So I’ve had two great adventures this week. First, on Thursday my buddy Dan and his wife Lauren wanted to show us a place in Brantford called WingMaster, an establishment complete with a … wait for it … wingmaster. It was brilliant. This place has 300+ flavors of wings, everything from your classic honey mustard to pizza flavor to stuff so hot you have to sign a waiver. It’s crazy. So we order 10lbs of wings, and get the pizza flavor, the cherry coke flavor, sweet lava, etc. This place was seriously amazing. Then, after a healthy meal like that, we get our dessert of deep fried oreo’s. These things are amazing, sound disgusting, but amazing. My mouth was so happy. So we sit back and are feeling quite satisfied when Trey, this big black guy who runs the place comes out and starts chatting with us and we’re laughing and telling jokes, loving the whole ambiance of the place, and Trey goes in the back and says he’s got a surprise for us, and the dude whips out a cardboard box (like you’d get for a flat of soda, kind of shallow and such) and covers it in foil, then fills it with 10 lbs of poutine, which for those of you not in the know, is French fries covered in gravy and cheese curds. So seriously, enough to feed a small European nation, and he brings it to our table. As if we hadn’t already compromised the arteries, we opt not to offend the gift giver and start shoveling gravy and cheese covered French fries into our mouths. It was quite the night. And in other news, I felt heartburn for the first time in my entire life that night. Completely unrelated, but thought you’d like to know.
Second thing, I hit a Toronto Raptors NBA game in a corporate box seat. It was a fine moment for me, thank you Wayne, there’s just something wonderful about watching a game from a plush chair with snacks. Though it seems there’s expected etiquette for yelling from the box, I don’t think I’m invited back. We had a good run though.
So just real quick, as I’ve been trolling through images doing some redesign stuff for businesses, I’ve been loving a cool new addon I found a week or two ago called Cool Iris. You can take any image you see while your surfing the web, hover over it, click in the bottom corner and it pulls it into a gallery view and then scrapes the links from the page and tries to load all the other images in the group. Great for google images or facebook albums. Love it.
Enjoy
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 6:26 pm. 3 comments
So after an upgrade to 8.02, when I open itunes and tries to sync up the genius info, it errors out (gives me the generic windows error) If I cancel the transfer (little x on the right of the display bar) I can go in and work it fine. This is a bit of a frustration as genius was supposed to be better in this. Though I still enjoy my old winamp magic match feature that was around 5 years before ‘genius’ better, but what do you do?
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Update, I thought the upgrade was to 8.02, it was from 8.02, sorry Justin. I got it after the upgrade today. Just me moaning about how much garbage I have to put up with out of apple. I suppose if I was more of a fan boi it’d be different.
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 3:14 pm. 2 comments
So I’m currently living up in Toronto. Toronto is great, we play hockey on Saturday nights, cool city, great friends, fun stuff all around. That being said, I’m not sure how long I’ll last up here. I did buy a hockey stick, so that’s saying something right, But I am still pushing the entrepreneur angle and having a blast en route. My latest two projects that are live are enviropuresolutions.ca, and then two more that go together, MissouriQuiltCo.com and QuiltersDailyDeal.com. The latter two have been a great experience for me really. Seeing something go from foundation to turn key is something exciting no matter what, and to be able to build something that will have a direct impact on several people I am personally connected to is a very rewarding feeling. I’m excited to see where it goes. But that’s been my life for 20+ hours a day, 6 days a week. I’m anxious to watch TV again, I feel like I’ve been away from life. But now that the foundation is laid and things are moving along, I’m scheduling in a bit more sleep and some exercise (this chair and ice cream sandwiches are a cruel mistress)
So anyway, I’m still floating really, in a great situation, but it’s definitely temporary, which is frustrating all over again. But alas, I shant bore you with the gory details of my inner workings.
As a side note, I’ll be manually restoring 3 years worth of thenyelabs.com for posterity, so if your rss feed starts wigging out on you, that’s what’s going on.
Enjoy
Posted 1 year, 5 months ago at 6:47 am. Add a comment
So again, I must apologize for the down time. I am back up on a great new host – midphase.com Their customer service has been tremendous and it’s a nice change from 1and1 internet hosting who were terrible. Needless to say I was down for another 4 days following my fiasco so a total of about a full week down over the course of 2 weeks. My favorite exchange from teh tech support calls went like this -
Me: So I’ve been down 3 days, 2 days, and now going on 4 more days, do you know what your garuntee is for uptime on your servers?
Support: Well not exactly sir
Me: 99.9% uptime
Support: Oh yes, that’s right
Me: Are you aware how much time is allowable to be down under such a promise?
Support: Ahh sir, but it’s only 99.9% we do expect for some down time
Me: 20 minutes a month is allowable under your promise, so knowing that, would you say that it’s a little unreasonable to expect me to be okay with my site being down for almost 8 days?
Support: I can’t say exactly sir
Me: Well, can you understand why I might be frustrated with the situation?
Support: I don’t know sir, I can’t say
and it gets more ridiculous from there. I love support centers and the powerless people paid to jerk you around in such scenarios, with the ultimate frustration being they really can’t do a darn thing about it.
Posted 1 year, 5 months ago at 6:33 am. Add a comment
so I made it one day guys, I’m pathetic here. In my own defense, I have written up about the next 5 days, but I just haven’t had time to piece them together with photos, I still plan on doing just that as Sunday’s give me reprieve, but right now, life provides very little respite from the hours of work.
To satisfy your craving for commentary, I’m linking to Mikale’s blog, she kept a great journal on the trip, and had some funny stories, so if you’re interested, pick up her blog over at http://sunshinenotes-mikale.blogspot.com/ and copy the text to word or something cause her background is impossible to read on She has some great thoughts and commentary though that will give you a great feel for what we had going on over there, and she’s much better looking than I am, so it’s like a double feature.
I got my photos up in albums on facebook if you’d like to take a peek for now, I’ll clean them up and put them elsewhere, but time is getting away from me -
Right now it’s snowing about 10cm up here in Canada land. Living up here is a good time actually. I am working every way I know how to get these businesses up and moving and to be honest, they are coming along nicely, it’s just a bit time consuming creating success. Once you have it, it’s easy to get more, but getting the first seed/plant combo to work is a heck of a time. I’ll send out some links of the projects I’ve been on shortly, but sufficesth to say, things are coming along nicely, even if they only come along from 5pm to 3am…. I call that my second shift
The branch is small up here, about 25 people, which is where I shine. So we’ve got plenty of work to do in that area as well, should be a good push for me to make.
Anyway, hope things are going well, sorry for the lazy posting
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 4:31 am. 2 comments
So I flew from Boston to newark to London, barely skirting out before Boston got its first major snow storm of the season and made the all night flight to London. I got in and struggled to manage the monstrosity that is the Heathrow airport, and waited for about 2 hours for Mikale to show up from DC. We ran down to the subway or “Tube”
as it is affectionately known, and converted mass amounts of money for small sums of their currency, then rode to the Belsize stop and walked to the family friend of Mikale and dropped our bags.
After a quick (4 hour) nap I pulled myself up and we went wondering around the city.
We rode down to Trafalger square and were pleasantly surprised to find a huge group of carolers out there putting us in the Christmas spirit.
We then grabbed a quick bite of pizza from a street vendor and walked up to the Queen’s Theater (or Theatre as it were) for the showing of Les Miserables, which I already mentioned, but it was truly amazing. For one who was raised on the music of Les Mis, it was a longtime dream to see that puppy.
It made for a very fulfilling day one of the adventure.
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 11:34 am. 3 comments
so as a quick side note, I moved yesterday from the very lovely Boston to the very wintery Toronto. I was sad to leave Boston, I don’t feel like I was able to give it a real chance, and really enjoyed the people I met while I was there. My roomies in particular were great to me, and a lot of fun to hang out with, then trivia night at the local bar with the trivia gang and a frosty root beer, and the church crew etc. Good people out there. Alas, rent surpassed me now that I am without income, so I packed up and moved to Toronto to live and work with my best friend Mifsud. I’ve setup shop in his office and am sleeping in his basement. Kind of a funny situation, but we (his wife, baby, mifsud, and I) laugh about it a lot.
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In the time I’ve been here it’s snowed 8 inches, what am I doing?
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 5:09 am. 3 comments
