QTN™: Dogfish Head Midas Touch

It’s been far too long since I’ve posted beer tasting notes; a reflection, I think, on the limited availability of off-the-wall beers in this little corner of the Boston suburbs, if not on my actual consumption. So it’s with pleasure that I renew the series with notes on the Dogfish Head Midas Touch Golden Elixir.

The backstory of this beer is almost reward enough: analyzing the residues found in drinking vessels in a Minoan grave site, archaeologists found they comprised a mix of grape wine, barley beer and honey mead. Dogfish Head took the finding and ran with it, creating a barley-based beer in which the yeast was fed with honey and Muscat grapes, with a little saffron added for color and bitterness. But the taste of the beer is almost as complex as its origin. Starting with a nose a bit like a Duvel (or other golden Belgian ale), the taste is sweet without a hint of the complex esters (banana or bread flavors) normally found in more complex ales. But a second after the first swallow, you get the part that balances the sweetness: the 9% ABV that provides the counterpoint to the up-front sweetness. There is a little bit of dry-cracker taste, as with more expensive wines made with méthode champenoise, providing the other counterpoint to the honey flavor.

This is one sophisticated beer. And as the alcohol content suggests, it should be drunk accordingly: in small quantities, preferably with friends about with whom you can share your reactions.

Funky fresh for the … 60s

I’m reluctant to give the Funky16Corners blog any more press, especially after it got well-nigh BoingBoinged into non-existence last weekend. But the music he posts—MP3s of funk, R&B, and soul 45 sides from the 1960s—is just too good not to rave about. The author, Larry Grogan, takes garage sale hopping for vinyl and turns it into something beautiful. And he is apparently also involved in a group blog, Funk and Soul, covering much the same ground.

I was going to write about my own garage sale vinyl experience from this week (a bunch of 80s sides—about a jillion early Elvis Costello albums, a David Byrne 12″ from the Catherine Wheel, the Cure’s Japanese Whispers, Big Science—along with Bob Dylan’s debut and a few tasty jazz recordings), but Larry has put me to shame. Perhaps I’ll be able to give my finds their proper due later today.

Well, that was interesting

It’s early morning on Sunday the 26th. I thought I’d be posting about the free Hatch Shell concert from earlier tonight. As it turns out, though, I slept through it.

And when I say “slept through it,” I mean I went upstairs for a nap at 4:30 PM and woke up at midnight.

And now, of course, my body doesn’t want to go back to sleep because it’s already had almost eight hours.

What’s the opposite of insomnia?

I have long suspected that my occasional marathon naps have something to do with depression, but this is a new one—I don’t feel depressed, just disoriented. Unless, of course, I’m hiding something from myself.

Where I hope to be in 75 years

Boston Globe: 82 years later, R.I. couple still holding hands. Tarnation. If Lisa and I ever make it that far—and I’m concerned about our individual vitality rather than the vitality of our marriage when I say that—I hope I’m saying “She had legs. And I said to myself, ‘I need to meet that broad’.” And I hope I can still move fast enough to keep Lisa from smacking me. 🙂

Oh: and how perfect is it that he was a typesetter? If there is ever a job that prepares one for the long view, it is that.

On that note: congrats to Furious on her nuptials last weekend. Sounds like quite a party—and I hope you’ll post the full vows at some point, as “I vow either to cook or clean up but rarely both” is about as perfect a replacement for “obey” as I’ve heard in this two-career world. Also have to give big ups to the choice of “Handle With Care” for a first dance, even though there’s an interesting contrast with that vow. I too have been uptight and made a mess, but the beautiful thing about marriage is that one never has to clean it up oneself.

AC Days 3 and 4: mission accomplished

First, the punch line: for the first time, as of about 2:00 PM this afternoon, I am making mortgage payments on a house with central air.

Details: yesterday, under Lisa’s close eye, the contractors pulled all the tubing, connected the electrical wire, installed the compressor, installed a new thermostat, and test-fired the blower (albeit without refrigerant). Today the head HVAC guy came out to inspect the system, and (long story short) the AC is now running upstairs.

Which is good, given the outlook for the weekend:

sunny day, sweeping the clouds away

So what’s next? Quite a lot, actually: The installation of the first floor and basement air handler; installation of a new Viessmann boiler and connection to the hot water coils in both air handlers; and removal of steam pipes, oil-fired boiler, and oil tank. But that’s a matter for a few weeks in July.

Then we get to fix the holes in the walls. Currently we have two open stud bays that need to stay open until the work gets done, at which point I learn everything about plaster repair. Fortunately the holes are eminently patchable with large pieces of backing board and I will get a lot of practice in making smooth plaster coats.

In the meantime, I think I’m going to turn lemons into lemonade. With those open stud bays, it sounds like a great time to run coax up to the top floor for future cable modem/TV hookups. Finally that structured media panel is going to pay off. And I might as well get started since Lisa is on the road all next week.

Nights are growing long: Alex Chilton free concert

Well, I may have missed Sleater-Kinney at Avalon (sob), and I can’t make My Morning Jacket and Wilco tomorrow night, but I’m damned if I’m going to miss Alex Chilton at the Hatch Shell on Saturday—for free. He’s going to be there with “the original Box Tops”—not sure if that means the actual band or the session players that played on all the group’s classic 1960s Memphis soul albums—but he could turn up with a Turkish prison band and I’d still go if he were singing.

For the uninitiated: Alex Chilton was 17 when he had his #1 hit with the Box Tops, “The Letter” (as in, “My baby, she wrote me a letter”); then went on to be the core of Big Star, a band which single-handedly created both indie pop and power pop, as well as reviving the “jangle” sound of the Byrds so that it could be absorbed by early REM. Unfortunately Big Star failed to make a chart impact and the band fell apart over several years, but not before releasing three incredibly seminal albums.

So this should be a fun show. For more modern day Box Tops stuff, check out what’s in Current Listening on the lower right side of the page…

AC Day 2: mid-course corrections

hood chocolate milk cardboard cap, fresh from the wall

After the workmen left yesterday, I cleared the area where they would be opening the wall in the morning, then went upstairs and tried to figure out where the equivalent opening would be upstairs. And said, “Uh oh.” The equivalent opening was right behind the radiator, right under the window. In other words, it was not a clear path from floor to ceiling.

This was a problem. What the contractor was going to do was to run coolant lines, drip lines, and electrical lines up from the basement to the attic through that bay. And the key was the copper line for the coolant. That wasn’t going to bend from one bay to another.

In the morning, the contractor confirmed my concern. We looked at all the options and figured out that the best solution was to open a bay in the office/guest bedroom instead, just inside the wall on the second floor, and meaning I had to open a little more ceiling in the basement. Sigh. But no biggie. At this point, I’m getting pretty quick at ripping down plaster, even on my lunch hour.

In the meantime, the guys were hard at work, getting the holes opened up for the vents and installing them, and doing the hard work on the wall opening. A few surprises remained. For one thing, all the contractors commented on how tough our plaster was. There were many hole saws and Sawzall blades that were sacrificed to cutting the holes in the wall. For another, we discovered the insulation material in the outside walls: an odd vapor barrier plus horsehair combination that explains our energy bills. Next priority: proper insulation.

The third surprise was the odd bits and pieces that popped out from behind the walls. I should have expected based on Aaron and Jeannie’s experiences that we would find a few things, but I wasn’t prepared for a bottle and a cardboard milk bottle cap (pictured), found in totally separate places in the house.

But at the end of the day we had:

  1. Eight outlets upstairs—three in each bedroom, one in the bathroom, one in the stairwell.
  2. Insulated mini-ducts running from the outlets to the air handler.
  3. An outlet and overhead light (though not yet connected) in the attic.
  4. Upstairs air return, installed but not yet connected to the air handler.
  5. Two opened interior walls.
  6. Electrical lines run from the panel, through the joists that were exposed in the basement ceiling, and tied off just at the base of their run.
  7. Bonus: an extra couple of electrical lines that were run by mistake and were undersized for the needs of the downstairs air handler. The electrician asked whether I wanted them connected to outlets upstairs. “Sure,” I said.

Whew. Tomorrow, we might have AC upstairs.

The sanitation of the Starbucks mermaid

If your first introduction to Starbucks was in the last few years, you may not realize that the woman in the logo is a mermaid—or that she’s holding her tails wide open in a fertility gesture. Dead Programmer traces the evolution of the logo from 15th century fertility symbol to 21st century corporate logo and explains how it has morphed over the years.

What he leaves unexplained is what happened when the first radical leap occurred, from the brown “coffee, tea, spices” logo to the green more stylized mermaid. As I recall reading in a print article about ten years ago, this happened as part of a general brand refresh (or first brand design) that also ushered in the use of subtle “steam” graphics in the packaging, the introduction of earth-toned paints in the graphics and the stores, and just about everything you think of as the modern Starbucks iconography. This all happened about the time Starbucks made the shift from mail order coffee into retail and began to appear on the East Coast. I think the article appeared in How magazine. (I can’t find the article online, but there was a recent article about the work of the in-house Starbucks design team that does appear on the How site.)

Original link via BoingBoing.

AC install day 1

unico air handler

Yesterday’s first day of installation went pretty well. Our contractors spent the morning preparing the small air handler by installing an expansion valve, then managed to load it into our small attic (in spite of a very small access panel and a very tight roofline) and spent the rest of the day preparing and insulating the main ducts and marking the locations for the ducts on the second floor. I didn’t manage to get many photos, but that’s our air handler and the very tight space around it.

A word about our installation: we are going for a full conversion. As I mentioned before, we’re getting a Unico system installed. Our setup consists of two small air handlers, the aforementioned attic one for the upper level and one in the basement for the lower two floors. Our contractor is combining this system with a high efficiency gas boiler which will provide indirectly heated hot water to coils in the air handler that will provide heat in the wintertime. As a consequence, we get to eliminate the old boiler and all the radiators.

Of course, this means the installation is a little more complex than a straightforward AC installation. So the workers are doing it in two phases. Phase 1, which is this week, is the upstairs work, plus installation of the compressor and removal of the steam radiators. Phase 2 is installation of the downstairs air handler and ducts, plus installation of the new boiler and removal of the old one. That phase will occur the week of July 4—when I’ll be at Tanglewood with the BSO, keeping cool in a different way.

Whither VB? The withering away of a category killer

Rogers Cadenhead posts about something that has been on my mind recently, the ending of support for Visual Basic 6. A while ago Scoble and Dan Appleman blogged the opposing viewpoint: making customers move their apps off VB6 is the right thing to do because VB.NET is a far superior language.

Let me illustrate a real world perspective on the debate, rather than the strawman that Appleman provides. Say you are a small software company that makes a product that is written in a variety of languages, and a core part of the application suite having to do with automatically sending e-mails is written as a Visual Basic 6 application.

Now why would someone write an email notification process in VB6? I don’t know. Why would someone write the standard procurement system for the Department of Defense in PowerBuilder? This happens all the time: mission critical apps get written in less than mission critical languages, and then get maintained, more or less, forever.

So fast forward about eight years from the creation of this app. The mail landscape has changed, and the architecture of the mailing process, which used to leverage client apps for sending mails, needs to change too. Email viruses and spammers have made old approaches to writing mail functionality painful; organizations are abandoning POP/SMTP based mail and retreating to MAPI. Meanwhile your VB app, which relied on a once attractive piece of third party code to provide MAPI support, is stagnating, and has started to show issues with age (like memory leaks, and interop issues with the security measures added across the Microsoft mail stack). In other words, it’s time to freshen the app. So the natural thing to do is to look at Visual Basic.NET, the successor to VB6, right?

Um, wrong. VB.NET famously no longer supports the programming interfaces used by VB6. And the VB6 to VB.NET migration tools bite; in fact, the tool blows up prior to successfully migrating the VB6 project. And no one in your development team has expertise in the .NET framework. In the years since VB, the team has moved on to C++ and Java. So which language will be the natural choice for migrating the mail app? Not VB.NET. What might have been a no-brainer to move up the ladder to the next version of VB has turned into a major nightmare for our small software company, and the only clear loser is Microsoft.

Beaten to the punch.

I was very excited that I was going to be at our house for the first day of our AC install today, and that I would be able to document the whole thing, when I opened my RSS aggregator last night and realized that: The Old Man and the Street had posted a much more compelling set of first-hand observations of his AC installation than I could manage. Like our house, his is a high-velocity system being installed in an old house with no existing ductwork. Unlike our installation, it looks like the Old Man’s owners (yes, the Old Man is the name of the house) will be keeping their radiators. And I think our installation team will be moving the blower into the attic first, rather than cutting the runs for the ducts. But otherwise a very similar project.

Oh well. Being first isn’t everything, right? Hopefully our team will have the AC working as quickly and easily as The Old Man’s.

Daniel Lanois gets control

According to his web site, überproducer and occasionally brilliant ambient-roots solo artist Daniel Lanois has regained ownership of his first album, Acadie. It’s available from his site as well as from eMusic.

Lanois seems to be focusing some attention on his solo career after a long hiatus, punctuated only by his uneven 2003 release Shine (I liked the track “Fire,” which I included on my 2003 mix cd A page I was meaning to send her, but Lanois-does-reggae can only be described as a disappointment). He also released an instrumental album this week called Belladonna. I’m listening now; it strongly recalls the early 80s instrumental work that he did with Brian Eno and Harold Budd, which is in my opinion a Really Good Thing.