For Webdesigners: 359 helpful links for webdesigners

Spirits of the Times:
Interactive Feature

A well-made, well-aged bourbon offers a gorgeous spectrum of flavors, beginning with a distinctive sweetness that can, depending on the distiller’s aim, turn spicy and peppery with clear fruitiness, or mellow into a creamy caramel toffee with highlights of citrus.

Bourbon is not Tennessee whiskey, like Jack Daniel’s, which is essentially made like bourbon until it is filtered through charcoal, at which point it becomes Tennessee whiskey. Bourbon is also not corn whiskey, which by law cannot be stored in charred oak containers. A whiskey can be distilled 100 percent from corn, but if it so much as kisses those charred oak containers it becomes bourbon.

While these laws may seem rigid, they leave a lot of room for creative distilling. Once you’ve got your 51 percent corn in the blend of grains (which distillers call the mash bill), you’ve got important decisions to make. Most distillers probably use 65 percent to 75 percent corn, blended with some proportion of rye, wheat or malted barley, and each grain provides different characteristics. The corn offers the sweetness and lush texture that are the basis of so many bourbons. Wheat adds a mellow roundness, while rye provides a spicy, peppery fruitiness and a dry quality. Barley can add a creaminess and a grainy sweetness.

The bourbons we tasted ranged in price from $14 to $120, and while a $20 bottle, Jim Beam Black, was our best value, there was some correlation between price and quality.

Naturally, the bourbon industry wants to capitalize on the cocktail craze, which is fine, but anybody who makes a mixed drink of our No. 1 bourbon, Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve 20-Year-Old, needs some remedial shaking and stirring. This is clearly a sipping whiskey of wonderful complexity, which would be wasted in even the finest mint julep or bourbon punch. The same goes for our No. 2, the fruity and chocolate-and-caramel-flavored [Pappy Van Winkle} Vintage 17-Year-Old.

If mix you must, I would suggest our No. 3, the brisk, spicy Knob Creek, which tastes as if it has a rye component. It might be the perfect whiskey for one of those cocktails that seem to be at home with either rye or bourbon.

Each of us also had a favorite or two that did not make the list. Ethan liked an Elijah Craig 18-Year-Old and an Eagle Rare Single Barrel 10-Year-Old. Pete liked the Eagle and the Wild Turkey. Florence liked the Elijah Craig and the Virginia Gentleman, an old brand that has the distinction of being distilled in Kentucky then redistilled in Virginia. I very much liked a Corner Creek Reserve 8-Year-Old and Bulleit[JW: this won a friend's Bourbon Tasting event a few years ago].

The strongest bourbon in the tasting was Wild Turkey, at 101 proof. The final strength of a whiskey is another choice that distillers must make.

While the just-distilled whiskey can be as high as 160 proof, those pesky federal laws mandate that it must be watered down at least to 125 proof before entering those charred oak containers.

By the time it is bottled, it can be as low as 80 proof, so producers have a lot of room to find just the right strength. If you find a bourbon that seems too strong, do what the producers do and add more water. Or ice.

Bonus Drink Receipe: Back Forty

4 teaspoons maple syrup
2 ounces bourbon
1 ounce lemon juice
3 to 5 dashes orange bitters
Lime wedge for garnish.

In a cocktail shaker, mix syrup with 2 teaspoons hot water.
Add bourbon, lemon juice and bitters.
Add ice and shake. Strain drink over ice in glass. Garnish.

Joel on Software has a great post about a site called Walk Score that lets you put in your address and find out how walkable your neighborhood is. I have several friends looking for apartments right now and this is a pretty killer.

I was pleased to find my apartment has a 91 out of 100 walk score.


and my parent's house in Southern California has a score of 54 out of 100 - which is about how I remember it being in my pre-driver's license youth.

Many of the cocktails that Mr. Berry has studied, the Zombie included, owe their creation to a raconteur named Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt who remade himself as Donn Beach and started the tiki craze in 1934 by opening Don the Beachcomber’s in Hollywood. In their interior design, the tiki joints inspired by Mr. Beach tended to thoroughly fake pastiches of tropical themes — swaying hula girls, angry savages — that can offend some modern eyes.

...To recreate the Beachcomber drinks, Mr. Berry became a kind of cocktail shamus. He visited libraries and thumbed through old issues of Gourmet on the chance any recipes had been printed (they hadn’t). Eventually, he learned that some of the Beachcomber’s bar staff had kept the secret recipes in little black books. Mr. Berry got his hands on one of the recipe books — but found that it too was coded.

The Audio Slide Show: The History of Tiki

Day 1 complete. Living room and kitchen covered entirely in a fine dust of plaster. Luckily the office and the bedroom were more or less spared.

Fox News is reporting:

Cops: McDonald's Workers Attacked by Cross-Dressers

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

MEMPHIS,Tenn. —  A troublesome trio of transvestites allegedly laid siege to a Memphis McDonald's restaurant Sunday night, sparking a brawl with the restaurant's crew, according to reports.

Police said they were working on a more detailed description of three men dressed in drag who came into a McDonald's restaurant and started swinging.

Restaurant employee Martez Brisco was working the drive-through window when he reportedly got into an argument with the suspects. When Brisco ignored them tapping at the window, they came in.

"They come to the window, 'Tap, tap, tap.' I'm still ignoring them," Brisco told WMC-TV. "I guess that just pissed them off worser."

Click here to read the WMC-TV.com report.

The transvestites allegedly struck the manager with a tire iron, and when he swung back, the drag queens took off their stiletto boots, removed their earrings and prepared to attack. The manager, Albert Bolton, was covered with scratch marks after suspects clawed him with their fingernails.

Bolton grabbed a pot of scalding french-fry grease and hurled it at his attackers. One of the cross-dressers then smacked Bolton with a wet floor sign, sending him to the hospital in an ambulance, WMC-TV reported.

Before driving off, the three attackers smashed the drive-through window.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

There must be NOTHING to do in Memphis these days. (thanks Anna)

There are no Rubio's Fresh Mexican Grill locations matching your search criteria near New York City, New York

At any rate, two Fish Tacos Especial hit the spot.

Layout-o-Matic, A quick and dirty way to get a some HTML and CSS for you're desired layout. Sure, it's simple to do this yourself, but if you can get it for free in 60 seconds I'm all for it.

What you get:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta name="generator" content="http://www.inknoise.com/experimental/layoutomatic.php" />
    <style type="text/css">
        #container {
            width: 760px;
            \width: 780px;
            w\idth: 760px;
            border: 1px solid gray;
            margin: 10px;
            margin-left: auto;
            margin-right: auto;
            padding: 10px;
        }

        #banner {
            padding: 5px;
            margin-bottom: ;
            background-color: rgb(213, 219, 225);
        }

        #content {
            padding: 5px;
            margin-right: ;
            background-color: gray;
        }

        #sidebar-a {
            float: right;
            width: ;
            margin: 0;
            margin-left: ;
            padding: 5px;
            background-color: rgb(235, 235, 235);
        }

        #footer {
            clear: both;
            padding: 5px;
            margin-top: ;
            
            background-color: rgb(213, 219, 225);
        }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
    <div id="container">
        <div id="banner">&nbsp;</div>

        <div id="sidebar-a">&nbsp;</div>

        <div id="content">&nbsp;</div>

        <div id="footer">&nbsp;</div>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Got this from the post The Best CSS Tools which seems to be a total regurgitation of stuff long seen before. I just like the look and name of Layout-O-Matic.

Frugal Traveler | Seattle

Sampling the Best of the Northwest

By MATT GROSS

Published: November 25, 2007

To the Frugal Traveler, no phrase is more inspiring than “happy hour.” In Seattle, those 60 minutes of joy have been elevated into evenings not only of cheap drinks but also of discount gourmet snacks at the classiest restaurants.

...Daily Dozen Donut Company for a sack of the signature treat ($2.10 for 12), fried up fresh before my eyes on a conveyor belt that bathed them in oil.

ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript Support

.NET 3.5 has ASP.NET AJAX built-in (no separate download required).  In addition to including all of the features in ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, ASP.NET 3.5 also now includes richer support for UpdatePanels integrating with WebParts, ASP.NET AJAX integration with controls like <asp:menu> and <asp:treeview>, WCF support for JSON, and many other AJAX improvements.

VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 also now have great support for integrating JavaScript and AJAX into your applications.  You can learn more about this from my blog posts here:

• VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense
• VS 2008 JavaScript Debugging
• VS 2008 ASP.NET AJAX Control Extender Support
• VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense for Silverlight

Watched the Phoenix Coyotes spank the Toronto Maple Leaf's today. While a hockey game in the burbs of Phoenix is considerably more tame than a Rangers game at the Garden, it's still a rollicking good time. 

<sarcasm>Good news for those of you who like to package your entertainment you can get all you can eat packages starting at $30.

"All You Can Eat" menu items include:

• Hot Dogs
• Fountain Drinks
• Popcorn
• Nachos
• Peanuts

Sign me up!</sarcasm> 

Actually, for someone who follows no sports what so ever, I really enjoy a hockey game.  Moves quick, it's rockus, and well the fights are pretty freakin' cool.

So this year my wife's mother opted for a bacon and maple turkey.  It smells pretty great sitting on the counter resting.  There was in interesting tidbit in the New York Times about carving turkey, Butcher’s Method Takes Carving Off the Table.  I'm interested to give this a try especially with the bacon and maple on the outside as every slice can have some skin.  I would love to say I'll report back, but I might be a little to tryptophan'd out. I'll see if can manage to get a picture online. My wife's mother sets a nice table and cooks pretty good too.

The tag line making the easy impossible is not mine. It's an homage to a former boss, Bruce, a bank vice president, who taught me about negotiating and doing buisness at my first corporate job. I think he actually used it as his IM tagline (he may still). At any rate, he's a great guy who taught me a lot.

I don't claim to be the guy who "makes the easy impossible", but I sure know him well.