J5’s Blog

All in all pretty good for a last minute event.  It ended up being a night at the good life bar as it was too much fun to leave.  People ended up rotating in and out all night and we all had a blast.  My dinner was pretty good.  The spinage was amazing but the steak was a little overdone.  The vodka martinis were also good but I would stay away from the mixed drinks as they didn’t seem to be of the same quality.  I still prefer Om for martinis and cocktails but overall Good Life was pretty good.  Dancing was fun on such an intimate dance floor and we even had a show of the local hip hop dance crew showing off their moves. Well it is 4 o’clock here - a bit late for this old man. I need to pack for my trip to Aruba on Sunday and am meeting someone for dinner tomorrow night. I will be mostly absent for the next week as I try to relax and soak in some sun and beach but I will be checking e-main every once in awhile and my phone will still work for emergencies.

I thought I was going to be on vacation for my birthday this year but it turns out I’m leaving the day after so I decided to do something this Friday to celebrate with people in Boston.  I’m going to have a small dinner with close friends at Good Life Bar around 8:00 and then perhaps some drinks at Jacob Wirth.  In any case I’ll be microblogging my whereabouts on identi.ca so use it as an excuse to come down, drink a few beers and have a good time.

Fudcon is great but when I like to unwind I go to the American Craft Beer Fest. Right now I’m getting ready for the beer and food pairing seminar. Like wine, beer is very versatile as an ingredient (if you have ever had a beer can roasted chicken you would understand). In any case we are about to start
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In other related news Gravity of Debian X fame was here. Great minds think alike and Linux hacker’s minds often think of beer.

Update

I tried to sneak off with the cutting board the food for the tasting was served on but to my dismay they let us just take them. Way to take the thrill out of the equation. I was however happy enough to get a high quality cutting board with the phrase “Here’s to BEER” branded on the top, and here is the proof:

Well perhaps not but I am taking off this weekend to a place I have been in spitting distance of but have never crossed the border. I find it strange that I have been all around the world and to almost every state in America and still have not bothered to visit our kind neighbours to the north. So with my roommates Bryan and Chris leaving this summer for far off jobs we decided to take a trip with a bunch of friends up to Montreal. I went down to NY last weekend for mothers day and to swap my car for my parents van just for this trip. It should be fun.

Oh and Les Halles, Anthony Bourdain’s home base, is fantastic. If you are down in New York City and in midtown I highly recommend it

Short Ciruit is being remade!!!  Johnny 5 is alive once again on the big screen.

A couple of weeks ago I made a post on how NOT to treat your customers. Today I had an experience which prompted me to write a counter point to the last post. As my readers may know, I just joined a gym. To kick thing off right (wait for the pun), I went out today looking for sneakers. For most people it is a simple trip to the local sports shop or shoe store but I needed shoes for the gym so they had to fit just right and provide proper support. The issue for me is I wear shoes one half size smaller than most stores carry. That is a bigger difference than it sounds when it comes to shoes I will be running in.

I decided to go down to the specialty running store, Marathon Sports, in order to see if they carried my size. I walked into a busy shop and looked around for a bit, clearly confused by the myriad of choice, mostly of brands I never heard of. This wasn’t your everyday shoe store. Just then a man asked if he could help and then made the strange request that I take off my shoes, roll up my pant legs and walk up and down the store. I complied and from that he deduced my gate, stance and the fact that I had wide feet. He promptly brought up a pair of some of the most comfortable sneakers I have ever worn.

I ended up paying a bit of a premium for the sneakers. Nothing huge but about $10-$20 more than I would anywhere else. The fact is from the service I was given I would have paid much more. These sneakers are going make sure I get an optimal workout without injuring myself and when they wear out, I know where I am going to get a new pair.

To review, expertise, good merchandise plus great customer service makes a happy customer. A happy customer comes back for more and may even bring friends along to start the cycle anew.

Awhile ago I signed up for Blockbuster.com. At 21 or so dollars a month for three movies out at a time and the ability to return them for movies at the store up the road it just fit my lifestyle. Even when they alerted me that they were changing the plan where they restricted it to 5 in store exchanges or I could pay $4 extra dollars a month for the same unlimited service I was getting I felt it was still a fair deal. The key there was they notified me and gave me the option to pay my current level or opt-in to pay extra.

This time however they have alerted me that they are raising the price by $10 (a whopping 40% or so increase) a month which goes into effect automatically in my next billing cycle. I now hold a service that was once competitive with Netflix but now seems to keep increasing in costs every couple of months or so. What is really interesting is the pricing on their website doesn’t seem that bad (though they have gotten rid of the unlimited exchange option). I have to wonder if that is an unmarked introductory price.

I can appreciate that the program may have been an ill conceived marketing ploy that has been losing Blockbuster a lot of money but then I would have been happy to move to a more restricted plan had this happen just once and they canceled the unlimited plan then (I did move to the higher cost plan the first time). The fact that they did it a second time just has me looking over my shoulder for the next increase. So the value is gone and I will be leaving Blockbuster.com at the end of this billing cycle. Perhaps I’ll start up with Netflix again or just get outside more. I did just join a gym after all.

Davis Square is opening up a new Boston Sports Club and I finally decided to join. The tipping point came last week during the snow storm when I slipped and fell down a couple of stairs at the Porter T stop. Usually I would walk away pretty embarrassed but non worse for ware. This time I thought I actually might have injured myself. In the end I slept it off and felt fine the next day, if a little bruised, but I realized sitting in a chair programming every day wasn’t getting me any healthier. We already have a fitness room at our office but I figured having trainers around and a place to go when I am home and on weekends will get me a bit more motivated. We will see how long this lasts but as things go these days I had to sign a contract so they’ve got me for a year. Being the type of person who skips the ‘fillers’ at a buffet just so I feel I got my money’s worth, I think I will be utilizing the gym quite a bit.

Getting in touch with my Italian roots while running around Florence was great fun.  Thank you Dorothy and Karl for getting married and sharing the moment with all your friends and family.  I’m busy uploading all of the photos which I managed to save after my camera started corrupting the memory card.  More on my time in Italy later. Now it is time to go and check out buzzgrinder.com - a music blog one of the guests at the wedding maintains.

I’ll be in various places other than the Boston area for most of November.  Starting this coming Friday I will be driving down to NY where I am catching a flight to Florence, Italy for a friend’s wedding.  I’ll be there for a week and then am going to work from Atlanta, Georgia while visiting my best friend who is getting married next spring.  To round things off I will be working from NY through Thanksgiving.

The Italy trip is pretty booked but I should be visiting the ATL and NY Red Hat offices to say hi since I will be there anyway.  If any Fedora or GNOME folks want to grab a beer or just meet up let me know.