Getting hungry

Carie pointed me to Bob Heffner’s Pepperoni Roll Page after I enquired about the origin of the fantastic snacks she brought me for my birthday. It’s my kind of food origin story—starting with an Italian baker in West Virginia looking to find a good portable snack food for Appalachian coal miners, and ending with a special federal exemption for the West Virginia bakers who produce them to get around rules about bread and meat products (no, seriously).

Cheeselords uber alles

The Suspicious Cheese Lords got some props recently from the Washington Post (many thanks to Greg for pointing out the article, which I missed). Quoth the Post’s reviewer, “The Suspicious Cheese Lords are a men’s chamber chorus founded in 1996 that’s beginning to make a name for itself in this area — for its singing as much as its odd appellation. And in a well-researched concert of mostly Renaissance music at the Franciscan Monastery in Northeast Washington on Sunday, they showed off the sort of blend accomplished only by careful listening.”

She also called the group’s name a “clever bastardization,” which is perhaps the most apt description of the group that I’ve heard yet.

Alas, I’m still waiting on the new CDs. I’m beginning to think that they’ll have to be Epiphany presents rather than being under the tree on the 25th…

Adventures in design

While I was once an avid amateur typographer (I would never dare call myself a graphic artist), these days I touch my design program about once a year. Yes, it’s holiday card time again…

This card started with a photo—my snow photo—and built outward from there. That wasn’t the problem; it was the type. Specifically, Mac OS X’s built in Font Book. Which would be an industrial strength font management tool, were it not for its propensity to drop my 1GHz PowerBook G4 to its knees when adding (or enabling, or disabling) more than one font at a time. You know this Apple training web page where it says, “or drag an entire folder full of fonts into Font Book to add them”? It is to laugh. Har-de-har-har. Only if you want to see the spinning beachball of death for up to five minutes at a time.

On the plus side, once I had my fonts in Font Book, it was a snap to preview them until I found the right script font for the cover, drop caps, and tag line of my card. on the minus side, I spent most of my four-hour waiting room sojourn at the Volkswagen dealership getting my font collection straightened out.

Then I found a printer. Since I didn’t want to repeat last year’s card printing disaster (Kinkos color copies—cost more than my universal remote), I started calling printing companies. And amazingly found one that was not only reasonably priced, but allowed me to print the file directly to them over the Internet. Very cool, and it turned out great.

Hops? or water?

New York Times: With Great Beer, It’s All in the Rocks (and That Doesn’t Mean Ice). Interesting article on the science of beer formulas. The argument is that geology influenced the development of beer, in the form of the mineral content of the local water, and that (among other conclusions) Irish stouts evolved to the depth of color and flavor that they did because of the local water. To get good “mashing” of the grain—to release enough phosphates from the grain to increase the acidity of the beer to make it suitable for mass production without spoilage—when blended with the local alkaline water, the brewers had to roast the malt until it was almost black.

Interestingly, the article also puts the lie to the claim that the high hop content in India Pale Ales is what allowed them to be shipped from England to India without spoiling. According to Dr. Alex Maltman, professor of earth sciences at the University of Wales, the trick was the water at Burton-on-Trent, which was not only the right pH for mashing the barley but was also rich in sulfides, which acted as a preservative.

What the water doesn’t explain is why the IPA style is hopped so heavily. That, I think, is more art than science. A brilliant brewer must have discovered that the additional hops balanced the extra sugar released by the more thorough mashing of the grain, resulting in a more balanced beer. But hops also contain various resins that help to preserve the beer by inhibiting bacterial growth and polyphenols that act as antioxidants, a point which the NYT article doesn’t address..

When it’s my moment in the sun

This site has gotten a bunch of traffic over the last 18 hours or so from DayPop, which thinks the site suddenly jumped up into the Top 10. The cause: apparently a hiccup at Weblogger, my hosting company, which spread the home page of Weblogger.com, including the crawl list of recently updated sites, across some 160 registered subdomains.

(Aside: I wonder if the hiccup was related to a Manila upgrade?) I like having better comment moderation; thanks, Erin, for doing the upgrade.)

This isn’t how I pictured getting into the DayPop Top 40, needless to say. However… as long as all you folks are coming here, anyone know a software company in Boston that needs a product manager?

Is your Panther password really secure?

macosxhints: Fix password security in 10.3.x for upgraded accounts. A useful, and slightly scary, hint that points to some lingering issues in password handling in OS X. Briefly: old versions of the OS, from the public beta through 10.2.x, only allow passwords up to 8 characters in length, but the OS would silently accept any additional characters both at password creation and password entry time. Your password entry only had to match through the first 8 characters to be successful.

Panther (10.3.x) now allows much stronger passwords and uses all the characters, which is good; however, upgraded users are still authenticated under the old, weaker scheme. The hint provides a way to check which scheme is being used to authenticate your password and points out that changing your password in Preferences / Accounts is sufficient to change the scheme—even if you “change” your password to the exact same value it was before.

HTML competes with PowerPoint

librarian.net : steal my stylesheet. The redoubtable Jessamyn West shows how HTML + CSS can be used to make a pretty decent set of slides for a talk, and releases the stylesheet she uses for this purpose under a Creative Commons license.

There’s definitely something to be said for authoring content in forms that are easily consumed across multiple platforms.

What comes after warblogging?

Newsweek: The Alpha Bloggers. When a publication as mainstream as Newsweek runs an article that talks about the influence of the “alpha bloggers” (whom they don’t exhaustively list but who they say (and I agree) include Doc Searls, Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, and Dan Gillmor) and they mean technology pundits, not political pundits, you know the press is waking up to the fact that bloggers write about more than the war. Nice to see, and props to Steven Levy for a good article. Too bad it took years for someone in the press to write this story.

Other mentions of the article: Steve Rubel, Donna Wentworth.

Justin Rosolino at Club Passim

After the reception at the Hong Kong, I made my way to Club Passim in time to catch Justin Rosolino’s debut there. This wasn’t a solo show for Justin—he was sharing the stage with three other talented singer/songwriter guys—but it was the first time I had a chance to see him play his own material (leaving out the shows he played at both my reunions to date, which while good were kind of hard to hear over the roar of the crowd and also were far heavier on covers).

Justin was amazing. He managed four songs in the first half of the show (the format was round-robin), including “To Say Goodbye,” “29” (the instrumental that closes out Wonderlust), “Legacy,” and a deeply soulful version of “O Holy Night.” I was impressed by the other artists, Brian Webb, Rod Picott, and Steve Delopoulos, but even accounting for my bias I think Justin stole the show with his musicianship (he did improvised guitar parts to everyone else’s songs, even some really high-speed picking numbers) and humor.

Hanging out with Dave

After the conference ended on Saturday, I wandered around Harvard Square for a while and then made my way up to the Hong Kong, where I gathered with a few other folks. In addition to catching up with Dave, I met a few interesting people, including a guy who is working on his first podcasts; some of the software developers from DownhillBattle who are working on BlogTorrent, which aims to simplify posting BitTorrents; and Betsy Campbell of MIT’s Community Innovation Lab.

An aside about Betsy: she made what I felt was the most cogent point in a long afternoon of spiraling abstractions when she pointed out that the motivating force that gets most people involved in issues outside their family or community is shame. Her thesis (approximately, since I don’t see a good transcript of it in the conference sources) is that something has to make you feel that you won’t live up to your own image of yourself as a good person for you to do something about it. Which is, I think, spot on.

Incidentally, the work that Betsy is doing in making cross-boundary connections between non-profit community activist groups and people that could help them is enormously worthwhile. If anyone from Sloan is reading this, working with this lab could be a good Socially Responsible Business project…

Tools discussion notes

Joi points out that translation is a derivative work. I hadn’t thought about that. I think I need to change which Creative Commons license I’m using. (I currently have BY-NC-ND.)

Well, that was quick. I’m now under BY-NC-SA, which allows derivative works as long as they’re shared back.