Denver - Oskar Blues IV, The Brewery

After dinner at the Oskar Blues restaurant, we headed over to the Tasty Weasel, which is their brewery/onsite bar.  The guy we'd met earlier had told us tours were still on, despite Easter Sunday, but when we got there we were told it was closed, and one of the guys in charge was in his bike clothes, fat tired bike in the back of his running pick up.  He stopped what he was doing and took us inside so I could buy some beer.  I love it when you can buy beer at the brewery. There's something seriously wrong in Minnesota.  This is in their work place.


I don't think you can see one from this view, but they have a few Surly cans on the wall.  They were very complementary of Surly.  Note the live music that happens at the brewery.  Their beer is in cans, but it's delicious.


He couldn't get into the beer cabinet, and had to go find me some from the back.  But this had a nice display of their cans.  Next time I buy a beer fridge, I'm getting a glass door.


This is what happens to all the leftover cans.  Those blocks are hard to move.


I don't know what to make of this.  I didn't want to hold him up, so I didn't ask.


These were brand new.  They like to keep the kids busy while the parents are on the beer tour.  And I imagine they're fun to play if you're there drinking, or if you're an employee.  We need these in the basement at my workplace where the developers have shared workspace.


It looked like this at Schell's when they bought Grain Belt and all the leftover can stock.  But the black cans are much stealthier looking.


Second picture of Eryn and I near the equipment, the outer wall of the in-brewery tap room in the background.  Great brewery!  I want to go back some day when they're running the tour or just having happy hour.

Denver - Oskar Blues III

Very cool - Oskar Blues has people who just meet up to play blue grass and drink beer.  Eryn liked it that there were so many guitars.


This doesn't look comfortable at all.  But my wife would probably prefer it to my kitchen drawer that achieves the same historical perspective on my drinking history.  Maybe all those nubbins are deceptively comfortable, like a full body massage.


More fountains made out of kegs...I have a keg.  I should try this.


See...purdy.  I wonder if my neighbors would approve.


The Oskar Blues tower.  A giant can of beer.


Finally, a picture of the front of the restaurant.  Eryn loved the ribs.  And the pulled pork. And the wings.  Reminded me quite a bit of the food and ambiance at Dinosaur Barbecue in Rochester, NY.

Bar Trash

A shout out for a high school friend who's got a shared blog about the life of a bartender, Bar Trash.  You can find what you shouldn't do if you don't want to be considered a douche by the bartender, what bartenders think about kinds of customers, and gems such as the celebrity bartender trivia, which includes, "Asked if he could smack me on the ass and called me ma’am. Answer…Brett Favre."

Denver - Oskar Blues II

The women's bathroom had Flash Dance on the door.  The men's bathroom was a plethora of old album covers.  I listened to the soundtrack from 2001 repeatedly as a kid.


And the soundtrack from Close Encounters!  Someone at Oskar Blue's is a serious nerd.


Quite the collection to look at while you're taking a whiz.


But there's more.  Art...beautiful, wonderful art.  This is fuzzy, so I suspect you can't tell it's Sheryl Crow.


Alison Kraus is a bit closer to real life.


And the point here isn't Amanda Bynes half dressed, although she was very good in Easy A with Emma Stone as the Bible banger.  The point is the Ten Fidy, which was delicious, though very thick, and that Fat Squirrel, from just over the border in Wisconsin, was another placer in the top 25 new beers.

Animated Gifs

I saw the link to this in a tweet from Adam Savage.  They're not new, they've been doing the same thing on The Chive for as long as I've been perusing the Daily Afternoon Randomness, particularly the "wind blowing the hair" style animations which, as far as I'm concerned, are the lamest of them.  One of the interesting things about the animated gifs on The Chive is that you can spend quite a while watching what seems to be a static photo only to have it shift for the briefest of instants.  Bit of a game.

But I recommend the article by Fast Code Design, because there are some beautiful examples of how to do it right with the taxi in the window, the barber pole, and the man with the paper.

[Link to Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg's "How to Create an Animated Gif" in the Atlantic].

Denver - Oskar Blues I

Eryn and I flew into Denver today to meet my parents and grandmother so we could drive my grandmother back north to the farm in Montana.  Usually we'd head down to Tucson to pick her up, but time was tight with ballet (Eryn, not me), so we only had Sunday morning through Saturday morning to make things happen.  We were still going to head down to Tucson, but my parents wanted to see more of Eryn, so they met us in Denver to trade grandma.  The best thing about that is the beer.  I haven't been to Denver before (just skirted it), and haven't even been in the area long enough to tour a brewery before, so this was my big chance.  I'm not talking about Budweiser and Coors.  I'm talking about good breweries.  Odell.  Great Divide.  Oskar Blues.  Breweries that are like Surly and Summit.

Today we went to Oskar Blues.  Unfortunately, it wasn't doing tours on Easter.  But the restaurant was open, and the guy who was on his way out of the brewery to bike stopped long enough to sell me some G'Knight from the brewery and let me look around for a minute.  Hell of a brewery.  The focus is beer.  Bikes.  Kids.  Fun.  I'm jealous.  That's what a job should look like.

This is a flight from Oskar Blues restaurant, just up the street from the brewery.  Couple of IPAs on the list.  One is 10% and smells like it's made out of crushed flowers, there are so many finishing hops in it.



I liked the flight so much I took a second picture with my stout in the foreground.  As a second beer, I had a glass of TenFidy.  That's like drinking concentrated Guinness.  It's got some real chew to it.


I know this is fuzzy, but vaguely readable, in case you want to know what was in the flight.  Check out the % on the alcohol.  Might as well be drinking two beers for every one.


Ingenious use of a keg.


Eryn trying to "pick up" the keg.


A better attempt.


When that didn't work, she went to a straight fashion shoot.


Girls' bathroom.  Flashdance is how you could tell.  What a feelin'.  I must be peein'.

Peculiar Similarities

I noticed this outside of work the other day.


Looks suspiciously close to this...which is a completely separate local start up.

Seafood Pot Pie

A highschool classmate of mine, Raquel, sent me a recipe for seafood pot pie.  I finally got around to trying it tonight.  Pretty good, although Pooteewheet claims it needs fewer scallops and more sriracha.

Scooter and Pooteewheet's seafood pot pies.  Can you guess which one is mine?  You'll note I didn't carefully cut the edges.  I thought about it and then decided extra crust was extra crust for the pot pie and that was a good thing.  Constructive mess.  As further evidence of my food should taste good but not always look good, you'll see my fingerprints in the quickly rolled pastry tops which I had to create because I only had two bottoms and twice as much pot pie eatums as fit in one.


Baked.  One sinkhole, but a nice color.  Don't ask me how long I baked it with the bake dial set to "off" before I finally figured out they weren't actually cooking.


A piece of seafood pot pie artfully plated in the John Deere bowl.


A little heavy on the liquid, but Pooteewheet was spooning it over her serving, so it doesn't go to waste.  I'm wondering how I'll reheat 1.67 seafood pot pies without a functional microwave, however.  Tricky.

• 1 bag (12 oz.) cooked frozen baby shrimp - thawed
• 1/2 lb. bay scallops
• 1/2 lb. of your favorite white fish or crab meat
• 1 cup sliced carrots
• 1 cup frozen green peas
• 1/2 cup sliced celery
• 1/3 cup butter
• 1/3 cup chopped onion
• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon celery seed
• 1- 3/4 cups chicken or vegetable broth
• 2/3 cup milk
• 2 (9 inch) unbaked pie crusts

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

In a saucepan, combine carrots, peas, and celery. Add water to cover and boil for 15 minutes. Remove from heat, drain and set aside. (you can microwave instead)

In the saucepan over medium heat, cook onions in butter until soft and translucent. Stir in flour, salt, pepper, and celery seed. Slowly stir in broth and milk. Simmer over medium-low heat until thick. Remove from heat and set aside.

Place the vegetable mixture in bottom pie crust. Place seafood on top of the vegetables. Pour hot liquid mixture over all of it. Cover with top crust, seal edges, and cut away excess dough. Make several small slits in the top to allow steam to escape.

Bake in the preheated oven for 35 to 40 minutes, or until pastry is golden brown and filling is bubbly. Cool for 10 minutes before serving.

Bicycling Has Started

I went out both Thursday and Saturday last week.  While the rides wouldn't qualify as sprints, I would say they were "aggressive" for early spring for me.  I did 17.75 on Thursday, biking down to the St. Paul Yacht Club, and then climbing back out of the valley to home.  And on Saturday, I did almost 36 miles, biking into Minneapolis to meet Ming at Hell's Kitchen, and then bicycling home.  That was a lot of hills.  I was running a bit ragged by the time I got home and I don't think I really recovered even by Sunday.  Erik felt bad that my wife had to wake me up to answer his page about whether I could drive him to Code Camp on Sunday.

The St. Paul Yacht Club. Most of the time I bike under the bridge and along the river.  Not exactly possible this year.  I noticed on Saturday that the trail that goes down around the base of Fort Snelling was flooded as well, which I've never seen.  I usually take the trail that doesn't take me down a big hill and back up, but I've been down there enough that it was surprising.

Thursday.  The snow was not yet gone.  On the way back, I saw a couple of co-workers at Lucky's.  I waved and yelled hello, but I don't think they quite identified me as the crazy cyclist out so early in the spring.  Note the orange Specialized bicycle!  I've had it out twice in the potholes without destroying the rims.  The new rims and weight loss are working well.  I'm 50# under my heaviest at the moment and 40# under what I was sometime around Christmas.  That's a lot less stress on a back wheel.  The ride on Saturday burned over 2000 calories, so it's exciting to go into the bicycling season with a low enough weight that I can drink 10-20 beers a week without so much as a blip on my calorie counting.

Saturday morning by the river.  Very high.  It might have been on the banks if not for the cement barriers.  Right after this a particularly attractive woman was dragging a "road closed" sign across the shallower road out of the river valley, so I had to take the steep path up to Carlson School of Management (after stopping to watch her drag the sign.  I didn't want to get in her way).  The people who are jogging, dragging road closed signs, and helping staff early morning marathon training booths, at 7:30 a.m. on Saturday morning are a somewhat attractive lot overall.  I never thought to ride around the river early, when I was single, to find someone who fit my early morning habits.  If I had, I would have never met Pooteewheet unless I was looking across the river through her window (her dorm was almost exactly across the river from here, and that fairly open grassy field you can see is where she dumped me while we sat on a picnic table and bunnies frolicked, or something similar starting with the letter f, nearby).

This really surprised me.  Grandma's!  It's a big hole in the ground full of concrete.  There are pictures on this blog of me standing on the far edge of that parking ramp taking pictures of the collapsed I35 bridge.  And I think there are stories of Kyle and I getting absolutely ill on Special Export at Grandma's, and how I was too hungover to stay awake during class, but had to go because they were giving out the info for the final test, and that I stopped by Hardee's (also gone) on the way back, bumped into Mike R. from high school (whose sister lived with Kim W., my high school crush, in an apartment below Kyle and I when we lived in Cedar Riverside, crack towers as the complex is sometimes known), got a whole bag of roast beef sandwiches and, to the best of my memory, nearly made Kyle heave by repeatedly offering him multiple roast beef sandwiches while he tried to clear his system of the Special Export dregs I'd voided several hours earlier.  Of course, I haven't been back there in forever as Town Hall is only a few hundred feet away.

Kinect for .NET

Can anyone tell me if I have to buy a special cord - e.g. this one - in order to hook my daughter's Kinect to my Win7 laptop so that I can code against it for fun?  I told Pooteewheet I'd like to code up a game based on obscene gestures and I mean to do it.  In particular, I'd like to code an app that tells you what binary value you're holding up if you flash it a few fingers.  I suspect that might be too granular, but it would be fun to try.

I got the drivers and code installed today, only to discover I couldn't plug the thing in.  I put a question out to the guy who presented at Code Camp yesterday (I missed it - I was at another presentation), but haven't heard back yet.

Resources:

• Silverlight + Kinect (what I'm running on my machine - it runs, and then tells me it can't find the Kinect).
• Mike Hodnick's Github website for .NET and Kinect - (Mike Hodnick Twin Cities Code Camp bio)
• Hilarious adapter article for Kinect with the punchline, "Or, you could just use the adapter that comes with the Kinect unit itself."

Any .NET programmers I know looking for a job?

Any .NET programmers I know looking for a job?  Because this seems like a nice one (not knowing the salary, of course).  I think I might have applied when I was a .NET developer and not a .NET manager.  The skill set fits my core and I could have brought additional skills to the table.

Tech dot MN has some good job postings out there at the moment.  It's fun to see what people are hiring for at the moment, particularly after Code Camp yesterday.

Required skills for this position are:

• 10+ years of demonstrated experience designing, developing and managing the deployment of Microsoft based software solutions
• 5+ years of hands-on programming experience in Microsoft C#.Net (v2.0 – v3.5), ASP .Net, ADO.Net, XML, DHTML, HTML, HTTP Protocol, Java script, and Web Services

Kate and William Contest

Katie that I talk to on Twitter, whose father apparently owns Scooters Plus (it's cool what you learn about people if you just read their tweets and posts long enough), pointed out this William and Kate look alike contest Brit's is sponsoring because she's looking for a William.  I'm disappointed I can't recommend that my cousin-in-law Rick put his name in the hat, because I suspect if he won a trip to London with Katie, his wife would be seriously annoyed.

But I mention it here, just in case he finds it and applies without my direct influence.

+ Appearance on Twin Cities Live on April 28th modeling royal wedding fashions.
+ A manicure at Blush Salon
+ A year subscription to Mpls.St.Paul Magazine
+ A $100 Gift Certificate to Max’s
+ A $100 Gift Certificate to Fogo de Chão
+ Photos on mspmag.com party patrol blog
+ Special VIP seating for the Royal Wedding viewing party
+ Be entered to win a 10 day trip for 2 to London courtesy of Sun Country Airlines and Trafalger valued at $5,400!

50 Books Every Child Should Read

One of the better lists of books every child should read, courtesy of The Independent.  I like the recommendation that children should be reading 50 books a year!  That's an aggressive reading schedule.  Even in my best years of reading as an adult, I wasn't quite reading that much.  However, I do agree with one of the comments, WTH, No Roald Dahl?  Those were definitely my favorites as a kid.  I still remember reading James and Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.  After 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and War of the Worlds, those probably kept me reading more than anything else (with some diversions into Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators).

Kinnect

Eryn has been playing with the Kinnect at Best Buy for the last month and asked if it was something we could get.  I made her the offer that if she paid for the Kinnect (which I valued at $120 before really paying attention), I'd buy her an Xbox for her birthday.  It gets rid of a little of her "surplus" money and gives her a stake in the gamebox so she feels like it's something she really owns, not just something we bought her.  I remember co-purchasing our Atari system with  my brother and paying for my own tennis racket - both objects had a vetting process before you were allowed to touch them.  Eryn's a bit more free with her objects d'art than Drew or I were, however, and she's already had Cookie Queen's children, her friend Morgan, and both neighbor children over to give the Kinnect a test drive.  We picked it up early so she has a chance to get good at the Kinnect games before her birthday slumber party.

It may have been the crash course in Kinnectosity that led to her inability to fall asleep last night.  She got so much exercise jumping in Kinnect Adventures and dancing, that her legs hurt.  And she had a complete breakdown about 1:00 a.m. until Pooteewheet got up and moved her to the basement bed.  Both of them were supposed to go to Capital Grill for breakfast with me this morning, but I just left them asleep and went myself to meet Ming and Logan at 7:30.  I was surprised Eryn got as far as she did on the bicycle today.  We biked all the way over to Gamestop so I could buy two adult games (with a side trip to share a burrito at Chipotle).  All that Kinnect jumping s*** is hard on me.  I picked up a copy of Fallout 3, which Pooteewheet is happily playing.  And I picked up a copy of Oblivion, which I'm going to play.  I played the last Elder Scrolls game, Morrowind, before Eryn was born.  I liked the controls for the PC better, as it was easier to use a mouse hand and a keyboard hand to control direction.  The Xbox control isn't as intuitive.  But I figure it's one of those things you get used to over time.

So we should be good for entertainment at my house for a good long time even if no new games show up for Eryn's birthday.

If only OOOO were a Scrabble word...

I've had some horrible luck in Words With Friends (basically Scrabble) lately.  I have one game where I haven't had any vowels for the first three turns, despite playing TCH on my opponent's E in order to trade in as many letters as possible for the chance to get a vowel.  And then there's this game.  I can almost spell FOOT twice.