Yelp is really cool. I found my first SF sushi restaurant, Sushi Zone, on Yelp.
Last night I went to another restaurant which I had been to before. The place had essentially found it’s mojo for me. It went from average to my new favorite.
The food was great, the environment and clientel were fitting, and the service was friendly like they were strangers having a party and wanted me to join them.
This is where Yelp comes in. I don’t want to yelp this place. I don’t want it to become popular. I don’t want people to come there for the first time. I realized, for the first time, why many of my elder foodie friends don’t use Yelp.
There is a very important layer to information disemination that Yelp doesn’t acknowledge. That layer is what I experienced last night. I would have shared this place with my close friends, in fact I will share it, I can’t wait to. But it won’t be by posting a review, or putting it into a bucket on my internet-public profile. No offense public, I think you’re great, but there are a lot of things that you have to find for yourself.
I gotta say that beyond the weird hang up the first time I installed this app,it now performs perfectly! All of the simplicity I have come to expect from the iPhone is here in sweet wordpress fuctionality. Now if they could make the keyboard landscape I would be in love.
The final volume of Y: The Last Man came out a while ago. I didn’t get it until yesterday because somehow I marked on my calendar it wasn’t coming out until July 1st. So I’m reading it two weeks late. Awesome.
If you haven’t read this series I highly recommend it. I expect this to be made into a movie soon.
George | humor, trends | Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
I got the Dungeon Masters guide book. Expect to see “Level 0 Dungeon Master seeks similarly new D&D players for epic after-hours office dragonslaying” on craigslist soon.
Went home for family thursday morning red-eye. Spent Thursday to Sunday in Ohio. Get back in to the office Monday and, surprise, I’m going to San Diego for work. I’m the one-man-show on the ground. One day, maximum productivity. 6AM fly to San Diego, work full-speed with a team of programmers and HCI people. After one delayed flight that evening, arrive home. Sleep like a rock.
Team Fortress 2 is AMAZING but I have only been able to play lately by severely neglecting other parts of my life. I can’t wait to return to a sustainable lifestyle.
I’ve been reading forums, watching videos, researching how to run a server, playing TFC and HL2. I am psyched for TF2!
The back story is: Team Fortress was a mod for Quake (yeah, the original quake) in 1996. Around this time I was just getting angry enough with playing Descent online. I think my joystick broke or something. Anyway, I got Quake for christmas and instantly was pulled into the online community. Team Fortress was awesome and I eventually joined a clan which I’m still a member of called the Green Panthers. We played for about 3-4 years until Team Fortress kind of fizzled out.
The reason for the fizzle was that TF2 was slated for development on the Quake 2 engine. A lot of new games started being released and people left the bustling TF community for smaller scenes. Half-Life, Quake2Action, Counter-Strike and eventually TFC put the nail in the TF2-coffin. TFC was a terrible remake of Team Fortress called “Team Fortress Classic”. There was nothing classic about it, the player physics were horrible, the game play was completely different and it was full of kids playing. So I never played TFC because it’s an abomination of the game.
Now, almost 7 years later, TF2 is finally going to be released. This Monday the beta begins, which you can participate in by pre-ordering the Orange box game bundle which includes HL2, HL2: Lost Coast, HL2: Episode 1, HL2: Episode 2, Portals, Team Fortress 2 and Peggle Extreme. All that for $45 and you get to play on a wonderful monday TF2 game.
I have almost completely ruled out team-based league play like the days of old. I used to play competitively and join leagues, enter tournaments and compete on ladders. I just don’t have the time for that anymore, or at least neither do my clanmates. We all have wives and kids now. The plus side to this is we also have job experience and money now and I am planning on spending some of both on attempting to monetize a game server that I will host. I’ve been researching dedicated, VPS and shared hosting for a TF2 game server as well as judging the general tone of the community so far. The idea is, I’ll be able to host a server and a bustling web-community just like the days of yore. I’ll be an enabler for all those 16 year old shitheads who won’t come to family dinner because they have a match.
george | humor, trends | Wednesday, September 5th, 2007
Renting is cheaper.
Please, please tell me this is true. Because, look, I invest in the stock market. I am working on a RETIREMENT PLAN. And honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to afford a 500k condo. If I can’t actually create a working retirement plan while living where the best work in my industry resides, then… what the hell is everyone else doing here? Am I extremely underpaid? (probably) I’m not going to get a jumbo-loan. I’m not going to get a subprime loan. I’d rather be dirt poor than in bad debt and that is why I rent. I want to believe.
Apple wants to believe, too.
But NBC is too impatient in their desire to shakedown consumers. iTunes is already precariously, slowly treading into the black swamp wasteland; The bowels of internet music trading, where consumers are unmanageable savages. They’re converting them one after another.
You give us a few dollars per song, and you get to go to heaven when you die.
An NBC spokesperson was quoted as saying in a New York Times article: “[The iTunes Store] is designed to drive sales of Apple devices at the expense of those who create the content that make these devices worth buying.” What they don’t get is that there’s already tons of content out there. If users aren’t getting it legally, they’re still getting it! And that’s the black swamp wasteland apple is treading into, converting savages.
I just read that Palm has closed the idea of Palm Foleo. I don’t know the entire story around this device but it seemed to be filling a particularly empty void in the mobile market. I guess I just couldn’t see myself using this with my phone instead of wi-fi. Why not just release an ultra-slim sub-$200 device with a full qwerty that connects to wifi and can do the basics? Why not a OLPC laptop for business that doesn’t look like kermit the frogs laptop?
I hope everyone had a great labor day. Gotta show the man who’s boss, right? TAKE THAT, insatiable machine! Me personally, I love to work.
I spent my weekend hanging with friends and working on World of Warcraft. That game never gets old and is slowly capturing the few friends of mine who have held off the onslaught. I’m starting a new character with my friend and this time around, I’m actually doing my skills. Fishing, herb gatherin… hell yea, braaeehh.
Burning Man is over and the hordes of spiritualized are returning to the office from the dusted plane. Even though this is the second year I haven’t attended burning man, I feel like I can’t escape it. Enjoy, dear readers, attempting to get actionable communication from them in your meetings today. KFC’s new advertising plan is to ship chicken-smelling packages to office mail-carts near you. “Maybe the sweet sweet scent of KFC in the air will bring burners back to the dollar.” Fuck no, man. “The Burn” totally, like, changed me.
You’ve Changed.
Anyone planning on attending the Mobile 2.0 Conference in San Francisco Oct 15th? Looks pretty gnar for $145 you get to see speakers, eat food and drink drinks. I’m hella down. Hopefully, in the name of Saint Labor’s Labor Day, I can get it expensed. I’ll be looking for ideas for persuading my decidedly anti-open client into using their powers for good and not evil. Wish me luck… or give me advice.
Duels.com is a social network and role playing game - create a World of Warcraft type character, buy him or her armor, weapons, etc., and then challenge other players to duels. Win and you get experience, gold and other stuff. Lose and you get nothing.
Burning Man is over and the hordes of spiritualized are returning to the office from the dusted plane. Even though this is the second year I haven’t attended burning man, I feel like I can’t escape it. Enjoy, dear readers, attempting to get actionable communication from them in your meetings today. KFC’s new advertising plan is to