I’ve just realized that all my #ShirtHot entries (1: TNP, 2: TB, 3: TS) involve the core BrewDog beers starting with ‘T’. Huh, I guess my upbringing did something with that*?
(* my other siblings names start with ‘K’ too and all my male cousins in ‘Oz – in families of 3 offspring – have names starting with ‘J’)
Growing up in a fairly metropolitan part of Australia, I consider that I’ve lived a privileged life in a multicultural environment. Surrounded by academics that had more geeky issues pressing their grey matter, I did sometimes find myself in the company of a strangers which small chatter lead to this question:
“But I mean, where are you from, originally? What are you Thai? Malaysian?”
This question was not very common back home, but in certain places it did happen. I felt mildly irritated that in modern times that this was even worth expending the effort in asking. And why do I have the obligation to divulge some of my history – isn’t it (at least borderline) personal information? Even during primary and high school I don’t recall a time when this was asked.
Now in the UK, I came across this beautifully written article by pure accident and all those moments flooded back. Some of those are fresh from last week: volunteering at the local beer festival. And it’s happened in all the festivals I’ve volunteered for. I get it in pubs too. That irritation I feel each time when I get asked – the article explains rather neatly.
So next time you see a short south-east asian woman and ask which part of south-east asia where she’s from, don’t be surprised to get this response “I’m fuckin’ Australian. Any questions?”
Are you fucking kidding me? I don't look like one of the major ethnic groups? No shit!
Note on the title: pun semi-intended! Couldn’t help myself!
Last year for the Letchworth beer festival we got the idea that we should try using some Google-fu into it and derived a map of the breweries featured in a simple mashup. I started off with addresses of the breweries from Quaff Ale then searched with their postcode (to a similar effect, getlatlon but plugging in all of the datapoints.)
Initially it was fine for the test cases but as there are restrictions on the number of geo location queries on Google maps and the asynchronous nature of the plotting we needed to obtain the equivalent lat/lon. At this point, the reigns were added to Yvan and he refined the map in such a way that it even generated a boosted brewery ‘bubble’ that listed the beers the brewery would be on offer. And custom pull-out markers to make the points easier to read.
Now it’s time for the Hitchin 2012 fest, and I thought it was a rather simple matter of taking the old code and switching the values.. Actually, this is almost correct but the tedium in obtaining addresses: how I forgot how long this took! Then the matter of adjusting the markers..
The history of web browsers; their popularity put into a more graphical perspective – and eerily similar to what most geeks would of expected (if I’m one example). Oh Opera, you need more love! (Via Pinterest)
Some people insist that they’re city folk, which I fail to understand. Who the hell likes to be in a constantly noisy, crowded environment – it causes (di)stress needlessly.
The following is just a small subset of reasons why I like it here in this little market town:
Twenty Eleven Post Formats – What Are They and Why Should I Care? A great post explaining what the available post types are and what they do in the Twenty Eleven theme (which is the ‘parent’ of this site’s theme).
In this theme, I’ve tweaked the ‘link’ type behaviour after I surprisingly found out that the ephemera widget takes the first link in ‘link’ types. It seems to favour single links-per-posts only, and I tend to get a little wordy (like this ‘link’ post.)
During LBF 2011 someone noticed they were ‘drinking a beer you’ve probably never heard of’. Though that was tweeted with the question ‘#amiahipster’ they moments before noted the lack of hipsters at the beer festival. It must be the Morris dancers…
