blog.circusgeek

a personal blog with nerdy bits thrown in

Category: Beer

  • BBQ & Moon

    Company BBQ atop the Ecotrust building Tonight Kelly and I attended my employer’s annual BBQ, held this year at the Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center (aka ‘The Ecotrust Building’) in NW Portland. We’d taken the bus into town, not sure what would happen but figuring this way we were safe in case we had too much to drink. That’s right, we’re responsible that way. 🙂 We arrived at 6pm sharp, when the event started, and made our way to the rooftop of the building. Pretty fun spot to have such a gathering, fully catered and hosted, with two kegs of beer (Black Butte Porter and Mirror Pond Pale Ale, both from Deschutes Brewery), along with wine and mixed drinks. The food itself was OK, but nothing worth really mentioning. The atmosphere was however really nice. It was a cool day today, and an even cooler evening, but the skies were clear, and the view over the Pearl was great. Had a really fun time chatting with coworkers, and introducing Kelly to a few of my many new coworkers that had been hired over the past few months.

    Moon & Sixpence We left the party at around 9pm, walking down to take the MAX train towards home, with a “short” trip to the Moon & Sixpence. We ended up hanging out there for quite a while, chatting about art, travel, and my continued annoyance of how many tourist destinations in Europe don’t allow photography (I’ve determined that it’s all to force you to buy the books that they sell at the gift shops on way out, not about protecting the art / sculptures from the dangers of flash photography like they claim).

    After getting home, I got to try a beer I’d bought earlier today from the local grocery store to celebrate Oktoberfest, something from Bayern Brewing (oddly, from Missoula Montana) called Oktoberfest Lager, which wasn’t so much a lager as it was a dark, malty märzen style beer. But it was pretty tasty though.

  • Mash Tun, and Kelly the Chicken Eater

    Chicken, your days are numberedAfter one of those “why can’t things go my way?” work days, I went and got a haircut and met Kelly at Mash Tun for some beers.

    After that, we went to New Seasons to pick up some dinner. After Kelly’s post regarding her decision to start eating chicken again, we’d picked up a couple parmesan-breaded chicken breasts, figuring we could add some marinara sauce and cheese to make a delicious (and ‘low shock’) meal out of it. Kelly raved the whole way through the meal. It was both funny and odd, seeings how since we’d started dating she has been a vegetarian (well, kinda, as her post explains).

    Free-range, hormone-free chickens BEWARE! There’s another mouth to feed! 🙂

  • Shanghai’d again

    Tonight I met my brother Travis, and friends Eric M and Ghost Dog at the Shanghai Tunnel (yes, again) for some pool, grub, and beers after work. My kid bro Chad also showed up, as did Mrs. Ghost Dog and some of her friends later (picking up GD). Had a good time hanging out, though I was a feeling a bit slow, having been out until 1:30am the last night, running on almost 5 hours of sleep. I ended up eating the same noodle bowl I had the last night (yup, it’s that good), and had a Guinness or two too many before hopping the MAX -> bus -> home. Got home just after 11:30pm. So tired. So very, very tired.

  • The Tunnel, and Editors

    Editors at Berbati's Pan, September 19, 2007Tonight Kelly, Miranda and I went to see Editors play at Berbati’s Pan. We’d started out meeting next door at the Shanghai Tunnel for some drinks and dinner. Kelly and I met there at about 6pm. Miranda joined us shortly after. We had a great time chatting, and I had the delicious noodle bowl (veggies, chicken, and curry sauce) along with a few pints of Guinness. It wasn’t until we’d been there for a little bit when Miranda mentioned that the show didn’t start until 9:30… and there were two opening bands. Obviously this meant it was going to be a late night.

    We got into Berbati’s shortly after 9pm and decided not to stand around in the venue the whole time so went through to Berbati’s bar / restaurant area for a bit to sit down. We ended up missing the first opening act, Ra Ra Riot, but went in to catch the crazy, yet fun Biffy Clyro, a loud rock band from Scotland, the singer of whom Miranda commented looked like “a cross between Animal and Charles Manson“. Pretty fair description. They were really good, just not quite what I was expecting as an opening act for Editors.

    Editors came onstage at around 11:15pm, and put on a GREAT show. We’d seen them before last year at Dante’s, but this was a much better show. Not only was this show to support their fantastic second album An End Has A Start, so they had more material, but their stage presence had also grown. It was an awesome show.

  • Bro, Brew, & Bond… James Bond

    Last night my brother Travis and I got together at Moon & Sixpence for the first time in several weeks to chat over some beers and grub. It was a lot of fun hanging out with the bro again, and he’d loaded his iPod with dozens of photos of my nephew Henry which were pretty fun to flip through.

    Today SuperSweetCo released another version of the fancy product I’ve been working on, and ended another development cycle for for the next great version due out in three weeks. In the midst of the flurry of activity trying to get a lot of new changes in, I met several friends at a burger joint on Broadway called the Red Coach for a hamburger, fries, and a soda. Fun lunch, and a nice distraction from the hectic work day. At the end of the day, after scrambling to get one big improvement implemented, the team demo’d the new stuff, and then embarked on a helluva happy hour.

    Happy HourFor the past few months, during the ‘release week’ different groups or departments within the company have been “sponsoring” happy hours. It started with the engineering team, and has worked it’s way through support, sales, etc, until tonight which was the happy hour driven by the SuperSweetCo management. Each group has tried to top the previous one, and tonight was no exception, though there’s no doubt that the managers clearly outdid everything before it. The theme (each of these happy hours has had a theme of some sort) was James Bond. They dressed in tuxedos, had bartenders serving martinis, and hired a company to come in with blackjack, craps, and roulette tables. Everybody was given vouchers for chips to play with, and at a later point in the evening, people cashed in their chips for raffle tickets to win new iPod Nano’s and Shuffle’s. It was a blast.

    Afterward, I walked with Mr & Mrs L. to SC’s place in the Pearl before getting a taxi home. Overall a brilliant night out. Though I’m exhausted now, both from the work week, and the evening itself.

  • The week ends

    Hooray for short work weeks! Aside from continuing to tweak my home network & server setup, the week was pretty fun. I got to design and work on some pretty fun stuff for SuperSweetCo, and on Wednesday evening I (and some other neighborhood friends) visited Miranda & Brian at their new place. I had a great time hanging out in their yard, even if it meant we were keeping them from unpacking. 🙂

    Last night Kelly and I went to the Mash Tun for a pint and some grub. Had a nice time chatting and hanging out.

    This morning, however, I woke up feeling a bit wobbly in the stomach, so decided it best if I worked from home. That said, I managed to get a lot done and by the afternoon I felt fine. Not sure if it was the food at the Tun the previous night (which I doubt, since I’ve had their food many, many times) or the sickness that seems to be spreading around the office for the past week or two, but whatever, all I can say is that I’m no longer ill. Hooray!

    After the working hours, I grabbed a beer and moved from my home office to the back yard. I’m determined to make the most out of what’s left of the summer in my back yard, before it’s too late. I sat out and tinkered for a bit on the laptop, set out the sprinklers, and chatted with friends. A bit later, I got to IM’ing with a coworker who was going to dinner down the street from me (to the Concordia Ale House). While I had already decided to stay in for the night, it was nice to spend some time with my coworker/friend and his better half. After two pints of Hobgoblin and one pint of Terminal Gravity Extra Special Golden, I walked back home and chatted with Kelly a bit about her night at class, and her upcoming day.

    Oh, and in case you haven’t read it, Kelly posted about her trip to New York / Jersey last week. Read it, and be jealous (like I was). 🙂

  • I broked the internets!

    Haven’t written in a few days. I intended to, but I couldn’t. I broked the internets! 🙂

    It all started Saturday, which was truely a day to myself. I didn’t leave the house except for some grocery shopping (translated: I bought beer and some meat to grill). I spent most of the day tinkering around my home office, backing up data, updating software, and researching some new computer equipment to buy. Fun stuff, yeah? Yeah, well it was for me. And, it was nice to spend a day doing practically nothing. Not seeing anybody, not going anywhere, just hanging out by myself. Well, me and the cat I guess.

    The research was for a new WiFi access point. I have been running on a dinosaur, the original Apple Airport (known as the Graphite model) since around the year of our lord 2000 AD. It was old, slow, and though it worked, I’ve recently been using the wireless a lot more (what with the new laptop) and it’s shocking how long it takes to transfer a large file over that old, slow WiFi connection. I also wanted to move to a WiFi router, something new that could take the place of my old WiFi access point and my old ethernet switch. One power plug instead of two, one or two less cables snaking along the wall, etc. This, after loads of research, lead me to the newly released Apple Airport Extreme (1 gigabit ethernet version).

    While out grocery shopping Saturday I tried to visit the nearest Mac store and buy one, but they’d closed. Oh well. I spent the night surfing the net and watching season 3 of Black Books, a very funny / snarky English comedy series.

    Sunday however, I was able to purchase my new toy. So I got home with it in the afternoon and set in getting it all hooked up. One thing I knew was going to happen in all of this was that my current setup was going to break a lot… my old setup was such that my broadband modem fed into my Linux server, which then fed to my ethernet switch, which then fed into my old WiFi access point. Long story short, a LOT of configuration was done on my Linux server to get all this working… and I had to undo it all, and do a lot of new stuff, to get everything back up and running.

    I had however underestimated how much of a pain some of it would be. Getting my network up and running and getting my computers online was really easy. That part only took 10 minutes. What was more troublesome was getting my Linux server happy again, and then discovering some things that meant some larger changes to my setup (new nameservers, routing for my domain name, port forwarding, blah blah blah). What that all means is that Circusgeek was offline for a couple few days until everything got sorted out. Which, as far as I can tell, happened today sometime. Now I’m finally able to post to my blog again. Hence, the long-winded post. 🙂

    Now that it’s all running, things are faster and I’m happier overall. More than anything, I’m just glad to have everything running again. What a pain in the ass!

  • Quite the day

    Interesting day today. Beside some time spent doing typical work tasks early in the day, I had my review (which went really well), and the afternoon was spent doing filming & recording for a video demo of a new feature of SuperSweetCo’s flagship product. I was picked to do this work since I was responsible for designing the feature, but it was a pretty stressful thing to do, and I now fully appreciate professional voice actors. It’s hard work, trying to time a script to a video. I’m pretty sure it was dreadful, but I won’t won’t know for sure until early next week.

    After work, I spent some time hanging out with some coworkers; first in the office break room sipping on beers, and later at another coworker’s place in NW Portland. The coworker was hosting a poker night, and other SuperSweetCo employees were attending so I figured I’d go hang out for a bit. While I didn’t join in on the gaming it was nice to spend some time with coworkers in a setting far removed from work.

    After that, Snooks and I went to Moon & Sixpence for some beers before calling it a night. Had a great time hanging out.

    Oh, and Kelly seems to be having a great time. All day she was taunting me with photos from her camera of her visit to the Met, MOMA, pubs, and photos of New York city at night. She also sent me a text message about how she got her photo taken with David Hyde Pierce. And no, I’m not jealous of her adventures or anything. Heck no.

    Oh, and I’m very annoyed that it’s the last day in August, and watching it get darker earlier and earlier every day. I already miss the days it was light until almost 10pm. Hrmph!

  • Happy Birthday Travis, & “all byyy myyseeellf”

    Happy birthday Travis! You’re 30 now. Not only a parent, but an old man too!* 🙂

    Last night we drove out to the home town for dinner at my parents house. We arrived just in time to hear my brother shooting old hard drives with his semi-automatic assault rifle thing (I can’t remember what it is, I keep thinking it’s an AR-15, not sure) from 100 yards away. After a delicious, home-made fish and chip dinner, he raced his fancy remote-controlled car up and down the gravel road. Yes, he’s a parent. Yes, it’s a scary, scary thing. 🙂

    After some delicious apple pie and ice cream we came home and I zonked out cold on the bed, fully dressed, at around 10:30 or so. Food coma. Urgh.

    Today I took Kelly to the airport for her visit with our friends ‘back east’. I got up early and worked from home, then drove her to the airport, and then drove to work (something I’ve only done twice before in the 1.25 years I’ve been at SuperSweetCo). Of course, the work day kept me busy with meetings and design tasks, so it was as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Except I got to drive home rather than take the bus. Now I’m home, sipping on beers, and it’s just me. And will be until Monday. *sniff*.

    Oh well, I’ve got work to do anyway (that I’m putting off at the moment), and there’s a lot of little things I hope to get done around the house while she’s gone. She called around 6pm and arrived safely. Hopefully she’ll be posting about her adventures.

  • Spamalot!

    Saw Spamalot tonight, but first, a recap from my busy week: WORK. Yup, that’s pretty much all I did. I spent my time working on a new feature for SuperSweetCo‘s flagship product. It was a lot of fun to create (from creating the mockups to the actual development) but it was really complex and demanded my full attention through the week, both day and night.

    Friday evening Kelly and I brought dinner to my brother, sis-in-law, and “Hank” my new nephew. Kelly had spent the afternoon making delicious pasta dishes that we shared (well, not Hank, obviously) and later Travis made me hold Hank. I’m not comfortable holding babies, I fear dropping ’em (they can be awfully squirmy, hehe). It was a nice evening, though towards the end of the evening I was laying on the couch about to fall asleep, and it was only 10pm! By the time we got home and unloaded the dishes from the car I was done and just went to bed.

    Today was good, since I’d gotten around 8 hours sleep (despite our cat’s earnest attempts at nudging me awake every 20 minutes, starting around 5:30am). I spent the day tinkering around the house, but did manage to take my newly fixed bike out for a spin. It was a fun ride, but I didn’t get very far from home because I soon discovered just how out of shape certain leg muscles were. After getting back I cleaned up and Kelly and I headed into town to meet friends for dinner and a show.

    We met Miranda & Brian, and Mr. & Mrs. Ghost Dog at the Goose Hollow Inn for dinner and drinks. Had a nice time on the deck, the weather was great, and naturally so was the sandwich (mmmm… reuben). After that though we all piled into Ghost Dog’s car and drove down to the theater. It was Monty Python time!

    Spamlot!Spamalot was very entertaining and while I’m not a big fan of musicals, this show was a lot of fun. The writing, sets, costumes, and cast were fantastic. There were a lot of changes from Holy Grail, such as Dennis (Arthur: Old woman! Dennis: Man. Arthur: Man. Sorry. What knight lives in that castle over there?) becoming Sir Galahad, and Sir Lancelot falling for Herbert (heh), but all the modifications were very funny and I just had to suppress my “but that’s not how it goes” reactions. 🙂

    There were some additions to the plot (such as the Lady of the Lake being present through the story, and including the song Always Look in the Bright Side of Life, originally from Life of Brian) and some scenes from the film that I felt were conspicuously absent, such as the Castle Anthrax (“Oh wicked, bad, naughty Zoot!”) and the Bridge of Death (“Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three”). But in the end, the it was a lot of fun, and those who aren’t as obsessed with Monty Python wouldn’t notice, and just have a good time.

    After the show, we all went over to Moon & Sixpence for a few pints and some snacks before calling it a night. Great time, and thank gang for coming out / hauling us around town.