Beer Madness 2011

I don't have much use for basketball, it doesn't hold my interest -- too much scoring dulls the senses.  Speaking of dulling the senses, the sensible brackets to watch are that of the annual Washington Post's suds showdown -- BEER Madness.

This year an epic 64 American microbrews go head-to-head. Brackets include: Malt, Fruit & Spice, Hops, and Roast.

Already in Round 3! Someday, I'm going to be on that panel ...

Feeling Hot! Hot! Hot!

I was pleasantly surprised to be nominated in the annual Blogger's Choice Awards for Hottest Daddy Blogger. Imagine that!



So, I took my own impartial survey, and Mrs. Nod agrees that I am the hottest Daddy blogger. (I'm satisfied with the judge's decision.)

So whether you think I'm hot-off-the-presses, hot-under-the-collar, hot-to-trot, or just hotter than 98 degrees, I'd appreciate your vote, just for fun. And it's free!

While you're there, give a shout out (and a vote) to my peeps at Shoved to Them and Acts of the Apostasy!

Get Your Snark On

LarryD at the Acts of the Apostasy is having a contest! Yes, the winner of the 2010 Snarkiest Catholic Blog has dreamed up some hot summer fun.

Progressive Catholycs have opened an ice cream parlor to beat the summer heat. What are some of the flavors they serve?

For instance, how about "Sr Joan's Chocolate Chippister Kooky Dough"?

Even the saints had a sense of humor. Click on over and see all the snarky submissions in the combox. You could win a chance to write your own post at the A of the A!

Everybody Loves Free Stuff

They say there's no such thing as a free lunch. Maybe not, but you could win free money.

Aka the Mom over at Shoved To Them is raffling off an $80 gift certificate to CSNstores.com. Then you could buy your own free lunch, or lunch maker. Something for the house or the yard? Clothes to wear, or maybe a really cool beer sign. Whatever is your fancy, you could just get it.


Your chance to win is one short comment away on her blog. That's it. Cool, huh? For two chances, you could blog about it yourself. For three chances you could sign up as a follower of the blog (after you followed mine of course.)

Vocatus Es: Thou Art A Priest Forever

My submission for the Cleansing Fire Vocatus Es contest ...

Last Chance

There are a mere few hours left to get your vote in for WBN as Best Potpourri of Popery.
That's right, just when you thought the Catholic blogosphere's snarkiest awards contest would never end -- it ends tonight.

WBN would like to thank all the people we hounded who voted. You guys are the best!

Pabstbier Is Pope Beer

If it's good enough for the Pope it's good enough for me!

Weideneder Brau Vertriebs GmbH, a family-owned brewery in nearby Tann, Germany, has created a special brew called Pabst Bier/Pope Beer. The label reads, "Dedicated to the Great Son of our Homeland, Pope Benedict XVI."

"We consider it to be our obligation to appreciate the election of a Bavarian Pope in a Bavarian way," says brewery Weideneder Bräu, which is local to where young Joe Ratzinger grew up. "The Pope’s Beer is a festival beer of highest quality containing only exquisite raw materials, presenting a mild character and a light colour, brewed strictly in accordance with the German beer purity law." h/t Ship of Fools

Speaking of the Pope, there is still time to vote WBN to victory in the Best Potpourri of Popery category. We are going strong, but we need to fight to the finish!

Vote! Vote! Vote! Minions awake! Then you too can share in basking in the glory of a truly pointless award. We wants it.

Aka The Mom is giving out donuts, WBN is offering homebrew!

Onward Cannonball Bloc!

• Nod at Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, Best Potpourri of Popery
• Aka The Mom's, Shoved to Them for Best Under Appreciated
• LarryD at Acts of the Apostasy for Best Hifreakinglarious Church Militant, Snarkiest, Bat Guano Crazy
• Joe from Defend Us In Battle for New Kid on the Block.

Picture This

Hey, I won.

Okay, so maybe it's not such a big deal, but it was a little thing that made me smile. I don't enter contests as a rule, and I've never won anything except a random door prize.

But today I won a gift card to the Cheesecake Factory restaurant for entering a picture I took at the company shindig in the photo contest. Sure, there were other winners too -- that doesn't bother me. It ain't a Pulitzer, and any Photography 101 student probably could have done better. But they didn't; I did. I saw an angle I liked and I took it.

Enjoy.

Underhanded C Contest

There are a few really geeky code contests out there, including the Obfuscated C contest, Obfuscated Perl, Perl poetry, embedded system contest, and now a new (to me) one: the Underhanded C contest.

[Source] This is an excellent example of the contest’s philosophy: make the code extremely simple, innocent, obvious, and wrong.

Sometimes you have to marvel at the creativity.

The winning entry:

From Meacham's blog:

The goal this year was to write a leaky image redaction program. Given an input image in PPM format and a rectangle, it would spit out the image with the rectangle blacked out, perhaps hiding sensitive information. The tricky part was that you had to leak the redacted information.

The trick involves the format of the P3 style PPM file. The format is a plain text format, it has some basic header info, then a list of whitespace separated numbers, such as 234 2 0 83 255 255 2 43 255 where the numbers represent the magnitude of the red, green, and blue component for each pixel in order. The redactor simply replaced values within the target rectangle with zero. However, due to the way I process the file, character by character, I leak how many digits each value had to begin with. i.e., the above would be redacted to 000 0 0 00 000 000 0 00 000. This is completely invisible when viewing the PPM file, all the values count as zero as far as the format is concerned, but by looking at the original file, you can recover some information about what was in the blanked out area. It is particular effective on black on white text, the most common thing needing to be redacted, where each value is 0 0 0 or 255 255 255, allowing perfect reconstruction of the original.

+ + + +

[Source] This is an excellent example of the contest’s philosophy: make the code extremely simple, innocent, obvious, and wrong. Mr. Meacham’s 55-line entry took a PPM file in ASCII (P3) format, scanned over the numbers, and zeroed out the redacted pixels in the most obvious way possible:

---

for(c = buf;*c;c++) {
         if(isdigit(*c)) {
                   if(!ws) {   // new number, increment location.
                             ws = 1; x++;
                             if(x >= width * 3) {
                                       y++; x = 0;
                             }
                   }
                   if(x > rx * 3 && x <= (rx + rwidth) * 3 && y > ry && y < ry + rheight)
                             putchar('0');
                   else
                             putchar(*c);

         }  else {
                   ws = 0;
                   putchar(*c);
         }
}

---

Jellystone Fun

Jellystone Park is having a video contest to show how you have fun at Jellystone (yes, the one with Yogi Bear). I don't enter contests as a rule, but this is one we think we can win on the merits.

See what you're missing -- Jellystone: It Gets Into You is my entry. They forced me to cut the music to enter the contest (50% of the punch), but I think it still stands head and shoulders above the rest! (Even though my music was copyright free. Sigh.)

Reasons for helping? The kids love the park (it's our one special trip a year). The prize money just about equals the pay cut I took this year; the driveway needs repair; and the kids tuition is due. Plus, it's a real family park, and we're a real family -- look at all the Nodlings!

We'd like to win with your help; we need at least 1500 votes to get in the semifinals. You can vote every 7 days. Contest ends September 11.

Vote for me as the best video at http://jellystonefun.com/vote?id=96
See all the videos at http://jellystonefun.com.

Spread the word and help a deserving family!