Mon, 29 Sep 2008
How To Taste a Lot of Wine with Your Friends
Are you in a rut with your wine selection? Want to branch out and try new stuff, but you're not sure what to try? Well, here's an easy way to taste a lot of wines with your friends that's also fun.
Have a station set up near the door where your guests can put their bottles in a bag and write down some key information on some index cards. In our case, we hand our bagged wines and cards to the "cardmaster" who will assign random numbers to our wines. Here's a vid from Saturday night where I'm bagging my wines while Patrick, the co-host, plays with the camera:Once everyone's wine is bagged- organize the bottles on a table, give everyone a glass, and have a place to dump out extra wine. Hand out some index cards and pens and serve some food! Then let everyone taste the wines and keep notes (they can take the notes home with them). Make the one sober person tabulate the scores and then do a "reveal". Here's Patrick who somehow got stuck being the tabulator . . . Oh, by the way- I brought two wines. One of them got last place. Yeah, I rock. . . Enjoy. . .
Reegs going over his notes, Pak picks a fave:
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29 Sep 01:00 | /food_and_drink | 3 comment(s)
Tue, 23 Sep 2008
I'm in a Bubble
You know, I realized something when I was driving around San Antonio and Austin this past weekend. I realized I had never seen a McCain yard sign in SF. Okay, "window sign" since people here don't have front yards . . . . I have seen a few bumperstickers though But when I was hanging out with Megan she told me she had seen a *Palin* sign in someone's yard. Correction- she had seen a few Palin signs in people's yards. I thought she was pulling my leg, so I made her show me and we drove to the location. Here's a video of it. Note- in the vid we say it looks like a printout but we realized it was a vinyl sign when we got close. It's pink too- very Barbie. . . . I doubt I'll see one in SF. . . 23 Sep 22:52 | /general | 3 comment(s)
Tue, 16 Sep 2008
More Flip Vids
Here are some more videos from the goofy Flip Video Ultra Angie, Mike and I pt 1- doing intense road-trip snack research
Part 2
16 Sep 12:03 | /humor | 4 comment(s)
Mon, 15 Sep 2008
Social Social!!
I have been playing with some alpha and beta software the past few months. Well, actually, I do that all the time, that's not news. But I like to tinker with Media Server software when I can. And now that I have a newer computer that can actually display stuff, it's been more fun. In the past you've heard me talk about how badly I've wanted to build a "myth box". It's basically a home-theater+dvr server. (Patrick has written much more about it, check out his site). There is other software out that's a bit easier to use if you're less inclined to tinker though and have a spare machine around. And if you have a Mac there's Plex and Boxee (and Sapphire, a plug-in for Front Row). But I was thinking about the Mac software a lot recently. And this morning on the bus there was a guy on his cell phone talking about Web Two Point Ohhhh (I should point out that he wasn't that loud, but the rest of the bus was quiet). But listening to that guy talk about Social Sites (and someone in the office talking about Facebook) reminded me that just because a site has a "social" aspect it doesn't make it any better than other software. In some cases it can be worse. Bear with me, I'll circle back to this . . .
... there's more to read here ...
15 Sep 12:16 | /tech | 1 comment(s)
Wed, 10 Sep 2008
And to calm me down ...
How about this after that last rant? 10 Sep 15:50 | /rants_and_raves | 2 comment(s)
Garbage Rant
I was reminded of something when reading one of Jen's posts. She wrote:
I was driving behind a man this morning who felt that it was appropriate to throw his empty Starbucks cup out of the window, onto the roadside. Now, my opinion about Starbucks aside (HATE IT. Venti? Come ON...it's LARGE), I live in the Bay Area where being environmentally conscious is almost a religion.The weird thing is that I've always thought the same thing but yet I've always been shocked (although the feeling's faded) about how much people litter out here in CA (SF in particular, but Jen's story was shocking to me because it's the "clean south bay"). My parents and I have this running joke about places being "first world"- I can't remember exactly how the joke got started but I think we started it after my first visit to Switzerland (I was hunting Nazi descendents and tracing Jewish funds that had been "repatriated" to Swiss banks... but that's another story). I think I had said something about how spotless the place was and my dad said, "now that's first world"-- and I said, "no, it's .5-- it's cleaner than first world". We don't just use the joke about garbage though. But when I moved to SF I had this image in my head- "Silicon Valley inventors, no garbage, wired busses that don't make noise, e-poppin/rave-attending coders, Wired magazine readers, sci-fi writers, hippies, restaurants, wine and bad football teams". You know- real "first world". But the thing is, San Francisco is by FAR the dirtiest fucking placed I've ever lived in. And the rolling blackouts wiped out any hope for "first world" status in my eyes. I still like it (most of the time), but good lord people, clean up after yourselves. I dunno, maybe there's no equivalent out here to growing up in Texas where the motto "Don't Mess With Texas" isn't just the most successful anti-littering campaign ever but a creed to live by. Maybe it's because we'd kick each others' asses (or at least report them to the Rangers) if we saw litterers and people out here don't do that. I partly wouldn't blame people if they did throw trash because of some Berkeley tree-sitter saying "omg omg don't litter" all the time.
Of course if a SF cop did this, some PBR-drinkin' fixie rider would start crying In my hood there is a ton of pink plastic bag trash- especially on Clement. The times I've yelled at people to not litter, they suddenly feigned a lack of understanding of English. (I bet I get bad comments about that line). And it's not just my neighborhood (which is cleaner on Lake). There are problems downtown too and all over-- Recently I was wandering over to Angie & Mike's in the Castro and saw this one dude trying to sneak behind the library- he had already dumped out some bags of trash in the yard of the yellow house on the end of the street and was getting ready to take a dump. (yes, pulling his pants down to defecate -dump, yes in theird 'yard') I was about to yell at the guy and the homeowners came out and said "ummm excuuuuuuuuse me, that's our yard sir, you need to get out of there soon." Soon? WTF? How about:"GTFO our property and take your bags of trash with you, and you have 25 seconds to do it."? Johnny D & the Rocket 88s I'm not sure I have a solution to the problem . . . but I think some tough love and billyclubs are in order. How about we arm Jen and let her rove around giving out citations? That'd be a start. 10 Sep 14:39 | /rants_and_raves | 4 comment(s)
Mon, 08 Sep 2008
CA DMV Phone Queue
It's sad that due to my work duties of running the Support ACD (phone queues) I'm paying more attention than usual to the DMV's phone setup. I'm on hold to speak to someone about late-arriving registration tag stickers. And as I was cruising through the phone menu I caught myself thinking, "hrm, that's an interesting way to set things up . . ." and "hrm, that's a good feature I should think about implementing in our hold queues in Q2 if I have time . . . ". The agent/CSR has since picked up and is having a hard time understanding me and the phrase "I have not received my registration renewal yet" so my mood has since passed from curious/inquisitive to normal DMV-hatred. Thanks! edit: and she just hung up on me . . . 08 Sep 13:18 | /tech | 0 comment(s)
Link for Angie and Jen
Kind of weird. 08 Sep 12:22 | /links | 4 comment(s)
Tue, 02 Sep 2008
RIP Don LaFontaine
Awww man, Don LaFontaine died. I loved that guy. I'm always trying to imitate him. "I would like a can of peas, please!" 02 Sep 13:19 | /news | 0 comment(s)
New Muni Record
I guess school's back in session- or the new people have started their jobs downtown as the bus has been more full these days. Last Wednesday there was this dude sitting in front of me who was all fidgity. He kept opening and closing an envelope that had citizenship papers/instructions in it. I figured he was trying to memorize an address, but wasn't doing a great job. He kept looking around and it was making me nervous (not to mention the woman next to him). As the bus was crossing Polk, he spazzed out and grabbed the cord to signal a stop. But as it was the express bus, I giggled inside. Even though I'm an a-hole, I was going to tell him that there was no stop for him and let him down easy. . . but no, spaz boy JUMPED up (the bus was full btw) and he forced his way to the door. When he forced his way to the door, he elbowed the hottie I'd been staring at in the head. She even told him that there wasn't a stop and to not hit her in the head. But I think there was a language issue. I think I'm becoming conservative because I think there should be a new section of the citizenship test. I don't care if you know who the 14th president (Franklin Pierce) was, but you should know 1) what the difference is between a regular and express bus is and more importantly 2) don't elbow hot chicks in the head! The sad thing is that afterwards, I thought, weird, that was the 2nd day in a row where someone tried to get off early and didn't realize it was an express. And then Friday I thought (again after someone else tried to get off and was pulling that cord like there was no tomorrow) "weird, that's 4 days in a row, that's never happened before".... So you know what? It happened AGAIN today. That's a new record! And today it wasn't just one person, it was two! The first one was a goober who thought there was one more stop after Fillmore (that's the "usual"). The second was a cute girl in a halter top dress (yum) in front of me who was desperate to get off the bus around Hyde. At least people tried to warn the girl, but she wouldn't take off her headphones so she didn't understand what was going on. But this rash of "jumpers" must end soon . . . 02 Sep 12:34 | /rants_and_raves | 1 comment(s)
Last Season for Mackey
I caught up just in time with all of the past seasons of The Shield. Season 7 starts on Tuesday and the always good Tim Goodman has an article about the upcoming season. I wish the Chron's other writers were as consistently good as Goodman's TV industry articles . . . . 02 Sep 12:08 | /links | 0 comment(s)
