Like many a webworker - I’m addicted to Podcasts and am pretty much plugged in on a daily basis to the best of APM, NPR, Guardian News Media, Grape Radio etc. Robert Krulwich of NPR did a show the other day about the MIT Bioengineering faculty, and the dawn of a new species under the fostering care of some students with olfactory concerns. You can listen to the show here, but basically the show discusses how for bio-engineering students - life is spent in fume cupboards culturing e-coli in a petri-dishes, and due to the fact that e-coli smells like, er, smells like, well… shit, these students applied their trade to splice out the shit-smelling gene from the e-coli and replace it with the gene from Wintergreen that makes Wintergreen smell like Spearmint resulting in good smelling shit.

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Anybody that knows me, knows that I’m a huge supporter of Mozilla, especially Thunderbird. However, after 18 months of wishful thinking, I had to make a change this week; out with Mozilla (Thunderbird) and in with iGoogle and Gmail. I stuck with Thunderbird for a long time because of its unbelievable ease of use, consistency, and open source upgrades all driven by its non-profit culture. I also hoped that they would merge Firefox with Thunderbird and create the all in one application suite they’ve always talked about. Got so pumped up last year when they finally released the Lightning add-on for Thunderbird. However, waiting became too inefficient and switching to iGoogle/Gmail this week has been nothing short of a spiritual experience. Of course, I still use Firefox, but with the new Google setup, I don’t ever need to close the browser.

Here’s how my web worker life has transitioned:

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White Zinfandel has certainly ruined many opportunities for rosés in the United States. Slowly they are appearing in restaurants and at wine bars, yet, it is only the brave that are drinking this pink sensation. The rest of us, myself included until recently, don’t want people to believe that we might be drinking White Zinfandel. In reality, the only person that will care, and should care, what you are drinking is you, unless someone else is buying your drink, but that is more geared for the topic of economics, which I won’t be covering here.

I was recently at a wine bar in Paris with friends for dinner. When it came time to order our wine, I was looking at the reds, and by accident I ordered a Cotes-du-Provence thinking it was red. The server came back with our drinks. We had a rainbow of wines sitting on our table, one ordered white, another red, and apparently I ordered a rosé. A bit reluctant at first, I considered sending it back, but quickly remembered the French customer service policy…

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The Rhône Valley.

That’s all I have to say, it is a region that does not need a proper introduction. South of Burgundy, here is where we start to leave the Pinot Noir, Gamay, Cabernet Franc dominated reds and move into deeper Syrah, Grenache, Mouvedre and Carignan.

Chateauneuf-du-Pape is the big stand out in this region, as well as the way to my heart. Of course such quality and recognition is also accompanied by a prestigious price. If you are fortunate enough to be able to enjoy this treat of a wine on a regular basis, then give me a call and we’ll start hanging out. To the rest of us, there are great alternatives within the Rhône without going into debt.

Côtes du Rhône is the most popular of these alternatives and is available at a great value. A typical bottle will range form $12 to $20. A Côtes du Rhône is, generally speaking, a blend of Syrah, Grenache, and then sometimes Mouvedre and/or Carignan, but Grenache is the dominant force here. It’s centralized within the Rhône, displaying characteristics of the North and the South. Côtes du Rhône Villages are within Côtes du Rhône, but a bit more specific. French wine can never be simple; there always has to be a break down and then possibly two or three more after that.

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Yesterday, I replaced the hard drive in one of my laptops. Everything was under warranty, so no problems there. Now that I have a brand spanking new hard-drive I figured I would take advantage of its innocence, and partition off a section for the anticipated release of Ubuntu 8.04 … aka Hardy Heron.

What a great call. Of course, I went ahead and installed the OEM Vista on a 60 gig partition, simple to do using the recovery disks provided by Toshiba. For the record, it is very important that you install the Microsoft Windows OS first if you plan on dual booting with Linux, so you can rewrite the micro$oft boot manager with the more friendly Linux boot manager. Basically, you aren’t under time constraints to choose which OS you want to boot at startup.

Today, I fidgeted with excitement as I booted up my clean Vista install, and as a first task on this windows machine, immediately browsed to Ubuntu.com to download Hardy Heron. Read the rest of this entry »