Maureen and I went to the Napa Valley Wine Auction on Friday. Wow! Tickets for the day were $250 per person, but we got to go for free, since we were helping Bruce and Danielle pour their three clicks wine. What an amazing event. I even had a long chat with Margaret Mondavi. She was chatting away as if we knew each other! Hard to believe there is a recession out there. I took a few pictures with my camera phone, but it was quite a feast. 700 guests, 500 wineries, wines poured from the barrels by the owners and winemakers, and food by the valley's finest chefs and restaurants (Thomas Keller was serving!). Some of the auction items went for millions of dollars.
I went in early on two barrel auctions (J.Davies 2007 Cab and also the O'Shaughnessy 2007 Cab) hoping that my low bids might somehow stay on the board. The barrel auctions work such that the top 10 bids (in increments of $50) each win a case so my starting bids were around $300 a case. Both these auctions finally closed with lows of $500 and $800 and highs of $1,000 and $1,300. Definitely not what I could spend! I think the top bid was for a case of Shafer 2007 Cab at $6,000.
You may have noticed some changes to the way pictures are being handled on frommel.net. I started playing with jQuery, which is one of the popular cross-browser javascript libraries out there with features such as handling web data services, ajax, and some really cool GUI components. I found a nice jQuery plugin, called prettyPhoto that creates a lightbox style popup for images (also works for flash movies and general html pages).
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I have a somewhat messy setup when it comes to my mobile pictures. I have been posting them to flickr for a number of years, but my free flickr account is nearly full, and I also want to post my pictures to facebook, and have them archived on my own server for safety sake. What to do, what to do. By the way, I like flickr because it actually stores the full-sized images (whereas facebook only stores a down-sampled version of the picture). Also, you can create a 'badge' from your flickr photos (as you can see at the top of my frommel home page) which can pull up the larger pictures directly from flickr by clicking on the thumbnails, whereas if you click on a thumbnail on facebook's badge it takes you to your public facebook profile, not the picture (very annoying).
If you have been reading the tech news lately, you would have noticed a trend in mobile computing called Netbooks. They are basically low-powered mini-laptops, typically with small hard drives, small screens, low-power CPU’s and GPU’s, built-in webcams and small batteries. And they are cheap and small.
After looking around at a few devices (HP 2125, Asus eee, MSI Wind), I bought a Lenovo S10 (black model… they also come in white and red) for $499 from Circuit City (the 512MB/80GB version sells for $399!). Besides liking the Lenovo brand (they took over the Thinkpads from IBM) I also liked the look of the S10. It came loaded with 1GB of memory, a 160GB hard drive and a low-powered Atom 1.6GHz processor. Not bad! I since upgraded the memory to 2GB (additional $40) and installed Vista Business instead of the stock XP (other options were Linux, or a tweaked version of OSX). The one big problem was that it did not have built-in bluetooth, but I fixed that by ordering a built-in card and cable from China.
I now use the S10 as my primary device when traveling and at the office, which is pretty much Mon-Thu every week. Click through to read about my likes and dislikes.
As a special gift, Maureen treated me to a week-end course on Wine Tasting at the University of Davis (about an hour away from Napa) called an "Introduction to Sensory Evaluation of Wine". The course was not only very good in terms of teaching us the differences between smells and tastes, but also taught us a lot about wine making in general. I would highly recommend this course to anyone interested in learning more about wine. I still find it very hard to discern all the different smells in the wines, but at least I have a better reference point for tasting. (our classroom)
My dad had one of these completely mechanical Curta calculators, and I remember how fascinated we were with it. I just saw this web page showing a video of how to use it, and discussing its amazing history. It was invented by Curt Herzstark in 1938 and perfected while he was a prisoner in a concentration camp, possibly saving his life. Also check out this diagram showing the complexity and beauty of this machine.
Kimberly, Josh, Mo and I went to a restaurant called Alinea in Chicago. It was the most memorable meal I have ever had. It is more of a sensory experience than a meal, though. Check out the menu and the pictures on the Alinea website. The dish that stood out the most for me was Fava Beans with lavender, banana and pecorino. They served the plates on heated lavender-infused pillows, so that your whole face was embraced by the lavender smells. I guess it is the equivalent of drinking wine from the perfect glass. A sensory experience that I will not forget. BTW, the menu is printed with the size of the circles indicating the relative size of the plate, and the horizontal offset indicating the savoriness or sweetness of the dish. Also see some of the pictures from our week-end in Chicago. We loved the architectural boat tour.
This is a beautiful contraption. The concept sounds ridiculous, but check it out. It is quite funny. The LeaveMeAloneBox does nothing more than turn itself off after someone flips it on.
04 Apr 09 -
Scimitar is Sapient's Automated Testing Tool. Daniel loves his little Scimitar guy and I decided to have him do some marketing from the bathtub...
Maureen and I went to the Napa Valley Wine Auction on Friday. Wow! Tickets for the day were $250 per person, but we got to go for free, since we were helping Bruce and Danielle pour their three clicks wine. What an amazing event. I even had a long chat with Margaret Mondavi. She was chatting away as if we knew each other! Hard to believe there is a recession out there. I took a few pictures with my camera phone, but it was quite a feast. 700 guests, 500 wineries, wines poured from the barrels by the owners and winemakers, and food by the valley's finest chefs and restaurants (Thomas Keller was serving!). Some of the auction items went for millions of dollars.
