Holy snot, that flu struck fast. Looks like I'm working from home for a while.

I was motivated to join two local wine clubs, of the variety that you typically see at wineries and tasting rooms. You commit to purchase x bottles y times a year and you will then receive discounts on their wine and merchandise, receive free tastings for yourself and guests, have access to members only pours, get invited to special events, etc. As my friend Mr. Harvey so correctly pointed out, one can get away with it because wine tasting is so much more socially acceptable than the "gin of the month" club. Some of that social acceptedness is negated, though, by the risk in being entitled to free tastings on any day at tasting rooms which are, in varying degrees, in walking distance. Fleming-Jenkins is three blocks away and I walk past it any time I go to the post office, hardware store, or most anything on lower Santa Cruz Avenue. Testarossa is up the hill at the old Novitate Jesuit winery overlooking the valley. They can claim to be the oldest continuously operating winery in the bay area since they continued to produce sacramental wine throughout the prohibition (sales skyrocketed).

My action was motivated by more than the reasons listed above, however. The real source of it goes back to a trip I recently took to Seattle and Vancouver for leisure. Near the end of my three days in Vancouver, I took the train to Gastown to have dinner and walked into the Steamworks Brewing Company. It was full, and I was alone, so I said I'd just sit at the bar. After chatting up the young lady next to me for a bit it came out that she was sitting there alone because she was unable to get into a wine tasting that evening held at one of the local hotels - and she was quite dissapointed since the theme that evening was California Zinfandels and she had been looking forward to it. At this point I had to mention where I live and my proximity to various things concerning wine. This prompted her to get very excited and take her gloves off, so to speak, and dive right into a heated discussion. It turns out she is a wine steward at a local wine-themed restaraunt, and now she was having a battle of wits with an unarmed man. Furthermore, not only did she know her wines, but she also was a self taught web programmer and once she found out I was working on a web appliance that brought about a whole new round of discussion as well.

The night wore on and I was long done with my dinner, and not leaving rapidly since we were having a good time, so she suggested that we ought to each have a shot as new friends. First I bought a round, then she bought a round, and then she said that she was expecting to hear from one of her friends working the tasting event and they were going to go to another friends apartment and have a private tasting with all of the opened bottles which were just going to be discarded anyway - and I really should come help them, which of course I did. I met two of her friends, a couple who were absolutely splendid company and very gracious to a strange foreigner brought into their home. I missed the last train by about three hours and thus all of us crashed there once the wine tasting finally ceased about 4am. I was forced to leave at 10am because I had to find the nearest SkyTrain station and get back to my hotel at Metrotown before I was to check out that morning - especially since my passport, laptop, suitcase, car keys, and other mildly important things were all left behind in the room. Otherwise they offered to take me out fishing or for a bike ride or to do something else they considered essential to visiting Vancouver.

So for four random people in downtown Vancouver it was a chance encounter brought about by the common interest of wine. For some people it is a common love of the Green Bay Packers, and for others it is collections of regurgitating fish. The beauty of wine is that you can do it anywhere, some may have more experience than others but nobody knows it all, the experience is subjective so if you like it you CAN'T be wrong, and you're bound to have a good time if for no other reason than the fact that good spirits bring about good spirits.

For anyone who would care to stagger to Fleming-Jenkins or head up the hill to Testarossa, drop a line and drop on by. I'll be happy to introduce you to the regulars I've met.

rLog snydely noted: As a reminder, snyde remark authentication will be coming soon. Until that time, if a real first name is not used and I can not determine the name to correct the post with, I will be deleting said remarks. Snydely.

I haven't been posting much on the rLog yet, and this is simply because I can not easily post until the next batch of features is ready. I have been posting with raw SQL queries because I haven't uploaded the page that allows me to enter new posts. This may be behind the scenes and you don't realize it - but it is a very important feature for updating the rLog nonetheless! The reason THAT page hasn't been uploaded is because I'm still working out some kinks in the logon mechanism. Once that is working properly, you should be able to log into the rLog to prevent misattributed snarky comments, to allow voting on rLog posts and also on said comments, and to enable you to play new games such as the forthcoming "project STG". I'm a little swamped for the rest of the week, but I hope to have some of this done next weekend. Your patience is appreciated.

The truth is that some of the reason I haven't posted much is that I've not had much exciting going on and did not wish to bore you with it. Last week was a machine tool show in Santa Clara, and was largely unexciting. In prior weeks I had machine tool shows in Dayton and Milwaukee. Those were also largely unexciting.

Exciting new rLog features are in the works.

	rLog snydely noted: Individual post comments are enabled, but all further feature additions will be held for release until I finish the account creation and user login functions.
	Alice snydely noted: Forget the new features. How about some posts?

Of course, you already knew that if you're here. That probably means you've been here before. You were one of the few, the loyal, and I thank you.

The original rLog was an exercise in stubbornness, simmered in silliness, and piggybacked on top of underutilized server capacity (which might be a fair way to classify any number of my life's activities). It was just a medium for someone with nothing of import to do and nothing of import to say to say it to other people who also had nothing of import to do. After years of service, a desire to more completely seperate my professional bandwidth from my personal, rLog moved to a professionally hosted server with an appropriately named domain to match. I will not call it rLog 2.0, as I hate that cliche nearly as much as gate lice. Maybe I'll go for something never used before - like New rLog (and, after much protest, rLog Classic?) to define that era.

The new rLog was new not just in its pictures (what few there are) and its location, but also in its construction. New rLog was not an exercise in futility, but simply an exercise. I learned how to put all sort of puzzle pieces together for VB.NET, ASP.NET, ODBC data access, web services, and more that have now transformed my career with the invention of the FactoryWiz. I find myself extremely busy, and the skills I use today far surpass what I knew of when I pieced together New rLog from high level, pre defined components. I look back and I realize that this creature needs attention to fix its diseases and inadequacies, to give it purpose, and to make it loved. If not, why keep it on life support to the tune of yearly hosting fees and domain name registration? There are database glitches, the feedback is awkward, the configuration pages leave something to be desired, and the raw HTML formatting could be automated.

The problem is that there are plenty of mechanisms for useless activities and little time or inclination to invest in this one. My friends reflect this fact. Their blogs linked to by rLog do not update for months, or in the case of many, even years at a time. All have been replaced by the ever expanding clutches of MyTwitFacedIn and such. I myself am so guilty of this I had not so much as glimpsed at rLog for three months prior to this post. Which brings me back to the rLog difference. I had ownership of this one. I made it - and since it can not be completed, I shall put it down.

And by the way - The rLog inadvertently revealed your credit card data to hackers. So sorry.