Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal. To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2003/06/Recent beers were Kelpie and (assuming I can get the font correct) Бaлtиka.
The one was really tasty and made of bladder kelp in Scotland. You would not have even guessed there was seaweed in there if someone had just handed you a bottle and said “what do you taste in here?” Knowing that there is kelp in the bottle, you can kind of taste it, but it adds a nifty little flavor. The other, the Russian beer, is a lager(?!) that is so pale as to be virtually flavorless. It was pretty good, but good in that flavorless sort of way. I would probably get it again and take it to a party just because the font is a crazy Cyrillic one and I have no idea how to pronounce it. As for home use, it was a little bland and expensive for a generic (“non”) tasting pale ale.
Today consisted of some serious taming of XML, XSL, HTML integration. [Warning! Acronyms ahead!] Converting XML into a DOM, then extracting certain bits of XML to convert to HTML, then inserting it back into the XML DOM, only to have the whole document converted to HTML through an XSL transform is not a fun task. Things end up being escaped wrong all over the place. My &'s end up as & or &amp; or get lost altogether. The same thing applies to my tags, which sometimes are gone, sometimes end up as the text literal “<br>” and sometimes are escaped all freaky-like. I finally got it all working, but then discovered that Sun's HTML widget does not like certain combinations of tags (specifically background color in text spans). Feh! More XML-RPC masquerading as web services tomorrow.
I do not know whether or not this has been said here before, but the first half of the first segment of the Animatrix (which is actually quite cool–for the cool shorts–and really lame–for the lame bits) is pretty much Street Fighter softcore pr0n. Yes, they know their target demographic–the same same people who are downloading pictures of Chun Li being anally raped by…crap, I do not even know any other Street Fighter characters, so I cannot complete the sentence. Anyway, the bits that are not softcore or otherwise lame are really cool. The entire history of how the machines got into power (The Second Renaissance, Parts I and II) is awesome! It certainly gets you asking a number of questions–can an artificial intelligence be put on trial or admitted to the UN? It also got pretty brutal in a few areas. So, tomorrow, I think I will genetically engineer myself a few indentured servants from a test tube. I will make them do my bidding, then when I tire of them, they can be cooked up for dinner. They will be free-range genetic indentured servants, by the way. They will be fed organically and be based on my own DNA–so it ends up being a murder that is technically a suicide against another instance of myself instead of killing a random being.
