BigCat’s Blog of DOOM

That is right, it is the amazing time of year when Ben Catlin has his major birfamaday madness blowout.

Well, it won’t be a complete blow-out because my wife is giving me a significantly limited budget from what I did last year (but in her defense…it did cost a lot of money to go out to eat that much in one day).

This years theme is, surprise, Beer!

But, here is the plan

Saturday May 5th

1 to 2pm-ish - go to a matinée of Spiderman 3 (movie times aren’t out yet, this time and theater will be finalized when they are)
4:30 ish - Fire up the grill. This is BOYM (Bring your own Meat) event. We will have a good selection, but limited quantities of various meats of my choosing to try with some of the beers, and some burgers and brats, but I’m not going crazy nuts on this like I did last 4th of July. So, bring your meat for your dinner, and then enjoy some of the other meats with beers later. Cheaper beer and pop (not soda) will be provided as well as chips and some other sides at this time.
6:00 - Begin the serious Beer. I’m going to Zipps liquor sometime soon to clean them out of some of my favorite beers. And we will try them with some of the food that I think makes them awesome (think Avery’s Czar’s Imperial Stout or the Old Engine Oil Reserve Stout with some decent steak….Seth I know you’re loving those)
8:00 it should be getting dark, which will mean less outside activities….so the beer movies inside and we play some Wii for a while.
9:30~10ish - start watching Beerfest….the movie that the braincell was born to watch.

And then when that wraps up the festivities.

All braincell members are STRONGLY encouraged to come to Minnesota for this event. As is ANYONE else who can read this and has any sort of desire to attend.

Harder start times for the movie and dinner will follow in later blog posts and emails.

Post a comment or shoot me an email if you plan on coming so I know how much beer and sides to buy.

Most nerds are shitty PR / marketing people. We suck at explaining things in simple ways, and we get bored trying to explain things like 500 times, which annoys people who don’t find things as simple as we do.

That being said, Linux has been moving down the chain of nerdom. It started with the hacker / programmer / developer types. The ones who don’t mind making source-code fixes and re-compiling their entire operating system overnight. Then it started moving down the chain a little to early-adopter, hobby-programmer / web developer types. And, now down past the upper echelon of hardware geeks / tech heads / and non-programmer geeks into the realm of the moderately computer intelligent, businesses like Google and IBM, and the person just looking for an alternative to windows Vista.

This has been largely due to massive improvements in the various flavors of Linux out there.

But, it still lacks good PR. Linux still suffers from the image of the uber-elite hackers pounding away at a keyboard, despite having worked well past that now.

But for a while I’ve been discussing with people real ways to promote Linux into the average computer user / learning children environment in order to attack the mind-lock windows has on this generation.

This article seems to sum up a lot of my thoughts on getting something a little more serious going in that direction.

http://opensourcelearning.info/blog/?p=338

And, I like some of these thoughts. And I really like the name “Linux Proliferation Agreement”

There is just something really awesome about driving towards the rising sun every morning.

Yesterday it was cool cuz the light was doing that ‘pour through the clouds’ thing that looks like spotlights or beams coming down. Today it was just an awesome cloudless sky as I was driving in a little earlier. I got to see the sun peak up over downtown St. Paul just before I turned north to go towards work.

God painted some pretty beautiful pictures in the sky. I’m glad we get to enjoy stuff like that sometimes.

I’m back visiting the Interweb again. And here are the things I learned during lent about not using the internet.

1. I suck at keeping up by reading the newspaper at work.

2. There is a lot of new software updates that give me nifty features I’ve been waiting for.

3. Besides missing a few things in my far off friends lives (sorry Greg and Julie…I just found out about your baby from Rob on Saturday….congrats!!!), I really don’t feel like I missed that much.

In my spare time I read a lot more of the Bible, started writing some stuff I wanted to write for teaching non-Vineyard people the 5 step model (this was harder than I thought it would be…I’m barely finished with the introduction and some of the theology), I started modeling this great idea I have for some furniture (it may even be patentable…also, Google Sketchup rocks for simple 3d modeling), and I felt generally more productive at work.

I’m going to continue to check my email w/ Thunderbird to avoid needless chatting online (looking at you Carlson) and the random internet surfing that comes from having a web browser open a lot.

Overall, I think I did realize I was somewhat medicating some of my feelings by fixating on reading more and more stuff on the internet (possibly addictively so). Not that I was reading bad stuff before (I found a bunch of helpful stuff from Vineyard people on a lot of good topics), but I was constantly filling any time or void w/ the internet. I hope to avoid that going forward, and may periodically fast from the internet again.