I had pretty much everything working on the site, but there was one little thing that annoyed me. When you referred to my blog as www.nsidestrate.com/blog it wouldn’t load. You had to say www.nsidestrate.com/blog/index.php for some reason. Nobody else who uses WordPress has that issue, so I knew that I had something weird. My site was being hosted as a virtual domain inside another domain that I already owned and I suspected that was the problem. I chatted with the WordPress gurus on IRC and played with a few configuration items, but I could never solve it. There were some poorly written Apache rewrite rules on the server that I couldn’t see which probably made things worse. I tried to hack something together with .htaccess, but it was ugly and still didn’t seem to work the way I wanted.
I decided to just bite the bullet and make www.nsidestrate.com a regular domain and avoid this whole issue. It seemed like a simple fix and my webhost assured me that it would be seamless and invisible.
Wrong! All my old mail went the way of the dodo, the blog no longer worked and the forums produced a very long list of unhappy messages. After several hours of tweaking and arm wrestling and cursing, everything is now working again and you can just type www.nsidestrate.com/blog so I’m happy again.
The unfortunate side-result is that I played zero poker and didn’t get any sportsbets down either. I did watch Suited play for a while and offered advice that turned out to be wrong every time I gave it.
On the plus side, we had a great dinner last night and I told Suited my new philosophy was that I was going to drink the good stuff when we had a nice meal instead of keeping it in the cellar forever. So we popped open a 1993 Beaucastel that we picked up in France several years ago.  The general consensus is that you should hold it 10 years at a minimum. The great vintages will last 30 years and the more ordinary ones will last 20 years. 1993 is not considered a stellar year, but a bit above average. I can tell you at 13 years old that this bottle could stil have been held for several more years. It was still a bit tight and tannic, especially when we first opened it. I think that the whole decanting thing and letting wine breathe is often snobbery, but in this case it absolutely got better and better after it had some time in the glass.  and Chateauneuf du Pape in general and Beaucastel in particular are among my very favorite wines and this one was no exception. Complex and a bit sweeter/jammier/fruitier than other Beaucastels I’ve had from stronger vintages, I would still rate this one high on my lifetime chart. We were trying to take very small sips at the end to savor our last tastes of this bottle. It brought back a lot of happy memories of our travels and reinforced our resolve to get back to Europe and load up on some more good stuff.
