Back in the saddle!

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Well, as it happens, I had to change hosting companies.  The old hosting company suffered the loss of one of their database servers, and in that, none of my sites were working.  To make a long story short, who knows if anyone is there any longer because after sending a ton of emails and leaving a bevy of voicemails, there still was no contact nor any progress by them.  So, the last copy of the database that I had was done at the end of May, meaning that I have lost some five months of wine reviews!  Even if I had more recent data downloaded to one of my local servers, the main drive on that machine went kaput as well, so I wound up replacing a local server on my end too.  Hmmmm, I wonder if Mercury was in retrograde at that time.

Well, over the past few months I have made some great strides in regards to my moves in the world of wine.  The first was that I attended the annual portfolio tastings for Southern Wine and Spirits, Capital Wine and Spirits and also Winebow.  They were each nice, with the Winebow event being the best of them all.  I made some great contacts at all three.

There was also my annual sojourn to DC for the Congressional Black Caucus" Annual Leadership Conference.  I reconnected with old friends and associates, met some new contacts and there should come some good business out of it as well.

October had me attending both stops of the VinItaly US Tour; one at the Italian embassy in DC and the other up in New York.  I made some great contacts and can"t wait to finish following up with each one of them.  Hopefully, some of them should have me traveling as well as visiting Italy soon.

That"s it.  I still have some other things to do with the website(s), but since I also moved hosts and to a new platform, I can finally get to rewriting some of the logic in the site.