mcgees.org

Inspired by a friend, I’ve begun two “living bottles” of scotch whisky, to populate as I finish bottles.  This is doubly cool: it allows me to have living bottles, of course, but it also gives me an excuse to finish off bottles, which I otherwise would leave with two pours left in them for all eternity.

It’s essentially a solera system.  Every time I get close to finishing a bottle, I’ll pour 50 mL from the bottom into a living bottle.  Then I’ll shake it up, let it settle, and pour off 25 mL as a tasting sample.  I worked out the math, and the solution for concentrations is really elegant.  To wit: count the number of generations; let’s say there have been six generations.  Then, the oldest contribution will have 1/6 of its original contribution, the second-oldest 2/6, and so on, until the newest, which has 6/6, or one times the original contribution, namely 50 mL.  I’ll leave the proof as an exercise to the reader.  If you need help send me an email.

I started two bottles.  No grand theme.  One is “peated”.  One is “unpeated”.  I did this because a little peat (for non-afficionados, that’s the phenolic flavors generated by burning peat moss to dry the grain) goes a long way.  (It’s a good way to stretch your peated whiskies, actually: mix a splash of peated stuff in with a bunch of cheap “carrier”.  Your detection of phenol concentrations is not in any way linear, so you’ll get the peaty enjoyment without the cost of the peaty whisky.)

I added the sixth generation to my unpeated bottle tonight.  I’m going to post tasting notes.  I’ll maybe make this a regular feature depending on the reception.

It contains, roughly:

1. 8 mL Glendronach 15 sherry cask
2. 17 mL Aberlour a’bunadh, euro bottling (heavily sherried)
3. 25 mL Glenturret ‘80/’00 (Blackadder)
4. 33 mL Glen Moray 12 Chenin Blanc finish
5. 42 mL Glen Moray 16
6. 50 mL Glen Garioch 8

Nose: The sherry monsters are in low concentration, and it shows.  No discernable sherry note.  Malty, mellow highland grain, with a hint of marshmallowy lowland character.  Golden raisins, Malt-O-Meal, American oak.

Palate: Sharp at first, then cabbage soup, malt, leaves.

Finish: Toasty, marshmallowy, malty, slightly briney (odd).

Notes: Not showing the best right now, as it is more than half really mediocre whiskies (Glen Garioch 8 and Glen Moray 16, both of which are good cooking whiskies.)

Score: 79/100

“As a thank you to our great customers, we are happy to announce that all snipes entered on our site [Auctiva] from 12:01am PDT to 11:59pm PDT Friday, May 26th will be free!”

I’m not sure if Steven Seagal ever bothered to jump the shark or whether he was just born with a school between him and the mainstream public, but he’s still jumping something.  As his physical fitness declines and he relies more and more on slow-motion to hide his slow reactions, he’s portraying ever more benign characters forced into violence by ever more tragic circumstances.  I mean, it used to be sufficient for him to be an EPA agent forced to punch and kick by ruthless big-business profiteers.  Then, it escalated.  He had to be a Buddhist recluse forced to punch and kick when his daughter is kidnapped.  I don’t know where he can really go from here.  I mean, what, maybe a guy who nurses sick birds back to health at a wildlife refuge forced to punch and kick by a gang of thugs selling little orphan girls as sex slaves?  I mean, maybe I could write that up this weekend and sell it.  “Birdman rescues vestal orphans.”  It could fly.

(Hold on, gotta take this.  Hi.  Yeah.  No, I hadn’t heard.  Really?  Really?  Oh.  OK then.)

Hi, I’m back.  Umm … seems he’s got that one covered.  Anyone else with a spec script?  I’m out of ideas.

Welcome, visitor from Armenia (.am)!  He or she searched Google Armenia for information on Megaproxy and found my Best of the Web page.

151 down, 113 to go.

Today is my seventh anniversary with my incredible wife, Jennifer.  Jenn, when you read this, I love you, and thank you for the best seven years of my life, and a lifetime more.

I just learned of the band Lacuna Coil last week, and purchased their most recent LP, Karmacode, last night.  So what are they?  Progressive Italian metal, maybe.  Or ambient goth metal.  AMG tries “Symphonic Black Metal”, which may get as close as anything.  In all, really hard to classify.  They live in the n-space neighborhood of Nevermore (who get a liner shout-out), Sabbath (ditto), and P.O.D. (right, them too) — but all that and ambient goth, too.  Your first handhold might be Evanescence, but legitimate.

They’ve apparently been around for eight years, but either I’ve been living in a ditch or they haven’t really hit the mainstream yet.

Karmacode features dense-and-rich-as-gold production, intricate layerings of traditional and electronic instrumentation, and either a recording studio or a digital signal processor that gives the feel of performance inside an abandoned cathedral.  They are two full-time guitarists, two full-time vocalists (one male and one female), a bassist and a drummer.

The guitar-playing is at times barely competant.  The band have us wait until track 12 to show that they can play anything more than power chords.  The male vocalist — well, I deleted what I just wrote about him and will instead say, subtly, he’s not very good.  The English lyrics are like high school goth girl poetry, but it doesn’t scan, so it’s like random lines of high school goth girl poetry (”I’ll be there when there’s nothing left / Night and day holding you / Harmony deep inside your soul / Meet me there / Can you feel me?”)

But Cristina Scabbia, the female vocalist.  Oh, Cristina.  As a first-order approximation, she is the band.  In fifteen years we may think of this group as her Y Kan’t Tori Read.  Her voice is soaring, ethereal, haunting, mezmerizing.  She sings her descants as if she’s standing on a Spanish minaret and her leads with gravelly earnestness.  She’s stunningly attractive, too.

Intrigued?  I am.  I’m going to buy the rest of their discography, as well as checking out AMG’s other “Symphonic Black Metal” bands, such as The Gathering, Moonspell, and Opeth, of which I now know nothing.

If you are mailing items from the US to other countries, or have been assigned the task of writing software that can handle every country (and would like some indigestion), check out this exceptionally good guide to international mailing.

Example of content:

In MAURITIUS, the use of postcodes has been introduced on a trial basis in a single delivery office. This trial, limited for the moment to the Curepipe office (742CU001 CUREPIPE), has not yet been extended to other offices owing to numerous difficulties, such as the lack of street names, house numbers, etc.

Also, you can check out the USPS International Mail Manual.  More from this to follow.

I was on hold to 911 for three minutes today.  This is unacceptable.  That is more than enough time to mean the difference between life and death.

I remember several years ago I found a book on Amazon called Dial 911 and Die, via a review the author had written about a legal humor book I had purchased.  His conclusion, as far as I can determine, is to equip oneself with a firearm.  While I’m a lefty gun control advocate, the three minutes gives one pause.  This time I was reporting a witnessed auto accident — but next time?

The book, by the way, is distributed by Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, self-described as “America’s Most Aggressive Defender of Firearms Ownership.”  Their website includes the essay Some Judaic Sources on the Right to Bear Amrs:

The common thread in [Biblical] narratives is that being disarmed when danger threatens is seen as a national disaster and a cause for lament. Disarmament of individual citizens is a problem — not a solution … We indeed yearn for the time of the Final Redemption when “They shall beat their swords into plowshares” but it is a very poor idea to do this unilaterally before that point in history!

Google has a new calendar function.  Predictably, it’s really slick.

Also, try texting stuff to 46645 (GOOGL).  Try define sherried, for instance.  (Fun, huh?)  Or 1 furlong per fortnight in parsecs per microsecond.  Or 1 usd in gbp.  Or price squeezebox.  Or lakers.  Or gdp of norway.  Or the proposition 91775.  Or translate “this is impressive” to french.

So, I’m looking at my referrer logs (or, in Apache-speak, “referer logs”) and I see this page on a site called StumbleUpon.com: http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.html.  A page that clearly couldn’t have referred anyone to me.  So it’s spam, right?

Well, technically.  StumbleUpon is, in fact, forging the referrer header.  But the mass behind it is real, and the referrals are real.

It turns out to be a social-network Alexa.  And it’s really cool, and highly reliable.  You download a toolbar, tell it your interests, hit the “Stumble!” button, and find great sites — great sites that people with similar interests liked.

I have to go to bed, but I’ve been having too much fun stumbling on “Atheist/Agnostic” sites.  They are wonderful.  Haven’t hit a bad one yet.  And that’s only one interest category I’ve explored (Maybe the rest aren’t as good.  But I expect they are.)

Check it out.  It’s really good.  And check out this, this, and this for fun.

The page people were raving about at mcgees.org was Postal Cancel Art, by the way.

You can use my utility to generate a random English word.  You are welcome to call it from scripts.

“As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software.  Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share.  Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?  Is this fair?“

I’ve upgraded my Random TinyURL script (it was giving a lot of “not found” errors, and I think I figured out why: “o” and “0″ are not present in any assigned TinyURLs).  Try it out, and please report the TinyURL of any TinyURL failures (not 404s).

Niall climbed up on the coffee table today.

“What am I doing up on the table?” he asked, unprompted.

“That’s right, what are you doing on the coffee table?” countered Jenn.

“I’m on the table.  I need to get off the table,” he said.