Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

/* I’m thinking about creating a searchable online database of my wine tasting notes. Any experts out there with thoughts on where to start looking for software or whatever?
*/

Getting the notes from a spreadsheet to an SQL database is pretty trivial.  I would be willing to do that for you for free once you pick the SQL database.  But then you’d still need a web designer to create the interface into that database.

There’s also Google Base ( http://base.google.com/ ) for a completely free possibility.

For the wine database, I’d suggest OpenOffice, which has the marvelous advantage of the right price.
http://www.openoffice.org
As an aside, OpenOffice also does a better job of handling spreadsheet-to-database, and for that matter text-to-database, conversions than Micro$oft’s products do.

You’ve actually described two entirely different sets of software for the video issues. The people I know who edit from camcorder files and create videos from still pictures swear by Pinnacle, and mostly at everything else. PC Magazine has done some reviews pretty recently (entry point at
http://tinyurl.com/yq2abp
However, I’ve heard nothing but disdain for commercial products’ attempts to create editable video out of PowerPoint presentations — apparently they leave lots and lots of artifacts behind that tend to choke either the editing or the playback machine. OTOH, I spent waaaaaaay too much time giving and receiving military briefings (PowerPoint before there was PowerPoint) to like PowerPoint in the first place.