Let’s start with a good one. Xingu is one of my favorites. It’s a Brazilian “black beer” that has a light, sweet taste. It’s medium-bodied, but doesn’t leave that heavy, filmy feel in your mouth like most dark beers. It’s very smooth, no tang, and almost no aftertaste (you know, the bitter one that comes with most stouts & porters). Ratings (10 = I’d be happy if I died right now, 1 = nearly yakked):

M: 10
N: 8

I should note that the “I’d be happy if I died right now” sensation wore off after the beer was gone.

(edit: link to Xingu)

***

This weekend has been an adventure in scanning slide film. I bought the fancy scanner that would do it well (Epson 4990 Photo). It’s a great scanner. However, the quality of the scanner is only as good as the software that you use with it (and vice versa). So… it came with Photoshop elements, which of course doesn’t work in Linux. The program I found, xsane, is a very good substitute. It doesn’t auto-crop the slides, but it scans transparencies well. The color correction, however, sucks pumpkins. Big ones. It illuminates the slides fairly well, but everything looks all magenta, so it took hours to correct them all. And there were a few great slides I cut out of my portfolio because I couldn’t get the damned scanned file to look like the slide.

The lesson: Ask the lab to scan them onto a CD for you. It’s worth the extra five bucks. Believe me. It’s nice to know I could do it myself if I had to, but it’s just not worth the effort… and they do it better anyway.