WombatNation

And I thought it was just women in restaurants that went to the bathroom together.

via BoingBoing, photo by Roberto Bettini

I just read about a new site called Utterz that goes far beyond what I did with PhoneBlogger a little over four years ago. A couple of other voice blogging by phone sites have cropped up in the intervening years, but their feature sets were generally the same or only slightly better than what I had built into PhoneBlogger. Their main advantage was hosting the service for you, albeit at a cost to you. I wasn’t surprised when I read about most of them closing up shop.

At Utterz, however, voice blogging by phone is just one of the services they offer. They even offer dial-in numbers outside the US. And even better, it’s free.

One thing I’m concerned about from reading the FAQ is that it looks like they just use caller ID to determine who you are when you call in. Caller ID is easy to spoof, so it would be simple for me to post a voice recording to someone else’s Utter page. If they had configured connections to their blog, my post would even show up there.

Another downside is that it appears that the voice app is just a DTMF app. That really limits what they can do. For example, one of the features I keep planning to add to PhoneBlogger is to let you tag or categorize the voice post. With a speech app that would be very easy to do. Some of the blogging APIs let you retrieve a list of all the existing categories. It’s trivial to those into a grammar and prompt the caller to say one of them. Good luck specifying a category with a DTMF app (press 1 for LOLcats, press 2 for flying spaghetti monster, …, press 19 for fishsticks are go, …). Actually, you could do better by having the caller enter the first two digits from the phone keypad that map to the first two letters of the desired category. Unless the caller has a lot of popular categories starting with the same letter, the app would then have to present at worst a short disambiguation list. Still, a speech app would be much better, especially if you want to support adding multiple tags to a post.

We went up to Sonoma County today for the 30th annual Russian River Barrel Tasting. This time, we visited Christopher Creek, Trentadue, Coffaro, Michel-Schlumberger, Wilson, Mazocco, Hawkes, Stryker and Murphy-Goode.

The Barrel Tasting event has really grown over the last few years. When we first went about five years ago, the event was just one weekend, it cost $5 and the crowds were relatively small, except at the largest wineries. Last year they expanded it to two weekends. This year the charge was $20 per weekend. Also, the crowds are now quite large, even at the smaller wineries. It’s still a lot of fun, though, and we had a great time.

After the official barrel tasting event, we headed up to Sandra’s relatives’ house for a tasting of their first bottling under the name Munselle Vineyards. The grapes come from the Wasson and Munselle Vineyards. The Chardonnay was delicious. It had a delicate flavor with a nice acidity and not overly oaky. They were also tasting two Cabernets from the 2006 harvest that are still in the barrel. I’ll definitely be posting more about these wines in the future.

A good friend had a birthday dinner this weekend in the sake tasting room at Ozumo in San Francisco. The sushi was wonderfully fresh and delicious. We also ordered a few items from the Robata grill that were fantastic. The real standout for me was the seared Dayboat scallops on shimeji mushroom risotto. I could eat that every night.

I’m not a sake expert, but my recent interest in lambics (a type of beer brewed in Belgium that is fermented via wild yeast) led me to more carefully read a recent article in the SF Chronicle about yamahai, or sake fermented with wild yeast. Although the article compares sake to wine, sake is technically a beer because it is made from a grain. Wines are made from fruit.

After asking our waiter about yamahai, he recommended I try a glass of Masumi Nanango. It’s a little expensive at $19/glass (or $135 a bottle), but it was by far the best sake I’ve ever had. The flavor was extremely complex and rich, but with a very delicate, acidic dryness that wonderfully complemented the food. So I had to have another glass.

And if that weren’t enough, every visit to the bathroom includes Japanese lessons.