Just When I Needed Some Guidance From Above...

Seek, and ye shall find.

Combined with this synergistic absolute contraindication:

Equals this (there's an HBO ad at the beginning, sorry, but so worth it):

Bike Redonculawesomeness

Starting at age 18 (right before fax machines got small and cheap), I was a bike messenger in DC. Did it for 5 years, on and off. Never got this good. Is there anyone as good as this guy? Brilliantly filmed, perfectly scored - stunt after stunt, relentlessly topping himself.

Thanks, zefrank, consistently amazing as always. Between this and Mandy, got my bike geek fix in for the month.

Heh...MacAskill.

Pipie Suits Up For Gardening

Brewed a Scottish Peated Wee Heavy Tonight

Visited Austin Homebrew Supply for two and a half cases worth of beer ingredients. Cost me $24 bucks. The six-pack of Sierra Nevada Torpedo I drank while brewing cost me about $10. You do the math.

Grain Bill:

.25 lb. peated

.5 lb. biscuit

1 lb. Special B crystal

1 lb. Cara-Munich
Malt extract:

6 Lbs. amber syrup
Sugars:
.5 lb. Turbinado sugar
.25 lb. Corn sugar

Hops:

.5 oz. Fuggle (bittering)

.25 oz. 10-yr. aged Czech Saaz (flavoring)

Yeast:

Safale S-04 dry English Scottish ale

Yum. Smells like BBQ. And, whene'er to drink you are inclin'd, Tam o' Shanters.

April Updates

Hey, Cupcake.

1) Jodie's back from Houston. I missed her, and so did the kids, but they did really well. Not a single mommy-related meltdown. Went to a birthday party at Goin' Bananas, and Caleb's house warming party (as usual, Scout didn't want to go, then didn't want to leave). Even got a bunch of work done on Saturday. And tonight, with Francesca, we're back to being all together.

2) Mike tried to do it again. Making me feel disoriented and defeated the last few days (he's in ICU, and stable now). Poor Betty. And Lis - like pregnancy isn't a bitch enough as it is.

3) Acquired another boss at work (now I have 4), who's in Raleigh, so I'll probably never meet him. Which is making the lead writer batshit crazy, mostly all over me. Please God -when the hell can I own my own business again?!

4) Got linked in one of Mandy's blog posts, that was nice. Random act of kindness to right the heel.

5) Can't tell you how desperately I'm looking forward to Shannon's graduation. Charles pointed out we'll be there for the North American Organic Brewer's Festival. Maybe drag James along.

7) Need to brew again. I'm thinking Scottish Wee Heavy. Feel like something heady, sweet, and smoked.

6) Thanks for all your support. I love you too. Cheers.

McKinney Falls, Part 3 - Lower Falls

Smith Rockshelter Trail winding up to the Visitor's Center has some steep stone stairs, and wooden walkways.

Toots tracing mile marker 3, in front of Old Baldy (to the left). She's a 500-yr-old bald cypress, over 60 feet tall.

Bathroom and water fountain break at the Visitor's Center. They also lent us some fishing poles. We bought night crawlers at the entrance.

You can tell we're in the middle of a drought - normally this entire rock ledge is spilling over. The girls bounced back and forth between those two rocks up front about 15 times.

Toots pointing to where we were fishing. Not a nibble. Worms were fun to play with, though.

Girls went bouldering instead.

Pipie took off like a little mountain goat.

She just grabbed holds and hauled herself up...

...straight up sheer walls.

Da-dah!

Heeeeee!

My natural-born rock climbers. We also saw frogs and a little shoestring water snake.

I love this place. Only 15 minutes from our house. Before Texas spring heat crashes down, Jodie and Francesca will be with us next time, when we head back for some primitive camping. And some real fishing. Meaning, catching.

McKinney Falls, Part 2 - Rock Shelter

Cool overhang (temp. and awesome-wise), used over the centuries by various tribes, most recently the Tonkawa. Onion creek ran through here and cut into the soft limestone - now it flows about 50 feet below.

CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESE!"

"One little, two little..."

Pipie likes to have her picture taken more than Toots.

Playing by the metate and fire pit.

Scout: "I'm ready to go!" That was actually a long hike, to get here. They did good.

Aaaaand...they're off.
Up next: the Trail; Lower Falls.

McKinney Falls, Part 1 - Upper Falls

People all over the top of the falls wanted to take pictures of the girls.

Note Miss P's hiking outfit, and 4-foot-tall Scoutie.

All these pics were taken with the Dash.

Camera phones + Moore's Law = 1 less bulgy pocket.

Up next: the Rock Shelter

After that: Lower Falls rock scramble & fishing hole

Happy Friday, Thank God It's Here And Not There

The whole week, feeling kinda like this. Hoping James made it to Portland safely. Loving all you all.

The Latest Majority Report from TED

Thanks to the last 10 years of tech absorption into our everyday lives, cyberpunk science fiction genre is now dead & buried (don't bother with William Gibson's last 3 irrelevancies, and Neal Stephenson is spiraling away with historical fantasy). But this "6th Sense" invention pounds down the final nail. Philip K. Dick would laugh himself into a coughing fit with this one.

Beer Wars Film: Can I Listen To Your Beer?

++=WTF?
What does a conservative, Nixon-worshipping, religious right/GOP groveller and hand-crafted beer have in common? Less than nothing, I thought, but there MUST be a good reason Ben Stein has attached himself to something WAY cooler than anything he's done in his life.

In the few months since subscribing to the Zealot's newsletter, I've learned more about home brewing in Austin than I did working at Austin Homebrew. And by "more" I mean "not as much," but here's the most recent awesome thing they posted: a new documentary about the American brewing industry, and the craft brewing upstarts that are fundamentally changing everything we know about beer.

Outside of his "Beuller...Beuller..." schtick and his mildly entertaining "Win Ben Stein's Money" trivia show, I have a hard time getting past Ben's incongruous intellectual hypocricy (e.g. tilting at creationist windmills, weeping over Nixon's resignation). It's like discovering a famous astrophysicist is also a Scientologist. "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed?" Dude, you were a presidential speechwritwer. You've published, like, 10 NY Times bestsellers. You're capable of grasping the irony, and you don't need the money.

Despite the creepy shadow Ben throws on the festivities, I can't wait, and I'm thinking of putting a petition together to get the Alamo Drafthouse to show it. The last beer thing I went to there (w/Tim and Caleb) was a funny, drunken travelogue by a bunch of friends on a US brewery tour (American Beer), while we were served beers from the breweries visited as the film progressed. More fun than you can stick a shake at.

These trailers are too dee-lish and new-trish. I salivate in their general direction.

Pandora's Box of Slumdog Qawwali

I was very pleased to see "Slumdog Millionaire" sweep the Oscars. I was even more pleased to see Francesca coming out of the showing before us, at the Alamo. It touched on a dizzying array of India-specific realities. One of which lept out of the screen and into the laps of the film makers - the BBC reported that the boy and girl who played Salim and Latika still lived in the slums (one in a tarp under a bridge), and only recently were relocated to permanent houses.

The closing dance number in the train station (Jai Ho) was also ek dam pukka accha hai, although this one may beat it:

Didn't know he spoke Hindi? Now you do.

Actually, what got all this started today was being Facecrack-tagged for a list of 25 favorite albums of all time (not done yet). I included ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's "Live in Paris," which got me thirsty for some tenor qawwali wajad, leading me in turn to create a Pandora station using his name, resulting (to my delighted bewilderment) in a series of club-DJ productions of Bollywood-style songs. 

So that's my favorite new station. Amanpreet Kaur's Bhabi Meri Gut all day, baby.

Your Pedagogy Ran Over My Demagogy

Here at Conglomerated Golden Handcuffs 'R Us Ltd, I have the skull-splitting task of translating hypertechnical database, scripting, and code requirements into standard American business English. I've been doing it for awhile, and can usually just cut-and-paste snippets from memory, and, like a vast colon (heh), break down dense technobabble into digestible brain bites.

Like any job, once you master the shortcuts and tricks (what gamers call "cheats"), work becomes more like play. For instance (and shake a geek stick at me if you need to), I have a knack for the spiky line dance of sentence diagrams - my high school comp teacher woke me to the same cool feeling with diagramming as Mom did with Scrabble. They can be more satisfying than crosswords, if you know what you're doing; plus they keep my English mechanics chops all axle greasy.

But every once in awhile, developers barf up blocks of content that make my train of thought jump track:

The product should allow filtered query of the messages + messageArgs by partially ETL'ing the message data by means of a background process (like blockstoreunhexer) that left joins from messages to the translated tables (new tables by lang or not, containing the 'final form' messages), uses that as the "todo list", and final-form-s the translations into the read-tables for filtered querying.

And if it weren't for the elegant utility of the sentence diagram, it'd take hours to sort subject from object from banana peel.

Feel free to point out my errors: that took me ten minutes to create longhand, and about 30 minutes to transpose with Dia. About half the time it took to write this post.

Listening to a loop of Ronnie Montrose's Mach1 helped.  All four and a half minutes of it.

Lemon Gloria Interviewish Thang

Lisa was interviewed by Lemmonex, and it was cool, so I played along.

To join in, follow these instructions:
1. Email me w/“Interview me.”
2. I'll email you five questions.
3. You post the interview somewhere, and link back to this post.
4. Then you also post these rules and offer to interview someone else.

I've known Lisa's family since before both of us were born. Francesca and I went to her wedding last year. Annnnnnnnd here we go:

1. I know you love to travel.  So in a fictional scenario, you and your wife have a child-free week (If you choose to - they're with relatives, who are delighted to have them), the time off work, and unlimited cash.  What do you do?

It's true I love to travel, but in the same way I love to go backpacking or have marital relations - I successfully feel love for it far more frequently than am actually successful at it. I haven't been back in Asia for 25 years. That's what I consider traveling. It may be awhile again to pick up where we left off, to be honest. Mexico's a 4 hour drive. I went to Amsterdam for 10 days. Those don't really count. What would count would be to fly to Chennai, visit Kodai Kanal, and a week later train it north to Agra, Veranasi, and Delhi. A quick email to our parents, and train west to Rajesthan - Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur. Then fly to Kathmandu for a week, and do some trekking - like Solo Kumbu, where you went. Kala Pattar. The last week we'd stay in a house boat in Kashmir, somewhere relatively safe. That's a good solid "week" or so. Kids might wonder where we are, but relatives have them, you say? 

If they're so delighted, they can keep it up for a month or two. They got used to it, right? I'm kidding, grandparents reading this. We'd be back in 3 weeks.

2. If you could have dinner with any famous person, living or dead, who would it be?

I'd want it to be an enjoyable time, so I wouldn't inter any dead people to prop up at the table; also I can't pick someone I'm in awe of, who would make me feel like a blubbering groupie. Like Ani Difranco. She'd probably be super cool, and try to put me at ease, and actually try herself to have a good time with me. But it would fail. I'd acquire Alzheimer's, rickets and Turret's right quick. Also, even people I eat with who are considered famous secretly complain about what a pain in the ass it is to choose a restaurant that has a good vegetarian selection to accommodate me, so I'd actually suggest dinner at my house.

Ultimately, I think we'd have a pretty good time having Patton Oswalt and his wife over for dinner. I'd fix the fake-meatiest courses he'd ever seen, and get him to admit hippy abominable deathless duck, sausage and steak can be as sumptuous, filling, and tasty as anything that rat he played would aggressively push on his menu. Two loaves of fresh bread, infused with barley that I'd brew a beer with specifically for the meal; and a homemade oaked-up Californian red. Tiramisu. Plus we would get lit the f*ck up after, more likely than not. Just to take the edge off of the gig - someone like Patton obliged by this question to eat dinner with someone like me.

3. Imagine yourself on The Daily Show.  What are you famous for?  What is Jon Stewart interviewing you about?

I'd be invited because of the speed at which I rose to fame - simply by writing and recording songs with my laptop for the web, I sold millions of downloads without performing once on stage, like an actual legitimate musician. Plus all my novels. And movies I wrote, directed, produced and starred in. Oh, and I cured malaria while brokering the permanent Israel-Palestine Peace Accord. Then he would hire me during the interview, while we're on a roll here. As Bill Hicks said, "why don't you pretend? You get paid more than me, you fantasize."

4. How has having children changed your view of the world?  Has it changed how you see yourself in the world?

Before switching to English, I was going for an Education degree, and worked at a preschool during most of my college years (I never actually graduated, of course, slacker I am). Same school Francesca went to for kindergarten and summer camp. Teaching young kids and training with child experts changed my understanding of the purpose of the world, and how we're supposed to act in it. I feel lucky for the people who taught me how to get a head start on early childhood ed, now that Parenting's who I am. All the choices made about work, friendships, family events-everything I do is for the kids. Which for me is an improvement, because I didn't lead a very safe or uniquely interesting life before them. I will say that I bust my ass to score software and engineering gigs solely because they pay well, and I probably wouldn't if I didn't feel I had to. So that's a nice perk when I'm drooling over a new toy or $15 microbrew.

Jodie insists that my life hasn't changed that much, meaning I still can visit my friends' houses, go to a pub, see the occasional band, and all the stuff she can't because of bedtime with The Boobs (her boobs). Not that I do any of those but once or twice a month - just that I can. Truth is, today I'd be able to stave off an infarction for about a week living like I did in my 20s and 30s. And though still an asshole, getting older I feel relieved I didn't turn out to be the old broken-down asshole I would've been without kids.

Having daughters saved my fatherhood. I don't know how my parents raised my brother and me. I can't tell you how it feels  like, watching my capacity for love expand every year, as my kids and marriage grow older. I'd probably have lots of love in my life without them, but I can't imagine living with that trifle amount, when I hold the two up. I bow down a hundred little ways every day for every woman in my house. I have a great appreciation for, and sympathize to pity with, my parents for raising us two boys. We were terrible, smelly, violent, reckless, rude young males in their life.

My daughters can be hellions, but they live in a world of pastels and lace and makeup and fairies and horses. They're in constant conversation, and they love us actively; they're peacemakers; they listen. I'm almost ashamed how easy it is to raise them. 

I don't know who I'd be without my children. Sometimes I work really f*cking hard at it, and some days it just comes about, for free, but in the end I got what I wanted. Jodie says she agrees. All that feels pretty good, most of the time. How has it changed me? I don't know, I'm not that interested in the person I'd be otherwise. Compared to him, I kind of win.

5. If you had to choose a flavor of ice cream that most fits your personality, what kind do you think you would be?  Feel free to make one up if necessary.

Bhang ki thandai gulab jamun.

Pipie and Toots Paint Hands

Scout is almost 4, and Piper's around 2.