Most notable:

Castello di Amorosa – more of an experience than a winery but despite the touristy castle attraction, it ended up being a blast. And the wines were not bad either.
V Sattui – Fantastic deli & picnic area AND some tasty wines, particularly if you’re a fan of Riesling.
Mumm Napa – I was somehow under the impression they made plonk but was pleasantly surprised to find I was wrong.

And one more photo, just because:

So a Federal court has struck down CA Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage, on the grounds that it’s unconstitutional.

At this point it’s obviously just a matter of time before Prop 8 winds it way to the US Supreme Court. So today’s ruling is just one more waypoint on that long journey and, thanks to the stay Judge Walker granted almost immediately after issuing his ruling, nothing has really changed.

What’s bugging me tonight are not so much the outright anti-gay bigots, but the ones who choose to wrap their bias in the cloak of their “activist judges are stepping on the voice of the PEOPLE!” outrage.

It’s really simple. The US Constitution sets the rules by which this country is run. If “the people” vote on something that’s against the tenets of the Constitution, it is completely appropriate to use the courts to deny “the people” their wish.

Don’t like it? You have options. Amend the Constitution. Or go live somewhere else. But this is America and these are the rules by which we operate. Getting upset when those rules go against you is, well, un-American.

I don’t know how this will all end. For all I know the Supreme Court will eventually decide that banning gay marriage does not violate the 14th Amendment and Prop 8 will stand. And I’ll be pretty unhappy if that does come to pass (G-d forbid!). But that’s how America works.

It would be nice if more Americans understood that.

I spent last weekend at the Community Leadership Summit up in Portland. My second CLS and my first trip to Portland.

Good conference. Nice town too.

UPDATE 7/26: I posted a few thoughts about the conference on my new work blog.

While back East, I was privileged to spend time with ~70 members of my mother’s family in our first-ever clan reunion. Approximately 100 years ago my great-grandfather came to the USA; a typical story of immigration – bit by bit he brought his 10 children over, and established a new life for the family here. A few generations later, the cousins have scattered across the USA. My uncle took it into his head to reunite us all for a weekend and the result was a fantastic event.

Here’s a sample of the photos taken:

Quite a few of the cousins have ended up out here in the Bay Area – it’s a nice feeling to know I actually do have family nearby.

I also spent three days up at a spa in the Catskills with my sister and a long weekend with Scott in Connecticut, celebrating the Independence Day weekend with sailing, food, friends, family, and fireworks.

As much as I love my job, it’s been really nice to slow it down for a bit, stop obsessively reading my work email, and relax.

The Bay Area’s Maker Faire gets bigger every year, and despite the hefty crowds, it’s well worth the trip.

I was there today with Scott & some friends and despite being there from open to close, we still didn’t see everything there was to see. You can find everything from robots and tesla coils to musicians and chickens. I saw a DIY butter making station, a human-powered merry-go-round, a bunch of art cars (shades of Burning Man?), the awesome Eepybird.com guys, and WAY more than I could possibly list here.

What’s sticking with me the most was the steampunk stuff. I’ve been aware of steampunk for a while now in a casual way but after checking out several of the substantial steampunk displays at Maker Fair I’m very impressed.

I’ve got some photos from today up here.

Year One was a wild ride. Year Two, even more so. New role, new boss, new additions to the team, new product launches, and a lot more to boot. Sometimes it feels like the only constant is change. But I still love it.

Well, OK, maybe I don’t love the days where there’s 200+ email in my in-box and I’m up to my neck in to-do’s and meetings…. but only for a little while.

The tech world is going through a period of massive change on a lot of fronts right now. It’s a chaotic, fast-moving, and stomach-churning time to be in this business. I feel immensely privileged to be at a company that’s smack in the middle of many of the biggest issues our industry is facing at such a pivotal time.

Some say that “May you live in interesting times” is a curse. I disagree. For those of us who make technology our career, this transition period we’re in — from a desktop-based to a multi-screen world, bringing a whole new level of complexity and creativity with it — is the most interesting of times, and as stressful as it can sometimes be, I wouldn’t be anywhere else.

Here’s to Year Three and beyond!

First off, Chrome for Mac is at the point where it’s usable and I’m starting to switch over to it. As a browser, it lives up to its reports — fast, stripped down, easy to use. My bookmarks were easy to transfer, too. I don’t love how Chrome handles their bookmark display but I’m adjusting fairly easily. And I like the choice of themes, they are much nicer looking that the Firefox themes.

What’s been keeping me from full-out Chrome adoption is that I have a huge pile of passwords stored in Firefox and Xmarks and getting them ported over hasn’t worked. Some of my friends have told me that they should be portable, but so far I haven’t found the setting or application that will help me do it.

This raises the whole issue of password management. Like many people who try to be reasonably secure with my passwords, I have a lot of them and if I don’t visit a site frequently I don’t always remember what password I used. Hence I’ve gotten pretty dependent on tools to help me manage them all (which is also a possible source of insecurity, I know). I haven’t tried 1Password or LastPass yet but I probably should. (Got any suggestions?)

I expect I’ll make a full transition pretty soon but sometimes it’s just easier to open a page in Firefox than try to remember exactly what password I used for what site. So for now I’m still switching between the two.

I’ve also been giving Windows 7 a look. Boot Camp makes trying Win7 on my MacBook Pro pretty painless, so I created a new partition on my personal laptop and installed a copy.

It’s been a few years since Windows was my full-time OS and that was XP, so Win7 is a new experience. Microsoft has clearly done a lot of work on the OS and it’s a more visually-appealing OS these days. I’d be lying if I said I was enthusiastic about making a complete switch though. Having to re-buy all my software, unlearn all the keyboard shortcuts I rely on, and deal with a much more complex set of system settings (not to mention having to worry about viruses again) is not something I’m looking forward to.

Still, it’s been fun to play with something new, and there are a few games I had to give up when I went Mac that I’d like to be able to play again (if I ever have time!). I’ll keep testing & see how I feel after a little more time using it.

It could also be that if I had different hardware I’d feel a little differently — the MacBook Pro’s touchpad isn’t really designed for use with Windows and that’s giving me some issues. I’ve looked at a few Dell and Toshiba possibilities but given that this MBP is less thsn a year old, I’m not feeling the need to go out and buy a new laptop just now.

I’m also still stuck in transition on the phone front, carrying both the Nexus One and my Blackberry. The N1 is a really nice handheld computer and I like it a lot; I’ve gotten rid of my iPod Touch now that I have it. For e-mail though, I still can’t shake free of the Blackberry. The keyboard and Exchange integration are too good.

My deepest wish is that RIM would hurry up and put out a Flash-enabled phone with a big screen and a slider keyboard. I may have to suck it up and go with another solution though, because my much-loved old Curve has taken quite a beating these past 2 years and I’m not sure how much longer I can wait for a replacement for it. I know there will be a lot more options coming soon but I am finding it hard to be patient.

Work continues crazy-busy with no light on the horizon. I’m not at SxSWi (again) and feel a bit bummed about that. I did get down to 360|Flex for a day and a half and that was fun. I will be going home for Passover though.

Still dual-wielding the phones — I can’t break free of my dependence on a real keyboard for email. Other than that, though, the Nexus is really nice & I’ve been adding apps to it like a fiend.

I’ve been pondering a blog post taking a longer look at location-based web services to update the one I did on Google Latitude last year, especially since in the ensuing months I’ve started using Forusquare. The bottom line is I am still deeply ambivalent about them. Perhaps there’s not much more to be said on the subject than that.

A good reminder that no matter how rough you think you have it, someone else generally has it much worse.

When I think of pivotal moments in the last 10 years, the first one that comes to mind is the one that set in motion much of what came afterwards. And it happened here:

In the spring of 2004, I sat on a bench looking up at the oculus of the Pantheon in Rome and decided that I was not going to accept what had happened to my life — which at the time involved living in a crappy (yet cheap) apartment in a remote corner of SF, working a low-wage survival job with no heath insurance. It sucked. It was what I needed to do to keep a roof over my head during the bad times, but it was not going to define the rest of my life.

Sitting in a masterpiece of Roman architecture, I decided I would go back to school for the MBA I should have gotten much sooner and get my career back on track. And despite having no money and a less-than-stellar math GMAT score, I did. And then while in grad school, I decided I wanted to work for a big brand — I was tired of working for companies that nobody had ever heard of before. And despite a gaping hole in my work history, I did.

Looking back now, I don’t know if it was pure luck, or hard work, or just persistence that got me through. It seems like a small miracle, especially considering much of that happened during two recessions. Probably a little of all. But however it happened, here I am.

A lot has changed over these past 10 years; mostly for the better but not all. Some family members have passed on. Some friends have moved onto diverging paths and grown distant. More pounds and grey hairs. But on balance, despite the really bad years in the middle, this decade ends with pretty much everything in my life, finally, heading in what feels like the right direction.

2010 should be quite a year. At work, I’m looking at some new challenges that will force me to get out of my comfort zone, learn, and hopefully grow. That was a theme for 2008 as well (although I didn’t know exactly how much so when last New Year rolled around, I never expected to get promoted so soon for one thing). Outside of work, I have much less free time than I used to but I hope to keep working on my photography. Who knows, it might actually get decent one of these days.

So as 2010 dawns, that’s where things are for me. I know 2009 has been a crappy year for a lot of people so my main wish is that we all have a better 2010.