The Last Candle

I’m slowing getting acquainted with this whole podcast thing, even if the idea has been around for a few years and even if I’ve been a TWiT fan for over a year.

For that year of TWiT, however, I listened to pretty much only TWiT, which, after a new episode’s release on Monday morning, lasted me only about an hour into the week, leaving me with recycled content for the week’s remainder. But the content draught is now gone: I’ve got enough podcast feeds running that I can listen for several hours daily of new stuff. I love the various (and varied) productions, and the afternoon music doesn’t sound so stale anymore.

Almost all of the netcasts I enjoy are about science-based topics and mostly about computer technology, but a new favorite is about a different science — the science of enjoying beer, as narrated by Beer School.

Beer School isn’t for die-hard beer snobs, the kind of folks who can name the particular hops in the beer after just one drink (disclaimer: I would not mind being that type of person, but I have a long way to go). Beer School is oriented towards the average beer drinker who’s looking to not only get a little more enjoyment out of the typical bottle or can, but who is interested in increasing the quality of the beer they drink. Best of all (as the show touts), the homework is, of course, about drinking beer.

Hosts John Foster and Motor, both from the fertile West Coast beerlands, put on a darn good show for Beer School, even if the talk can meander topics frequently and for extended periods of time (see: episode 2, Rockstar Bartender, where Angela the entergetic bartender frequently tangents the conversation amidst some helpful bar-ordering tips). The meandering isn’t a problem for me — the dialogue in podcasts can keep me as interested as the source material if the conversation is good, and Beer School’s beer-conversation is mighty good. Beer School isn’t a bleeding-from-the-ears approach to beer — it’s more like drinks with pals.

The place to start for Beer School is episode zero, It All Starts Here, where basic beer terms are explained and the jovial banter standard is established. Episode one, Getting Beyond American Tastification, has Foster and Motor laying down some basic tastes and flavors exemplified by some common American drinks, even if the hosts don’t care for the beers themselves. And then there’s the bartender episode, an episode comparing the difference of a beer’s taste if in a can or a bottle, and so on.

Like I said earlier, Beer School is not a beer snob’s podcast, but a beer fan’s pubcast, and I mean that as a testament to its goodness.

Next to try: What Ale’s Thee?, a ‘cast that appears to be similar to Beer School.

A minor but persistent project of mine lately is to move much of my Web productions and online. For example, I used to copy a single copy of bookmarks.html across computers and formats, but I now have a del.icio.us account, and instead of a local news reader I use Google Reader, which allows me to read my RSS subscriptions from any Web-interfaced machine. And of course, I now use web mail (courtesy of GMail) instead of the POP-based method I used stubbornly for many years.

The transition will continue for some time: I still write the entries for this blog on in a regular ole’ text editor and separately upload them onto the server for parsing by the Blosxom software (which is the bane of my current blogging universe, and will definitely change for the next design). And I don’t have any hardware implanted in my body or probing my brain, so the interface is still strictly 21st Century. As all things, in due time.

Anyways, I figure that if I have all this data following me around, I might as well share the “data cloud,” my ethereal blob of data, media, and statistics that implicity follows me around on the Interest, to the collective of visitors. Here we go.

• 
• Coldspire @ Twitter: my global away message.
• Seespire @ MySpace: neglected, but not ignored.
• Coldspire @ del.icio.us: bookmark collection.
• Coldspire @ YouTube: a few hours of video editing goes a short way.
• Coldspire @ Last.FM: music listening history. Reset today, just to make it interesting.
• XBox Live Gamertag Profile: Coldspire.
• GTalk: use the above e-mail address.
• AIM: Coldspire.
• Netflix: use the above e-mail address, or use this handy hyperlink for insta-add.

The only thing I notice that I’m “missing” is a image gallery service, like Flickr. (The current gallery I have stored on my site here is pretty unwieldly — it’s not “Web 2.0” enough. Ha.) Maybe when I upgrade my digital camera down the line I’ll feel a need to begin yet another service.

When the new blog design is up — and I haven’t even started pre-pre-production on it yet — all this info will be available on the usual navigation spots, but for the present and near future I’ll link this post from the right sidebar.

Porcupine Tree, the super-fantastic prog-rock group headed by the British musical genius Steven Wilson, announced a couple months ago that a US tour would commence in the Spring for the new album, Fear of a Blank Planet. This was good news. Well, mostly good — when the dates and venues were posted, the closest show to us Michiganders was Cleveland, OH, a two hour drive from my town of Ann Arbor.

While a closer location was preferable, none was available, and two hours of traveling for a Tree show is a worthy trip. I consorted with my friend at work, another big fan, and tickets have since been purchased for the much-anticipated concert. The big day: May 18th! I froth with excitement.

That was a few weeks ago. Today’s news: Porcupine Tree is playing not one, not eight, but two shows in Michigan, one in Detroit at the Majestic (the same venue they played in October ‘05) and one in Grand Rapids. The two shows fall on consecutive days at the end of May, the 30th and the 31st.

After relating the news to my friend at work we were both a little aggrevated (no fault of the band’s, of course), and there was much gnashing of the teeth. Our no-exchange, no-refund tickets were now taking us on a four-hour round trip to Cleveland; traveling to the new two shows, both in Michigan, cost either the same travel time with the benefit of not leaving the state — hey, that’s something, if minor — or, best of all, an hour and a half of travel time for the D-Town date.

And then we realized that we also had an opportunity to see three Porcupine Tree shows within two weeks.

That put us back in a very good mood.

What did I spend my time doing on today, the figuratively-greenest of days out of the entire calendar year? Nothing special. I drink good beer on pretty much every day, removing all of the need to hit a pub on this particular evening. And when I talk about “good beer,” I don’t mean a Guinness every now and then. I mean barleywine, every night. Mark it.

Actually, the day was not completely without a touch o’ the Gaelic: delicious leek and potato soup was served at lunch at the parent’s house, complemented with Irish soda bread and Irish drinking songs played over the sound system. (Yesterday we chomped on the traditional corned beef and cabbage for dinner, as well as the ever-palatable Irish soda bread and Irish cream-Guinness ale mixers, the latter known as Sky and Storm.)

After finishing up today’s meal, we watched a classic Blarney-kissed film: The Maltese Falcon. Okay, maybe that terrific film doesn’t have much of the Blarney, but it certainly had plenty of Bogey.

Finally, I leave this not-so-special St. Patrick’s Day posting with a recommended Irish music podcast and a screencapture of an Irish pub from a favorite adventure game, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars.

Notice: the fiddler under the window (the game music matched his playing), the genial full-bearded man behind the bar and the two friendly local chaps on stools in front, the gentleman in the foreground checking his watch, and the elderly fellow on the right side having a sneeze and playing with a bit of string. That’s a classic adventure game environment if I ever pixel-hunted one, and I’ve hunted a few.