Seriously, food coloring is about the worst thing that you can do to beer… including the kind of cheap shitty beer that generally gets food coloring dumped into it this time of the year.  All it is is a green mistake.  If you want to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by having an “Irish” beverage, just have a Guinness.  Or Harp.  Or Killian’s.  Or some Jameson.

I was going to wear a green t-shirt to work today, but ended up not doing so (I wore a salwar tunic top with elbow-length sleeves that kind of had some light green on it instead) because I didn’t have any t-shirts that would cover my bruises.  They may be the right color (they are at the yellow-green healing stage) but the bruises that I got at fencing practice last week just aren’t appropriate accessories for the office.

Ahem.  Now for some important news about the news.

I get my news from three sources – The Daily Show and Colbert Report (yes, it is a comedy news show, but I think that they do a better job of hitting important events and stories and are more “fair and balanced” in their presentation then, say, Fox News), NPR, and the New York Times online.

Starting March 28, the New York Times will begin charging for unlimited access to their web site and mobile apps.

If I don’t subscribe, I will be limited to “20 free articles (including blog posts, slide shows, video and other multimedia features) each calendar month on NYTimes.com, as well as unrestricted access to browse the home page, section fronts, blog fronts and classifieds.”  (This is from the article.  To my understanding, I can look at the headlines on, for example, the home page for free, but if I click on an article, that counts against my monthly allotment.)  I probably read 20 NY Times articles every day.

I will subscribe.  I read the NY Times online daily and I don’t want to lose access to that news source.  (I donate to NPR as well, because I want them to stay on the air and continue to fund shows like Car Talk and News from Lake Wobegone.)

On one hand, I can understand their need to charge something.  I doubt that they make much money from the ads on the site or from the sales of the print papers, and they have to pay their reporters something in order for all of us out in reader-land to continue to enjoy their high-quality content.  On the other hand, I do think that their prices are a little high.

After some additional thought I realize that a year’s subscription to the NY Times online is about how much I donate each year to support NPR.

However.  There is a difference.  I freely give that money to NPR, even though I could continue to enjoy their programming without contributing a red cent.  The NY Times, on the other hand, will cut me off if I don’t pony up.  It is the fundamental difference here between donation and coercion that is sticking a bit in my craw.

Every now and then, John and I do things that normal people do, like go out on a Friday night to see our friends’ band.

Fin Tan is an Irish band that is made up of SCA people and fronted by our friend Sir William (MKA Pat Savelli).

They are pretty awesome, and put on a great show.

Fin Tan

(This was the first time that I took a camera to one of their gigs. The rest of the photos are here on my flickr site.)

They play a lot of gigs at Molly Malone’s and The Dublin Pub (we have seen them in both places) and have several CDs out. I know that they have a lot of gigs coming up on St. Patrick’s day in Columbus, here in Dayton, and in Cincinnati. So, support local music and go see an awesome band!

One more Mardi Gras in Dayton without Pazcki.  King Cake just won’t cut it, and a custard-filled donut from Tim Horton’s (which may look like a close enough facsimile on paper) really just doesn’t cut it either.

Ah well.

Ceilidh was this past weekend, which is always a fun event.  This year it ended up being smaller then usual, as there was a competing event that ended up drawing off some of the potential (rapier, at least) attendees.  Which was actually a pretty good thing, as the space we had for the event this year was a lot smaller then it was in previous years.  If we had too many more fencers then we did show up, we would have been seriously overcrowded.  As it was, I think that we hit the “sweet spot”… enough people (or enough variety of skill levels) came to make the fighting interesting, but not so many that there were long waits for bouts.

I ended up running the list table so that John could fight (we co-ran the fencing portion of the event) as I was just a couple of days out from yet another dental incident, and wasn’t really feeling like fighting.

(The dental incident was getting the abutment and temporary placed… the best way of describing how it felt is to say that it was like there was a headache in my mouth.)

After the event was over, we went to Nanking Inn for take-out.  As far as John and I have been able to find so far, Nanking Inn is only one good Chinese restaurant in Dayton.  One of their signature dishes, Nanking Beef, is just about the tastiest variation of sesame beef that I have ever tasted.  I spent some time last summer experimenting to see if I could replicate the dish.  This recipe, which I found on FoodNetwork.com came the closest, but even with a lot of tinkering,  just couldn’t get the sauce to come out right.  It never tasted quite sweet enough.  Unfortunately, Nanking Inn is going to close on March 31.  Albert, the owner (and the cook, maître d‘ , head waiter, and almost everything else), is almost 80 and has decided that he would like to retire.  I can’t say that I really blame him.  So meanwhile, we are eating there as often as possible, while we still can.

…when a UX Specialist’s fancy turns to site redesigns.

I am still tinkering with it a little bit – adjusting fonts and hex codes and the like – but this will basically be it for the next year or so until I get the itch to overhaul everything again.

When I look back over all of the iterations of this site from 2003 up until now (or think back over them, since I didn’t always bother to take screenshots for posterity’s sake) it seems like it has been one long, slow march toward minimalism.  That first site design back in 2003… man, was it busy.  And colorful.  The way that I have been trending lately, I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a couple of years, this is nothing but black text centered on a white page.  Then, who knows, maybe I will loop all of the way back around to busy and colorful again.