astro-better post

I contributed to a post on Astro Better asking about mosaicing software.

Year in review

It's been just over a year since I started this blog. I posted a LOT more than I thought I would. Also, I apparently dropped the tradition of reviewing beers. So I'll start by reviewing some beers!

Mountain Sun Hummingbird - a strong honey-ale (meade-beer?) brewed with orange blossom honey. Slightly darker than a typical Belgian Golden but similar in style. The beer is mildly sweet but very drinkable. Hmm... there are flavors I should mention but they escape me.

Mountain Sun/Avery Van Diemens - brewed with Tasmanian Pepper Berry, this is a very curious, semi-dark beer. When I first sampled it, I tasted a little bit of pepper kick at the end, but couldn't really identify any other flavors. Yesterday I sampled it next to a burrito with some somewhat spicy salsa. Somehow, since my mouth was already sensitized to spiciness, the flavor I got was root beer (sassafras?). It was... odd. Pretty good, but I didn't end up purchasing a glass.

Moving on to code. I don't know why I haven't mentioned this, but with my discovery of svn, I started uploading my code to the webternets: agpy is my Google Code page and includes a number of useful python codes, especially readcol and gaussfitter, which I have tested and used extensively since writing them. Python is still a long way from a cohesive astrolib code base, but with individual contributions, the STSCI development group, and APLpy underway, we're getting closer.

Blogroll

Since you're now subscribing (I'm assuming, at the moment and for the next... say... year, Kyle's the only one who will see this), here's a list of other blogs to check out:
http://sketchbrewing.blogspot.com/
http://thedrog.blogspot.com/

I'd send you to some other ones too, but they're not complete. I have vague ambitions to write a genuine science blog for the international year of astronomy and public outreach.... but I don't really know if that will go anywhere.

google accident

I'm still trying to figure out why google doesn't link to my page for the term died in a google accident, but we'll see if this page ever changes that. I link to XKCD #369 from that page with that phrase.

meta

Why a blog? I've been strongly opposed to blogs for the longest time (after all, Desert Strike coined the word BLOG as an acronym for building), so why use one now?

1. link power - more links to my own pages if done correctly
2. google owns the blogger
2.a. google made it really easy
3. it's easier to add content here than to my real 'web page' which is already too content-heavy. Still, my web page is more useful for displaying code, my cv, etc.
4. needed a place to post beer reviews / brewing related content that doesn't fit on a normal web page unless I made a blog there
5. easiest way to take notes that I can't just accidentally delete...

and now that I've made this post,
6. because I like metahumour