Somewhere along the line I discovered what kind of alcohol drinker I am: a hophead, or a consumer of highly-hopped beers, typified by double, triple, or imperial India Pale Ales (or "IPAs"), a type of beer originally designed to retain some hop flavor after a long sea voyage in a wooden cask. Indeed, there is a strong trend in cask-aged IPAs and other styles of strong beer. But that's not what I want to talk about; right now I want to mention some "other" fine beers that I enjoy just as much as Pliny the Elder, which is broadly considered to be the world's best IPA.

When we left our story last time, things were in decent shape. But then I noticed that some of my img_assist tags weren't displaying, and had to meddle with the custom img_assist filter some more. I made some progress, and I feel I might as well share.

After some deliberation I decided that it was finally time to move to Drupal 7. Most of the modules I use have been ported, and I figured I could hack my way around the rest. While there's substantially more hacking to be done, I have a fairly good handle on it so far. There were more complications than I expected, however.

Hey, nVidia, what has happened to your drivers lately? They seem to have all the quality I expect from ATI drivers. I have new problems I didn't have before my last Linux driver upgrade. What, exactly is wrong over there, and what can I do to help short of buying a $600 graphics card from you? Sincerely, formerly a rabid pro-nVidia, anti-AMD Linux user.

A lot of people think that we are utterly dependent on burning oil for energy for our modern existence, but this is patently untrue. One example of potential independence is biodiesel. I own two diesels (a car and a truck) and I put biodiesel into them when I can, but it costs significantly more than petroleum diesel. This is due to the tax breaks given to Big Oil, and the fact that no one is paying for the major externality of burning petrofuels, carbon dioxide. The US government proved at Sandia NREL in the 1980s that producing biodiesel from algae grown in open raceway ponds was not only feasible, but that it should be profitable with diesel fuel retailing at $3/gallon.

You’re only allowed [to] link to the official site of the Olympics if you’re going to say nice things about the Olympics.

Bahahaha. Understanding the internet? The Olympic Committee fails it.

Do you love Freedom? Do you love the internet? If so, perhaps you should consider the declaration of internet freedom.

A turbocharger is better than an nitrous install because it works better and you don't have to refill it. But that's not all; a turbo also puts less load on the engine for the amount of power you get out.

Every time I get comfortable with a retailer something bad happens. In this case, Newegg is doing Microsoft's work by illegally1 refusing warranty support to a customer who installed Linux on a computer. I submitted a letter about it to Newegg through their system; they gave me back the code #120612-001897.

Lately there has been a lot of nonsense (as I see it, ho ho) going around about the GPL. Perhaps it's just that the people who dislike it are becoming more outspoken, but many people are saying that they have recently come to believe that the GPL must necessarily spell the end of all software companies, the loss of zillions of jobs, and so on and so forth. I believe this is all a lot of hooey. The following material is (currently) the culmination of a long and involved thread on the subject on Google+; I will spare you a link as this is probably the most cogent contribution I made to the conversation anyway. Content after the break.