03.25.08 | Permalink | Caught on the Web, CultureMob | Comments (0)
I’ve been working on new features and design tweaks at CultureMob.com, but on the side, I’m getting ready to try out a test run on our CultureMob “Street Team” in Seattle. Pending how successful our test run is, what I want to do with it is open it up to CultureMob users to be able to go to shows, hand out flyers and talk us up, and we’ll subsidize a chunk of the ticket (No promises here, folks).
So, our first trial event: Super Sonic Soul Pimps @ the Nectar Fri 3.28.08. This is the band that, back in ‘95, lead me down the path that I’m at today. They are a high energy funk-rock band, which attracted the 16-year-old in me, who happened to be 16-years-old at the time. Ahh, nostalgia. The web was young and I jumped on to do a site for them, under the pseudonym of Captain Fantasy. Now it’s 35 years later and I’m still doing this web thing.
And if you’re looking for a good event in Seattle, check out CultureMob.com. I’ve been messing with this project since it was just an idea 2 years ago. We’ve only been live for 3 months now and still are a little rough around the edges, so I’d LOVE to hear some feedback.
So come on down to the Nectar this Friday and say hi. We’ll make sure to buy you a cranberry juice.
03.19.08 | Permalink | Comics | Comments (3)
For the past couple years, The New York Times Magazine has been running serialized comics by popular artists in their Funny Pages section. Last month, Daniel Clowes wrapped up his 20 pg. story on awkward mid-life romance, Mr. Wonderful.
The magazine has been releasing each page as an individual PDF, but I combined the 20 pages into a convenient single 18MB PDF. Grab it and have a read.
03.05.08 | Permalink | Personal | Comments (5)
Greg and I had 10 hours to kill in Taipei on our flight. To kill the time, we decided to go visit the current tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101.
Finding an incredibly tall building turned out to be too much for our cabbie. Greg and I became curious as we got farther and farther away from the Taipei 101. Turns out that our cabbie loves his GPS system a little too much. We were well beyond the entire (massive) city before he realized that he was in the middle of the woods and began to apologize to us. He got off on the next ramp and then preceded to get right back on the same exact road because his GPS told him to.
By the time we got back into town, he had already doubled our trip’s necessary distance. He then felt that the advice he got from his GPS had served him better than we did and decided to drive into town in the opposite direction of the most obvious landmark in the world.
To end this story, we got there. Eventually. I’ve heard of people going overboard with their blind trust in a GPS device, but jeepers, this was enough to make me really really mad.
UPDATE: I’m telling you, people trust these GPS gizmo’s too much, even in Seattle.
03.01.08 | Permalink | Personal | Comments (4)
Greg and I had a mantra before we embarked on our trip to Thailand: “Make as few plans as we could get away with.” We didn’t want to be tied down to an agenda when reading about Thailand was only going to give us a small window into the best way to travel here. We’ve lucked out so far, but were becoming quite concerned this morning that our luck had run out.
Pretty much as soon as we got to southern Thailand, it became completely overcast and spouting spurts of HEAVY rainfall. We just got into Phuket and it was raining just as much as our mood was souring. We were spoiled earlier with the courtesy and cheap prices of northern Thailand. In the south, the sun and scenery brings too many tourists and too much money. And now we didn’t even have the sun.
So we scrambled to figure out how to salvage our remaining days. We couldn’t get out of Phuket, so we decided to attempt to follow a very loose rumor about a “mom and pop” bed and breakfast joint that I heard about for $8 a night. “Down a dirt road about 2 kilometers from the Marriott” is all I had to go on.
But the cabbie spoke as much English as we spoke Thai and explaining “bed and breakfast” wasn’t working. He dropped us off at what looked like a pre-1989 East Berlin re-creation from the outside. At that moment, what turned out to be the hotel manager walked by and noticed our predicament. He offered to help us and allowed us to stay at what turned out to be a very secluded 5-star hotel for a fraction of the price. We now have our own private pool at our room and several kilometers of our own beach (!).
We were thinking of heading back to Bangkok early, but now we might be a little more flexible with our non-existent agenda.
