Double Tall Iced Mocha, Lite on the Chocolate

So almost every work day I go to Revolutions for a Double Tall Iced Mocha, lite on the chocolate. There is a sticker they have hanging on the wall that says “Enjoyin’ my coffee.” which of course is a line from one of my favorite movies The Big Lebowski.

A while back I noticed the sticker had a URL, http://lebowskifest.com. I kept thinking to myself when I saw the sticker subsequent times that I should check out the website. Today I was at work and something happened that reminded me of the movie, which in turn reminded me of the sticker, and of course the URL.

Enter Lebowski Fest, a celebration of all things Lebowski. I fell in love with The Big Lebowski when I first saw it, and have gone through phases where I would fall asleep to it at night a couple of times a week at least. Considering that this years Lebowski Fest is less than a month away and I have softball playoffs that weekend, I cant make it this year. I am going to plan on it for next year, and maybe try to go the smaller Lebowski Fest West.

Maude: “You can imagine where it goes from here…”

Dude: “He fixes the cable?”

This appears to be old news, but I just came across it today. Dan Freeman is a retired 60 year old computer consultant who has decided that in 2005 he will have a beer in 1000 different bars.

He is steadily approaching 600 and on track to finish up by December. It appears as though we walks to most of the bars, and has actually lost 3 pounds since starting this endeavor.

This reminds me of a plan I came up with shortly after high school. I wanted to have a cup of coffee at every Dennys in the continental US. I have only been to about 40 out of the 1600, and I lost my stash of reciepts over the years.

Links:

1000 Bars: The Begining

Seattle Times Coverage

The industrial league softball season is wrapping up. We have our last regular season game the weekend of July 9th
and the playoffs begin the 10th. All things considered we have had a good season, and after this weekend we are now tied for 3rd place with The Twilight Exit. It looks like our run differential will give us the tie breaker. Here are the current league standings:

It has been almost a year since I setup the Seattle Drunks Wiki (What is a wiki?).

While it does not a get a ton of attention, like all good wikis we have our wiki gnomes. A wiki gnome is someone who without announcement volunteers their time to keep a wiki up to date, fix broken pages, remove spam, and vandalism.

On the SeattleWireless.net wiki there have been many wiki gnomes over the years most of whom we have not met, primarily because they don’t live in Seattle. They just stumble on the wiki one day find it useful and contribute their time.

The SeattleDrunks.net wiki has one wiki gnome that I know of, whom I happen to work with. He has taken on the primary responsibility of maintaining the fortune cookie page. The fortune cookie page is a collection of quotes related to drinking, which serves as a pool of quotes for a macro that displays random quotes on the front page.

The current count of quotes on this page is 339!

Ideally the wiki would be used as much as the Caffeinated and Unstrung wiki which tracks coffee shops with Wi-Fi. However we have not put nearly as much work into it, and yes the color scheme is sub-optimal. One of these days when I am rich and famous I will dedicate more time to this project.

On a side note, I also just noticed that MoinMoin (our wiki software of choice) now has a macro that will draw graph of stats, like this one displaying number of page views vs page edits.

I have registered my first Bookcrossing book. The idea is same as the “Where’s George” stamps you see on dollar bills. You register your book, you label it with BC-ID (book crossing id) and note letting the person know about the site, then you leave the book somewhere. You can then track your book to see where it ends up.

My book’s BCID: 037-2968002, I am going to leave at Revolutions on my lunch break.

Meloknee’s post about her past of poetry inspired me to dig through all of my old notebooks and journals. It is always strange to revisit the things I thought about as a teenager. This is a poem I wrote about 11 years ago, I was either 16 or 17.

See more …

First things first:

I am not alone. I must say that OneFineJay is braver man than me to experiment with a McDonalds cheese steak.

I was having a conversation yesterday about Cheese Steaks and was reminded that I never posted anything about my Roxy’s Deli experience.

Sometime last summer Jason and I went for a bike ride on the Burke Gilman. On our return we stopped at Roxy’s. A typical sidewalk A-frame sign screamed “Authentic Philly Cheese Steak” or something along those lines.

Well I can’t refuse a challenge like that so I decided to take them up on the A-Frame offer. First off the environment in Roxy’s is very lively and the staff friendly. I informed the person behind the counter of my desire for a Philly Cheese Steak, not brandishing my badge from the Cheese Steak Police.

Upon accepting delivery of the sandwich, I immediately noted that the bread did not appear to be the traditional hoagie, but a haute monde grain product. As I looked deeper into the sandwich I also observed that provolone cheese was melted over the chopped up rib-eye steak (some will disagree that provolone is not acceptable, the streets will flow with the blood of the non-believers). Roxy’s 0, Cheese Steak Police 2. The last short coming which could be seen as a benefit to the health conscious, the grease or lack there off. Cheese Steaks should ooze grease, yes it aint pretty but that’s the facts mam.

To there credit the meat was of good quality, and all in all the sandwich tasted fantastic, however it did not taste like a Cheese Steak.

I had a good dining experience as did Jason. On a side note, Jason returned a couple of months later and claims to have had received food poisoning on his second visit.
This may have just been an excuse to get out of hanging out with his friends, but we’ll let you decide.

Interview with Marcus Ranum

I normally wouldn’t post something that has been linked of off Slashdot, however I really enjoyed reading Marcus’s interview and rants on computer and network security.

I was introduced to firewalls by someone who was of the “Proxy firewall” school of thought versus “Packet Filtering”. The
first firewalls I setup/used were Marcus’s firewall products (specifically gauntlet, and the older TIS Firewall Toolkit).
I was introduced to the concept of firewalls and network security in an environment where security policies were taken
very seriously and outbound traffic was scrutinized just as much as inbound traffic and we took the “If it is not
explicity allowed then drop it” approach.

Little did I know at the time, this was the exception not the norm. My first role where dealing with security was part of
my job was in what was probably the most security focused/minded environment I have worked in to date. I have spent loads
of time after that job convincing the people I work with that this is something that needs to be part of their process,
business, and lifestyle.

Anyways, this interview inspired a little walk down memory lane for me.