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Gentil Hugel - a pleasant white wine from Alsace.

Lately I've been drinking some tasty and inexpensive white wine from Alsace, which you might remember as the place Tomi Ungerer comes from.

This is called Gentil "Hugel" - by itself a fun multilingual mix, like Alsace/Elsaß itself. A link where links do well:

http://www.hugel.com/en/

The web site is actually pretty charming, with things like pictures of the hotel in Macau where they went to (presumably) sell wine.

Anyhow, this wine was imported by Frederick Wildman & Sons - a pretty reliable importer, in my experience. The single bit of marketing copy that really struck me as true (from the hugel.com site) is the description of the wine as grapey.

Yes, it's very grapey. It tastes like Autumn. I recommend it. I paid twelve bucks US.

Bank of America Online is down down down...

I'm sure it's just a minor, temporary glitch, but in these scary times it's unsettling when your online banking is unavailable without any explanation.  At least the ATM worked... um, five hours ago...

Fun surfing: Alltop Design News

I more or less randomly stopped over at http://design.alltop.com/ tonight and found lots of good design links to surf through. All of it very high-bandwidth stuff, but cool. I'm not sure what to make of alltop per se - besides better aesthetics, I don't quite get what they give me that the likes of Google and a couple good blogs don't already - but there you have it, variety is the life of spice.

fail@me.com

I've been a loyal mac.com customer for years.

I recognized the Mobile Me rollout as a travesty from the start, but as a software engineer I knew what the problem was: technically oblivious upper management had forced the release of half-baked software over the authors' objections.

So far I've held on as a loyal customer, and I have no plans to leave. For me, the price is easily worth it -- if the software works. And I genuinely believe Steve Jobs was caught off guard by the rank incompetence of his web-app management, and has cracked the whip unambiguously.

I'm not going anywhere in 2008. But hey, Steve: you promised it would get good this year, and it's already September, and:

• Mail I've handled on my iPhone or on me.com still doesn't "push" to my Mac 12 hours later.
• The "reply" function on me.com routinely throws the web-app into a bad state ("action not allowed").
• Sync from my Mac to me.com to the iPhone is basically nonexistent.

Message from me to me.com: I still love you and I believe in you, even if you made a catastrophically bad call on SproutCore. But if you don't make it work@me.com by January, I'm out. Sure, you might still keep my money, since $100 for non-mail sync and not changing my email address seems like a good deal to an old fogey like me, but still: I'll find my escape hatch and sing its praises to the world, and that would be sad.

You were never exactly the best, but you always cared. Please, me dot mac dot mobile sprout dot oops dot com, pleeease don't fail.