Old man's war

I needed a sci fi that I could get a little lost in, so I picked this one up, and it delivered. Someone compared the writing to Heinlein's, but I think it's vastly superior. After all, I couldn't finish "The moon is a harsh mistress", but I finished this in two days.

AT&T (ass, tit & tit)

... because AT&T couldn't possibly be an acronym in any way related to anything technological.

I had the worst day today, in large part due to AT&T. I found out the SLO store had iPhone 3G's, so I headed up there, and landed the last 8GB box. Went through the whole shindig of divulging every piece of personal information you could imagine, got approved, but porting my number from T-Mobile threw an incomprehensible error. Got bumped up to the store's trouble-shooter, who got on the phone with AT&T. At AT&T nobody could figure out why the porting was glitching or what the error messages meant -- this last one I forgive them, I couldn't understand them either. Fine, so after 20 minutes of mumbling on the phone with AT&T, it's time to cancel the port request and try putting it in again. So we cancel it. But then the request can't be put in again, because that phone, the actual device, is now in the system (I assume the fact that the IMEI was attached to the previous request means now this phone appears to be activated), AND there are no more phones left. So, get this: they offer to take my name and number and call me when they get a new one. *chortle*

To recap: 100 mile trip, find iPhone, 3 apple employees and 2 AT&T employees on the phone, and they can't port my fucking number and sell me a fucking iPhone. Yeah.

Oreana 2005 red table wine

This wine has a big orange question mark up front, and is decidedly a blend. It's a little spicy, and pleasant to drink with dinner, and since it's cheap, it's bound to become a staple. Apparently they have a tasting room downtown, so I might head down there sometime...

Alone through the roaring forties

Alli got me Vito Dumas' classic for my birthday last year, and I only now got round to reading it. Dumas is famous for many things besides the solo circumnavigation about which this book was written. He was a big proponent of double-enders for blue water sailing. He was also an advocate of heavy displacement, but with as much of the weight in the keel as possible, to increase stability. He was against heaving-to in heavy weather, instead favoring running before the wind, which is how I found out about him: an old skipper of mine and I were having a disagreement as to whether heavy full keel boats or light fin keel boats are safer in a nasty blow, and I was advocating for the old stop-the-boat approach, while he was arguing for the planing-while-running-before-the-wind approach (which I've since come around to seeing the merits of, may I add). This was an incredibly fun and educational book to read, even if the speeds cited seem absolutely fantastically improbable. If Dumas is to be believed, he routinely dealt with winds over 40 kts, and, even more improbably, made 15 kts running downwind in the "Lehg II". This book also wins the prize for having one of the coolest double entedre titles ever: the "roaring forties" refers both to latitude South, which was the parallel that Dumas hugged through most of the circumnavigation, and the decade, the 1940s, while WWII was raging, when he undertook the trip.

Pacific Oasis 2005 Merlot

This Gehrs wine deserves special mention, because it is a bottle of the 2003 vintage, which Ian brought to dinner a couple years ago, that got me thinking I might want to learn more about wine. So when I recently found a 2005 bottle, at a Japanese market of all places, for $15, I scooped it up. I looked it up on the web, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that winemaker is almost geeky, and has data sheets for his wines. Awesome!
The roomies and I had this bottle during the power outage due to the Gap fire a couple nights ago. Immediately after uncorking, this is a harsh drink. It mellows out as it sits, but I still wasn't nearly as impressed with it as I was with the 2003 two years ago. It could be that it's a wine to be had with food, it could be the vintage, it could be the store kept it in a warm place and it went off, or I could be a little more discerning. We'll never know... but I was let down.

Three depressing wines

These have sat and languished on the counter, open, missing one glass' worth. So obviously I wasn't too hot about them. I did use one for making vindaloo, but that's about it. Two came from wine night:
Cline 2006 Zinfandel
Clos Du Bois 2004 Merlot
And one I picked up because I liked the label:
Novella Synergy 2005 Paso Robles