2005 Tin Roof Cellars (Merlot)

winemaker’s notes

“Our 2005 Merlot offers ripe, luscious black cherry and plum fruit aromas and flavors characteristic of the Merlot variety, enhanced by hints of tobacco, herbal spice and chocolate. With smooth, supple tannins and a long, rich finish, it pairs especially well with grilled red meats, herb-roasted chicken, pork chops, red-sauced pastas and flavorful hard cheeses.”

2006 Water Wheel Australian (Red Blend) "Memsie"

Grape blend: 87% Shiraz, 7% Cabernet Sauvignon, & 6% Malbec

Wine Review (from Kenswineguide): This dark purple wine opens with a spicy blackberry like bouquet. On the palate, this medium bodied wine is round, easy to drink, and has fruit forward black current flavors along with a little black licorice and spice. The finish is dry, but brief. This would pair nicely with your favorite burger.

Winemaker Notes: The 2006 Memsie red has a dark cherry/purple colour. There are obvious blackcurrant, plum and spice characters dominating the nose. The palate is fresh with voluminous and forward, spice, berry and plum flavours obvious. These flavours are complimented by hints of sweet oak. The wine has great length with a persistent, smooth and clean finish. Ready to drink now to 2010 with a variety of food styles including risotto and red meats.

Wine Advocate notes:

"The purple-colored 2006 Memsie Red is composed of 87% Shiraz, 7% Cabernet Sauvignon, and 6% Malbec, the wine was aged for 6 to 9 months in used American hogsheads. The aromatics are unusually expressive for a wine in this price category. Aromas of cinnamon, allspice, plum, blueberry and black currant lead to a medium to full-bodied wine with a plush texture, ripe sweet fruit, and a sense of elegance. This tasty wine will provide pleasure over the next 4-6 years. Congratulations to Water Wheel for over-delivering on a superb quartet of wine values."

Who said CDMA violates the law of physics.

Many proponents of CDMA technology, when inquired about the early days of CDMA, say that it was a tough time pushing the technology. Some Stanford professor even said CDMA violates the law of physics.

I have already been curious who said this and did some research. It turns out that in the Jan/Feb 1997 edition of IEEE internet computing, the name was mentioned in an interview "George Glider on the bandwidth of plenty", Bruce Lusignan.

Here is the quoted text from this interview "
For some reason people were unusually intense in opposition to CDMA technology. Bruce Lusignan, a brilliant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, said that CDMA, as Qualcomm described it, violates the laws of physics—and this was quoted over and over again. So that laws of physics—laws of God, if you will—were involved in this debate! And because it was said to violate the laws of physics, lots of people jumped to the conclusion that Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi (of the Viterbi algorithm fame) were pushing a technology scam!
"

It was also interesting to see that Bruce later obviously changed his opinion as he also published a number of papers on receiver design for IS-95 CDMA technology.

Bruce's original comment was hard to find, but I got something in one article (" Down to the Wireless - Stakes High as Rivals Race to Provide Next Generation of Celluar Gear") published online in May 1996 edition on LA Times website. This article quoted Bruce's comments as follows "

On the other side of the aisle is Bruce B. Lusignan, professor of electrical engineering and director of the communications satellite planning center at Stanford University, who contends that CDMA technology is actually something of a hoax and will ultimately result in a loss of capacity compared with the gains offered by other digital signaling methods.

'The basic problem is that it does not have anywhere near adequate protection from the fading that the other techniques all have,' said Lusignan, who said his lab has been studying the underlying technology, known as spread spectrum, for 20 years. 'That makes it completely inadequate to achieve the type of capacities that they have been advertising.'

"

In the book "The Qualcomm Equation", the author also pointed out that "In several forusm, two Stanford professors, Bruce Lusignan and Don Cox, took CDMA to the task and concluded that the system essentially would not work as planned."

Free DVD burning software

CDBurnerXP:

• CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Everyone, even companies, can use it for free. It does not include adware or similar malicious components.
• Used this for a couple of times by now, it seems pretty fast (compared to some other software packages I used before).