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Lately I’ve been making a move away from the Australian Wines, seems I was a bit possessed by Yellow Tailed Little Penguin named Wolf Blass. Additionally, trying to keep the cost below the $12/bottle mark.

So I’m taking it back to the roots, but keeping with the cutesy animals names, I got my hands on a bottle of “Big Fat Llama” Merlot (2004) direct for El País Mayor, Chile. Ringing in at $12.42 ( I think) it was a mighty cup. Full & Fruity and good for gulping, with just hint of cinnamon. If you still care about real corks, Big Fat Llama has ‘em. But the best part is the Winemaker’s name is printed right there on the label. So if I wanted to, I could scour the Cachapoal Valley for José Ignacio Cancino, and give him a pat on the back and tell him to “Keep up the good work!” or “Me gusta su viña, me gusta Tú, José”.

When Kenny Roger’s Roasters closed its doors a nation wept, and with good reason. Easy access rotisserie was lost for the rest of time. Hoping to rekindle a bit of that magic, I set out to rotisserie a fine bird which I hoped to enjoy while Kenny belted out a beautiful rendition of”Ruben James” in the background.

ROUND 1 - Somethins Burnin’ (I think it’s my love…)

Well things started off just fine, I was thoroughly pumped, my chicken was peppered an stuffed with garlic. To make it tasty. I set it on the spit and let it roar along. Things were looking good so I went inside to finish up supper. 30 minutes later I went out to check on the bird, and much to my chagrin it had sprung loose of the motor and was resembling Tommy-Lee Jones in Batman Forever. Disappointing at best, but ever resourceful, I had a backup chicken should such a situation arise.

ROUND 2 - Always Leaving, Always Gone

There is Chicken Number #2 all spitted up and ready to go. This time I implemented the Mission critical “spit guard” (pic2) preventing any slippage out of the motor. Things were looking encouraging. I was checking often to ensure even cooking, and everything was going as planned. But about another 20 minutes into the cooking process the propane ran out… dag. So rotisserie turned to roast, and it was supper like any other night.

So the take home lesson is one does not just casually wade into rotisserie cooking, it requires planning, triple checking of all possible failure points, and a near limitless supply of resources. It is a style of cooking well suited to architects & astronauts, nary the common man. Perhaps this was the reason Kenny Roger’s Roasters wasn’t able to pull through.

John Bogle The Little Book of Common Sense Investing 5/10

Ever want to feel like scum, sleaze, or perhaps just a good old fashioned greed head. If so pick up a book about investing. It’s not so much that investment books are bad. But thinking about yourself reading one is bad, each turn of the page brings on another shank of self-loathing to the guts.

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Several years ago I was struck with a desire for palm-top computing so strong it rivaled typhoid. The holy grail of palm pilots of the time was Palm’s Tungsten Line. In addition to Wi-Fi (That’s right 802.11b) it allowed for Cisco LEAP Authentication through a 50$ third party app (AEGIS Meetinghouse), perfect for the campus’ overly strict wireless access policy at the time. Add to that color screen, mono out (who needs Left AND right channels), expansion slots, and QWERTY keyboard. This thing should have been the choice communication device. But, when put to use, the Tungsten crashed and burned like oh so many incandescent filaments. It was horrible, AEGIS’ Meetinghouse combined with the Palm brand web-browser caused seize up after sieze up. And after losing all data not stored in flash memory for the 100th time, the honeymoon was over.

After a 2-year trial separation, I decided it was time to kiss and make-up. And was delighted to find that there had been a few advancements, that turned Tungsten into Gold, or at least a usable wireless device.

The 2 big deals are:

IBM Java WebSphere - Basically a mobile JVM. This badboy opens up a world of mobile development to the Java Folk. Which leads to…

Opera Mini - A real usable web browser. Does RSS feed support, a half decent job on page renders, intuitive navigation, good caching. The only down side really is Yahoo! search instead of Google. With continued support this is only going to get better.

So yeah if you have one of these and were dissappointed with it’s Internet Capabilities in the past, I recommend trying throwing on these two gems.