Thursday, 14 February 2008

2007_05_01_archive



KSG Wine Club meeting

Last night Alli and I went to a meeting of the KSG (Harvard's Kennedy

School of Government, where Alli works) Wine Club. The graduate

students there started the club earlier this year, and they've been

holding monthly meetings, each one with a different theme. It's a

fantastic idea, and I'm surprised KSG didn't have such a club before.

Last night's theme was South African wines, and it was enjoyable. We

had 3-4 whites and 3-5 reds. One of the great things about the

international crowd at KSG is that there's always someone around from

the locality being discussed who can bring a lot of information and

history to the discussion. The honorary chair of last night's party

was from South Africa, and he really explained a lot about the

vineyards, the terroir, the wine-growing approaches, pricing, tariffs,

and more.

My favorite was probably the (2003 I think) KWV Pinotage. We also had

a great Chenin Blanc and a couple of nice wines from Stellenbosch,

whose name escapes me at the moment.

There's an issue at the club with succession for next year, as all the

current members are graduating. Alli and I may step in to help with

the transition, as I definitely think this is a worthy cause ;)

Posted by Yoav at 12:10 0 comments Links to this post

Gaim is now Pidgin, but I still like Trillian better

So the Gaim folks changed their instant messenger client program name

to "Pidgin" for legal reasons, and cut out a stable 2.0.0 release. I

gave it shot for about an hour the other day, but quickly concluded I

still like Trillian better.

They both support all the features I need. Trillian just comes

configured by default mostly the way I like it, and I think it looks a

lot better. I know it's superficial, but given the equality of other

things, not having to spend a while configuring the IM client, plus

having it integrate very smoothly and nicely with my desktop, those

two become winning factors.

From a pure engineer's perspective, Pidgin does have a couple of big

pluses, in theory. First is the ease with which one can develop

plugins: I haven't done one myself yet, but it looks trivial. The

whole system really looks open. Second is the availability of a Pidgin

version for text-only systems, "Finch." As someone who spend a good

amount of time on Linux text consoles, I appreciate that.


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