Posts from — February 2007

Warning- boring, typical rambling post for most of you . . .

Do any of you use Basecamp, Stikkit, Backpackit or RememberTheMilk? I’ve been trying out the sites for a while and keep thinking about them in the work environment. I’m not sure if I completely like/love any of them although they each have pretty nifty features. I’d be interesting in hearing what you think if you have used them.

They each have been getting a lot of buzz (stikkit a lot recently just because it’s newer and 43folders mentioned them — well, 43F’s main dude is on their board). But I’m not sure if the buzz is deserved. (Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good site, but the 43F community tends to go a bit overboard on things).

RememberTheMilk is the newest one for me. Pak told me to check it out. It seems like it’s pretty fast and slick (nice maps), but not as intuitive. Stikkit goes out of the way to be automatic for the user. Basecamp and Backpackit aren’t as automatic but seem more “enterprise-level” friendly.

I’m also not sure how stikkit, in particular, is going to make money. Basecamp/Backpackit and the other 37Signals sites seem to have their price plans well thought out and implemented.

I was going to write a brief blurb about what each site does, but you can look them up yourselves. Besides, if you’re looking them up, then the answer to my question at the start this post is “no”. If you do sign up for Betas/Free Accounts, and want to add contacts I’m usually using my gmail account and my typical username.

But really- if you were a consultant, or had a small office, or projects that didn’t require SVN-type repositories, I can see you liking this. But in a company with more than a certain amount of people- you’d need an in-house version of these types of sites. (A slimmed-down CollabNet anyone?)

Okay, enough – I’m going to play with my free Basecamp project planning thing for a little while longer.

Over the holidays I was bored and signed up for Yahoo! Personals. I wrote my normal, clever, funny profile, uploaded some pics and waited. –Keep in mind, this is the free version- I was just trying out their site. I’ve tried out Match and JDate and didn’t have much luck.

When you’re searching around for profiles, you have a lot of options. You also have a few options on how your results are displayed. By default the listing is “New to Yahoo”. I assume this is so you can hit on the “fresh meat”.

I like to sort by “Overall Fit”. This lists what the system thinks is most likely to be a match. It’s usually just a basic keyword match– oh, they both like wine +1, they both are within each other’s “distance” settings, or zipcode +2, etc.

It’s kind of obvious how Yahoo’s works, because as I’m browsing I realized, it must have picked up on the fact that I had an attribute of “I speak Spanish” set in my profile because some of the “fits” were girls who were looking for guys who “and/or” spoke Spanish eg. hispanic/latina girls and/or “berkeley” hippies who lived in Guatemala for a semester. –my profile is vague enough, but you get the drift, I like to travel, I speak spanish, like to cook, like wine, etc. so that fits in with 99% of the women here.

As an aside (yes, I’m already making this story too long)- what’s up with Asian girls liking Jewboys? Are we a fetish for y’all? (not that I mind).

So, I’m perusing my “best fits” and up comes a partial headline:

Latina – Outgoing and Pr (you have to click the headline to read the full profile on the site)

See more …

I went to Pancho’s with Angie tonight for some nachos. We’ve been sampling the nachos across SF. I wanted her to try Pancho’s partially to know if they were as good as I thought, or if I just liked them because of the distance to my place. They were damn good though. I didn’t realize how hungry I was*.

Here’s a stupid Yelp link if you’re in to that site. Pancho’s isn’t earth-shattering, but they have good nachos and good carnitas. That’s it. *I pulled an all-nighter on Thurs/Fri due to an upgrade at work. I think I had a pb&j at some point in the morning. Boo-hoo? Not really.

I’ve been too busy this week to finish updating the blog and adding another dvdroundup. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have it updated. In the meantime- enjoy:

I think I’m going to update the blog to this style. The font’s a bit larger and it’s time for a new color scheme. I think I’ll add a flickr badge to the main page, and remove the links to Pandora as well as the calendar thing in the top right corner. Any thoughts?

In other thoughts, I realized the old blosxom gif wasn’t loading and went to check out the creator’s webpage. I hadn’t realized (or I forgot) that he was helping out with (or creating) stikkit. Not that I use that site. Click the link for Web 2.0 goodness! (lolz).

Another odd thing is that rael’s blog uses blogger.com now. Maybe I should take a hint and move my crap over to a db-backend finally, like a WordPress site. I dunno though, blosxom’s so simple to use.

I want a Do Over for last week!

On Tuesday, I had a massive migraine. That’s bad enough, except it was my birthday! My migraines typically last 1-3 days too. So that big one took me until I caught a cold from a coworker on Thurs or Friday. Sucks ass. So I didn’t do anything this weekend. Yeah, Superbowl weekend! Ugh. DO OVER!

So Kevin went down south to visit his brother. They flew to BA for a few days to have some fun. He sent an email:

Kenneth,

You are the best. We just got back from B.A. and had

a wonderful time. The first night, while sitting in

front of La Cabrera sipping champange, Brad says,

“its like Kenneth died and we are celebrating his life

eating at all his places.” It was so damn funny. We

poured a bit of champange on the street for you and

toasted you each sitting. I’ll try to get picts out

today or tomorrow. We just got home from the airport.

Scuba diving in Zappalar at 10 am tomorrow. Gotta

unpack, repack and get up early for the lovely 2 hour

drive.

Pretty funny. I’m glad those two crazy kids stayed out of trouble.

Man, I keep having these really weird dreams. I’ve been a type of insomniac of sorts lately maybe it’s affecting my dreams.

I keep dreaming of opening a bar, or a lounge for all my friends to come out and hang out in. Yeah, that’s it. One where people can just be themselves and let gooooo.. . . ya know man, just let the music flow through us, let the music flow man.. But yeah, also, while we’re on roller skates. It has to be while we skate. I have this big dream- I’ll eventually open my own place, I’ll call it Xanadu.

Who knew GEne Kelly couldi skate so well? movie version is much funnier. ELO rules you.

It’s racist to laugh at foreigners, but is it racist to laugh at racist foreigners? Via boingboing, I saw the Debito Rogue’s Gallery, “PHOTOS OF PLACES IN JAPAN WHICH EXCLUDE OR RESTRICT NON-JAPANESE CUSTOMERS”.

Reading that page reminded me of the time I tried to get into the Korean place for their yummy fried chicken with Bryan. Damn that chicken’s good. I need one of my Korean friends to take me back there. But I digress. . .

Oh, for that actual pic, scroll down to “Hotel Sanremo”

Speaking of this topic– Angie, should I write up the story I told you about interviewing people in Spanish? I’m hesitant to add work stories but I thought it was a good one.

Okay Boston, calm down. People installed LITE BRITES not bombs. Chill the Eff out. You are overreacting, and your DA needs to chill. But what do I know? All I know is Good Ball and Rape