Just Gibberish

Wordpress Plugins

Jacob Langley — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 17:59:00 +0000

Anyone know of a wordpress plugin for food blogging/calorie tracking? I was just thinking that it might be useful/interesting/have a fairly wide appeal.

Liquor Cabinet

Jacob Langley — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 20:20:00 +0000

I just took a picture of the majority of my liquor cabinet. The rest is unimportant, but this bit is my slowly growing baby.

More scotch for the cabinet

Jacob Langley — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 16:01:00 +0000

During a trip to the liquor store last week, two more bottles of scotch ended up in the closet. The first is a bottle of the Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban; I've had it before at the bar and seem to remember it being tasty. The second a house guest picked up. Its The Balvenie Rum Cask which has made its home in my closet as well.

And then yesterday I made a trip to a different store - this time I picked up the Glenmorangie Nectar d'Or which I'd never had and the Oban 15 Distillers Edition.

I just need to find time to actually do tasting notes for everything but the Rum Cask, which I did last week. And then I need to go back through my other bottles and update notes for them.

Watchmen DVD

Jacob Langley — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:45:00 +0000

So, the special edition DVD set of Watchmen contains a "digital copy." Thats not really the case. What it contains is a code for iTunes to download a copy (oh yea, offer expires July 21, 2010. Its a year off, but still) or an executable to give you a license to some WMVs (and the WMVs are on the disc.)

Now, I want to know why we couldn't just put both the digital copies on the bloody disc and have done with it. That way, should something happen to my computer, I can still have my digital copy in the future. Did no one really think of that? Thanks guys, for not really selling me something.

Android based phones

Jacob Langley — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 03:31:00 +0000

Anyone have any thoughts on Android based phones? I love my iPhone but I'm really getting tired of AT&T. My contract is up in September and I have no desire to pay an increased monthly rate for their mediocre service AND have apps pulled from the store that I use and like by Apple. I can only take so much of being annoyed and so I'm curious. Anyways, looking forward to hearing thoughts.

Weird Vehicle

Jacob Langley — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:24:00 +0000

Seen today in a parking lot at the corner of Pike and 2nd in Seattle:

Distilled feed for whisky information

Jacob Langley — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 16:44:00 +0000

So, I've got a number of whisky blogs I subscribe to and what not. I decided to create a public feed for that sort of information. You can subscribe to this if you're interested: http://feeds.feedburner.com/jlwhisky

Scotch, Scotch Everywhere!

Jacob Langley — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 02:54:00 +0000

So I spent a bit of today refactoring the Scotch scraping script and it now exists in a script + library form. The interesting bit about this particular change is that now I can make it scrape other sites as well. I've already added another state, but if you live in a state that has some centralized site for finding liquor, let me know and I'll add you to the list of "should be supported sometime in the future." Before I add more states, though, I'm going to be adding some code to make the scripts more robust, keep some state information better, and so on. I'll try to keep people up-to-date as it happens, but things are still moving along.

Scotch in Seattle

Jacob Langley — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:03:00 +0000

So, I've got a sort of side project. For those who don't know, in the state of Washington, the distribution and sale of hard liquor is pretty much a state monopoly. Its expensive, there's not a great selection, and the stores frequently have reasonable, but not necessarily great hours. One of the benefits of this, though, is that the Washington Liquor Board has searchable lists of liquor types, where they can be found and how much it costs. Theoretically it also tells you how much a store has on hand, but those numbers get out of date very quickly.

The site does have a drawback though, in that its got more information than most general consumers care about on it, and its not necessarily all in one place - there's no way to say "tell me all the scotches at this store," for example. And the only way to get at the information in the first place is to place a search. There are no full listings available.

In response, I've created this handy site for disseminating some of this information. It queries the liquor board site for the lists of Scotch, then grabs every store that each whisky is sold at and makes a blog post out of it. The first draft of the site only posted a flat text list. I got some feedback that it was hard to read/use so I added some HTML and JavaScript to make it a folding style list - click on a scotch to toggle whether or not you see the stores its sold at.

There are some bugs in it right now; it jumps back to the top of the page when you expand a location list, the list of scotches isn't sorted, the location lists aren't sorted, and probably others. I'm going to try and have this bug list fixed by the end of the weekend.

After that, its on to new features. For example, I'm also thinking that I'll try and call out different Scotches as they appear or disappear from the list. Any other ideas, I'm open to hearing.

Amazon Fresh, confusion less

Jacob Langley — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:51:00 +0000

And I just got an email that Amazon Fresh is now delivering to my neighborhood! This is very exciting - now to see if I can get unattended deliveries. More news as the story develops.