Did you know?

Having a six year old is a lot of fun, if you are a geek. There is the endless flow questions, the daily visits to Wikipedia to finally get the right answer. We watched YouTube videos about planes and ships over and over. Without further ado, here's my son's 2007 zeitgeist:

• The Airbus A380 is the biggest passenger plane in the world. It is made in Toulouse. You can find an amazing 7 minute video of the assembly of the plane on YouTube. 873 people can evacuate an A380 in 77 seconds.
  
• The Antonov An-225 "Mriya" is the biggest cargo plane in the world. It is bigger than the Lockheed C5 Galaxy. It has six engines. It takes of soo slow.
  
• The Spruce Goose (aka H4 Hercules) beats all of them. But it only flew once and is now stored in a museum in Oregon.
  
• The smallest plane in the world is the Bumble Bee II.
  

• The biggest ship in the world is the Knock Nevis, a Norwegian owned super tanker.
  
• The biggest container ship in the world is the Emma Maersk.
  
• The biggest passenger ship in the World is the RMS Queen Mary 2.
  
  
• The list of most populated cities in the world: Mumbai, Karachi, New Dehli, Sao Paolo. Although the list changes a bit when you include larger metropolian areas: Gran Buenos Aires metropolitan area is number 17 with over 13 million people. You can imagine what will happen if they make it to the World Cup final next time.
  
• The longest river in the world is the Nile (6650km) (list of rivers by length)
  
• When completed the Burj Dubai (598.6m) will be the tallest building in the world, dethroning the CN Tower (553.3m) in Toronto. Although the tallest structure is the KVLY TV Mast (628.8m) in (list of tallest structures and buildings)
  
• Our Volvo V70 can drive to Los Angeles (340 miles) in one tank of gas.

And I am leaving the questions about gas consumption of the different hybrids, the country with the most cities, the fastest car, the fastest production car, the fastest car by acceleration, the biggest of the rocky planets, etc etc etc etc etc etc but luckily no questions yet about Britney or Lindsay.

Where's the bacon?

When the world was still ruled by the tobacco companies, you could buy a pack of chocolate cigarettes at the candy store. My favorite candy was always original "coca-cola gummies". But you ain't seen nothing yet. My kids got over the Christmas break a pack of Uncle Oinker's gummy bacon. It is even packed the same way bacon is packed and contains four tick slices of bacon. Luckily it doesn't taste like bacon: it is strawberry flavored. The safe handling instructions advise you to keep in a cool, dry place and to "not attempt to fry or microwave". Made in China for Accoutrements :(

A picture every day

One of the best Simpson episodes aired last Sunday. I originally posted a link to the video on YouTube or DaiyMotion. Twentieth Century Fox kept going after them (Hey, Twentieth Century Fox, why do you keep taking the video...). How ironic, since the Simpsons got the idea from Noah Kalina's YouTube video: http://www.everyday.noahkalina.com/

Torture me!

For many months, I've been part of an advanced Toastmasters club, the Agile Articulators, both as a member and as the VP for Public Relations. Toastmasters is all about becoming a better public speaker. Our small club is an advanced club: it combines speech with debate. Every meeting there is a prepared speech, and either a short 1-on-1 debate or longer 2-on-2 debates. The debates are forensic style debates [1] [2]. The topics are current affairs and are voted upon by the members. Tonight's dabate: resolved, that no agency of the United States government should use torture during interogations of prisoners under its control. Unfortunately, I had to argue the affirmative. This was unfortunate not because I like torture but because 80% of the debates are won by the negative side. I really wanted a win this time. Tonight our team lost again against a USC forensic debate pro and his debate partner. Dear fellow Americans I hereby apologize, we lost the torture proposal. Get ready to be waterboarded!

• Agile Articulators
• Toastmasters
  
• PresentationZen
  

Suck on that, Belgium!

Mute!

At Sun, subscription to Sun internal/external aliases was managed using a centralized tool, which allowed you to enable, disable and select digests, control whether the alias was public or not.

Regularly email storms would erupt when a new employee or a clueless employee would email "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" to a large email alias (such as sun-all-employees). Many would respond to all with information on how to (un)subscribe. This would be followed by a storm about 'do not reply to all!" - flame - flame. The email thread would not die quietly.

Gmail added a nice feature recently, called "Mute":

If you're subscribed to a mailing list, you've no doubt been subjected to the 'thread that just won't die!' If you're part of a long message conversation that isn't relevant, you can 'mute' the conversation to keep all future additions out of your inbox.

So simple ... yet so useful.

Lightning + Gcal provider + Google Calendar

Almost all my events are tracked in Google Calendar: my personal events, my wife's appointments, the kids school schedule, the soccer games, tech events in the Bay Area, Google developer events and of course birthdays. Specific calendars are shared with my friends and family. Everybody is in-synch ;)

I like the Google Calendar interface. The most useful feature beyond sharing calendars is the SMS notification.

I also use Thunderbird and was looking to tie it all together. Using Lightning and the GCal provider, I now can synchronize my calendars (in an open way). The setup is very simple. Here are the pieces that make up the solution:

1. Mozilla Lightning for Mozilla Thunderbird 2
2. Provider for Google Calendar
3. Instructions on how to synchronize with Google Calendar or LifeHacker instructions
   

Alternatively, LifeHacker documents another solution, which looks much more complicated to set up.

Image: courtesy of LifeHacker

Sinterklaas

In the midst of all the Christmas shopping and appearances of Santa Claus in the US shopping malls, we kept the European tradition of Sinterklaas on December 6th alive. While other years he drops by in person, he was terribly busy this year (as he wrote in a letter to our kids). Hence he only dropped by in the middle of the night and left the presents and candy in the living room. And lo and behold, the horse of Sinterklaas ate the carrots my kids left in their shoe. It was a great morning. All was well.

Wikipedia has some interesting facts about the history of Sinterklaas and his relation to Santa Claus:

Sinterklaas is the basis for the North American figure of Santa Claus. It was during the American War of Independence, that the inhabitants of New York City, a former Dutch colonial town (New Amsterdam) which had been swapped by the Dutch for other territories, reinvented their Sinterklaas tradition, as Saint Nicholas was a symbol of the city's non-English past. The name Santa Claus is derived from older Dutch Sinte Klaas.

West Vleteren - St. Sixtus

I have been catching up on reading the newspapers of the week. The front page of the Wall Street Journal of Thursday November 29, 2007 is an article by John. Miller about what is labeled the best beer in the world: St. Sixtus Trappist of West Vleteren in Belgium. Come to think of it, I've never drank this beer. And after reading the article, it might be difficult to even put your lips on a glass of West Vleteren. It will be definitely on my to-do list when we visit Belgium next year. (Or if anybody in Belgium reading this post could arrange a couple of bottles.)
So far my favorite beers include (in no particular order):

• Duvel (Brewery Moortgat)
  
• Brugse Trippel
• Lindemans Geuze
• Scaldis (Brewery Dubuisson)

Trappist Command: Thou Shalt Not Buy Too Much of Our Beer
John W. Miller, WSJ

WESTVLETEREN, Belgium -- The Trappist monks at St. Sixtus monastery have taken vows against riches, sex and eating red meat. They speak only when necessary. But you can call them on their beer phone.

Monks have been brewing Westvleteren beer at this remote spot near the French border since 1839. Their brew, offered in strengths up to 10.2% alcohol by volume, is among the most highly prized in the world. In bars from Brussels to Boston, and online, it sells for more than $15 for an 11-ounce bottle -- 10 times what the monks ask -- if you can get it.

For the 26 monks at St. Sixtus, however, success has brought a spiritual hangover as they fight to keep an insatiable market in tune with their life of contemplation.

The monks are doing their best to resist getting bigger. They don't advertise and don't put labels on their bottles. They haven't increased production since 1946. They sell only from their front gate. You have to make an appointment and there's a limit: two, 24-bottle cases a month. Because scarcity has created a high-priced gray market online, the monks search the net for resellers and try to get them to stop.

"We sell beer to live, and not vice versa," says Brother Joris, the white-robed brewery director. Beer lovers, however, seem to live for Westvleteren.

When Jill Nachtman, an American living in Zurich, wanted a taste recently, she called the hot line everybody calls the beer phone. After an hour of busy signals, she finally got through and booked a time. She drove 16 hours to pick up her beer. "If you factor in gas, hotel -- and the beer -- I spent $20 a bottle," she says.

Until the monks installed a new switchboard and set up a system for appointments two years ago, the local phone network would sometimes crash under the weight of calls for Westvleteren. Cars lined up for miles along the flat one-lane country road that leads to the red brick monastery, as people waited to pick up their beer.

"This beer is addictive, like chocolate," said Luc Lannoo, an unemployed, 36-year-old Belgian from Ghent, about an hour away, as he loaded two cases of Westvleteren into his car at the St. Sixtus gate one morning. "I have to come every month."

Two American Web sites, Rate Beer and Beer Advocate, rank the strongest of Westvleteren's three products, a dark creamy beer known as "the 12," best in the world, ahead of beers including Sweden's Närke Kaggen Stormaktsporter and Minnesota's Surly Darkness. "No question, it is the holy grail of beers," says Remi Johnson, manager of the Publick House, a Boston bar that has Westvleteren on its menu but rarely in stock.

Some beer lovers say the excitement over Westvleteren is hype born of scarcity. "It's a very good beer," says Jef van den Steen, a brewer and author of a book on Trappist monks and their beer published in French and Dutch. "But it reminds me of the movie star you want to sleep with because she's inaccessible, even if your wife looks just as good."

Thanks to the beer phone, there are no more lines of cars outside the monastery now. But production remains just 60,000 cases per year, while demand is as high as ever. Westvleteren has become almost impossible to find, even in the specialist beer bars of Brussels and local joints around the monastery.

"I keep on asking for beer," says Christophe Colpaert, manager of "Café De Sportsfriend," a bar down the road from the monks. "They barely want to talk to me." On a recent day, a recorded message on the beer phone said St. Sixtus wasn't currently making appointments; the monks were fresh out of beer.

Increasing production is not an option, according to the 47-year-old Brother Joris, who says he abandoned a stressful career in Brussels for St. Sixtus 14 years ago. "It would interfere with our job of being a monk," he says.

Belgian monasteries like St. Sixtus started making beer in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which ended in 1799. The revolt's anti-Catholic purge had destroyed churches and abbeys in France and Belgium. The monks needed cash to rebuild, and beer was lucrative.

Trappist is a nickname for the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, who set up their own order in La Trappe, France, in the 1660s because they thought Cistercian monasteries were becoming too lax. The monks at St. Sixtus sleep in a dormitory and stay silent in the cloisters, though they speak if they need to. Today, though, Trappists are increasingly famous for making good beer.

Seven monasteries (six are Belgian, one, La Trappe, is Dutch) are allowed to label their beer as Trappist. In 1996, they set up an alliance to protect their brand. They retain lawyers in Washington and Brussels ready to sue brewers who try use the word Trappist. Every few months, Brother Joris puts on street clothes and takes the train to Brussels to meet with fellow monks to share sales and business data, and plot strategy.

The monks know their beer has become big business. That's fine with the brothers at Scourmont, the monastery in southern Belgium that makes the Chimay brand found in stores and bars in Europe and the U.S. They've endorsed advertising and exports, and have sales exceeding $50 million a year. They say the jobs they create locally make the business worthy. Other monasteries, which brew names familiar to beer lovers such as Orval, Westmalle and Rochefort, also are happy their businesses are growing to meet demand.

Not so at St. Sixtus. Brother Joris and his fellow monks brew only a few days a month, using a recipe they've kept to themselves for around 170 years.

Two monks handle the brewing. After morning prayer, they mix hot water with malt. They add hops and sugar at noon. After boiling, the mix, sufficient to fill roughly 21,000 bottles, is fermented for up to seven days in a sterilized room. From there the beer is pumped to closed tanks in the basement where it rests for between five weeks and three months. Finally, it is bottled and moved along a conveyor belt into waiting cases. Monks at St. Sixtus used to brew by hand, but nothing in the rules of the order discourages technology, so they've plowed profits into productivity-enhancing equipment. St. Sixtus built its current brewhouse in 1989 with expert advice from the company then known as Artois Breweries.

In the 1980s, the monks even debated whether they should continue making something from which people can get drunk. "There is no dishonor in brewing beer for a living. We are monks of the West: moderation is a key word in our asceticism," says Brother Joris in a separate, email interview. "We decided to stick to our traditional skills instead of breeding rabbits."

The result is a brew with a slightly sweet, heavily alcoholic, fruity aftertaste.

One day recently, the wiry, sandy-haired Brother Joris returned to his office in the monastery after evening prayers. He flipped on his computer and went online to hunt for resellers and ask them to desist. "Most of the time, they agree to withdraw their offer," he says. Last year, St. Sixtus filed a complaint with the government against two companies that refused -- BelgianFood.com, a Web site that sells beer, cheese, chocolate and other niche products, and Beermania, a Brussels beer shop that also sells online. Both offer Westvleteren at around $18 a bottle.

"I'm not making a lot of money and I pay my taxes," says BelgianFood.com owner Bruno Dourcy. "You can only buy two cases at once, you know." Mr. Dourcy makes monthly two-hour car trips from his home in eastern Belgium.

"Seek the Kingdom of God first, and all these things will be given to you," counters Brother Joris, quoting from the Bible, adding that it refers only to things you really need. "So if you can't have it, possibly you do not really need it."

174 days and counting

And still no government in Belgium. After two full months of negotiations Yves Leterme, the strongman of the Flemish Christian democrats, handed Saturday afternoon for the second time his mission as formateur of the next government back to king Albert.

A parody on Yves Leterme is also no longer in my favorite countdown list, de Afrekening on Studio Brussel. It is written in Dutch by two popular radio-presentators Peter Van de Veire and Sofie Lemaire, of the Flemish broadcast Studio Brussel. They sing the text on the fragile music of ‘Hey There Delilah’ from the US-band Plain White T’s.



For details about the ongoing creation of a new Belgian government, check out http://crisisinbelgium.blogspot.com