Posted by Max Dunn
Wed, 26 Apr 2006 04:38:00 GMT | no comments
Last week when we were on vacation, one of the highlights was to visit Hi-Time Wine Cellar in Costa Mesa, CA. We enjoy going there so much that we visited it 3 times that week!
On our last visit, I was in the Zinfandel section and saw a women walk right up to the Tobin James Ballistic, 2004 Zinfandel grab a bottle and leave. Intrigued, I looked at the wine and saw that it had 15.5% alcohol and with a name like “Ballistic”, expected it to be a big, bad, bold Zinfandel – just the type we love. So I bought a bottle too.
Boy, was I wrong. Reminds me of when I was a freshman in college and copied an answer off my frat brothers paper, and got it wrong. Cribbing off of someone else just doesn’t pay. This wine was jammy all right, it just didn’t have any character. It tasted more like grape juice with vodka, or maybe a watered down port. No, that is a little harsh. I have had worse red wines in the Czech Republic, but this wine still was pretty much at the bottom of my list of wines I have had in the last year. Give me a 2 Buck Chuck any day over this.
0 out of 5 stars.
Posted in Wine and Whiskey
Posted by Max Dunn
Wed, 19 Apr 2006 18:24:00 GMT | 4 comments
What if you were told:
- In order for girls to be complete humans, they need to be as good at sports as boys.
- The main reason girls don’t play sports is that “Girl Rules” looks down on girls that play sports.
- In order for girls to be good at sports, women just need to encourage them and play sports too.
You would probably disagree with most of these points. Yet May Polce-Lynch makes similar claims in her book Boy Talk regarding boys and their emotions. Her main points are:
Read more...
Posted in Books and Movies
Posted by Max Dunn
Mon, 17 Apr 2006 19:01:00 GMT | 26 comments
For our spring vacation in 2006, we didn’t really know what we wanted to do, so we decided to just pack the car up and start driving. Here are the pictures of the trip and comments from our family members:
Posted in Trips and Vacations
Posted by Max Dunn
Sat, 15 Apr 2006 17:58:00 GMT | 1 comment
Alfresco is a new but promising open source document management system. It is Java based and supports many of the latest standards including the JSR-170 file access API, the JSF tag based interface, the Spring framework, JSR-168 portlets and WebDAV file transfers.
While Alfresco is still young and lacks some functionality, it is well architected and shows a lot of promise. Here is some information about its architecture.
Read more...
Posted in Tech Tips
Posted by Max Dunn
Wed, 12 Apr 2006 15:11:00 GMT | 1 comment
A lot of people think it is a little weird that I put so much personal stuff in my web site and blog and I can understand their point. However, here are some reasons why I do this.
Read more...
Posted in Random Thoughts, All About Me
Posted by Max Dunn
Tue, 11 Apr 2006 15:43:00 GMT | no comments
Has anyone noticed a significant gap in these postings? During the winter months, I hardly posted anything. I did spend a lot of time using Ruby on Rails to develop the Tri-Cities Baseball web site, but wasn’t able to write much.
I am guessing that there are two causes of this: less sun and less activity.
I am definitely affected by the lack of sun. Even in the summer, when it is cloudy all day, I get depressed. This happened even last summer when we spent a day south of Santa Cruz. Even though the day before I was feeling fine, I got more and more depressed as the day wore on when the sun refused to come out.
Another reason for these winter blues is probably also I don’t exercise much in the winter. I like outdoor sports: mountain biking and surfing especially, but these are hard to do in the winter.
Last year, I was pretty depressed during the winter months too. This was the period where I really wasn’t enjoying my job, and ending up quitting on April 1st.
Now that Spring is trying to make an appearance, I am posting a lot more. This is probably a good indicator that I am feeling better and my right brain is waking up from its slumber and starting to actually work again.
Posted in All About Me
Posted by Max Dunn
Mon, 10 Apr 2006 17:55:00 GMT | no comments
Marx was right; he was just 150 years to early.
In the Communist Manifesto published in 1848, he outlined the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” as the next step in society’s development.
Of course we have seen how this principle has failed miserably when applied to anything that is resource limited. Who would work hard growing food if others would just take it all away? This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union during the grain crisis of 1928 when the Politiburo set too low a price for grain and, when not enough was sold at this price, they seized what they needed. The next year, the peasant farmers engaged in massive hiding of grain which resulted in an agricultural collapse.
However the situation changes greatly when dealing with software. Since distributing software over the Internet costs essentially nothing, making software available to whoever needs it doesn’t take anything away from the creator. So open source software is the perfect embodiment of this communist principle: those that are able to contribute do, and those that need it can take it at will.
Marx also envisioned a stateless society where there was no central power exerting control over its citizens. This is another stark parallel to open source.
So while the ideals of communism have not been successfully applied to society, many of these principles can be vividly seen in the open source software movement.
Posted in Random Thoughts
Posted by Max Dunn
Sat, 08 Apr 2006 14:31:00 GMT | 3 comments
So what is the “college experience”?
This was a topic on this week’s O.C. that got me thinking that maybe some people had a much better experience in college than I did. Without going into too many details, here are some of the highlights of my Berkeley experience:
Read more...
Posted in Random Thoughts, All About Me
Posted by Max Dunn
Sat, 08 Apr 2006 06:42:00 GMT | 1 comment
Suzanne and I enjoy finding and drinking good wines, and especially when we can find a great wine under $20, or better yet, under $15. However we often will drink a wine and then forget if we liked it or not, so we are going to blog about some of the wines we liked.
The first wine is a Synergy 2002 from Richardson Vineyard which is a blend of 66% Syrah, 15% Merlot, 13% Zinfandel and 6% Cabernet. Overall, we really enjoyed this wine. It had a nice overall complexity with some earthy tones. The one drawback was that it was a little to acidic for drinking by itself, which is how we usually drink wines.
This wine received a gold medal at the Finger Lakes International Wine Competition
We bought this wine at the Wine Club, but they don’t have it on their web site anymore. Wine.com and BevMo also do not have it
The only place I could find it on the web was at The Cellar Door restaurant. However, Wine Club sometimes has some wines in stock that don’t show up on their web site, so check out their store and grab a bottle or two if you see it.
4 out of 5 stars
Posted in Wine and Whiskey
Posted by Max Dunn
Sun, 12 Feb 2006 18:25:00 GMT | 1 comment
None of us are right all the time. Even the smartest person is probably right only half the time. But the only people that are truly foolish are those that don’t know this, and think they are always right.
Posted in Random Thoughts