March 2005 Archives

This is my attempt at regular beer reportage. Yup, when you come to Percolator, it's all about kids, marketing, and beer. Not sure what that says about me, but it can't be good.

In spite of the Beer Store's best attempts (through its Soviet style retail experience) to prevent beer drinkers from trying brands other than the big swills, I do like to try different microbrews. I keep meaning to post my findings in hopes that someone will have other suggestions.

That said, I should mention that my love of a really good microbrew is tempered by a fundamental cheapness (Scottish gene pool, not my fault) so the real goal is to find the best VALUE in good beer, not simply good beer. I love Creemore, but it's a bit pricey so I tend to drink it when I'm out with friends rather than buying the bottles.

The Percolotor Best Value microbrews right now:

Belle Guelle from Quebec. Very nice crisp beer I remember from way back when in theatre school. It's $19.95 for 12, which falls below my psychological $20 mark and makes it a great deal. Sadly, packaging is only in sixes, making it awkward to pick up on the way home if I'm on my bike. Also, it's 5.2% alcohol, slightly more than average.

KLB Cream Ale: Just discovered this with my friend Mike Humphries when we went out and it was on tap. Very nice, although a little heavier than I usually drink.

Wellington Arkell Bitter: what I like about this is that it's actually only 4% alcohol -- or technically "light" beer -- but tastes really great. So when I'm feeling extra fat and not into, you know, eating better, this is Plan B.

I notice Sleemans has been on sale for awhile now, I think their strategy of keeping their beer priced high (and it is a marketing strategy, not a cost of production issue, as admitted by John Sleeman) is started to backfire. I like Sleemans fine, but about $20.45 for 12 is about what it should be all the time. So I gave the new Original Draught a try. Aside from the ridiculous concept of draught beer in a bottle (that's called a "oxymoron" everywhere but in marketing), I have to say it's quite good. A little more bite than regular Sleemans. If they go back to their regular rapacious pricing it doesn't make the PBV List though.

We have Sympatico DSL at home, and recently I've noticed precipitous slowdowns in the evenings when I work. One of the reasons I went with Bell rather than Rogers (aside from disliking them less than the loathsome Rogers) is that I didn't want to get into the slowdowns that I'd heard about with cable when there were a lot of people online. I called Sympatico to ask about it, but they seemed mystified by this, telling me my modem was synching up fine etc. Then of course they tried troubleshooting my computer, even though I told them that it works fine at other times of the day. It's not like the traffic is increasing on my computer in the evenings folks. I spoke with a friend who said he's been having a lot of issues with his email not logging on, and the Tech person finally let slip that their servers are a bit overloaded.

This is the downside of the insane competition in this space: I think in the effort to sign up as many people as they can immediately, they just can't keep up with the increased service demands of them. Sigh. Anyone else have this issue?

Just as Campbell appears to have turned the corner behaviour-wise, Leighton is stepping up to the plate. Oy. This morning he started wailing because he wanted his oatmeal to be warmer. Not a problem, except it was already very warm. It's interesting, it's like the subject or issue is of no importance; it's entirely about exploring the concept of having power and an opinion. (In other words, it's a lot like dealing with middle management clients at a large corporation. )

Then the punchline came from Campbell, the boy who has wailed his way through many a breakfast, said disdainfully, "Dad, it's really hard to eat with that noise."

What could I say? I know!

Carol was doing the One of a Kind Show and I had the boys on my own for the long weekend. I mostly enjoy this as they're pretty easy going -- no setting things on fire yet -- and of course, it's mostly just a lot of fun hanging out with them. So, all good.

The one fly in the domestic ointment was that Carol's dad was with us while her Mom helped at the booth. Although he's a great guy, he's also one of those old school guys who has never had to do a single domestic thing for himself his whole life. I don't mind cooking and cleaning up after two small children, but add one 70 year old man-child and it gets a bit much. Luckily, if you give him a newspaper he's good for two hours, kind of the way pulling out the train set is with Campbell and Leighton.

I was feeling a bit stressed about it until I realized was having a version of the much spoken about "sandwich generation" experience: Struggling to care for kids on one side, and older parents on the other. So it made a kind of irritating situation something interesting to contemplate -- eg what would this be like if sickness was in the mix, what if you were a single parent? etc. It also made me feel better when, after a while, I just told Reg where he could find the bread if he wanted another sandwich. After all, I already had one.

See, when you get that call at the office, you're torn between wanting to get home early to help out and wanting to get a cheap flight to Vegas for a few days.

Leighton started it all, and as of today has thrown up on each of the three floors of the house. If he visited our tenant downstairs then he could complete the entire floorplan. Now Carol has it, and Campbell is not feeling well either. Yike.

This is what it must be like where you discover your family has been taken over by zombies and they're calling you home to make you one... of... them.... argh!

I got offered a ticket (through work) to go to a Liberal fundraiser tonight. How could I not say yes to this kind of cultural experience? It'll be fun to see the political machine in full swing; I've never been to anything like this, although I do know a few people who live and work in that theatre of operations.

Besides, I was thinking of building a tree fort for the boys, and I want to be sure my back yard doesn't get placed in the greenbelt legislation, preventing any further development. According to the newspaper, going to these things is the way to do curry favour and influence the decision makers.

"Heeeeyyyyyy, howareya!?"

Just practicing.

I've been doing a brochure for a theatre organization, and the various theatres need to send me their logos and a photo to go inside. Unfortunately Sympatico has this lame 2 meg limit (2 meg!!) on its email storage -- not per message, in total. What's with that? Hotmail gives you 250 Mb, and Gmail gives you a full gigabyte!

I guess this isn't an issue for a lot of folks, because given the crazy competition for high-speed customers you think otherwise this would be something they'd be upping. Anyway I set up a Gmail account, which works pretty well although I don't really like navigating email in a browser. That said, I notice there's a setting for POP mail, meaning I could just get it into my Entourage at home. Oh goodie, another evening spent fiddling about with the computer!

Well I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to OS X on my computer at home. I have a neighbour who is an IT person at a Mac based shop, which helped me get over a few of the biggest hurdles: backing up all my files before upgrading (she has a 160 gig Firewire drive); trouble shooting the inevitable glitches (more on that later); and getting upgrades to some of my software. Oy! I can see why small companies have been slow to move to this, it's not a cheap undertaking. But I finally couldn't deny that the stability of OS X and the software was so superior that it didn't make sense to hang on to OS 9.

Overall, the upgrade went smoothly, except that my old serial Wacom tablet no long works -- even with the iMate USB converter -- as they don't make software for that old model any more apparently, and I can't get my Postscript printer to show up on the Ethernet network. The latter is the bigger issue actually, it's really frustrating. I can't be the only person in the world who has Sympatico and a printer both requiring Ethernet. But no one seems to have a decent solution.

One perk of the upgrade though is that I wanted to try InDesign instead of Quark for my freelance theatre design work (yes, I still dabble in that crazy world of print). So far the transition has been astonishingly good. There are a few bugs here and there, but it's unbelievable what a good job InDesign does converting Quark 4 files. (I hear Quark 6 won't allow you to do this, but really, who cares?) In a lot of ways, InDesign has that same "eureka" quality to it that Quark had for me back in 1994 when I had only been using Ready Set Go! (Can you guess that I'm freaking OLD?) They've been very smart in keeping a lot of the Quark-like key commands, but the interface is much like Illustrator, so even after only a week or two with it, I move around the app really quickly. It's also a lot less hassle making PDFs to send to clients. So far, so good.

I've been fighting off some sort of nasty bug the last few days and just don't feel myself. I hate these low level infections; you don't feel sick enough to say home, but neither do you feel well enough to enjoy your day.

However, it occurs to me though that when you scrape your knee, say, you apply alcohol to the wound to kill the germs. I thought I might try an internal application, using a beer-based delivery system, to see if the alcohol had the same effect on the germs in my blood stream.

I can't believe I haven't heard of this before.