Right thinking individuals know that one of the great things about Santa Cruz is 99 beers - where the have Young's Double Chocolate Stout on draft. But it's not always convenient to get to Santa Cruz and when you go somebody has to drive back over the hill. At the last Game Day Brian.NET brought a revelation - Young's Double Chocolate Stout is available in 4 packs of tall cans that come with the nitro widget for a creamy, stable head. (URMKHOG) And they actually carry this in the local Beverages & More!

I was surprised to realize that BevMo had it and it took a minute to figure out why I didn't know this before. I don't usually shop in the "Import Beer" aisle there for a couple of reasons. One is that it's the same aisle as the cold 12-packs of Bud Light and in a cursory glance it looks like it can be skipped. The other one is that the German section tends to be a bit . . . dusty. So I usually only shop the "Craft Beer" aisle which is where they keep the microbrews - the Deschutes, the Fat Tire, Blue Moon and so forth. But the British section seems to have several of these cans+nitro distributions. Good to know.

It's a little pricey - a four pack costs more than the other six packs I was grabbing (and if you like IPA's they have the Deschutes seasonal IPA (Inversion) on sale! Mmmmmm.) But it's a lot more convenient than driving to Santa Cruz!

technorati tags:beer

So I went on record recently at a Game Day as saying that I saw no reason to use Perl in modern times - that Perl had been supplanted by Python or Ruby. After spending all day yesterday getting my head back into "Perl mode" - I've got both the Llama and Camel open on my desk right now, I'd like to amend my statement. Amongst the many perfectly valid reasons to use Perl you might end up needing a CPAN library to get something done. If the Irony Gods are listening I'm sorry and I'll try not to tempt you again!

Perl's syntax is twisted, and it's made even worse by my insistence on use strict; And of course everything I wanted to do was crazy syntactic juju. "OK, so we've got a reference to a hash of arrays of hashes. And what we want to do is iterate through one of the arrays, and store each hash in a DIFFERENT array, in a different order." You can make that work in one compact foreach although Perl will complain about using a hash value as an array index, but it looks ridiculous. At one point I seriously wrote $rows[%{$item}->{sequence}] = {$item}; And that made sense. And it still does this morning, but give me six months of non-Perling and it will be gibberish. And don't get me started on the fact that you don't declare $rows, but really declare @rows (and in fact you can declare $rows - which will bear no relation to $rows[0], which any sane language would write as @rows[0] anyway). I also quite enjoy the fact that the "reference to a hash of arrays of hashes" came out of a library that calls itself (with a straight face) "XML::Simple". What could be simpler really?

So yeah. All these because the Ruby port of the WriteSpreadsheet module writes out Excel 95, and I need Excel 2000 format. So I also blame Excel.

technorati tags:Perl, programming, Excel

So I was gonna blog about reading some Christopher Moore books recently, but I discovered that I did blog about him here. Which is handy, because I was trying to remember how I found Chritopher Moore in the first place. Hey thanks for the historical info Tim-from-the-past. I'll totally go put the keys beside the police station for you!

Anyway, Amazon a while back had wanted to me buy You Suck at some crazy 30% discount. I meant to, but I was vaguely aware it was a sorta-sequel to another book I hadn't read, and we were hip-deep in Christmas stuff so I was busy anyway and so on. Then Karin went to the bookstore and brought home a copy of Bloodsucking Fiends that she had gotten on a sale table. So I told her "y'know that's a sequel right?" (Yeah I was confused. And now my overly literal chronological nature has passed the confusion onto you! Here at HiddenJester we work in confusion WHOLESALE!) So once that got all straightened out I ordered You Suck, as well as A Dirty Job - one part Amazon's "Buy this with that" program and one part because I already had that on my "to-buy" list. Which turns out AGAIN to be serendipitous because the two recent books overlap a bit. So my suggestion is to A) read these books, and B) read them in this order: Bloodsucking Fiends, A Dirty Job, and lastly You Suck.

Christopher Moore is an odd author. To my mind he is clearly writing science fiction - there are angels, vampires, people who can control whales, etc. (not all in the same book thank goodness), but he's not in the SF section. I think the literary fiction people would call it "magical realism, but as far as I can tell "magical realism" just means "this is sci-fi or fantasy but we want to read it so it's something different". But his books are light fun, so I can put down the chip about him not being filed properly in the Sci-Fi ghetto and just read them.

technorati tags:fiction, ChristopherMoore

I just saw this video over at Wonderland. It's about the web, and "Web 2.0" and Flickr, and del.icio.us and . . . just watch it.

technorati tags:web2.0, hypertext, tags, folksonomy

Blogged with Flock

A while back I started reading a humor blog called The Sneeze. I don't remember how I found it now, but I put in my RSS feeds and went on about my business. Today it came up with pictures of some really cool sculptures and a link to the sculptor's blog as well. Worth checking out.

And on a still somewhat sculptural note - I love some of these tiki mugs. I'm not sure if I like Radar Vic or Malicious the best, but I'd be happy to drink out of either. Is it too blatant to point out my birthday is next month? No, I don't think it is!

technorati tags:sculpture, tiki, art

Blogged with Flock