A favorite beer

Tonight I'm celebrating the end of the work week with a Firestone Walker Paraboloid.  This beer isn't readily available on the east coast so I have to order it directly from Firestone Walker in California.  This brewer was founded by a couple guys with experience in wine making.  They make some amazing beers with all the complexity of a fine wine.

Sipping on the Paraboloid made me remember the first time I had its little brother, a beer called Parabola, about 11 years ago at a restaurant in Leesburg called Leesburg Public House.  LPH had been opened by a friend and quickly became one of our favorite weekly happy hour venues.  I had been reading about this legendary beer for a few years but had never seen it available nearby.  Jay, one of the servers at LPH, was very knowledgeable about craft beer and had a few connections in the beer world.  He was able to get a few highly rated beers such as Parabola to sell at the restaurant.

When we arrived at LPH that night, Jay told us that they had just received the Parabola.  I managed to convince Dave, a friend I had worked with at 5 different companies, to split a bottle with me.  Jay brought us the Parabola and served it with the flourish fitting such a special beer as you can see in the photo below.  Dave loved the beer as much as I did but he never let me forget that it was me who got him hooked on more expensive beers.  Each year when it was released we'd compare notes on where to find it in nearby stores.

 

This rambling train of thought caused me to remember that it's almost the 1 year anniversary of my buddy Dave's untimely death.  It would be difficult to express how much I miss him.  One of the things I miss most about Dave is how we both enjoyed talking about low level programming.  If he were still around I'd be telling him about the pointer math I had to do in a C program today.   I was doing that to solve the problem of a device at work occasionally misplacing its timestamp from the usual location at the start of a buffer to somewhere in the middle of the buffer.  Knowing where the timestamp ended up could provide clues about what's causing the problem.  This timestamp takes the form of a 64-bit integer.  This wouldn't normally be a problem to find that given the fact that the upper 16 bits of the timestamp contain an easily identifiable value but on ARM CPUs, 64-int integers are stored in little endian format.  So having found the correct 16 bits somewhere within the buffer, it was necessary to back up by 6 bytes to get the entire timestamp before the timestamp could be displayed in all its glory.  Pointer math is always fun.

Well, my celebratory beer is nearly gone now and that low level programming tired me out.  I think I'll sign off for now.