Erator's Sandbox

Thinking about what to post today, I decided to give a restaurant a quick review. The Porch is a restaurant in Dallas' night-corridor located just off I75 and Knox/Henderson exit, on the east side. The atmosphere, drinks, service and especially the food was great! The only downside is the parking, but if you're going to any of the restaurants/bars in that area, you'll run into the same problem. That's it! We really enjoyed our dinner at The Porch and would recommend it to anyone who likes a great place to have some drinks, food and chatter.

Accidents, car accidents in particular, are very common. But unless you're in it, you really don't care or become affected by them. Today, on my way home from work, I was about half-a-mile from my front door, and out of nowhere a car runs in front of me at the intersection and although I slam on the brakes I hit the car. I was going north on Custer Road, and the other car was going east on El Dorado Road, but the light was green for me, as 5 or 6 other cars in front of me had already gone through the intersection, so of course I'm unsuspecting of any person at this point thinking of running the red light. It was around 6:30pm CST, and by then it was already dark, since we just switched DST, so the street lights are pretty easy to see and to notice what color they are. So what the heck happened? After the impact, I scream in frustration, look around and try to turn my car off, but it is already off, but I am unable to pull the key out. I finally get out of the car, and sev

Last year we bought one of those pre-made Thanksgiving dinners from La Madeline because we didn't feel like cooking and their prices were great for what you got. This year we were invited by my uncle to celebrate Thanksgiving with his family in their house, so I already has discarded worrying about the dinner, but today I received an unexpected phone call from La Madeline: "Last year you ordered the Thanksgiving dinner package from us, would you like to place your order for this years now?" It took me a minute to figure out what they were talking about and to remember what we had last year, but I was pleasantly surprised that they kept my phone number and only called me to offer me the same service I had already purchase from them before. So I let them know that I was not interested because we already had plans, and they said they were doing the packages for Christmas dinner too, in case we needed it. Great service and if you want to skip the cooking, call La Madeline, th

In this recent post at the 37signals blog, they have a great excerpt about finding one's own schedule to maximize the creativity flow. Great info, sadly not many have the ability to implement these techniques. Csikszentmihalyi: "Time is more flexible than most of us think" - (37signals)

What a great invention: He said: "Something had to be done. It took me a little while and some very frustrating prototypes but eventually I did it." Conventional filters can cut out bacteria measuring more than 200 nanometres but not viruses, which typically are 25 nanometres long. Mr Pritchard's bottle can clean up any water - including faecal matter - using a filter that cuts out anything longer than 15 nanometres, which means that viruses can be filtered out without the use of chemicals. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/12/nwater112.xml Now if only they could make something similar for adware infested software...

Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, wrote an open letter to the early adopters of the iPhone where he defends the recent price-drop but also says they will give these early adopters a $100 store credit "towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store." So if you bought the iPhone early-on, you only wasted $100 for that " I got it first " feeling and brag-rights (ouch). Read the letter: Apple - To all iPhone customers

I have come to realize that I'm a Google fanboy... but there's good reason why I enjoy most if not all of the services and products that Google offers, they're GOOD! Gmail is by far the best webmail service out there, and not that I've tried them all, but that's the point! It's a good sign that I'm not moved or interested in trying again Hotmail, Yahoo!Mail, etc, because I'm really happy with my Gmail account. The space and the features that I get are superb for being free, and why would I want to move? Ok, well without going down a rat hole, here is the final cut video Gmail users submitted to Google for the Gmail: Behind the Scenes collaborative movie .

In case you missed it, like I did, Merlin Mann has an excellent Google Tech Talk presentation about managing your emails: Inbox Zero . Watch his presentation and grab the slides in PDF format from the site. I'm personally going to try this, although it might be hard with my current Inbox count being 2,177 items.

Some days, it's easy to get into the work I have laid out in front of me. I think of it as interesting or worthwhile and I finish it as fast as I possibly can. Other days, I have a really hard time getting started. I know I have a pile of work to do, and that it's not going away, but unconsciously I find myself distracted away, looking for a new subject of interest online, or getting caught in the "Option Loop." The loop is simply thinking about all the options, but getting stuck not starting or finishing any of them. It's almost like a mental deadlock. Most of the times I am able to regain focus and productivity by: Getting a cup of coffee or a high-caffeine soda Turning on the lights Adjusting my chair Walking around a little bit Talking to someone else about my projects Unfortunately, there are times when none of the above works. The biggest problem is I know the best time to start is now , so I have no excuses. How do you get into your work when you'r

Cheat in a good way! What if you could have a quick reference for some of the more obscure properties of CSS or a Regular Expression assertion? Yeah, sometimes you just can't remember what property you're supposed to use to show the text font with a hot-pink background. What if you could have a *gasp* Cheat Sheet!? You can! Dave Child has an excellent website where he has created cheat sheets for the most popular web programming languages, MicroFormats, and even World of Warcraft! Do yourself a favor and checkout ILoveJackDaniels.com's Cheat Sheets.

As a software engineer, I've had the pleasure of receiving bug reports that make no sense whatsoever, and asking for additional info leads to dead ends and frustration. I really like what Joel recommends should be on a good bug report: Steps to reproduce, What you expected to see, and What you saw instead. But I have a couple of points to add, since in my experience people skip the basics: First and foremost, test it again to make sure that it is a valid bug. Specify what is not working, and where I can find it in the program. Avoid non-standard abbreviations. Proofread the bug report before submitting it to the resolver for any ambiguous information. As I started to write this post I thought I was very clear on what I was going to write and what I wanted exactly to be in a bug report, but, as I kept typing I started to remember all those pesky bug reports that annoyed me because they take forever to research and solve (especially the ones that end up being no-bugs). If you think

Walk everyday for 30 minutes at least. Seriously, if you have a good pace, that should be approximately 2 miles, and by the 3rd day of walking, you will feel a big difference in your body. Plus, walking around the neighborhood is good to know your surroundings and socialize with your neighbors. Not to mention the health benefits you're getting with at least 30 minutes of daily exercise. It doesn't sound like much, but it makes a big difference. Try it and tell me how it goes!

I must say I am impressed with Blogger. I love being able to customize things, and Blogger seems to give me enough bells and whistles to play around with to make me feel happy and in control. Thanks Blogger for giving us so many knobs, switches and buttons to tinker with, you've come a long way.

One word: Blogging. Is this what is has come to? Not too long ago, one needed to be pretty tech-savvy to install a script on one's own website and after trial-and-error successfully setup the required components to create a "blog" (which back then was known as content management systems -- I guess the CMS initials were not trendy enough). Now, one can create such a site in a matter of seconds. The biggest timesink is in finding the title and webaddress. Oh, did I mention blogs are free? Well, not free as in posting whatever content you want, but as in you have no financial obligations. Really, web logs -- sorry, I mean BLOGS -- have filled the internet with a lot of "crap," yes even this blog might be considered crap by some people, but the amount of spam and content cloning has increased significantly, because anyone can make a few dollars by posting the same information, plagiarizing what someone might of taken the time to develop, research and create and c