Category — I found something sweet!

So, if you’ve been living under a rock the last 18 months, you would not know who Gary Vaynerchuk is. He’s the guy with a crazy popular wine video show that you need to check out.  But for all who have heard of Gary, I have an offer for you…AmericanWinery.com is begining a promotion as of today. We bought a truck load of Gary’s new book, “101 Wines: Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World” maybe not a truck load but our accountant was puzzled.  Scheming to sell the books for record profits was quickly shot down in board meetings, and then Erica Sharp our Customer Service Evangelist said she’d quit unless we give the books away.  Erica’s value far outweighed the profits to be had and the “101 Wines in 101 Days AmericanWinery.com Promo” was born. 

Thats right, getting your hands on one is as easy as creating a free account at AmericanWinery.com, no purchase neccesary to keep the ABC folks at bay, but every day for 101 days we are giving these books out in droves, or maybe a steady book a day, we dont know yet but we got a bunch of them to get out there, see for your self!  Check out how you can get a free copy of the book head over here

To check out my official review as well as two other awesome reviews of Gary’s book go here

Cheers,
Lloyd Benedict

Last night I revisted my favorite wine film “The Secret of Santa Vittoria.”  The second viewing was better than the first and the wine I enjoyed during the viewing tasted sweeter than ever.  Killer Juice Cabernet Paso Robles in the 3 litre box.  ”Its not a great wine, but eh…..its not bad!”  The movie totally fit this wine perfectly.  

The movie is set in Souther Italy and is a lighthearted tale about rural italian life and Nazi occupation of Italy post-Mussolini “the tyrant.”  It was common for the Nazi’s to steal all the Italians wine and the Italians had no way to defend themselves.

I highly suggest this movie to all wine lovers.  The acting and theatrics of this movie are stunning and I guarantee you will want to hop the next plan to Santa Vittoria after seeing this 1969 film.  

Here is a sample of the movie

June 30, 2008
Tonight I laid in bed for about an hour before I realized there was no way I was sleeping a wink.  Tonight was not my night for sleep I guess.  However, it is now 2:21 am and I have seriously discovered some of the coolest things for my mac book that will definitely add to my productivity in the near future.  

Safari 3.1 Opening new links in a new tab and NOT a new window automatically
I have been using Mozilla Firefox religiously since I first heard of it a few years back.  The Tab feature is glorious.  In one web browser window I could tab it up with everything from email, news, and anything else I was working on.  I now use a mac and after attempting all browsers from Opera, Camino, Shiira, Seamonkey, and good ol’ fashion Firefox for Mac, I ultimately liked Safari the most….but when you click a new link it always opens up a new window.  Of course you can command click it every time but come on!  And to no avail in the prefs Apple apparently hasn’t had 12 million requests yet for this feature because you can’t adjust this…they must only be at 9 million so far.  
After reading up on some forums I found this magical piece of code that makes my life sweet.  

Open source mac software for just about anything…its free and legal and it kicks ass!
 I love new features and fucntionality and I like Free.  Once more, I like if the free things kick ass.  Here is an awesome site for really making your Mac killer.  From word processors, podcasting, web browsers, and financial software, this site has a bit of everything.  

Pandora as an application, not a browser window…..so you don’t accidentally close it like I do every ten seconds!

Pandora.com totally rocks, great music streams, solid variety, and commercial free besides visual ads.  However, I am a clumsy web surfer and sometimes my speed at which I modify my tabs or windows exceeds my ability to preserve my current Pandora song.  I find myself always closing the tab mid song and thats a bummer!  Well after a google search I found that Pandora now offers a desktop software (in beta) to make it run as a windows program or Mac application.  This is totally rocking.  Go to Pandora and pick it up!

Cheers,

Lloyd