{"id":164,"date":"2006-03-18T13:26:35","date_gmt":"2006-03-18T21:26:35","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2016-05-25T23:34:34","modified_gmt":"2016-05-26T06:34:34","slug":"march-randoms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/archive\/2006\/03\/march-randoms","title":{"rendered":"March Randoms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some thoughts from the month of March:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Am I the only person who consistently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.epinions.com\/well-review-6E19-1C642744-3A0613A1-prod5\" target=\"_blank\">burns the hell out of the roof of my mouth<\/a> whenever I eat French Bread Pizza?  I am <em>done<\/em> with that stuff.  I eat regular pizza multiple times per week with no mouth-scorching issues, but for some reason &#8212; perhaps the fact that French Bread Pizza seems much hotter on the inside than the outside &#8212; I just can&#8217;t eat the stuff without inflicting personal injury.  I&#8217;ve tried Stouffer&#8217;s and Red Baron&#8230; both with the same result.  The worst part is that often you don&#8217;t even know you&#8217;re burned until hours later.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.airbagindustries.com\" target=\"_blank\">Greg Storey<\/a> taught me a new drink in Austin: The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.drinkoftheweek.com\/archive\/r\/nail.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Rusty Nail<\/a>.  It&#8217;s two parts Scotch and one part &#8220;Drambuie&#8221; (a Scotch-based honey liquour, or something like that).  I never drink Scotch or any other straight alcohol, but damn!  Not bad!  So I get back to Seattle and try to order it in three places and apparently barely anyone has Drambuie up here. I was so psyched to have one though that I ended up ordering a regular Scotch on the rocks for the first time in my life.  I fear it&#8217;s only a matter of time before I become &#8220;one of those Scotch people&#8221;.  Thanks Airbag. :(<\/li>\n<li>Normally when I don&#8217;t have something nice to say, I try to shut up about it, but regarding SXSW this year: I&#8217;m sorry but 80% of the panels I attended were awful at worst and unenlightening at best.  I did go to some good ones, so if you spoke on a panel and you got a good amount of laughter, engagement, and positive feedback, then you were probably on one of those.  Just like last year, I made it a point to attend mostly sessions which were outside my normal line of work (i.e. no web standards, no CSS, etc), but even so, I learned very little.  The most outstanding session to me by far was Harvard Psychologist <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Daniel_Gilbert\" target=\"_blank\">Daniel Gilbert&#8217;s<\/a> session about his book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/1400042666\/104-2271843-1768734?v=glance&#038;n=283155\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Stumbling on Happiness&#8221;<\/a>.  I also found that in general, solo sessions were <em>much<\/em> more engaging than panels.  When you have a panel full of people jumping from subject to subject and no experienced moderator to pull them together, the result is a mess.  All future SXSW trips will be limited to solo sessions, daytime golf, and of course, the parties.  I won&#8217;t even go into the parties because everyone else already has, but this year, they were great, great, great.  To all of you who I met and consumed spirits with, thank you!<\/li>\n<li>I was extremely happy to see so many Treos and Casio EX-Z750s down in Austin.  I have written extensively about my love for both on this blog and it&#8217;s great to know so many people feel the same way.  The Casio didn&#8217;t surprise me so much as it&#8217;s been the best ultracompact camera on the market since it came out a year or so ago, but I figured the SXSW crowd would be more into camera-centric flip-phones than business-centric Treos.  I think that with both the Casio and the Treo, it comes down to one thing above all others: user interface.  Neither can be beat in that department, as far as I&#8217;m concerned, and the SXSW crowd does seem like the type to care deeply about such things.<\/li>\n<li>I could have been a big success story for Sprint and their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.buzzmachine.com\/index.php\/2006\/01\/06\/smart-sprints-unadvertisement\/\" target=\"_blank\">Ambassador Program<\/a>.  I wouldn&#8217;t mind upgrading my two year old Treo 600 to at least a Treo 650 and I don&#8217;t mind switching carriers to do it.  So what does Sprint do?  They send me a free phone with six months of free unlimited voice, data, TV, and music service.  So far, so good.  Unfortunately, the phone is a  flip phone with no qwerty keyboard or IMAP email support and it <em>comes hardcoded with a Missouri phone number that cannot be changed<\/em>.  What am I supposed to do with that?  The only thing I can think to do with it is just use it as a portable TV, but the screen is so small that it&#8217;s hardly worth it.  On the bright side, it confirmed my long-standing opinion that I have very little interest and\/or need for mobile video.  It&#8217;s probably against the terms and conditions of the program, but I may give this phone (and service) away on Mike Industries.  It&#8217;s a several hundred dollar value if you&#8217;re into it.  By the way, I don&#8217;t mean to give the impression that the phone and the service suck&#8230; I think this is a great program for people who live in Missouri and like flip phones.<\/li>\n<li>I don&#8217;t mean this in a rude manner, but does anyone know what causes &#8220;old person smell&#8221;?  I think I remember seeing a Seinfeld episode about this awhile back, but can&#8217;t remember what the conclusion was.  What I&#8217;m talking about is that distinctive scent that you can sometimes detect around elderly people.  I smelled it again the other day in a coffee shop, and for the life of me I could not equate it to any known scent.  I&#8217;ve had conversations with friends about this so I know it&#8217;s not my imagination, but the best we could come up with was that it&#8217;s either: a) an old perfume or shampoo that was perhaps popular around 50 years ago, b) medication related, c) denture related, or d) clothing related.  I have a great respect for my elders and I&#8217;m interested in this subject only for its olfactory implications, but does anyone know what&#8217;s going on here?<\/li>\n<li>If you&#8217;re into alcohol-free mouthwash and you think <a href=\"http:\/\/www.37signals.com\/svn\/archives2\/products_ive_been_impressed_with_lately.php\" target=\"_blank\">Biotene tastes gross<\/a>, you should try Crest&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/crest.com\/prohealthrinse\/index.jsp\" target=\"_blank\">Pro-Health Alcohol-Free Mouthwash<\/a>.  It&#8217;s quite palatable.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some thoughts from the month of March:  Am I the only person who consistently burns the hell out of the roof of my mouth whenever I eat French Bread Pizza?  I am done with that stuff.  I eat regular pizza multiple times per week with no mouth-scorching issues, but for some reason &#8212; perhaps the fact that French Bread Pizza seems much hotter on the inside than the outside &#8212; I just can&#8217;t eat the stuff without inflicting personal injury&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,282],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany","category-original"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}