Am I a beer geek, or a geek who loves beer? Both, I guess.
Here’s an interesting mash-up of technology: LEGO Mindstorms, iPhone, and Pownce.
Primitive, yes, but geeks love to make iterative improvements to things. A year from now someone will have something really impressive.
(via Switched)
Another intersection of beer and technology.
Award-winning German design TrekStor firm appears to be making a combination bottle opener and 8GB USB drive.
Actually, I am in the market for a thumb drive. This might be just what I need.
(via Dowd’s Brews Notebook)
Here’s another instance of beer intersecting with technology.
The staff at Tom’s Hardware decided to see which of four beers from different countries, when combined with a little antifreeze, would be the most efficient coolant of an overclocked CPU.
International Beer CPU Coolant Competition
In spite of billing itself as “The Coldest Beer on Earth” and “As Cold as the Rockies”, Coors Light came in dead last against Guinness, Franziskaner Hefe-weissbier, and Molson’s Canadian.
(via InfoWorld Tech Watch)
One of my other passions is computers and technology. I can still remember quite distinctly when my family finally got a computer. Was it a Commodore 64? A Texas Instruments TI/99? An Apple ][e? No, it was the ill-fated IBM PCjr. Still, it was a computer. A few days later my father and I startled each other at around 4:00 AM. He had gotten up and was on his way out to work, while I still hadn't gone to bed because I couldn't pull myself away from Wizardry. (The first of many one-nighters.) I am ever thankful that I've been able to parlay my passion and aptitude for computers into a job where I can work indoors in a climate-controlled environment and use my brain, rather than my back.
It's always amusing to me when two of my passions intersect. Case in point: I was catching up on my issues of PC Magazine. There in the June 5, 2007 issue is an article about how the Brooklyn Brewery is using technology to improve the productivity of their remote workers.
Like most small businesses, [founders Steve] Hindy and [Tom] Potter’s enterprise needed simple, reliable systems to help employees do their jobs, not force them to focus on technology. “We are brewers, and we try not to be technology people,” says general manager Eric Ottaway.
But as the Brooklyn Brewery grew, its IT solutions weren’t meeting the company’s needs—especially those of remote sales staff, who had to call office administrators to get data they needed.
