Random Notes

I was just reviewing some of my (growing) list of news feeds today and ran across a couple of interesting but generally unrelated items. At least one of them had something to do with the general thrust of this blog, so read on.

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The first was this thing called the Wine Boot Camp. It actually seems like a pretty cool idea. The web site claims it's "the ultimate fantasy experience for wine lovers. Wine novices and experts experience firsthand the joys and frustrations of winemaking." Looks like it's a day's worth of educational activities related to wine making for $395. I'd be really curious to hear from anyone that's done this and found it to be worth the price of admission. If done well, it might be pretty fun. So, is this the equivalent of sports fantasy camps for the wine lover? I wonder. Many years ago I recall driving by the actual home where the movie Field of Dreams was filmed. The baseball field was still there and there was a baseball fantasy camp going on there at the time. Sox uniforms and the whole thing. The has-been athletes on the field looked to be having quite a bit of fun.

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Completely unrelated to wine and perhaps more specifically related to blogging, was the article I ran across that mentioned a site that can inspect your web site and give an assessment of its readability. It uses some algorithms (which it describes) to determine the readability. When I fed in this blog (in its present state prior to this post) I got, for example, a 'Gunning Fog Index' of 7.69. For some perspective, they say that Reader's Digest has a typical Fog Index score of 8, and that most popular novels are in the 8-10 range. So I guess my postings should be fairly easy to comprehend. They're usually fairly short and to the point, so that would seem to ring true to me. I ran a few other blogs through it too (which shall remain nameless) and a few scored a little higher on that same scale. Perhaps I should be stepping it up in terms of complexity of what I write. Anyway, give it a try.