This article was written by Joseph Ho of uShip.com, an online marketplace for moving companies.

Moving wine bottles can be quite a daunting task. Imagine unpacking in your new home and realizing your most prized bottle has been cracked and is leaking on your other possessions.  Read on for a step-by-step guide to prevent damage to your wine during a move.

1. Use a box with dividers. You can purchase boxes with dividers specifically designed for wine and liquor bottles from moving companies. An alternative is getting similar boxes for free from wineries, liquor stores, restaurants, or supermarkets. Stick to using smaller boxes for ease of transport. Multiple wine bottles in a box can be heavy and hard to handle, an undesirable combination for fragile items.
2. Reinforce the bottom of the box with extra tape. The last thing you want is for all the bottles in the box to fall out the bottom of the box while it is being carried.
3. Make sure the bottles are tightly corked.  A good preventive measure to avoid the loosening of corks in transport is to secure the corks using wire cork cages, especially for sparkling wines.
4. Wrap the bottles with paper or bubble wrap. Start at a corner of the paper and wrap the bottle diagonally on the sheet, folding in the excess paper on the sides as you roll the bottle. When done rolling, wrap the exterior of the bundle with shipping tape to secure the wrapping and any loose ends.
5. Place the wrapped bottles in the dividers, and fill in the empty space with packing peanuts or crumpled newspaper.
6. Seal the top of the box with a generous amount of tape.
7. Clearly label the box as fragile to prevent damage.
8. During transport, make an effort to keep the temperature of the bottles as low as possible. Many moving companies offer climate controlled moving vans.  Ideally, the wine should be kept at 55°F to prevent damage, but this may be impractical. You may want to carry more expensive bottles in an ice chest with dry ice.

There is no feeling quite like opening a nice bottle of wine after moving into your new home. By exercising caution and following these steps, you will surely transport your wine collection successfully.

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Yesterday, I replaced the hard drive in one of my laptops. Everything was under warranty, so no problems there. Now that I have a brand spanking new hard-drive I figured I would take advantage of its innocence, and partition off a section for the anticipated release of Ubuntu 8.04 … aka Hardy Heron.

What a great call. Of course, I went ahead and installed the OEM Vista on a 60 gig partition, simple to do using the recovery disks provided by Toshiba. For the record, it is very important that you install the Microsoft Windows OS first if you plan on dual booting with Linux, so you can rewrite the micro$oft boot manager with the more friendly Linux boot manager. Basically, you aren’t under time constraints to choose which OS you want to boot at startup.

Today, I fidgeted with excitement as I booted up my clean Vista install, and as a first task on this windows machine, immediately browsed to Ubuntu.com to download Hardy Heron. Unfortunately, I was one of many people (stats yet to be released, but it must have been a lot), and the ubuntu site was down.. Argonne National Laboratory was downloading at 15KBs and University of Maryland was at about 30KBs… I ended up using the Ubuntu mirror at Georgia Tech. Software Library which was running at about 140KBs over my 3G HTC phone, and I downloaded the 699MB file in about 2 hours.

After downloading the file, I made sure to burn a DISK IMAGE..very important, do not burn a data CD, burn as an IMAGE. I then shut down my computer, rebooted with the disk in, and was greeted with the Ubuntu install screen. I followed all of the prompts, and when it asked me about partitioning, I selected manual and made the following adjustments. I set a new partition of 50 gigs for Ubuntu install, and I also created a 4 gig swap partition… a clever little trick that helps speed things up a bit. I then wrapped up the install, let it do its thing, and now I have a FREE desktop operating system that not only took less time to install than Vista (1 hr vs. 2.5) but has more functionality.. at least for what I need it for.

I’ll follow up in a few to let you all know how my experience has gone. Considering Ubuntu’s track record of operating systems, I’m sure this one will be just as impressive. I hear, though I’m yet to experience, that there are some small driver support issues for laptops.

Just as a general note.. if you have some old laptop somewhere with windows 95 on it, you can easily wipe the hard-drive and get an install of Hardy Heron going that will perform almost as well as a new machine running windows. Linux is such a lightweight system that it doesn’t require all of the processing power and space as a microsoft system does. Granted I’m sure I will always have at least one copy of windows running within arms reach, if for the sake of compatibility alone.

UPDATE:
I personally have not had any driver issues, though a friend of mine with an ATI graphics card has experienced a small issue. I have an Intel graphics card, which is pretty versatile.

If you have the ATI card, you simply go to System -> Administration -> Software Sources and enable the repository for restricted software. Then go back into your drivers, and you should be able to select and update without a problem.. you can use the tutorial here -> Every Flavor Beans

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