plaxoed!

At Meebo this past week for Lunch 2.0, I ended up meeting Jason Calacanis (thanks Jeremiah for grabbing this photo of us):

I’d e-mailed back and forth with Jason before and it was good to finally meet him in person. I wasn’t the only one making connections; the crowd was a good mix of over 100 students, engineers, product people, and even the occasional Googler

Looks like we’re hitting our original goals of Lunch 2.0 - and of course getting free food to boot

Here’s a picture of me last week:

Here’s a picture of me today:

Hehe, yeah, I shaved.

I opened up my e-mail this morning and promptly got a spam message from Chuck Poochigian’s Attorney General campaign. Not only did they probably buy my e-mail address from some less-than-desirable source, the e-mail is part of a smear campaign on the opponent. I don’t know if the claims in the article are true - and it doesn’t really matter to me. What matters is the fact that they decided to send me this message. (I will admit that their URL is hilarious though: pooch4ag )

I guess in all reality, they probably don’t care how I’m going to vote. After all, I’m probably in the minority. I have to assume their target market is busy buying some v1agara and discovering some amazing diet pills

I heard a session of Forum the other day with Mr. Poochigian talking about the issues he stands for but I don’t really remember what he said. So we can figure he probably had a 50/50 shot with me. Now there’s no way I’m going to vote for this guy. Who’s running his PR? They should be fired.

For my birthday yesterday, Rose got me a Lego Mindstorms set

For those who don’t know, Lego Mindstorms is a Lego set that has a module that hooks up to electronic servo motors and can be programmed from your computer. Basically, it’s programmable motorized Legos.

While I was growing up, I’d always played with Legos. I had multiple large plastic bins filled with various pieces from different Lego sets all mixed together. Recently, I’d noticed that Lego has been coming out with some new sets that seem to be targetting my demographic - the childhood Lego fanatic, now working professional with plenty of expendable income

Browsing around Lego’s Mindstorms site a little bit, it looks like there’s tons of stuff you can do with the set and they’ve got some pretty active user forums too. Completely brilliant play on Lego’s part.

My last post was actually post #300 on this blog; while that’s way behind many active bloggers, it seems like a lot to me

So much has happened this past year and a half that it seems like an eternity ago when I first typed out those fateful first words at http://99zeros.blogspot.com. My blog has been really slow going these past few months since I’ve been really busy… how long will it take me to make it to another 300?

Ah, this strong bad e-mail reminds me of my college days… hehe.

I was prompted to head over after I saw that they were back and creating new content over at homestarrunner.com

A few weeks back I met Weiting at a Lunch 2.0 event. He told me about a little app he was working on that was something to do with social networks and stocks which sounded pretty interesting; a few days later I got an invite in my e-mail so I checked it out.

Enter socialPicks, a social network + finance site. Basically, they built what Google Finance and Y! Finance should’ve built (and may be building as I blog…). The idea is that there’s a lot of community right in our brokerage accounts - people who buy the same stocks as you, your friends, your co-workers, etc. And there’s no good way to commiserate with them when stocks go down or celebrate together when stocks go up.

They’ve got cool ideas, like the ability to leave comments on stocks with your predictions, which anyone else can read over and then comment on.

We’ll put this in the “tools I wish I had before I lost a bunch of money in the stock market” bucket

If you’re interested in an invite, let me know. As far as I can tell, I’ve got unlimited invites!

Not that 30 boxes; I’m talking about 30 boxes of Costco pizza that is

Last night for the Plaxo party Huy and I picked up the pizzas from Costco. We ran into a few surprises:

1. Costco pizzas are huge. I hadn’t seen one for a while and was rather shocked at the pure size of each pizza.
2. Costco pizzas are heavy! I mean, watching Huy and I lifting all those pizzas was like a free ticket to the guns show… but seriously we could really only lift maybe 6 or 7 pizzas at a time.
3. An Audi S4 can actually fit 30 Costco pizzas in the trunk perfectly. It was almost as if they designed it for this exact purpose

When we got back though, we needed some help though

Check out the pictures of the party over on the Lunch 2.0 blog!

Went up to Seattle this past weekend to visit Rose (her mom and brother were in town visiting too). We went up to Whistler for a fun day of spring snowboarding. Even though it’s already mid/late April, the snow in the upper mountain was pretty decent. The peak at Whistler actually had a good 6 inches of heavy powder. The sun was out and you could see for miles, which made for some great photos:

We stayed at the Hilton Resort and Spa (which I believe is relatively new). They have some strange things there, like bidets in the bathrooms and a huge bear statue; but overall the hotel is nice. (whistlerblackcomb.com claimed it was 5 star, but I think it’s really closer to 4; it’s definitely not as nice as the Pan Pacific, Westin, or Fairmont)

On our way back from Whistler, we stopped in Vancouver and then the Tulip Festival in Mt. Vernon, WA. Rose and I went to the Tulip Festival last year too, but it was raining so we didn’t really get out of the car This year the weather was phenomenal though, so we parked on the side of the street and walked around the flower fields for half an hour.

Rose isn’t a big tulip fan - I’ll let you guess what her favorite flower is - but it was still a fun time. I’m halfway through my Flickr upload quota for this month… I better step it up if I want to use it up like last month!

J commented that I never followed up about how I was liking my S4, so here we go

Well, I’ve been driving around with 340 horses on tap for about 4 months now and I have to say, I’m getting quite used to it. Now when I drive, I always know that I can pass at will and enter/exit the freeway effortlessly. The ride quality is firm, but it’s more than comfortable since I was used to driving around a Celica (where I’d describe the ride quality as almost twicthy). I like the overall presence of the car, it’s very smooth and refined; here are some words I’d use to describe it: powerful, refined, comfortable, willing, confident.

Now the bad stuff. My experience getting service at the local Audi dealer has been a little less than stellar. First, taking it in for standard service, they needed to keep my car for a couple days (there was a part that needed to be replaced under warranty) and they wouldn’t give me a loaner car. They had a courtesy shuttle, but it was only to/from the dealer - not much help when you need to get from home to work. Even Toyota picked up a rental when they had to make warranty repairs on my Celica. I can’t believe VW/Audi wouldn’t capitalize on that marketing opportunity. It seems to me that it would be a free opportunity for them to try to sell me my next car. Let me test drive a A3 or TT, give me a car with DVD Nav, maybe I’ll get one next time. At least make me want to come back to the dealer for service… isn’t that where you make your money anyways?

Then, I had to replace a button on the center console because the face had started to peel off. The button cost $30, which was a bit much, and then the dealer wanted to charge me $70 to install it. They claimed that they’d have to take out the entire center console, so a bunch of work, yada yada yada. It seemed fishy to me so I just went home and tried it myself. With a simple flathead screwdriver I was able to pop out the old button and put the new one in. Total time: 2 minutes. Carlsen Audi in Palo Alto, you’ve lost a customer here…

Aside from the dealer experience, what I’ve become aware of is how quickly I can get acclimated to nice things. When I first got my S4, driving anywhere was a treat - I will admit, I was uncommonly willing to run my errands those first few weeks. Nowadays, I’m just used to it. I’m so used to it that when I went to UNC and rented a car it was horrible (it was a Jeep Liberty, which I’m sure is a decent vehicle, but compared to my car it felt like the worst vehicle ever produced).

Lastly, as expected, my gas mileage would make a Prius owner cry - well, maybe until they realize that disposing of that huge NiMH battery pack at their car’s end of life is going to destroy the environment just as bad as marginal gas emissions on regular cars I’m lucky to get 15 miles / gallon on a normal tank; on the freeway I get closer to 20 though.

I saw over on Autoblog a link to this French Audi advertisement for their new RS4. The clip makes me drool, but I wish they’d cut out the speaking parts and show me more driving parts… turn up the soundtrack on that RS4 engine note too please