Monday, August 18th, 2008

Below is proof that I’d be a complete tool no matter when I grew up. I found a cool site that allows you to upload a photo of yourself, and you can overlay your pictures with some notable looks of kids over the years.

Whether it was the 50s, the 70s, or when I actually graduated in 1998, it appears that it would not have mattered a whole heck of a lot. If Michelle allows, I’ll upload her photos too — they were equally amazing.

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Posted on August 18th, 2008 | 4 Comments »

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

I must own this shirt.

If you have’nt seen this video, or the (surprisingly catchy) dance remix, do yourself a favor and jump in now.

Posted on May 21st, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

At some point over the past year or so, I have noticed signs along Georgia 400 that say ‘Hospitality Highway’. At first, I thought this was some sort of program established for highway cleanup, but I could never be sure. A few weeks ago, Michelle noticed another one of the signs, so I looked up “Hospitality Highway via Google. Boy, I was in for a treat.

Georgia 400 is henceforth to be known as the Hospitality Highway, a corridor of highway stretching from Atlanta up to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Apparently, the site of my daily commute is more than just a road to some — it’s a marketing opportunity, and one that should be exploited to the greatest amount possible.

For example, I direct you to the suggested itinerary section of the site. It’s here that you can learn how to fully explore the quaint southern charm of suburban Roswell, Alpharetta, and Cumming. The activities outlined in this section are laughable to any local North Fulton resident, but that doesn’t stop the writers of this site. Part of Day 4’s schedule includes:

Rise and shine! Get your motor running with a complimentary breakfast—offered at many of the Alpharetta hotels. Then drop by the Alpharetta Welcome Center in the heart of downtown for a glimpse into the charm and vitality of the city. Pick up a local Calendar of Events to find out what’s happening in town. The Welcome Center is the best source of information on nearly all that the area has to offer.

Spend the morning at the Honda Rider Education Center where you can take beginning, intermediate or advanced courses for street or dirt bikes on Honda’s own courses. Be sure to register for this popular experience beforehand.

How charming!

The tour takes you all the way from the north end of the highway strip, down towards the toll road in Buckhead. And it’s chock-full of corny things to see and do around town. I just want to remind everyone that the GA 400 corridor is simply suburbia. Tons of it. There is nothing ’southern’ or ‘fascinating’ about 30 minutes of traffic no matter where you want to go, a Publix on every single corner, and a Starbucks every quarter mile.

So if anyone asks you how to get to Alpharetta, just tell them to take the Hospitality Highway — but don’t forget to stop along the way and make a memory that will last a lifetime!

Posted on May 1st, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

I’ve tried to be good lately and not post about politics as much on here (I’ve been posting most political-type stuff on my tumblelog), but this one was too much to pass up.

The New York Times has posted an editorial today about the ongoing Democratic race for the nomination, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d think that they were ‘un-endorsing’ her (the NY Times endorsed Hillary right before Super Tuesday). While the author (rightly) does not claim that Obama’s hands are completely clean in the latest round of mudslinging, he certainly makes it clear that Hillary is the one that seems right at home in this style of politics, and is benefiting from attempting to destroy Obama’s electability by focusing on fringe issues that do not matter to Democratic voters.

Because Hillary has been constantly attacking, there has been little time to talk about things that I feel voters deserve after 7+ years of divisive, brain dead politics. As the author says, we deserve a nuanced debate for a change, about how each candidate will approach all of the issues facing our nation over the next 4+ years. Instead, we get multiple questions about a flag lapel pin. We get Hillary invoking 9/11, Giullani-style, unprovoked. Even Karl Rove would be proud of her fear-mongering.

I guess you could say that I ‘called it‘ back in February after Super Tuesday came and went. I wasn’t alone in this prediction back then, and I’m certainly not alone now. However, I would like someone to ask her to honestly answer the question of how she plans on winning the nomination. So far, all I have heard is that she plans to say that Obama is not electable, and she is. However, her negatives are off the charts among independents and Republicans. Most Democrats will vote for her, but if the Superdelegates were to flip the pledged delegate count in favor of her, I think a lot of folks would walk away from this election. Now that’s what I call an electability problem.

I’m still confident that Obama will win the nomination, as there is just not a realistic path for Hillary. But god, am I tired of all of this. I think the positive is that Hillary is bringing up all of the petty stuff that 527’s and McCain’s folks will try to bring up in the fall. If it’s already had it’s run on the news now, it’s kind of hard to revisit it in a substantial way come general election time.

Regardless, it’s time for Hillary to hang it up if she can’t win North Carolina and Indiana in two weeks. She’ll try to spin it (just like she claims she ‘won’ Texas, she won by double digits in Pennsylvania, and she’s winning the popular vote) in a number of ways if she doesn’t win one of those primaries, but the stark truth is that she needs to win every primary by a 70 - 30 margin to overtake Obama’s delegate lead. That’s just not going to happen.

Sadly, she doesn’t realize this. Ah well.

Technorati Tags:
politics, obama, clinton, hillary, barack, north carolina, indiana, pennsylanvia, democrat

Posted on April 23rd, 2008 | No Comments »

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

So, a funny thing happened to me last night. While going through my Mint site statistics, I noticed that one particular site was bouncing quite often – all while trying to visit one specific page. The way my blog is set up, any 404 redirects back to my main page, so the only information I really had to go on was the referring site. After clicking on this site and going through a few of the pages, I noticed that it was a coffee / restaurant review site, specifically for the Orlando, Florida region. Keep in mind that I attended college at Full Sail roughly 3 years ago, so I do have contacts down there. More specifically, one of our projects involved making a website for Palmano’s, which is a small coffee shop down in Winter Park.

As it turns out, the site that was linking to my site was actually linking to the location of a testing page that I had accidentally left up for about six months. You see, the Palmano’s folks had contacted me last spring regarding revamping a lot of what we had made for them while at school. Their host had gone down, and they lost their entire site. They wanted me to help them get their site back up (if I still had it – which I did) add some features, tweak some text, add some new photos, and things of that nature. I told them that I would gladly do that for them, and I did have the files they needed, but I did not have the sql database backed up. If the server was in fact down, I’d have to re-create all of that for them, and it’d take me maybe a work day to make all of the changes they wanted. I told them that would cost them, they said okay, and away we went!

Fast forward to July of last year. By this time, I had re-created everything and gotten most of the content back where it needed to be. I had also sent the clients some hosting options, told them what it’d take to get this thing live, and thought we were on our way to essentially getting the site back to where it was 2 years prior. As soon as money was mentioned, all I got was radio silence. No replies to my emails, and even to my phone calls. I had obviously seen this behavior before from people, and gave it a few weeks and tried again. Still nothing. At this point, I figured I’d just let it go and move on. If they wanted to continue working, I’d demand payment in full and we’d move forward from there. If not, I guess I was out a few hundred bucks.

I didn’t hear anything from them until I emailed the son of the owner (the guy I had been working with when I lived in Orlando, and the contact I had when I was getting things set up for them again) last night. I basically told him that I noticed a site was linking to my site, and I’m not sure how that happened, but I have since deleted the test pages and made a meta refresh that will send traffic to a google search for their company. Additionally, I offered to redirect it somewhere else if they so desired. I just figured this was a simple mistake, and we could sort this out quickly and easily.

No reply.

I decided to see what would happen when I typed in the client’s address. Wouldn’t you know it, it redirected to my site as well. This, of course, set off a nerve. Someone could have made a mistake and linked to my personal site, but it takes a real set of balls to log into your registrar and redirect it to a testing location when you have stopped replying to their emails and phone calls. Simply amazing. Torn, I wasn’t sure how to react. Part of me wanted to do something vindictive, and the other figured I should remain as professional about this as possible (although this could hardly be considered professional work). I decided to strike a compromise and simply link the redirected location on my website to a starbucks.com search for locations in Winter Park, Florida. I also sent an email to the client in question outlining how unprofessional they have been with me from the outset, but this was obviously the icing on the cake.

The money is certainly not the issue. At this point, it’s been a year since we got started and it’s only a few hundred dollars. I just find the fact that they chose to go behind me back and link to my personal site hilarious/infuriating (if that’s possible). These guys seemed sketchy from the outset, but I certainly didn’t anticipate anything like this.

Anyway, if you’re ever in Winter Park Florida and need to quickly know where a Starbucks is, don’t waste your time fiddling around with their search interface. Just type in palmanos.com!

UPDATE: Looks like they have changed their DNS info. It was fun while it lasted! To at least see what the client saw, you can go to http://www.danielandrews.com/palmanos/ - where he had palmanos.com pointing to.

Technorati Tags:
Orlando, stories, funny, Winter Park

Posted on March 12th, 2008 | 7 Comments »