Saturday, October 3rd I received a half ton of old vine Zinfandel Grapes from a vineyard in Dry Creek Valley, Healdsburg. It was the most luscious fruit I've seen in a while, big clusters and grapes with deliciously sweet flavor. With help from friends and my cousin Bryan we ran the fruit through the destemmer and used our feet to crush the first half of the batch.

( Here are some crush photos... )
We added dry ice to the bin to cool down the grapes and juice, and let them soak on the skins before starting fermentation. Tuesday we added yeast, the fermentation is now under way.

Much thanks to Boing Boing and their ISP(Canada's Priority Colo) for fighting against abusive DMCA notices seeking to stifle fair use criticism.

The criticism that Ralph Lauren doesn't want you to see!
The issue involves Boing Boing publishing the photo below of a Ralph Lauren advertisement. It is pretty easy to see why they think it worthy of criticism.

Go niners! My first NFL game.

On Saturday I get my Zinfandel grapes, a whole half ton. They are old vine grapes from a great vineyard in Dry Creek Valley in Sonoma. I'm doing the crush at the Harrington Winery in Potrero Hill. Looking forward to getting sticky with grape juice.

Davin's own words:

STEVIE WONDER!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

Seriously though, I'm still shaking from this two days later. I think the song 'All Day Sucker' will be in my head for the rest of the week, and quite possibly for the rest of my life. Which would be alright, 'cause it's funky as hell.

And speaking of life, I think that having Stevie Wonder join Supertaster on a tiny stage at my 30th birthday party might well have made the best night of my entire young life so far. There is literally no living musician I would have rather had on that stage. Absolutely none. Wow.

The Better Market Street Project kicked off its pilot program this morning, diverting eastbound cars off of Market Street between 10th and 6th streets. I rode Market to 4th Street to see what it was like, and it was much nicer to ride on. There were still delivery trucks, but I felt like I could use more of the street without having to make room for cars. I imagine that buses ran more quickly on Market Street after 8th Street.

I'm all for making Market Street better for everyone to use. It has always been a bad street to drive east on, it makes much more sense to divert this traffic into SOMA. It will be interesting to see whether most people like this change or not.

The quality is not great, but I think you can tell how excited everyone was to see Stevie Wonder sing in a small club in San Francisco to 40-60 people. I was probably standing about 10 feet behind the guy who recorded this.

Stevie Wonder is checking out the Jazz Mafia at Coda. Very cool.

Stevie Wonder




Stevie Wonder showed up around 1:20am at Coda, listened to Jazz Mafia and had a good time. Then around 1:45am he got up on stage. He sang a snippet of Happy Birthday for Davin's 30th birthday. Then he did 3-4 of his own songs and almost everyone lost their shit. It was very cool. It blew Davin's mind, what an awesome birthday surprise.

This is my second week running the San Francisco Wing Chun class. Will ran the class for over 6 years and has handed it over to me. It feels different being responsible for the school, but actually teaching the class is not something new to me. The thing I like about our school is that everyone teaches, to some degree, once you have been there a few months.

My biggest priority is to get some new students. We haven't added any new students in a while and classes have been small. It is good for everyone when new students come in and everyone gets to cover the basics again. So, if you know anyone in San Francisco who wants to learn Wing Chun Kung Fu, martial arts and self-defense, send them my way.

Verizon is back on txtLJ

It took me about 7-8 hours to get a good Windows XP install yesterday. I could get Win XP installed(with SP1) without problems. Then I ran windows update and it told me I needed to install a few things(WGA, BITS, newer Windows Updater and more) before continuing. So, I went ahead and installed whatever it wanted, rebooted, and then windows update failed. Turns out all microsoft.com domains would fail. Some update I got via windows update made it next to impossible to get any more updates. I wasted a bunch of time trying to fix the problem before I decided to start from scratch again, thinking I must have done something wrong.

I'm fairly sure I didn't do anything wrong, the first or fifth time, but I actually needed to get the updates in a specific order. I got around the problem by downloading Service Packs 2 and 3 to my machine. After starting with a new install of XP, I installed SP2, restarted. Then I got the latest version of BITS, IE7 and Genuine Advantage via the MS website, and installed them. Then I installed SP3. After all that windows update still worked and I was able to get more updates via the normal update interface. It was all very frustrating trying to guess how to get around some problem in the upgrade path.

The happy news is that I have a new machine that runs really quiet and fast, and a big new flat-screen monitor.

My home computer died this weekend, so I just went and bought myself a new computer and monitor at Central Computers. I don't even exactly know what I bought, just that it is somewhat decent, has lots of memory, and enough case space to add my old hard drives to it. Tonight will be spent installing the OS and drivers, and setting up as much of my new system as possible. I would like to have taken the time to research and buy an even better computer, but I wanted it today and the store had this system ready. I didn't want to go another night without a computer and internet access at home.

With MyBrandz.com offering a day of free tattoos in San Francisco of your favorite brand logo, I am even less likely to consider ever getting a tattoo. I like tattoos, have even designed a few, but some people are choosing to ink their bodies with meaningless and ugly work.

Most of us have heard of the funny stories about Chinese character and kanji tattoos that are popular among non-asians. While kanji script is beautiful, it is not going to seem so exotic if you ever take a trip to China, Japan or your nearest chinatown. Celtic knot and cross tattoos were almost as popular as Riverdance, but there is a good chance your beer mat will have a matching design the next time you visit an Irish Pub.

Popular tattoos might have significance and meaning to their owners, but with so much excellent skin art in a place like San Francisco, you might be judged by the quality and originality of the tattoos you choose to display. A free brand logo tattoo will look about as cool and significant as a sweatshirt with GAP across the front.

I've been acting as an assistant instructor at my kung fu school for quite some time now, and teaching one class a week since the beginning of July. Today a bunch of us went through more formal tests, and I completed and passed the Assistant and Junior Instructor tests. It was a good learning experience and I'm a little more confident about my knowledge and my ability to teach others.

testing

I am almost recovered from my trip to Ireland, even though I have been back in SF for 5 days now. My visit was pretty mellow and relaxing, I spent time catching up with friends and family, and got outdoors a little. I would have liked a little more sunny weather, but bad weather is to be expected in Ireland.

My nieces and nephews all seem to have matured quite a bit in the last year. The older ones are almost teenagers and don't want to be treated like kids. My parents are doing well, we took them out for dinner to celebrate their upcoming 50th wedding anniversary.

I had to cut my visit short by a couple of days, so I could come back to San Francisco for a funeral last Saturday. My grand-aunt Margaret, and my father's godmother, passed away a few days after turning 103 years old. She was the last of that generation of my family.

Definitely Italian. Pizza, pasta, oven roasts, salads, wine and tiramisu. Italian food has a good deal of variety and has a lot of very tasty options. I think I would eventually get tired of any cuisine, but I could probably last the longest with Italian.

A friend of mine wrote this in an email to me today:
My What Would Henry Do mantra usually becomes active when I am struggling to like/accept, or make a connection with someone. I tend to see each person as either someone I absolutely want in my life, or as someone I want nothing to do with. Nothing in between. Its not healthy for me or community. And I've never done well juggling lots of friendships which stresses me out a bit at times too. I always will remember how you had friends everywhere, from ALL walks of life. And it seemed like you always had a perfect handle on managing all those relationships too. You made friends everywhere you went. I loved watching that. Very inspiring. And I guess the biggest thing is that I never heard you speak bad about anyone's character. Maybe you would pipe up about stupid crap people did, but you never attacked anyone's person.

I was very honored and flattered to be told that by a friend. I can see the truth in it, and also see the cases of where it is not true. I do have a diverse group of friends and I like making connections with people, but it isn't always easy to manage. It takes more effort to maintain some friendships and those are the ones I will most likely neglect when my life gets hectic. I can't say that I never speak bad about anyone, but I'm fairly accepting of all kinds of people. And when people do something really bad or stupid, I might never forget it.

Community, family and friends are important things to nurture. And people that will tell you what they think about you, good or bad, are good people to be around.