The San Francisco Chronicle’s Friday wine section has an article, Social Swirl: Surging in popularity, wine clubs let you learn while you drink, with some choice quotations from Rochelle and from our friend David, about the wine tasting group Rochelle started more than four years ago.

This is our third major news article having to do with obsessions with food and drink. Not sure what says about us, except hopefully we’re fun to be around…

I was surprised to discover this evening that Rochelle’s very creative movie (given the constraints of our 1999 digital camera’s 10-second video limit) is not the top result for corporate drone on Google.

I have to admit, I bought Apple’s iMovie, and then Final Cut Express, and then upgraded it, all without producing something as compelling as what Rochelle dreamed up on a (slow) Happy Boss Day at the office. Check it out.

As usual, Rochelle’s invitation to a recent party is funny and worth preserving. In addition to Rochelle’s birthday, this was the “coming out” party for our new kitchen (even though it wasn’t quite finished). We do regret that we didn’t get to the grilled cheese sandwiches on the griddle, but at least we did make quesadillas.

Worst of all, we forgot to take any photos during the event, especially of people in the kitchen. We’ll just have to try harder (or drink less) next time.

Keeping Up With The Jones Poverty Party

We started the year on a good note by getting rid of lots of crap, but alas, during a routinue appliance swap, we got sucked into a kitchen remodel. We’re only through Stage One (structural), and we’re broke.

So it’s time for a party! We’ll celebrate Rochelle’s birthday and our folly. Come by and make fun of us!

We’ll be serving cheap but good food like bread & dip, deviled eggs and…well…you haven’t lived ‘til you’ve had a fried baloney sandwich made on a Viking Range! We’ll have red wine & tequila (& mixers) from our existing but not insubstantial stash. We’ll also serve whatever beer is on sale that week.

From all you iPoders out there, Rochelle has a special birthday request — bring a playlist of not more than 10 songs from any time I have been alive (May 31, 1962 to present). They can be all from one year [extra points for great years: (birth)1962, (college)1980-84, (move to SF)1985, (move to 569)1992, (guess)1995, and (married Michael)1999], have a groovy theme, or just be 10 cool songs you love. We’ll take take turns jacking into the system, so it’s your chance to be a DJ.

And if you like dressing up, come as your favorite Jones (Davey, Shirley, Starr, Bridget?). Since I suspect there will be at least one Tom Jones, bring panties to throw.

PS – We highly, highly recommend coming via cab or public transit because parking is virtually impossible in the Lower Haight on weekend evenings. Seriously.

For many years, Rochelle used Netscape Communicator for her email. About a year and a half ago, I switched her to Mozilla Thunderbird, which is the code and user-interface successor to Communicator. For the most part it works very well, but it has one astonishing omission: its anti-virus capabilities are terrible.

This is all the more remarkable given their tagline (“Reclaim Your Inbox”), and the second sentence of their Why Use Thunderbird blurb: “We designed Thunderbird to prevent viruses and to stop junk mail so you can get back to reading your mail.” Thunderbird is positioned as the more user-centric, safer alternative to Microsoft Outlook.

For the most part, that’s well-deserved. Thunderbird isn’t riddled with security problems like Outlook, and it comes with built-in anti-spam features that are quite a bit more effective than those that are built into Outlook.

But the reality is that, even if your email client isn’t itself a security disaster waiting to happen, if you use Windows, you need anti-virus protection, because you’re definitely going to get viruses and worms and trojans in your Inbox, and once they’re in your Inbox, one wrong click and your computer is hosed. And it’s in dealing with these threats where Thunderbird falls down.

In the mozilla.org Thunderbird Help section, this is the only “useful” information about what to do about viruses:

As with any mail program, take proper caution before running any file that you receive in e-mail. Appropriate anti-virus software should also help keep you safer.

With a little more work, you might follow links to a third-party site with an anti-virus knowledgebase article that is by turns unusable, out of date, and a recommendation against Thunderbird. You definitely finish reading that article thinking that no major anti-virus software vendor supports Thunderbird — and you’d be right.

In Rochelle’s case, Norton Anti-Virus has corrupted her Thunderbird Inbox multiple times, causing her to lose all of her messages. (Fortunately she’s mostly using Gmail these days.) I’ve spent hours looking into this, and there is basically no good configuration for using Norton and Thunderbird together. (It does not help that Norton has a truly abysmal user interface.) I’d switch Rochelle to McAffee, except I can’t find good configuration information for that combination, either.

The worst part is the Thunderbird developers seem to take the attitude that the problem is the anti-virus software vendors’ fault. This defect was reported in 2001, and is still marked as open in their defect tracking system. After four years of end users losing email, I would think they might start to realize that they need to work with the commercial anti-virus software vendors to get compatibility.

Failing that, there are some pretty good Open Source anti-virus tools for Windows. How about incorporating one of those into Thunderbird? Or picking one to make the “official” anti-virus software to use with Thunderbird, and giving clear, complete directions for how to install and use it with Thunderbird? (I’ve read good things about ClamWin.)

I can understand the impulse to blame the anti-virus vendors for not working with Thunderbird. Technically, it is their fault. But from the perspective of a Thunderbird user, rather than developer, I just want Rochelle’s Inbox to be protected, both from incoming malware and from the scanners that do the protecting.

Right now, Thunderbird the product can’t provide that. From an end-user’s perspective, that’s Thunderbird’s fault.

On New Year’s Eve, Rochelle and I had a “Freecycle party,” where we put all the things we were getting rid of in our dining room, invited people over, gave them plenty of alcohol, and told them they could take anything they wanted from the pile. The idea being, people would go home with new treasures, we would get rid of a bunch of crap, and whatever didn’t go, we would take to Goodwill the following Sunday.

Except, it was raining Sunday, and for a couple of weeks afterwards. We couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to drag bags and boxes to the car, multiple times, in the rain. So we skipped it.

This weekend we finally took the second car load of stuff to Goodwill, and can at last rearrange the dining room back to a semblance of its normal state. Still one more load to go, but that will definitely happen this week, and then our dining room will be back to normal.

For a couple of days, until we start dragging the entire kitchen in there, to start work on that project…

Luigi has this alternately amusing, endearing, and irritating desire to sleep in between Rochelle and I. He likes to be the meat in the sandwich. Given that he sleeps on top of the covers, and weighs 18 pounds, it means he essentially separates us into separate compartments of the bed.

Almost like a chaperone. We’ve taken to calling him the abstinence kitty.

Like I said, alternately endearing, amusing…and irritating. ;-)

2004 was a decent year for us, and as always (at least since I started this weblog), I like to take a few moments to reflect on some of the important things that happened.

For me, the thing that dominated the year was my new “job” as a consultant. I’d done some consulting before, but in 2004 I managed to string together almost an entire year of work. Mostly half-time, so it wasn’t quite the income I would have liked, but I was able to pay the bills, and that’s pretty amazing. Really, all the credit goes to my primary client, Nicely Done Solutions, where the majority of my work comes from. They’ve kept me busy, and I hope to keep doing work through them for some time.

That dominated my day-to-day, but my biggest accomplishment in 2004 was my five year wedding anniversary with Rochelle. We have many more of those in our future, if we can both resist the temptation of butter.

After a frenzy of traveling in 2003, we mostly stayed at home in 2004. A short trip to Boston, where Rochelle was attending a conference and I was eating cannoli, was the furthest we went. We also made our traditional Thanksgiving visit to Rochelle’s family in Texas. And our longest trip was a road trip down to Palm Springs, where we stayed for two weeks in a condo, while Rochelle wrote the culminating papers for her Masters degree. (Which was Rochelle’s biggest accomplishment of 2004, successfully completing her Master’s program. All over but the paperwork. Yippee!) I mostly loafed around and read a couple of books; in fact I think that was the only fiction I read all year long.

I did get a chance to enjoy more fiction than those couple books, though, by finally giving Audible.com a try. Rochelle started her subscription to the service last year, and has really enjoyed listening to the audio books on her player. When I gave her an iPod mini for her birthday, I inherited the Audible.com Otis player she had been using, and started using it while I was driving. While the Otis sucked, the audio books are fantastic, and there is no better way to enjoy them than on a digital player; CDs and tapes are more expensive, and you have to constantly change them to keep going. Not with the iPod, or even the Otis, which can store almost nine hours — or hundreds of hours for the iPod.

We continued to improve our home with a number of projects, including replacing the solid wood back door with a wonderful wood door with glass panels that lets in far more light. In spite of the glass, with the redone (and now straight) door frame and new weather stripping, the kitchen is much warmer now than it was with the solid door we replaced.

Also in the kitchen we added a display shelf along one wall, to better show off the ridiculously large collection of champagne bottles we’ve amassed. I’m sure we’ll have to purge the collection at some point, but for now it’s fun to have them all in a row, and know that we’ve found and enjoyed some really fine wine in the last couple of years. The bottles on the shelf are only from the last two years, but it represents far more champagne than I drank in my entire life before Rochelle.

We painted our bedroom from top to bottom. Rochelle picked out three new colors that matched our antique bed frame, and over the course of a week, we stripped and repaired walls, and painted painted painted. The results are not perfect by a long shot, but it’s still a tremendous improvement for us.

Also in the bedroom we ended up replacing all but the headboard of that bed frame, which lowered the mattress and gave us a much more stable bed. The antique bed frame itself was quite solid, but the queen conversion kit that came with our McRoskey mattress replaced the solid side beams, and made the bed horribly shaky.

The biggest improvement we made was replacing the old, grim gray carpet that Rochelle picked out 10 years ago with new carpet that is warmer-toned, and coincidentally hides cat stains far better. That went into our parlor, office, and bedroom, as well as the hall closet, which we somehow omitted from the hardwood floors project a couple years ago.

In the office, we replaced almost all of our furniture, getting rid of our desks and a chrome shelving unit, and replacing with much bigger desks and some standard shelving from IKEA. They’re not perfect, but they look a lot nicer than what we had before, and work a whole hell of a lot better with the computers, etc., than the old stuff did.

We didn’t eat out as much this year, and so we discovered fewer new restaurants than we usually do. We still found a few, including Saha, where Rochelle’s favorite chef from last year went after he sold and left our favorite find of 2003 (which is no longer particularly special). The cuisine can best be described as Arabic fusion, and combines Middle Eastern spicing (the chef is from Yemen) with French technique. It’s extraordinary, and everyone we’ve taken there has agreed that the prix fixé dinner would be a bargain at twice the $27 it currently costs.

On the topic of food, I took HomeChef’s “essentials” cooking course (4 hours one night a week for 12 weeks), and had a blast. I made a lot of the food at home during the course, but haven’t cooked as much as I’d hoped to after the class ended. Still, I probably cooked more in 2004 than in 2003, which is a trend I’d like to continue in 2005.

We only threw one party in all of 2004, and it was on the last day of 2004 (more on that in another post). Shame on us. Look for that to change in 2005.

On the technology side, I got a new computer, my first laptop, and have really enjoyed the new mobility. Before the current generation of PowerBooks, I always felt that getting a laptop was too big a compromise. There’s still a big performance gap between the PowerBook I got and Apple’s professional desktop systems; and my hard drive size is limited compared to what’s available in full-size systems; and the PowerBook’s screen is quite a bit smaller than what I had before; etc. But with the current laptops, the hardware has advanced so far that what you get is more than good enough, and the trade-off of headroom I don’t need for mobility I want is now possible.

We also switched to a new DSL provider, Speakeasy, which is both saving us money and providing better service. We stuck with our reduced cable plan, which is $14 a month, and we (mostly) don’t miss the channels. At the end of the year, we signed up for Netflix, so we could get the movies back. Minimum cable plus Netflix is less than half what we were spending for our premium cable services, and gets us pretty much everything we want. Except for ESPN…

I made roughly 60 posts to this weblog. And I sold zero BeBoxes. Both of these numbers need to go up in 2005.

I gained back much of the weight I lost at the beginning of last year. That number needs to go down in 2005.

The cats all stayed healthy and happy, and we didn’t add any new ones. The number of cats in our house needs to stay the same in 2005.

And that was my 2004.

I enjoyed the (fairly long) article Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask). The author works in the Seven Deadly Sins, the 2004 presidential election, and Chernobyl, among other things, with current scientific research and understanding of sleep. There’s also some really good hints on how to optimize your sleeping patterns. (The guy is apparently a biologist working in sleep research.)

I especially enjoyed this quotation:

Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered a capital crime. For a first offense, that is.

Possibly this will save my Saturday mornings from Rochelle’s depredations. (I am an owl, Rochelle is a lark.)

Anyway, it’s longish article, but some sections with considerable scientific detail are easily skipped, and overall pretty interesting.

Rochelle and I were quoted in the New York Times again, this time in the travel section, an article about people who base their vacations around food, so-called “gastronauts.” It’s a fun article to read; better do so quickly, before the story disappears behind the for-pay firewall.

It looks like the story might have gotten chopped up a bit in editing, because I am a San Francisco-based software developer, not LA-based. And, while the Klausners may also have done so, I know we told the reporter about our trip to Chicago to eat at Charlie Trotter’s, which turned into a week-long eating binge though much of Chicago’s best-rated food establishments. (Our vacation eating focus is much less high-end these days.)

If I was going to offer once piece of advice to other food enthusiasts who were going to plan a vacation around that passion it would be this: walk everywhere you can. There’s no way you can put everything of interest in a spreadsheet before you get on the plane; walking will take you past things you could not possibly have planned for. And if nothing else, it’ll keep you from gaining too much weight while you’re eating your way through the local food scene.

Today Rochelle received her notification letter from San Jose State, informing her that the two papers she submitted for culmination of her Masters program had been accepted as passing. This was her last requirement for her program, and so she will soon be graduating, adding a Masters in Library and Information Sciences to her Masters of Tequila.

Congratulations Rochelle!