Wine.woot.com - awesome wines, super prices

If you are already familiar with Woot.com, you may have taken a peek at their wine website, wine.woot.com. It's a very similar set up - there is one deal offered at a great price, and when it's gone, it's gone. The big difference, of course, is that all of the wine.woot deals are wine. Another difference is that wine.woot offerings are changed once a week, so you have a week to buy the wine that's being offered.

I've purchased several of the wine offers from this site. I can easily say that I'm a bit of a wine snob, since I have a good friend who used to write for wine magazines and a modest cellar full of excellent wine. I didn't really expect to see wonderful wines coming out of a bargain site, but these are AWESOME. Of the dozen or so wines I've ordered from wine.woot, I've liked every one...and several have been absolutely dynamite. The main drawback (if you can call it that) is that some of the wines I really enjoyed turned out to cost $50-$75 a bottle at retail when I went looking for them. Still, this site is a wonderful way to get your hands on some superb wine from small, relatively unknown vineyards at ridiculously low prices. My friends always look forward to having me bring the wine these days because it's always different - and it's always good.

Cnet - one of the great geek resources.

In the very early days of the internet, there were quite a few websites that just had big collections of geekish stuff. You know what I mean - stuff like video card reviews, and shareware downloads, stuff that makes a geek a priceless fountain of technical trivia and tools.

One of the oldest sites devoted to this kind of great information is Cnet. Although it has morphed over the years to have a lot more gadget reviews (after all, that's where the money is), it's still a priceless trove of downloadable files, especially programs. If I'm looking for something obscure, like a game that will run on my Blackberry, or a shareware app that will convert a Powerpoint presentation into a PDF file, this is one of the first places I look.

You'll also find wonderful Q&A stuff in Cnet's forums. My assumption has always been that the devoted users of this site know far more about what's wrong with my computer or gadget than the underpaid, undertrained person on the company's support site - and they will usually answer my questions a lot faster. Next time you need an answer, check out the Cnet forums!

www.cnet.com