http://www.edholden.com/ Ed Holden's Web Log. en-us Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:18:00 MDT Copyright (C) 2008 Ed Holden ed@edholden.com ed@edholden.com http://www.edholden.com/ http://www.edholden.com/favicon.ico 12 12 http://www.edholden.com/blog/detail.php?id=95 Summer calls for crisp, refreshing beers: the less malt-heavy, the better. Which is why I decided to pick up a few bottles of Hopfest by Josephs Brau, a brewey in San Jose, California. Hoppy beers, done well, are as crisp as they come. Having no pint glasses available I tossed the entire bottleful into a red wine glass. Like a fine wine, a decent beer will always have a bouquet that can enhance its flavor, and drinking some beers from wine glasses can actually improve them. In fact most Belgian beers are consumed from custom bowl-shaped glasses for this very reason. This turns out to be ... Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:15:00 MDT http://www.edholden.com/blog/detail.php?id=94 After several months of recovering from our trip through Europe (and by that I mean recovering from posting the resulting photos, not from the trip itself) I've finally got around to putting together some of the better photos from the trip Andrea and I took to Chicago in June. Chicago's a great city. It's one I've meant to visit for a very long time, and we found an excuse when we returned from London and our newlywed friends Padmini and Apurva settled there. I'd still like to put together some shots from around Boston, from up in the Adirondacks and from my walk of the River Thames last y ... Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:50:00 MDT http://www.edholden.com/blog/detail.php?id=93 I just got a new gadget. The cheap little Canon Wireless Remote Controller RC-1 goes with my camera (and probably other Canon DSLRs), and it's already pretty fun. The main thing most people are likely do with such a remote is appear in their own photos without having to use the pesky timer, and admittedly that is convenient under some curcumstances and it's the only thing I've managed to do with it so far. However, the impetus for buying the RC-1 was actually to take night shots. I found it a pain to use my Canon's bulb feature (that's the mode wherein the camera keeps its shutter open un ... Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:30:00 MDT http://www.edholden.com/blog/detail.php?id=92 I like beers that play with the tongue, flavors popping up in unpredictable but (with the repetition of the raising of the wrist) repeatable ways. Shipyard Summer meets this criteria. An easy sipping beer ideal for the season, Shipyard Summer feels smooth on the swallow, hits you with soft orangy citrus and then finishes hoppy and lemony. Andrea and I toured the brewery in Portland, Maine, a few years ago. It's a nice place, and it's in a great port city that's well worth visiting. This particular selection is one Shipyard should seriously consider brewing year-round. I found this o ... Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:15:00 MDT http://www.edholden.com/blog/detail.php?id=91 This is another thing I've been planning to do for a while, along with my Beers of the Month. I've always been passionate about trying styles of the greatest food ever created: the pizza. Not so much a distinct food as a medium for endless culinary creativity, pizza is the result of the confluence of seventeenth century events that brought the North American tomato to Italy. The oldest pizzeria in the world, in Naples, dates to the eighteenth century, but the food didn't find its way to America until the twentieth. Chicago style pizza is a thick, heavy concoction that originated at Pi ... Sat, 12 Jul 2008 13:26:00 MDT http://www.edholden.com/blog/detail.php?id=90 Another month to cram into the wee days of July is June, a span during which Andrea and I visited our friends Padmini and Apurva in the great city of Chicago. While there I tried a number of local beers, including Unfiltered American Wheat from Bell's Brewery in Kalamazoo, Michigan. (The last two times I've visited their website I received a serious-sounding error of Severity hinting that there may be an undefined offset of 9 in the file include/detect.php on line 449. The site otherwise worked fine, but sadly included no information about this beer.) This beer was yeasty and delicious, ... Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:30:00 MDT http://www.edholden.com/blog/detail.php?id=89 Yes, it's July. And what better time to introduce May's Beer of the Month? This time around it's Redhook's Sunrye (I'd link to it directly, but their site is all Flash). Sunrye is a beer made with a variety of malts that includes rye, so it has a pleasant citrus flavor. I got mine at The Burren in Somerville, Massachusetts, and they decided to enhance the flavor by adding a slice of orange. I'm used to lemon in a wheat-based beer, but orange adds a very special touch. This is a stellar summer beer, with unique malt flavors, orange or no. Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:15:00 MDT http://www.edholden.com/blog/detail.php?id=88 Until last week I hosted this site at Onsmart, which was slightly better than the typical web host in its feature set (in particular, they offered SSH access). It worked well for a couple years. But in February they sent me an e-mail that said this: Dear OnSmart Network Customer, Due to the difficulty in web hosting industry, we decided to close our business in March, 2008. In order to help our customers to transfer out to other web hosting provider. We have open a temporary help desk at http://help.onsmart.net/center/contact to keep track each transfer issue. Sorry for the inconveni ... Tue, 06 May 2008 17:00:00 MDT http://www.edholden.com/blog/detail.php?id=87 As a former Rochesterian I grew up calling any carbonated, non-beer beverage pop. I guess this term has something to do with what the bubbles do when they hit the beverage surface so it always made sense to me. But while this term is common in Rochester, most of the country calls it soda. It took some practice, but starting at university I forced myself to shed my pop ways. I still associate pop with Rochester because I've never been to any other Pop places. But it turns out that it's the same deal in Ontario. I heard someone here in Waterloo say it, so I conducted an investigation. ... Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:15:00 MDT http://www.edholden.com/blog/detail.php?id=86 I've had Endurance Pale Ale on two occasions at the Washington Square Tavern, a wonderful Brookline pub that currently has the beer available on draft. (In fact, I'll take this opportunity to segue into a tangent: the Tavern is one of my favorite places in Boston, and one of the few pubs in the area with the commendable audacity not to have a television mounted on any wall. It is entirely TV-free, and one of very few such places. It deserves your attention if only for that reason, but it also happens to be a nice, well-located pub with a good beer selection.) So why is Endurance Pale Al ... Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:20:00 MDT