djn’s posterous

I have been eyeing this seasonal beer up at the beer store for a while and I finally gave in to curiosity and tried it out. I'm a big fan of the Dogfish Head brewery and I've got to hand it to them with this one for coming up with an intensely curious brew.

The beer pours a dark amber color. Not cloudy, but dark enough that I can't see through it well without holding it up to the light. Very little head was present, and it dissipated very quickly after the pour.

There is a faint sweetness to the smell with a very slight hint of apricot which had I not known better I might have mistaken ifor peach.

It tastes just like a dried apricot. Complete with that funny tangy aftertaste, unfortunately. As I neared the halfway mark though, I could appreciate where they were trying to go with this beer: the first hint of the pungent apricot flavor hints at something special -- something in the realm of a kriek beer maybe. However, the flavor never progresses that far before it spirals into a funky acidic bitterness of dried apricot.

Also, I was expecting to get more of a hop flavor, but there was not much in the traditional way of hops. Maybe a little in a 120 minute IPA sort of way: syrupy and sweet. There is a sweet heavy maltiness that is overlaid with the pungent apricot.

Kudos to Dogfish Head for their seemingly boundless innovation in beers, but this one just didn't do it for me.

I have this mic in my mic collection but I can't remember what it is or where it came from. I vaguely recall it being an Electro Voice but I could be mistaken. Anyone know what this is?

Update: It is an Electro Voice PL80. Apparently they started making these again, but they look slightly different.

After recovering from my week of standing, I'm thinking about doing another experiment: a week of kneeling while working. I really like how the posture affects my back -- it feels very correct. However there is the issue of pressure on the knees, and the difficulty in moving around periodically. Standing up was quite conducive to frequent breaks to walk around or re-adjust positions to avoid remaining fixed for too long. The human body was designed for movement, any long-term working solution will have to account for this.

Update: This is not working out that well. Kneeling for more than 30 minutes is tough since the pressure on your knees gets pretty bad, even with a lot of cushioning. I can only suggest that this might be useful as part of a system where you would stand, sit, kneel in alternating patterns throughout the day.

I've been at my 'working at the computer standing up' experiment for over a week now, and I can say that It is interesting but not without its drawbacks. I find that I get a little more fidgety over time and I'm more likely to wander around more often. This is great for avoiding RSI, but not as good for maintaining focus. I didn't experience any more discomfort as the days went on though, but at the same time I don't seem to be adapting to standing all the time either. I still get sore heels, and the backs of my knees eventually get kind of stiff.

I'm thinking of modifying things somewhat by getting an exercise ball to sit down on periodically. I wonder if some combination of sitting on the ball and standing will work better. Another idea is to alternate between sitting on the floor periodically. However I don't have a good way to support my laptop in the latter case. I'd have to buy some kind of laptop stand to make that work.

I've been meaning to pick up some Dominion Oak Barrel Stout for a while now, so last time I was out I picked some up. I had mixed feelings about the last Dominion beer that I sampled but I'm always willing to give a different variety a try.

The beer poured a rich black color -- fully opaque. Thin, creamy head present. Not much of a nose, but I could detect some chocolate malt and a little bit of a roasty smell. So far pretty typical of a stout.Smooth mouthfeel, nice creamy carbonation. Kind of a soapy aftertaste though. I can detect a hint of anise perhaps. The beer is big up front but thins out a bit at the end of the sip.

Not bad but not great.

I'm still doing my experiment with standing while working on my computer. Last time I noted that my heels were getting sore, so I wore slippers with padded soles today. Problem largely solved. Susan noted that I was probably not centering my weight properly - shifting back onto my heels. There may be something to that, since standing with locked knees seems to bring about the most discomfort over time. Bending too much at the knee will cause your quads to become sore pretty quickly though. I guess it's about training yourself to achieve a neutral position naturally. I'll note that I did take two hour-long breaks during the day where I sat down and did something else, which seems pretty much essential to making it through a full day at this point.

Another thing that I'm trying is moving the laptop height up a little higher to a counter height of 43.5". So far I like the screen height, but the keyboard height is a little too high. I might be able to get the heights worked out when I use a separate monitor later on.

Update: I later tried putting my Microsoft Natural Keyboard up on a stand separate from my laptop so that the display height was decoupled from the keyboard height.

I've been experimenting with standing up while working the last few days. Now I've just completed a fourth day, and I'm thinking about making it a week to see how it goes. I'm going to say that the definition of a day is 8 hours although I've stood longer on each of the four days so far.

Some things that I've noticed after standing for a while:

My heels feel kind of sore. This is kind of unexpected but I'm standing without shoes on a wood floor so that may have something to do with it. This is kind of surprising though since I walk around in socks most of the time that I'm indoors anyway. There is a little tension in the backs of my knees such that I periodically want to bend forward at the knees every so often. My back feels better than it did when sitting most of the time, although I don't have back issues ordinarily. I only mention this because I expected my back to get stiff out of all things but this doesn't seem to reflect reality.

The major upsides so far are alertness and energy levels, which seem to be higher in general than they would be sitting all day. Also, there is a higher likelihood of walking around every so often since you are already standing up, which is probably a good thing.

I just completed a standing day. What is a standing day? I worked an entire day standing up at my computer instead of sitting down. I put my laptop up on a counter and did my normal work.

The idea came to me after doing a day of work on music recording, where I'm using a computer, but I'm standing most of the time.

What do you do when you get tired? Take a break. Walk around a little bit. You need to do it anyway, even if you are sitting down.

I don't know if I'd want to do this every day, but it is refreshing every once in a while. Also I don't know if I could do a long day like this. Not as a one-off anyway. Maybe if I worked up to it.

I'm reading the book Dune: The Butlerian Jihad right now. I read the original Dune book years ago, and turned on of my friends on to it back then. That same friend turned me on the the prequel that was written by Frank Herbert's son, Brian Herbert. So far it hasn't let me down. I'm about half way through the book and I'm loving it.

I think that I'm going to read a few other SciFi authors soon too, eg H.G. Wells, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, etc.

I was just reading this article about the first jobs that now-wealthy entrepreneurs had when they were young. I thought it was pretty interesting, and it made me think back a little to some of the jobs that I had through school. Here are the ones that I remember, roughly in order:

Newspaper delivery boy - I delivered the 'little paper' since all of the routes for the Beaver County Times were already taken by older kids. Upshot was that you didn't have to wake up at 5AM, downside was that you had to roll each paper up and put a little red rubber band on it for some reason. My hands were completely black after rolling up all the papers.  Upside to that is the paper was easy to throw!

Grocery store bagger - I aspired to make it up to be a full stock boy! My efforts included surviving a trial-by-ice by catching cases of ice cream thrown down from the top of the freezer by my boss. Highlights include training videos that likened bagging groceries to building a house.

Fast food worker - This should have sucked, but worked with some interesting people (We played mandolin to pass the time on breaks). Also, if you have never waited on customers it is an eye-opening study of human behavior. Also, I learned just how efficient a crew of people could be with the right motivation. The drive-through closed at 2AM, but you had to go through a huge checklist of things to close the store. The key element is that you were paid through 3AM regardless of how long things took. Needless to say we were very innovative in our approaches to expediting operations.

Landscaper - Planting flowers and digging holes for trees. I wasn't lucky enough to be on the lawn crew, who rode around listening to headphones instead of kneeling in the dirt.

Lab Assistant - I walked around helping electrical engineering students with the infamous embedded systems laboratory.  I must be some kind of freak, but assembly language just made sense to me. The same cannot be said for most EE students, so it was certainly an interesting time. I wasn't high enough on the food chain to be a full teaching assistant (had to be a grad student for that I think) so the pay was abysmal for the skill requirements (although still better than most of what I see on RentACoder these days).