to 5 at a time and the numbers...
2 tags
Blog or It Didn't Happen
I know people that do neat things. I know people who know more about certain subjects than anyone else they meet in a given year knows. I know people with intelligent and insightful opinions on topics of all sorts that most people rarely care to spend much time thinking about.
You’re probably all of these things. For my part, I have circumnavigated the world, I can remove collectible beer...