not my blog

Trying a new beer is always and adventure. Sometimes the adventure truly inspires and excites, and sometimes it leaves you with that empty feeling inside. My latest trial from Great Divide Brewing Co. falls in the let down category. The Denver Pale Ale looks and tastes like it should be a beer of solid quality, that is until you sip it. The first few sips were smooth and mellow, but don’t give much hint to the beer in terms of overall body and flavor. So you drink some more, still no solid indication as to the quality of this brew. Five glasses later, and I still can’t really put any words of note together to describe this particular brew. It might be a well developed ploy, just to get me to buy another six pack of the brew so I can figure it out. But then, it is decided not worth the $7.99 I paid for it either. So in the end, no more Denver Pale Ale, and Great Divide Brewing is going to have to make up for it big time on their next chance to get a more frequent spot in my beer rotation.

So a couple of the guys that used to work with us at the office decided they were going to start a Penny Arcade style comic about tech work. If you ask them, it’s not PA styled, but just looking at it, it just smacks of PA’s influence. They are calling their comic Techs in Debt, and are attempting to use it to help supplement their income so they can get out of debt. Knowing the two of them, it is safe to say that their claims of how large their debt actually is what they say. The comic itself has seen five individual comics so far in the two months they have been on the web, and I think they’ve done a fair job. It’s done in colored pencil for the cartoon, with the dialog being added in afterwards via (insert graphics program here). The style is appropriate I think, just for the fact that it adds to their “I’m poor” mantra. So far, I’ve had one of their comics make me laugh, and two elicit a chuckle. They are pretty much running the normal array of make money tools: Google Ads, Firefox Download, CafePress crap, Affiliate links (Spysweeper and AVG), along with the ever popular donation option.

Given their slacker nature I’ll be very impressed if they ever reach ten total comics on their site (of the level that is there or above… no crap). If they make it that far, I’m going to go ahead and pick up a t-shirt or mug or something from the CafePress store. I figure if I’m going to give them money, I might as well get something out of it.

Also, Alan is getting rid of a used laptop (with a couple missing keys), so make him an offer. It’s a Toshiba (BLAH), but it works and has the usual bells and whistles.

Of course now I need to get them to improve their horrid table ridden web design, and move themselves over to some sort of CMS package. It’s 2006 boys, no reason to be running a website that is nothing but static HTML. Pick a Drupal or Joomla or something, please! Hell, even Wordpress would be an improvement, static pages are dead!

Now go view this comic, best one they done so far.

So I got to spend some time in sunny Florida last week working with one of my customers and their remote office they just opened down there. It was fun, got lots of work done, had some good food, got to sit on the beach for an hour, and got a ride in a Ferrari! It’s a smaller office, just three desktops and two laptops that come and go. So we went with their standard Watchguard Edge of the X5w variety. This has been their standard remote office unit since they came out, good value and pretty darn rock solid. The box that I recieved though was a little off and I came to discover I got a member of a mis-released batch of the Edge series.

Seems the box was originally going to be labeled the Soho7 until someone in the marketing deparment got ahold of it and decided it needed a new name. Some changes to the firmware, and some other voodoo and out popped the Edge series. Unfortunately it seems there was a batch that slipped out there still containing the original 7.0 firmware and thinking it was a Soho7. It seems that these also have the unfortunate problem of not having their SSL certificate loaded, and not knowing their serial number. The issue with this, you can not load the feature key, and therefore can not activate all the features of your Edge series device.

It seems that Watchguard is trying very hard to keep this particular issue on the DL. After calling and leaving a message and waiting for someone to call me, I finally got the “insert generic middle eastern country here” person to call me back, just to tell me that a Level 2 person would have to fix this issue. After another 30 minutes I finally got a call from a really nice woman at Watchguard by the name of Kimberly. She sat with me on the phone while I installed the new file she had sent me via email that installs the SSL certificate and sets the boxes serial number. The file I was sent was just plain text, which makes me wonder if you can hack your own Watchguard box, but I don’t have a Watchguard of my own to site around and tool with, so we will probably never find out.

In the end, I’ll give Watchguard an A in ability for their tech support, a C- for their responsiveness, and a D- for attempting to hide this issue from the user. Still a nice box, and will continue using it for this customer despite these issues.

So tonight was Valentine’s Day. Cooked a nice dinner for the wife and I, nothing too fancy, just some fresh steamed broccoli, a serving each of Boston Clam Chowder, and some broiled Lemon Butter Catfish. Not too bad, just about 10 minutes total worth of work, and a decent night’s dinner is to be had. I picked up a bottle of white wine from the liquor store to go along with our meal. Cassie and I haven’t shared a bottle in a while, and this bottle from Rodney Strong Vineyards in Healdsburg, CA caught my attention. It’s a 2003 vintage of Sauvignon Blanc, not my normal white, but quite the tasty varitable. It’s not to strong, and fairly mellow in the flavor department. From the site:

The 2003 vintage began with a long wet spring, which delayed bloom and reduced yields for early varieties like sauvignon blanc. A relatively cool summer delayed harvest initially, but a September heat wave allowed everything to catch up, and we finished picking all our sauvignon blanc by the first of October.

Not a full on white wine expert yet (still a heavy red drinker), but for someone still working on his white wine tasting skills, I say this would be a worthy addition to my wine rack, and possible an early beginners staple to fish night here at home.

So I finally watched the film, Super Size Me last night. It put such an amazing perspective on the American idea of fast food and our own inability to control ourselves that it really should be required viewing in both Middle and High Schools throughout the country. But we all know that will never happen because the large corporations that makes billions off the food that is killing us will not let something like that be shown… they can’t possibly be evil. Look at all the money they donate to schools and public education in exchange for getting their food in schools. If you haven’t seen this movie, do yourself a favor and watch it. I think it will give you an amazing example of the extreme side of what fast food can do to a person. And if you like the movie you should really check out the series on FX, 30 Days, which is based on the same basic premise of the movie. That’s actually how I found out about the movie was from watching the show.

In my own attempt to clean up my act, I’m going to start a 30 Day trial of my own. No fast food for one month! It’ll be really interesting to see if I can keep it up, especially with as much traveling as I do at work. But no McD’s, no Burger King, no Wendy’s, no Taco Bell, nada. We’ll just have to see how everything works out won’t we. Now if all this goes well, I just have to stop drinking…