Advent of All Sorts

‘Tis the season!

As has been the custom for many, many years, Tammy has put up our little tree with the “advent birds” for the kids. She puts little treats in the birds each morning for the kids to find. It’s nicer for the kids, and more variety.

Last year, Tammy got me a whisky advent calendar: 25 tiny shots of various whiskies. She suggested getting me another this year, but I said no: they were nice, but in retrospect, the little white-labelled bottles weren’t memorable. So, I didn’t get much of an education, considering. When I was riding (virtually) with Phil last week, he said that he’d gone to the liquor store and gotten 25 single cans of IPA as an advent for himself. I mentioned it to Tammy, and the next time she was out shopping, she did the same. Now I’m two days into having a different beer. She puts the can in the paper gift bag for me to find each morning. ❤️

I’m going to post pics of the cans here and a note about them.

1. Young’s Double Chocolate Stout: nice, nitrogenated, very dark
2. Kronenbourg 1664 Blanc Red Fruits: very fruity, barely tastes like beer.
3. Velkopopovický Kozel lager: a light-tasting beer, not bitter. Quite good.
4. Paulaner Salvator: double bock. Strong beer (8%). Has a flavour that reminds me of molasses but a scent that evokes apple cider.
5. 8.6 Red: Strong Belgian-style beer. Reminiscent of Gulden Draak, and that’s a good thing.
6. Peroni Nastro Azzurro: a very light beer. Suitable for a hot day. Not particularly memorable.
7. Banana Bread: Strong banana aroma, but disappears when drinking, until you eat something. Then POW! It’s banana. Tammy didn’t care for it.
8. Stiegl Radler Zitrone: A lemon radler. Lemonade flavour. Very nice.
9. Innis & Gunn Mangoes on the Run: Tasted a lot like Innis & Gunn but with a mango flavour, too. I’d prefer regular I&G.
10. Stella Artois: a classic light beer.
11. Jever Pilsener: a pilsener. It wasn’t particularly memorable.
12. Berliner Pilsener: another pilsener. Tammy likes this one better than yesterday. It’s just an easy to drink beer.
13. Beck’s: I’ve had this before, when Kurt borrowed my rollers he bought me some as a thank you. Another light-coloured German beer.
14. Stiegl Goldenbrau: Our first repeat brewer on the list. Tammy thought this had a surprisingly malty taste for a light beer. The radler was better.
15. Asahi Super Dry: Japanese beer. Not bitter, easy to drink. Tammy liked it, as in she probably “shared” half of it.
16. 8.6 Black: Strong Belgian-style, but with the colour and flavour of a stout. Very interesting and enjoyable.
17. Yanjing: A Chinese beer. A lager that Tammy didn’t care for much. I didn’t mind it, but it wasn’t as good as many of the German beers earlier.
18. Guinness Hop House 13: I didn’t know what to expect. Guinness? Hops? Turns out it was a bitter, with lots of hop flavour. I liked it, Tammy didn’t at all.
19. Estrella Damm Lager: Spanish beer. Light, but with a bit more oomph to it. Not as standout as the Guiness.
20. Tuborg Green: Danish, brewed in Turkey?? I have no issues with it, but it doesn’t really jump out at me.
21. Dab Maibock: had the sharper note of a bock, but not as strong as the double bock earlier in the list. Tammy didn’t care for it, but I liked it better than the lagers.
22. Guinness Blonde: Whiskey, tango, foxtrot, over. This is a Guiness? I guess they’re branching out. In this case, a lager. Decent. A floral note to it, I thought.
23. Red Horse: A strong beer. I have enjoyed the strong beers that have arrived in my magic bag every morning, and this is not exception.
24. Pilsner Urquell: Another Czech beer, and this one was a real winner. Easily the best of the lighter beers. It went down very easily. Recommended.
25. Ginger Beard: An alcoholic ginger beer. Strong ginger taste. Crisp and refreshing.

A comment after 20 days: it’s funny how innocuous a lot of these beers are. I don’t think I would be able to identify any of the lighter beers in a blindfold test. I like the distinctive beers better.

And, of course… The Advent of Code! I’m back for a second year. My main effort is in Swift. The AoC isn’t a joke: I know there will be puzzles that I won’t be able to solve without help and I want to use the best tools at my disposal. But for some coders, just completing the puzzles isn’t enough of a challenge. If you do a bit of searching, you find lots of really cool attempts. Examples include: doing every day of the AoC in a different language, doing the AoC on an emulated Commodore PET, doing the AoC in COBOL, assembly language, Scratch… and so on. I do not have the Comp Science skills to do all 25 days of the challenge in a primitive environment. But that’s not to say that I didn’t dabble: last year, after the AoC was complete I gave it a shot on the old PowerBook in C++98, successfully finishing 18 days.

I have finished the first two days of this year in Swift with little difficulty. The problems aren’t too difficult to start. And I had a few extra minutes… so I re-solved Day 1 in Pascal.

It might not be in the top echelon of hard-core, and it might be the simplest challenge, but I did it with a language from 1970 running Free Pascal over SSH on a Raspberry Pi 4. 😎

The only time I’ve written any amount of Pascal was in Computer Science 110 in my first year at UVic. At the time, it was still a top-tier language for programming on the Mac and it was still the darling “teaching language”. Now, Delphi (the niche language that descended from Pascal) is ranked #28 worldwide, which is a long, long way down the list. When I started doing this tonight, I barely remembered what a Pascal program looked like.