Aaron Williamson's webl

When Coors Brewing Company introduced the first of its recent questionable innovations in beer canning technology, the Frost Brew Liner, I admit I was charmed. Does a thin layer of plastic inside my can really lock in the Rocky Mountain freshness? I don’t know, but the child within cries Yes! And what’s more, the vaguely Web 2.0 infograms on the can made it feel like science.

But Coors: like the extra-wide easy-pour opening on a can of your cool, refreshing Coors Light, the credulity of this Rockies-tapper extends only so far. Guys, this vent thing is just not believable. I even gave you the benefit of the doubt when i saw the first commercial — I thought “maybe an internal straw-like apparatus extends from the mouth of the can to air in the interior, to prevent a vacuum from forming and allow the crisp, frost-brewed lager to pour smoothly forth.” Now, I didn’t think for a second that it would work, but as with the frost brew liner, that explanation would have at least left some question in my mind.

But ever the cultural reverse engineer, I took a can opener to your bold new design, and the truth was far lamer than the pseudoscience I invented for you. Look at this thing:

Coors Light Vented Wide Mouth Can

It’s not that easy to see from the picture, but basically the vaunted “vent” is much closer to a “dent” — a shallow canal running outward from the mouth about 3/4 of an inch. What could this possibly accomplish? It’s exerts no more influence on my pour than the unpredictable deformations that inevitably result from merely opening the can. It is a nothing.

For shame, Coors. I fear the integrity of your practice of the beer-related sciences has fallen victim to Madison Avenue’s siren song.

Tonight when I came home from work, I decided to mix myself a martini. Alas! as I went to add the vermouth I noticed it had gone off (I really should have noticed this long, long before). The ice was quickly diluting my gin in the shaker… I had to act fast!

Like any would-be mixologist worth a damn, I decided the only thing to make was ’something up.’ So in went some Grand Marnier, a little pot-stilled rum, and bitters. Out came my first mixological invention worth recording, the Girl Erin (named for the lovely and thoughtful Erin who gave me the book that got me interested in the mixological arts).

The Girl Erin

Ingredients:

• 2 oz Plymouth gin
• 1 oz curacao (I use Grand Marnier)
• 1 tsp 115-proof pot-stilled rum (I use Inner Circle green)
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters

Pour all ingredients into a shaker with ice and shake well. Serve up, with a quarter-wheel of orange on the rim of the glass.

It’s a work in progress, and there is room for experimentation (one obvious tweak would be to replace the Angostura with orange bitters, which i didn’t have on hand), but it’s a pretty tasty drink as is.

The Settlers of Catan is a sweet, nerdy, hex-based strategy game. Pioneers is a free software implementation of ‘Settlers’ — some co-workers and I have taken to playing it in the SFLC conference room (and over the tubes) after hours, typically with scotch and pizza. It’s great, you should do it.

They say that every contribution to a free software project begins with one developer’s itch (to see a new feature implemented, a bug fixed, etc.), and the graphical themes (e.g.) that shipped with v.0.11.3 of Pioneers made my brain itch something fierce. So I made a new one. ccFlickr, as the name suggests, is cobbled together from Creative Commons-licensed images harvested from Flickr. Here is a screenshot:

Download ccFlickr

To install, just place the ccFlickr directory in the directory with all of your other themes. In Ubuntu Linux, this is: /usr/share/games/pioneers/themes/

It’s a first effort, but I’m happy with the result. The one problem I’ve noticed is that, because I made tiles with the exact dimensions of a hex (rather than making smaller images to tile), space sometimes shows up between tiles upon resizing the window. Not sure whether this is an issue with the scaling algorithm, could be fixed by making the tiles rectangles (the space is usually on the diagonal), or if it’s unavoidable.

All of the images I used to make the theme are licensed CC BY-SA (Attribution-Share Alike), so that they can be distributed with the GPL-licensed program. Some images were originally (or still are) licensed CC BY-NC-SA on Flickr. In each of these cases I requested a BY-SA license to the images, and the authors were kind enough to grant one, either by changing the public license on Flickr or by simply giving me a one-off grant of permissions. Here are the images:

• “Catch the Sun” by estaticist
• “Cool textures” by MaxPower
• “IMG_1833.JPG” by mtoz
• “obscured by clouds” by vsz
• “Oh my gold !” by Tater1982
• “Sand Dunes in Gran Canaria” by szeke
• “Swirly rock” by bcostin
• “There are 4 mln people in NZ… and 40 mln sheep!” by Alles Photos