WombatNation

Saturday we joined our friends M and N and little baby S for a pleasant visit to Davenport and the nearby Bonny Doon Vineyard. The entire trip was predicated on the opportunity for N to relive a scene from the Australian comedy “The Castle” by singing repeatedly, “We’re going to Bonny Doon!”

If you’re like me and haven’t yet indulged in the pleasure of watching “The Castle”, read Roger Ebert’s review and skim a faithful fan’s partial transcription of the script to see if you would like it. The movie is acclaimed by our favorite Aussie ex-pat to be epic cinema.

We spent the night at the Davenport Inn. If you ever find yourself spending the night in the tiny city of Davenport, CA, (population 200), it is likely that you will also be staying at the Davenport Inn, as I didn’t see anything else resembling a hotel or inn. If you do go there, and I recommend that you do, definitely spend some time in the Davenport Cash Store and Restaurant. The store has some very cool ethnic stuff, including a lot of nice art objects from South America. The restaurant serves excellent food and has beautiful ethnic decor. The textiles, the Day of the Dead figures, and the masks were gorgeous. Everything we ordered was stellar.

The Bonny Doon Vineyard never disappoints. It’s unlikely you will find yourself in Bonny Doon on other business, but if you are in Santa Cruz, the vineyard is only about a twenty minute drive away. It’s far and away my favorite tasting room experience in all of California.

Although M and I worked our way through eight Bonny Doon wines, very few of them were among the ten or so Sandra and I had tasted at the winemaker’s dinner I mentioned here.

The dessert wine highlight was the Book of Love Framboise served in small dark Belgian chocolate cups. Raspberry and chocolate are definitely made for each other, assuming that both are very high quality. Otherwise you get Robitussin Ovaltine. We liked the chocolate cups so much we bought three packages. Oh yeah, and twenty bottles of wine between us.

at The Register

The Register has a story about a whitepaper posted by Security Officethat was written by a member of the MS Windows 2000 Server Product Group. The whitepaper analyzes the move of MS acquisition Hotmail from FreeBSD to Win2K. The startling conclusion (startling only in that a Microsoft employee wrote the document) is that the most compelling reason for choosing Windows 2000 over FreeBSD to run the Hotmail service is that Microsoft owns Windows 2000. In most other categories, Brooks concluded that FreeBSD was a superior operating system.

It’s a great read for people like me who are so unfortunate as to have to manage a Win 2K server. Currently, I run RedHat 8 in a VM with Win 2K server as the host. I have to stop the Linux VM often to apply Win 2K critical updates, which always insist that the machine must be rebooted. When I get the time, I plan to reverse the situation and use RedHat as the host and primary testbed for my J2EE apps and use Win 2k only as necessary for certification testing. That will drastically improve the manageability and reliability of my testbed.

Earth 911 provides information on recycling, pollution prevention, composting, fire prevention, etc. for a community based on a postal code that you enter on their web site. They cover Canada and the US now, and they have plans to expand the service to more countries. This is an excellent free service. Now, maybe I can find a home for the styrofoam peanut collection that I have been building up in my garage for the last nine years.

bIPlog

bIPlog was created as part of a class at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. I had seen most of the references blogged earlier elsewhere, but it’s nice to have them collected in one place. They also have a high quality list of resources to information on the web on intellectual property issues. The students’ commentary is fairly minimal, though.

Broadband Reports has an article on how eMusic has gotten confused about the definition of “unlimited”. Many users (like my brother) signed up for the promise of “unlimited high quality MP3’s for as low as $9.99 per month”.

Just last week, eMusic cut off my brother for what they called “unusually excessive downloading”. Even though eMusic encourages customers to use their automated download system, my brother was informed that he could not use “any automated system for the selection or downloading of files”.

He thinks that the habit leading to him being cut off was that he found it easier to download music that he thinks he might like, listen to the music from his hard drive at a convenient time, and then delete it if he doesn’t like it. As a result, he downloaded a lot of music that he didn’t necessarily keep. Of course, eMusic still had to provide all that bandwidth, but no one forced them to advertise “unlimited” access, either.

While my brother liked eMusic and the wide range of music they offered, he said that their quality control was not particularly good. He said a lot of albums he downloaded had poorly encoded tracks where the music had short stutters. Also, the automated downloader sometimes cut off songs before the download was complete. He then had to email eMusic with details on the problematic tracks and wait a couple days for their response, which was usually that he should check back in 6 to 8 weeks to see if they had fixed the problem.

Mmm. I’m greatly enjoying a bottle of 1998 Tyrrell’s Old Winery Cabernet Merlot that our friend Chris brought last time he was visiting from Sydney. I’m normally not a big Merlot fan (but not on the level of Bonny Doon’s Randall Grahm’s sharp dismissal of the grape), but this blend is quite tasty. Not quite the slap you around the head and shoulders and then check your pockets for change kind of experience that you get with Shiraz (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

On a related note, I highly recommend a visit to Tyrrell’s vineyard next time you are in the Hunter Valley. Lots of fantastic wine to taste, great personalized tour, friendly people, beautiful location.

I also highly recommend attending a winemaker’s dinner hosted by Monsieur Grahm. We attended one at Verbena in Oakland. He is, to no surprise, as witty and eloquent in person as in the Bonny Doon newsletter.

Update: Corrected link to Verbena, thanks to someone from the restaurant. I had mistakenly linked to a Verbena Restaurant in New York, which, by the way, also looks like a fantastic restaurant.

As I was downloading the songs from the Illegal Art exhibit website that I mentioned in my last post, I was happy to see that Culturcide’s They Aren’t the World was one of the songs. I’ve got a lot of connections to that band through friends, the record store I worked at, and the Rice University radio station, KTRU, at which I used to be a DJ and the general manager.

Immediately, I dug up my copy of the “Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-Revolutionary America” album. I think it came out in late 1986 or early 1987. The front album cover has a photo taken not too far from where I used to live in the Montrose district while attending Rice. Even better though, the back of the album is a picture of the record store (Sound Warehouse) where some of the band members used to work and where I worked for nearly two years while in school. The woman in the front was my co-worker Tracy and some of the three guys in the middle browsing for records are Culturcide. Despite being part of a chain, it was a really great record store at that time. The employees all knew a lot about music and we carried a lot of alternative records and tapes.

Now this is definitely a case where you want to have the actual album, instead of just downloaded MP3s. The Side 1 label has the quote “It doesn’t take any talent to do that” – Fan at Strake Jesuit College Preparatory, 3/1/5/86, and the Side 2 label has the quote “They completely ruined that song!” – Fans at New Music America, 4/13/86. The lyrics sheet on the inside says, “Home-taping is killing the record industry… so keep doing it. Let this record be the master for your cassette edition.”

“Tacky Souvenirs” consists of songs that Culturcide recorded over with amusing, caustic lyrics. Despite their relative obscurity and the lack of an address or their names on the album, the lawyers tracked them down quickly. Unfortunately, the legal settlements pretty much bankrupted them. Of course, that didn’t take much, as these guys weren’t making a lot of money anyway.

For more info on Culturcide, check out this article published by the Houston Press about Culturcide’s comeback in 1998. I’m quite amused to learn that I own a “collector’s item”. The article says the new version of Culturcide includes Scott Ayers, who I knew as the guitarist for the Pain Teens as well as Bliss Blood’s husband (my mistake, they were never married), and Ralp Armin, who was one of the assistant managers at the Sound Warehouse and who was in the graduate school of music at Rice (I confused a Ralf with a Ralp).

illegal-art.org :: a project of Stay Free!

I wish I were going to be in Chicago or New York sometime in the next couple months. This should be a great exhibit. To no surprise, Negativland is very well represented with audio, video, and visual (U2 album cover) contributions.

Quote from the website:

“The Illegal Art Exhibit will celebrate what is rapidly becoming the “degenerate art” of a corporate age: art and ideas on the legal fringes of intellectual property. Some of the pieces in the show have eluded lawyers; others have had to appear in court.”

They will be giving away a free compilation CD at the exhibit events, but you can also download the audio here. Grab a copy before they are gone.