My rental running on vapors, my first introduction to Nashville was a city without gas and vacate gas stations. Most of the cashiers were annoyed that I disturbed their lounging when I asked if they knew where I could get some gas.
After visiting seven different gas stations, I finally ran across one that had a semi-truck delivering fuel so I jumped in line only to find out that the pumps would take 45 minutes to prime.
Both Jay and I have worked from the Israeli Google offices before and while we haven’t seen all of Israel, it’s not often that we’re this far from California. We tried a trip to Cairo for the weekend but it was a bust so at the last minute we booked flights to Istanbul, Turkey.
Israeli airport security grilled us both pretty intensely… apparently they frown upon buying tickets five hours before the flight with limited luggage, international passports, on September 11th and during Ramadan.
However a few hours later we were at the Ararat Hotel and we had a great show going on in the Arasta Bazaar across the street with the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in the background:
I wish we had more time, but we still had a blast and saw the city from both sides of the European golden horn as well as the Asian side of the water in two days.
However I have to admit that the They Might Be Giants song, Istanbul (not Constantinople), popped into my head more than once:
…Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks…
After a couple of delays and some maneuvering around the hurricane that’s making it’s way up the east coast, we landed in Ben Gurion last night just in time to grab a small dinner and go to sleep.
It’s great to be back in Israel… even if I have to drink a pot of coffee again tomorrow morning to jump start my brain into consciousness.
While playing around with my Chumby this last weekend, I realized that I never finished one of the clock widgets I was working on back in January.
So after a couple tweaks I made my Time Stacks widget available publicly and after two days of being live it’s the highest ranked clock widget on Chumby.
Here in the states we are among an increasing rare group of nations, namely those that are antimetrification. Yup, it’s only Burma, Liberia, and us… we are the only three countries in the world who have not switched over to the metric system.
our antimetrification friends
Feels good to snub our collective noses at those arugula eating base-10 elitist bastards doesn’t it?
In our strong economy and with help from Burma and Liberia, I’m sure we’ll never have to change our measurement system to remain competitive in the global market.
FlashForward was just in San Francisco and this was the first one I’ve been to that was run by Metalliq and not Lynda.com.
We had a booth right near the entrance and had a lot of foot traffic. Between the office, booth, and conference, I only made to a few sessions. Unfortunately the general buzz of the conference was disappointment.
Instead of the usual format of multiple sessions running at the same time, Metalliq daisy-chained all of the session into a large dark auditorium with no tables and instead of having inspirational and learning sessions they also decided to go with all inspirational. So new Flash users who were hoping to learn something were stuck watching portfolio and site reviews of more advanced designers and developers without gaining any knowledge on how to reach that level.
The last day of the conference I was talking to one Metalliq organizers and they mentioned that they were happy with the turn out but realized they need to switch it up for the next conference.
In either case, it was great catching up with my Flash friends and I made some new ones as well.
While watching an episode of SciAm’s Frontiers on Hulu I nearly choked on my dinner laughing.
During a segment of the show about the famine of the Fremont Native Americans in Utah during the 1300s an ad overlay for Hungry Man suddenly came up and declared: “Hungry Man: It’s good to be full”
I wasn’t fast enough to take a screenshot, so you’ll have to take my word for it.
