Last fall, I had the opportunity to drive down from Paris to Vouvray, in the Loire Valley, to look into an argument between the town and the French railroads. It seemed that the S.N.C.F. -an abbreviation for the railroad system – had drawn the route for its new high-speed train, the T.G.V. Atlantique, through some famous vineyards. Understandably, the locals were up in arms. It was a good story. It was also a chance to meet Gaston Huet, the Mayor of Vouvray and one of its best-known wine makers.

My normally superior $3.99 vintage.

Americans are in love with sparkling wine. It all started, most recently, five or six years ago, and even now no one is sure why. There is talk of more sophisticated life styles, the switch away from hard liquor as an aperitif and the not inconsiderable discretionary income of the yuppie generation. Whatever the reason, sales of sparkling wines, from the cheapest California and Spanish stuff to the most exclusive vintage Champagne, are running about 200 percent ahead of still -non-bubbly – table wine.

Old habits die hard, I guess.

But, that’s not to say that I’m a full on Apple fiend. I did have an iPhone. I no longer have an iPhone. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think one of the main things is that I felt like I was losing my freedom and that my technology was trying to take me over.

I’m not trying to say that this is some kind of crazy Videodrome-deal, but I really felt like I was kind of locked-in when I had an iPhone. Sure, it had a lot of neat features and the battery life was pretty decent, but I felt the more that I got into the Apple ecosystem, the more unhappy I was.

Not only was I kind of forced to buy everything from Apple in terms of media, (which obviously makes them incredibly rich) but I kind of felt that a lot of stuff was pretty overpriced for what it was.

The answer to my telephone problem? It has to be Android.

Is Google just another behemoth looking to take over the world? Yes, very probably. But at least they seem to be a little bit more open source and friendly about doing it. I feel like I trust Apple less and less every day, and I feel like a lot of people are on board with me with this.

Well, that’s just one man’s opinion. But obviously, if you back up your opinion by not sucking up to the market leader, you are to find that your soul feels a lot better in the long run.

Okay, consider that the end of my rant.

If you are looking for Mac hard drive recovery, and your Mac looks like this, you're in troubl

When it comes to Mac hard drive recovery, I have admit that I am completely out of my skill set. I have admit that my MacBook is been probably one of the best tools I’ve had in a long time, but I can tell you that when it breaks down the it can be pretty brutal. And, of course I made the big mistake of going to a computer repair store to see if they could recover my hard drive. I didn’t realize that this was a bad idea, but it turns out it is.

The reason why this can be considered one of the worst ways to go about finding hard drive data recovery services is because such shops actually do sell hard drives, and then they automatically think that they are experts when it comes to data recovery. Of course, they are usually just a couple of geeks sitting behind a desk being snobby at you. What I’m saying is that they are very unbelievably unskilled in general and that if you actually want to recover from hard drive failure problems, you’d better avoid these guys like to plague.

I can tell you this because I had a huge problem with a computer repair shop because they basically took my Mac hard drive in and claim that they could recover all the data when in fact they really couldn’t. I found out later that they attempted to outsource the service to the company that I ended up going with. I can’t believe how money hungry these guys are, but if it makes sense because who really get things fixed anymore?

As an example, have you seen some of those old television repair shops that sit there in the middle of nowhere in your town and nobody ever goes in there? That is pretty much the signpost of what is to come for every computer repair shop in the USA. Remember that you read it here first.

So stop your whining and man up for a change because getting depressed over a hard drive issue won’t even begin to solve your current problem. Everyone who has been using a computer for some time now will have experienced a similar situation wherein you accidentally click the delete all data button on your mouse whether by random clicking or your kids trying to play with the keyboard and somehow hitting the right key at the wrong time.

Some people are more unfortunate. Sometimes, they kill the hard drive altogether. There goes four years of college papers down the drain! But not to worry. Just like any story has a hero to fight against the villains, the data recovery professionals are there to help, like really geeky supermen.

Just make sure you find the right company, because I’m told that some of the companies in this industry are outright ridiculous. They can really take you for a ride. So make sure that you have your skepticism on if you have a hard drive issue. It’ll probably save you a lot of cash.

Well, you honestly wouldn’t be that far off, frankly. But that is a different story for a different time. Today I’d like to talk about the whole Mitt Romney situation.

Yes, that one.

I have to say that I have never really felt very sympathetic for Republicans in general simply because they typically tend to look at right and wrong as right and left, which is obviously pretty stupid. I could go on about the health care debate and the fact that pretty much every country outside of the United States has universal healthcare, and no one seems to be dying of poverty in those countries. Here though? That is another point.

But I really do have to say that as far as gamesmanship goes, I actually feel bad for the Republicans. I guess that’s what makes me weak kneed liberal, in that I have difficulties crushing the hopes of people who clearly are hopeless.

But seriously. If you were to look in the dictionary under “loser”, I really feel like Mitt would be the kind of guy that would have a full on Sears portrait studio photograph right underneath the definition.

We all know that there are a lot of problems with Mitt Romney, including the fact that most Republicans don’t even support him, but this latest thing with the fact that he can’t even find a potential vice presidential candidate is definitely him hitting bottom.

So I guess you could say at this point the only way that he can go is up. Well, if you believe that, then I have a truck full of John McCain 2008 T-shirts that I can sell you for $1000 per shirt.

I don’t want to curse the whole thing, but it would be very difficult for Obama to lose this one. I mean, Liberals don’t like Romney. Republicans don’t like Romney. Most women find him creepy. Oh and on another note, I recently heard a right-wing talkshow host asked his caller “what specifically about him is creepy?”

That was funny. I think if you have to ask what specifically is creepy about a person, you’re probably not understanding what the concept of creepy is. Someone doesn’t have creepy specifics, they have creepy vibes in general. Mitt seems to have that going for him.

One thing I can say about this whole situation is that is going to be very fun to watch. Now that the Republicans are basically destroy themselves with all of this infighting, it will be interesting to see just how quick Obama takes the whole shebang.

So you could say that I’m looking forward to it.

I will admit that initially when I found out about Old Moon Old Vines Zinfandel, I was pretty impressed with it. It is a fantastic wine for the low amount of money that you’re going to spend on it. And let’s face it, once you’ve had a couple of bottles of wine, it really doesn’t matter if you are drinking two Buck Chuck or a $50 Pinot Noir. In the end, it’s all vapor talking anyway.

But I digress, as I will typically do.

While looking for this brand, and of course discovering that it was made by Trader Joe’s, I ran across a wine that I had experienced not too long ago and was pleasantly surprised. I think it was one of those chain restaurants in the northern part of San Diego County, in fact, and it was by far probably one of the best wines I experienced just offhand. The wine was called Valley of the Moon Cabernet, and it was quite frankly pretty damn good considering the fact that we only spent about $40 for it. What can I say? It was a birthday party of a friend of mine.

At any rate, I ended up doing a lot of extensive research into this particular vineyard, and actually ended up finding out that they have a lot of other fantastic wines at their website, which is of course Valleyofthemoonwinery.com. Yes, it’s not the most creative of website names, but I have to wonder if these winery owners put winery on the end of their domain name because they are looking for people to find them, or is it because somebody already took Valley of the Moon.com? It’s always a mystery, I tell yer.

Very Available

At first, I assume that this one was going to be very difficult to get, but then I quickly realized that is a lot more available than I thought. In fact, I just checked out the best in the website and I found out that they have the wine in stock probably about 365 days every year.

So it’s a good tasting, full-bodied wine for less than $15. And is it better than Trader Joe’s Old Moon? Of course it is. But if there is a burn about this company it is that their website is absolutely horrible. Not only can you not really get any good pictures of the wine, but it frankly is unreadable if you are using anything other than a giant screen TV to read it with.

Something tells me that they may be doing a little bit more drinking of their own product than you might think.

Still, it’s a pretty good beverage.