A return to form today, with the vase of fate serving up a helping of Riggwelter, the Black Sheep Brewery’s delicious 4.7% strong Yorkshire ale.I could drink this till the cows come home.Or perhaps that should be the sheep, for (according to the bottle) the name Riggwelter comes from the Old Norse rygg meaning to overturn.“When a sheep is on its back and cannot get up without help, local dales dialect says it’s rigged or riggwelted.” ...
Today’s festive ale is the Teignworthy Christmas Cracker, a strong (6% ABV) dark and warming malty bottle conditioned ale from deepest Devon. Um, it’s OK, certainly tastes weighty and, well, worthy, but it isn’t really to my taste – it has a very strong aftertaste yet is lacking in any interesting fruity flavours.There are plenty of other things I’d rather drink before picking this. Jocelyn says: “Damn, I’ve dripped it on my top, I’ll have to wash this now.” ...
Another superb ale tonight, and this one is close to home. Nightmare by the Hambleton Ales microbrewery in Thirsk is an extremely creamy, fruity, and flavoursome stout—not as bitter as you might expect from its appearance. Very tasty—I’ll definitely be buying this again.
Third Time Lucky! After two days of novelty nonsense, the vase of fate finally served up a half-litre of Harviestoun Brewery’s 4.8% masterpiece, Schiehallion, named after my all-time favourite Munro. Here’s an interesting fact for you: the mass of the Earth was first measured in 1774 when the Astronomer Royal, one Nevil Maskelyne, spent four months mucking about on Schiehallion with pendulums. By observing how the mountain’s bulk caused the pendulums (pendula?) to swing away from the vertical, he was able to estimate the mountain’s mass and extrapolate from this to calculate our planet’s mass at 5,000 million million tonnes—which is a pretty reasonable estimate, if you ask me. Based on that work, it then became possible to determine the mass of all the other planets, their moons, and even the Sun itself. All of which rather puts my own summer’s evening stroll up Schiehallion in 1998 into perspective, enjoyable though it was. ...
Well, this evening’s advent beer couldn’t be more different from yesterday’s. I had the dubious pleasure of sampling Crazy Ed’s Cave Creek Chili Beer, all the way from Arizona. Be warned: the website dates from 1999, and boy, does it show—we’re talking Comic Sans in a scrolling <marquee> tag, framesets that have a tendency to get confused (try clicking the “home” link), and a 53-kilopixel JPEG weighing in at an astonishing 232 KB (why?!). Seeing those “Netscape Now!” animated GIFs makes me all nostalgic for the twentieth century… ...
This is surely one of the best ideas I’ve ever had! I’ve followed through with my plan to buy twenty-four beers from around the world to count down the days until Christmas. Their names are all written on slips of folded paper in a small vase (nobody actually draws things out of a hat anymore, do they?). Today I’m enjoying Young’s Christmas Pudding Ale, which is 5.5% ABV according to the bottle but only 5.0% according to the website—don’t believe everything you read on the web, eh? ...
Isn’t it funny how one’s tastes change as maturity progresses? I used to spend my summer holidays at the sea-side, playing in arcades and seeking the perfect milkshake (lime); more recently I’ve been spending them in the highlands, playing on the hills and seeking the perfect dram (lagavulin).Hmmm… I think I may have mentioned that the wife is away in the States for a while.At the start of this period of solitude, I panicked, wondering whatever I could do with myself, and came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to buy a computer game to while away the hours.After all, I spent much of my formative years killing time on a variety of computer and console games, so why not rekindle that prior love affair? So it was that I bought The Sims 2, a truly excellent game, and had an enjoyable evening trying to motivate my wee Sims to improve their skills, better themselves, and generally enjoy life.All good harmless fun. ...
If you like maths problems, and you like programming (and hey, who doesn’t?), then you’ll love Project Euler.
Never underestimate the stupidity of users—or the benefits of a little field validation. One of the web-based systems I’ve been developing allows users to enter a customer’s fax number and automatically fax confirmation details (using Zetafax). It’s been working pretty well—until we discovered a flaw today. One user, tired of obtaining valid fax details from customers, had been entering a string of nines and then actually attempting to send the fax to this number. ...