Beer, Music, and Dates

Thursday night I went on this date with a cute little blonde. We have been flirting for the last few months and I finally figured out how to get her to go on a date with me. It was pretty genius if I do say so myself.
What I had done was bought her two tickets to a concert, and gave them to her for Christmas, and of coarse she felt obligated to choose me to go with (score for the pity date). So everything went according to my plan  : )

Well the night of the concert arrived and being a good date, I made sure we had reservations at a place close to the concert so we could park the car, relax, and not have to worry about traffic getting to our concert (Downtown Baltimore during rush hour is NOT cool).

I picked somewhere that fit the genre of the music we were going to listen to, and in this case it was Country. Miranda Lambert / Dierks Bently / Thomas Rhett to be precise. So i chose a bar / restaurant / brewery type atmosphere. I settled on a place just down the street from our concert venue called Alewife. It checked out at Zagat with a cool 22 rating, nothing too extravagant, but definitely not a fast food joint.

The best part of this place was by far it's beer selection. It had over 40 beers on tap, but none of those 40 were mainstream beers, they were all 100% small-batch / local / microbrewery beers. For those of you who know me, I am a HUGE fan of specialty beers, so I was obviously in heaven at this point. I realized though that I had to keep my cool and not try them all, because if you didn't know, a drunk date is a HORRIBLE idea for a first date. So i limited myself to 3 beers. 1 Wurtzburger Festbier, 1 No-Li chocolate Dunkle, and 1 beer of the waitresses choosing.

Male Dating Pro Tip: Asking the waitress to choose her favorite beer is NOT flirting, it shows your outgoing side and that you're not afraid to try new things and be a bit adventurous.
 
Being that we both live in Maryland, which is known for their crab, and we have both never had crab cakes before, we ordered up some crab cakes. They were the perfect appetizer and sparked a bit of a link being both our first time trying something new. The main course was also fantastic, we both settled on their signature dish, which was the "smoke burger". Now I am a bit of a burger connoisseur, it is rare that I will go to a place that sells a gourmet burger and not order it. I thought this was an excellently crafted burger, the thing that set this one off was their homemade Chipotle Aioli sauce, which the waitress described as a fancy was to say chipotle mayo. It added the perfect spice to the burger that was topped with caramelized onions and pulled together with a mixture of white cheese including my favorite, Swiss Gruyere cheese.

After dinner it was on to our venue for the night, the concert. The arena we went to was nice and clean, and our seats weren't too bad. The opener for Dierks Bently / Miranda Lambert was a guy named Thomas Rhett, which I had never heard of till he sang a few of his songs. But he was very entertaining, and got the crowd in it a little bit. But I think the best part of his performance was the song "1994" that he wrote for Jason Aldene which included the crowd chanting "Joe, Joe, Joe Diffie!" (go to time 1:00 at the link) that was actually stuck in our heads after the concert was over, very catchy.

The main performers did not disappoint, both Dierks and Miranda are both phenomenal artists and have a great way of bringing you into the music.

Male Dating Pro Tip: Do not be afraid to join in on crowd participation parts of songs at concerts, it'll give you guys something to remember and talk about later. Don't worry about looking like a goon! she's on a date with YOU, make sure she likes who she's really with, not who you think she wants to be with.
 
This concluded the majority of our date, the ride home was interesting since in the middle of the main highway from Baltimore to Washington DC we ended up following cop cars that were driving side by side, then they started slowing down and put their lights on. They eventually came to a complete stop and we sat there for 15 minutes waiting for I don't know what, but our best guess is it was due to road construction. We arrived home safe and ended the date with a kiss. It was a great ending to a great date.

I hope you were able to maybe get some tip, or idea for a date night with your significant other from this post, and if nothing else, maybe it was a bit of entertainment for you!
Till next time, remember whatever you do, add a little bit of geek to it!  (in this post, beer geek applies)

This week in geek

The top geek stories for the week:
J. J. Abrams hired to direct Star Wars: Episode VII
My take on it:
Personally, I love Abrams directing style. I know he gets lot of crap for having bright lights in the background and shaky camera work, but I thoroughly enjoy a majority of his work.
I first started to like his work when watching Mission Impossible III. I thought there was something a little different to his movie than I had seen, and whether you like it or not, it is different, and I think he'll be able to bring different to the star wars brand, which after the last 3 releases... could really be of use.
City of Munich transitions to Linux/Open Source, Microsoft says it cost them money
My take on it:
A few months back, the city of Munich, Germany was the latest story, and perhaps the most publicized, of companies migrating away from the Windows operating system. Well this week, in retaliation to Munich claiming a €10 million savings by switching, Microsoft conducted their own investigation claiming that it actually cost them more money to switch.
I find this quite funny honestly. Microsoft spent an undisclosed amount of money to attempt to prove that someone else may have spent money on someone else's products. I think they got their feelings hurt a little bit.
For those of you who don't know, Linux is an operating system for your PC, much like Mac OSX is different from Windows, Linux is just another Operating system you can run. But Linux has a horrible reputation for being difficult to use (not true).
Skype eavesdropping possible now?
My take on it:
Since the acquisition of Skype by Microsoft in October 2011, there have a been a number of core architecture changes to the Skype program. Many of these have been to make it easier to integrate into the average desktop. But these changes have also made it completely possible to for the government to conduct wiretaps on your Skype connections. This isn't going to prevent me from using Skype, but if I'm going to be talking about stuff I wouldn't want the government to hear, I would definitely consider something else, perhaps jitsi will be getting installed on my pc soon :-)

Simplify your phone!

I think I will start doing weekly (monthly?) tips for Android.
My tip for this week is going to be to Simplify your phone. There is more computing power in a standard smartphone today than there was in all of NASA in 1969...When we went to the moon... With that being said, it is very easy for us to get lost in our own phones.
The majority of people with smartphones use it for 3 main things:
1 - Pictures
2 - Texts
3 - Phone Calls
Yet we still find the need to have 6 screens full of apps that we have used twice.

A few months back I ran into this amazing launcher, for those who don't know what that is, it's the application your phone uses as your home screen.
It is called Smart Launcher. It takes away all the pages that the default launcher has. "GASP! But Josiah, However will i clutter my phones home screen with pages and pages of apps now?"
Well I'm glad you asked, Smart Launcher organizes all your apps for you in categories such as" Utilities", "Settings", "Games", etc. And gives you a single page home screen with a few shortcuts to your most commonly used applications arranged in a nice little circle. My shortcuts are for camera, phone, gallery, Web browser, texts, and email.

Now tell me what else you need to have on your main screen?

The first picture is of the home screen with the shortcuts, the second page is the categorized apps listing that you get when you hit the little icon in the bottom left corner of the screen.
this app has singlehandedly made my phone less frustrating and confusing to use on a daily basis and i highly recommend you at least try it out on yours. Worst case scenario... You miss your cluttered unorganized phone and you just un install the Smart Launcher app and your phone goes back to being its messy self again... Yay cloud!

That'll be it for now, stay tuned to see if I post again.

Welcome back me!

We'll see how this goes... apparently my wife thinks that making a blog, posting twice, and not posting again isn't how you're suppose to do it. I thought about telling her its just a part of my evil plan of world domination, but i think that would be revealing too much.

I was able to successfully complete my fall semester of classes (somehow). This included taking the biology class for geniuses... And by geniuses I mean that my buddy, who already has a bachelor's degree in physics and is now pursuing a degree in medicine, struggled with this class. You know it's bad when the first day of class, during introductions, everyone is saying their majors and it's Nursing, Nursing, Pre-med, Pre-med, Bio-tech engineering, Cybersecurity... Wait wait wait...
[sing]
"One of these things is not like the other one,
one of these things just doesn't belong"
[/sing]
In case you didn't know, I was the Cybersecurity major that walked into the 3rd ring of hell knows as Biology 107. Now this was no basic run of the mill everyday biology 100 series class, it was biology specifically for biology majors. This means we get all sorts of up close and personal with cells. And not just "this is the nucleus, this is the cell wall" we're talking electron chain transfers during cell respiration and isolating specific dna strands using pcr methods. You know... Things that someone going into a degree like Cybersecurity will probably use on a daily basis.

But despite the universes attempt to hinder the college level of my life, I was able to overcome and get a C in the class. I have never been excited about a C in my life, but it's possible I screamed like an excited little girl when I saw the grade posted.

Stage "Fall Semester" completed.

Next stage... Spring
Known enemies: Computer Classes, Finding a new job
Weapon chosen for level: Knowledge and a Resume'
Difficulty Rating: 4