originally posted by Ruben Ramos:
(I'll wait for WD's triptych of wine chicks Eden, Maureen, and bubble girl's app!)
Thanks for the support Ruben, but I've trod (treaded?) that slippery slope once before. Back in the 1980s I developed an app (this was before we called them "apps"- we referred to them as "thingies") for the Newton that commingled wine tasting notes from the Underground Wine Letter, The Loire Schnauzer, Parade, and Consumer Reports all in a program that would have been loaded off of a floppy disc that would be mailed to subscribers on a monthly basis. I was writing all of the transitional information (food/wine matching, color, label, and bottle shape coordination etc) and had just begun working on my "Introduction to White Zinfandel" chapter when they pulled the plug on the Newton project and made the entire platform redundant.
Being fair sorts of people, they gave me the choice of a check for $705.47 or a pile of stock options in lieu of the gratification of seeing the thingy launched but I couldn't see much future in a company that didn't see the beauty and value to society of having all this valuable wine information available in a device no bigger than your average bread box, so I opted for the money (besides, there was a yurt I wanted to buy in Santa Cruz and they offered to throw in a year's worth of patchouli oil
and a hot tub if I bought immediately).
Come to think of it, the whole thing probably would have crashed and burned anyway. Dean Delahanty (the Loire Schnauzer) was a litigious SOB around that time (he subsequently became a sweetheart after the Boy Scouts/Nun/Guinea Pig scandals and his subsequent divorce) and he'd probably have sued us six ways from Sunday because we hadn't really gotten "official" permission to use his notes. Back then, licensing was something you did at the DMV and anyhow, information wants to be free, doesn't it? Peach out, dude.
-Eden (I prolly shoulda took the stock options. WTF, AAPL was selling for like 11 a share at the time and Jobs was still exiled to the Kingdom of Atlantis or wherever he went and who knew that the evidence would soon be uncovered that Windows was actually developed on Satan's own OS platform as a means to spread disorder, confusion, and mistrust throughout the population?)(expect my reviews of apple-flavored Kool-Aid to arrive soon)
