I’ve located a number of other wine blogs. They all seem to be somewhat infrequent, but most of them seem better informed than I, so worth looking at. Here are some of them:
http://www.purplesunshine.com/blog.htm
http://wineblog.blogspot.com/
http://vintner.blogspot.com/
I’m sure there are others.
The Ca’ del Solo Big House White is unusual for a number of reasons.
First of all, I have *never* had a disappointing wine from Ca’ de Solo, or their other label, Bonny Doon. Everything that comes out of there is unusual, unconventional, and wonderful.
The Big House White caught my eye because the Big House Red is wonderful, so I figured this would be too.
The bottle has a screw-top, which I actually did not notice until after I had bought it. It comes with a little pamphlet explaining why this is a good thing. Very interesting. And it has an amusing label, as do all the wines from this winery. This label features a picture of the Big House, with an escape in progress, and the getaway car speeding off.
And the wine itself is a rather unconventional blend of Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, Pinot Blanc, Viognier and Pinot Grigio.
I tasted it in less than condusive conditions, but even then it was intriguing. It is somewhat tangy, and had a medium finish with various melons, tropical fruit, and citrus hanging around once everything else fades. My initial impression was that it had rather more oak than I care for, but tasting it again now, I’m not really finding that any more, so this might have had more to do with what I was tasting it with.
The nose is a little hard to pin down. You can catch traces of all of the grapes in it, with the fruit of a riesling being prominent one moment, and the distinctive aroma of a Sauvignon (what some folks like to refer to as cat pee) surfacing at other times.
This is just an all-around good table white. It seems to me that it would be really good with crab or shrimp. And it’s got enough backbone from the pinots and sauvignon that you don’t really want it quite as cold as some folks are inclined to serve their whites – just slightly chilled.
But definitely don’t be scared off by the screwtop, and read the little pamphlet, so you can ridicule the barbarians who criticize you for bringing a screwtop. 😉
I had another experience with a speaking computer. I called to cancel a magazine subscription, and was immediately aware that I was speaking with a recording. I figured this meant that I would be able to get through the entire process without the tiresome task of convincing someone that I did indeed wish to cancel.
Alas, it was not to be, although I expect that the process was, overall, less painful than it would have been with a real person.
The computer first offered me two free months if I would reconsider. Then, it offered me a choice of several worthless trinkets if I would repent of my folly. Finally, it said that it would cancel my subscription at the end of the subscription year, rather than immediately, since that was probably what I had in mind.
At last, and grudgingly, it agreed to cancel my magazine immediately, and refund my money.
Now, when subjected to this kind of thing by a person, I always figured that it was their job, and they were just trying to get their bonus. But when a computer program does it, there’s just no excuse, and it was just annoying.
I also wondered what this does for employment. If one can, with one studio recording session, and a simple menu-driven script, replace a few dozen employees, surely this will happen in many call centers. Perhaps things like 411 will be replaced this way, since voice recognition appears to be sufficiently advanced now.
What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?
— Ebenezer Scrooge. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens.
This year, I seem to find myself more in tune with the first chapter of A Christmas Carol than with the last.
Tonight was the Christmas fling in Wilmore, where all the town folks turn out on Main Street, and all the downtown businesses open their doors and have snacks and hot drinks. I just did not feel like staying very long, and I got very cold, so I just came home. I’m trying to work on my book, but I’m having a hard time concentrating.
Tomorrow night is another Christmas party. I’m not even sure I’m going. Perhaps I will make the requisite appearance. I suppose folks will expect me to do a Dickens reading, and I’m just not sure I have the heart for it. I’m more inclined to read about Scrooge walking home through the foggy streets of London and up his broad staircase – wide enough for the coach-and-four! – than I am to read about Fezziwig and how the small things we do for one another mean so much.
Perhaps I should not write things like this in such a public medium, where I am supposed to be all jolly and positive. However, this year has worn me down as no year ever has before, and I’m just not sure I have the energy to do the Christmas thing this year.
I find myself with a rather unexpected problem. I’m out of storage space for my wine!
This is actually due to two things. First, I’ve bought a number of wines that I’d like to keep for a long time, and I want to store them in such a way that they will actually benefit from aging, and not just get old and crufty. The other problem is that my new schedule give me very few opportunities to really sit down and enjoy a good wine, and so I have been tending to buy wines, but then never actually open them.
A while back, I made a wine storage cabinet out of an old fridge, and that’s where I’m keeping the wines that actually deserve a quality storage facility. It is full full full. I also have a little 12-bottle wooden wine rack, and that is almost full.
I need to go through and figure out what wines really need to be in the cooler, and which ones don’t really deserve that honor. Perhap that will let me stretch my storage out another year or so. However, a number of my friends want me to buy wine by the case, in order to have some sort of wine club going, where I serve as the somellier and storage person, and they … well, basically, they pay for me to have good wine. At least that’s the way that I see it. 😉 I’ll let you know how that plays out.
I got a new phone. In order to call my parents, I press a button, and then I say “mom and dad”, and it calls them for me. As I observed last week, Google allows dumb people to do things that they would otherwise be incapable of doing. And now my phone relieves me of even the mental exercise of pressing number buttons, and of remembering a phone number.
When I was teaching College Algebra, I became convinced that calculators were leading to dumber students being able to pass math classes. I am now becoming more and more convinced that computers in general are allowing dumber people to survive the evolutionary process, but that they are also making the rest of us dumber. I think I’m a pretty smart person, but I can’t remember my parents’ phone number, because I don’t have to. I have trouble writing (by hand) a page of text, because I have been typing so long that that much writing makes my hand cramp up. It’s really quite pathetic.
Of course, technology allows me to be physically unfit also, but that’s hardly a new thing. The phone just got me thinking. Or, perhaps, it enabled me not to have to think …
Day 5 of the Apache training has normally been pretty rushed, and an opportunity to cover last minute stuff before people dashed off to the airport. Well, I’ve decided to add real content to day 5, so that 1) people really feel that they are missing something if they leave early, and 2) so that the notes that they have to take with them are actually worthwhile for that last day.
So, I’ve added quite a bit about mod_dav, mod_rewrite, and mod_proxy, as well as a complete treatment of migrating to Apache 2.0.
I suppose I really aught to write some “slides” for this content, but I tend to consider that somewhat less important, so I’ll just probably have all the examples up on the screen while I talk about stuff.
tell all the friends who think they’re so together
that these are ghosts and mirages, all these thoughts of fairer weather
Indigo Girls — Love’s Recovery
Past the half-way mark in the Apache training class. Things are going well. Having an intelligent student makes all the differentce between a frustrating week and an enjoyable week. Having a student with Unix experience makes things even better. This has been an enjoyable week so far.
Weird thing happened this week. Elections coming up in Kenya on the 27th, and there are two people that really have a chance of winning. Uhuru Kenyatta, who is the son of the first president, and hand-picked by the current president to be his succsssor, and Mwai Kibaki. Kibaki used to be the current president’s vice president, but was fired a few years back. Kibaki was involved in a pretty serious car accident yesterday. The official story is that he is not badly hurt, but he was flown to London for treatment, which seems more serious than the fractured arm and sprained ankle that they are reporting. It seems rather suspicious, in a country where politicians have been involved in “accidents” as they rose to power. But today Kibaki assured people that there was nothing underhanded about the accident – that it really was a normal accident.
And today we had the first real snow of the year. There’s quite a bit of accumulation, and the roads were kind of a mess on the way home. People were driving 35 about the whole way, which got annoying real fast, but was probably just as well.
Yesterday started training again. I find myself wondering, yet again, why the default configuration file uses ‘Port 80’ rather than ‘Listen 80’, while the documentation says that Port and Bindaddress are deprecated. I’ll have to experiment with setting Listen, and not setting Port, and see if any bad things happen. The only strange thing that comes to mind is that Port has a default value of 80, so if we leave it out entirely, it is still set to 80. I think.
These classes invariably bring up something in the docs that could be done better. Which is pretty cool. It’s like these folks are contributing to Apache just by virtue of letting me talk at them. 😉