oranization 3 super crazy social spreadsheet

I’m sorry about my blog not being updated. I’ve been busy cataloging my life. To celebrate the summer, I’ve delved deep into organization. I’ve decided to make all of this public, even though it will be way more detail than most of you really care for. In fact, there is so much detail, I’ve decided to make several blogs… this paragraph will be posted before each. Sorry for the unoriginality, but otherwise people will read the blog before they read the info and think I’m crazy… crazy for organization.

A friend and I were trying to make plans some time within the next two weeks and I wrote down my schedule. In an effort to organize hanging out (is that actually an oxymoron or not?) and assist my many stalkers and paparazzi, I've decided to post this info on my blog. I have been warned that I shouldn’t make my organizational insanity public, but I think potential friends should be warned to stay away if they don’t like things like spread sheets. I will probably update this periodically. If you have an event that I should attend, please let me know and I can pen (pencils are for people who don’t make spreadsheets) you in asap. Not that there aren’t many holes, as you can see.

I’m talking to my friend at google to see if I can be part of their online spreadsheet program so that you can alter this when you want a piece of my time. This will make it easier, but until then, just e-mail me if you want to hang out or attend an activity on one of these days.

Until that point if you have ideas of how to make this easier to read, let me know.

Oh, and of course being fairly organized, there is a key…

Date - Date
Day - Day of the week
Location - Where will I be (see below)
Free - Am I free to hang out that day?
looking? - Am I especially looking to hang out that day?
Join? - Are you able to join me on already scheduled activities?
Details - Details
Phila+ - Greater Philadelphia area including Philadelphia and the 10 county, tri-state region.
CentCit - I will be in Center City Philadelphia at the end or my work day or for fun
Other - Other places… so keep your eyes peeled even if you don't live in Philadelphia


Date Day Location Free? looking? Join? Details
06/06/06 Tues Phila+ After Work maybe free after work
06/07/06 Wed Phila+ Partially maybe yes upper darby meeting at 7:30This meeting takes like 30 minutes at tops. otherwise free
06/08/06 Thu CentCit After Work yes I will be in Philadelphia at the end of the day, which may end early. I'm ready to hang out and downtown at about 3 or 4
06/09/06 Fri Phila+ After Work maybe free after work
06/10/06 Sat Phila+ Partially yes no engagement party in the distant suburbs at 4 pm
06/11/06 Sun Phila+ Partially yes yes the new Korean grocery store in upper darby (hmart) is having a drawing at 2pm. Hockey party in NJ which is a maybe I want to be there to collect my round trip ticket to Korea.
06/12/06 Mon CentCit Partially maybe yes a friend will be in town and I get to play tour guide
06/13/06 Tue CentCit Partially maybe yes see 6/13
06/14/06 Wed Phila+ Partially not really yes Biking in Upper Darby
06/15/06 Thu Phila+ Not Really maybe yes sustainable Philadelphia symposium 6 pm
06/16/06 Fri NYC Partially elsewhere NYC for the weekend (sorry to miss Charolette’s photo show)
06/17/06 Sat NYC Partially elsewhere maybe see 6/16 cookout at Josh’s house in Ft. Greene
06/18/06 Sun NYC/Phila Partially maybe yes see 6/16 though I will see the S Korean World Cup game at 3pm
06/19/06 Mon Phila+ After Work maybe
06/20/06 Tue Phila+ After Work maybe
06/21/06 Wed Phila+ Not Really not really yes Media Parking Committee Meeting and Rebecca's balkan brass night (which I think I have to miss)
06/22/06 Thu Phila+ Not Really not really yes Seeing a play
06/23/06 Fri Phila+ After Work yes
06/24/06 Sat CentCit Partially yes maybe Housewarming party in fishtown
06/25/06 Sun Phila+ Entirely yes
06/26/06 Mon Phila+ After Work maybe
06/27/06 Tue Phila+ After Work maybe
06/28/06 Wed Phila+ After Work maybe
06/29/06 Thu Phila+ Partially not really yes Upper Darby meeting at 7:00. This meeting is all night. I can be swayed by more intersting offers
06/30/06 Fri Phila+ After Work yes
07/01/06 Sat Phila+ Partially yes yes free until the evening, then I am meeting the intern at the airport
07/02/06 Sun Phila+ Partially maybe orienting intern to life at home
07/03/06 Mon Phila+ After Work yes 4th of july festivities anyone? I don't have work tomorrow
07/04/06 Tue Phila+ Entirely yes
07/05/06 Wed Phila+ After Work maybe
07/06/06 Thu Phila+ After Work maybe
07/07/06 Fri Phila+ After Work yes
07/08/06 Sat Phila+ Entirely yes
07/09/06 Sun Phila+ Entirely yes
07/10/06 Mon Phila+ Not Really not really no Night meeting for work
07/11/06 Tue Phila+ After Work maybe
07/12/06 Wed Phila+ Partially maybe yes Upper Darby meeting at 7:30. This meeting takes like 30 minutes at tops. otherwise free and I can be talked out of this meeting
07/13/06 Thu Phila+ After Work maybe
07/14/06 Fri Ohio Partially elsewhere
07/15/06 Sat Ohio Partially elsewhere
07/16/06 Sun Ohio Partially elsewhere return to Phila at 8
07/17/06 Mon Phila+ After Work yes
07/18/06 Tue Phila+ After Work yes
07/19/06 Wed Phila+ After Work yes
07/20/06 Thu Chicago Entirely elsewhere
07/21/06 Fri Chicago Entirely elsewhere
07/22/06 Sat K-zoo Partially elsewhere
07/23/06 Sun No. MI Partially elsewhere
07/24/06 Mon No. MI Entirely elsewhere
07/25/06 Tue No. MI Entirely elsewhere
07/26/06 Wed No. MI Entirely elsewhere
07/27/06 Thu No. MI Entirely elsewhere
07/28/06 Fri No. MI Entirely elsewhere
07/29/06 Sat No. MI Entirely elsewhere
07/30/06 Sun No. MI Partially elsewhere
07/31/06 Mon Chicago Partially elsewhere
08/01/06 Tue Chicago Entirely elsewhere
08/02/06 Wed CentCit Partially yes I return after 2 pm or so
08/03/06 Thu Phila+ After Work yes
08/04/06 Fri Phila+ After Work yes

Organization 2 Pictures

I’m sorry about my blog not being updated. I’ve been busy cataloging my life. To celebrate the summer, I’ve delved deep into organization. I’ve decided to make all of this public, even though it will be way more detail than most of you really care for. In fact, there is so much detail, I’ve decided to make several blogs… this paragraph will be posted before each. Sorry for the unoriginality, but otherwise people will read the blog before they read the info and think I’m crazy… and I am crazy. . . crazy for organization.

Many of you have gotten e-mails about getting my pictures. I think I may be the last person who still uses film. I’ve been giving serious thought to a digital lately, but probably won’t get around to it anytime soon. I’d love to hear suggestions, though. I like things small enough to carry around with me (the smaller the better), but with quality comparable to film. I find cell phone pictures so frustrating, because they can never seem to be of good quality.

Anyway, I send my film to Snapfish, which sends me back a set of prints and puts the pictures online for a low low price. I always send a link to people in the pictures and a few have signed up to receive all of my pictures. I am always looking for ways to make it easier to share pictures, though and if you have thoughts on companies which do this better let me know. As always if you want to see all my pictures and aren’t on the list, let me know. If you are interseted in signing up for snapfish, click this link and we both get 20 free prints.

One site I found that I like quite a bit is Flickr. My personal site link is http://www.flickr.com/photos/justindula/, on which I have a strict policy of only pictures that I have taken, not every picture taken with my camera. Flickr lets you organize your pictures with tags similar to del.icio.us, which I obviously love. This makes pictures much more searchable. They have been purchased by Yahoo, but make it pretty easy to download pictures from a hard drive. I’ve started putting some of my favorites or other downloaded pictures up there. Unfortunately snapfish doesn’t give me a cd of uploadable unless I pay for it, so I have to save each on to my hard drive and upload it if I want to put it up. If anyone knows an easier way to do this, let me know.

This also has some related applications like mappr where it maps pictures from flickr. I have a few of mine up there. It is a neat application. I hear there are tons of applications related to flickr, because they let anyone tinker with their applications. Let me know if you know of other cool ones.

They are also big in the Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a group that encourages voluntary flexible use copyrights so that people can repost pictures or other things so long as they give credit, or other various exclusions. The flickr creative commons link is great for finding pictures for documents and other things, because you don’t have to worry about the strict all rights reserved copyright law. I use it quite a bit at work for that purpose. So I’ve made a point of making my pictures under a creative commons license.

So photo folks, please give me advice on which sites you use for pictures. Let me know if you would like to see more of my pictures, but mostly I hope to get advice out of this entry from my more photo and technology oriented friends.

etiquette

Originally this was part of the food e-mail, but I've separated them because of length and a different topic. Also, while it is marginally off the organizational topic if you read the long version, you will see it is very anal retentive. This focuses on politeness and rudeness, particularly relating to Philadelphia's supposed rudeness that is very much felt by some and contested by others. In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I find Philadelphians very friendly. I hope this leads to much thought and debate from people who know this and other town's personalities more than I do. I'd also like to say that though I've regionalized this context I think that all places have all kinds of people, I'm just going on stereotypes here.



I am going into this in such detail not only to defend my initial opinion, but also to give my personal thoughts on interaction in Philadelphia, which I hope will be helpful for Sandy and others from the Midwest hoping to work in hospitality industries as well as those who interact with Philadelphians. I should preface this by saying that I will always be considered a visitor from the Midwest as I wasn’t born in Philadelphia, and therefore my estimations may be off. Philadelphian’s should feel free to chime in with thoughts on just how off base I am.

For those who don't feel like reading, this is my conclusion.
There are a few ways of thinking of politeness/rudeness
1)The absence of politeness is rudeness (more common in the midwesst and by people who think Philadelphians are rude).
2)Politeness and Rudeness take extra effort and are reserved for situations when they extra effort is warranted. (Philadelphian laziness)
3)Politeness can be a way to make yourself feel superior to others, which is rude.

The situation
Then on Tuesday, Sandy, Heather, and I went to go to Striped Bass, which I knew was fancy pants. It is in an old bank building and the design is meant to intimidate, from the high wood ceilings to the leather placemats. I had just come from work, but this place clearly was a jacket wearing kind of place. I guess if you are spending $50+ on a meal you want to be fancy all the way. Sandy asked if there was a dress code to which the response was something along the lines of there isn’t, but you may feel under dressed. There were no tables but we were free to eat at the bar, which served the full menu. We were promptly led to the farthest back corner of the bar. If you look at this picture, note the flower arrangement, we were seated behind that.

There is mixed opinion about how snooty they were. I thought moderately, but that was to be expected. I’d always felt that Philadelphia has a fairly relaxed restaurant scene and that you could go most places and people wouldn’t frown on you for being under dressed or the like. Sandy and Heather told stories about going into similarly fancy restaurants in Chicago and having it be a point of fun joking around with people. They felt the initial answer was a little snotty and that the bartender’s food answers were clipped to the point where it was like he was doing a favor to answer your questions. I am going to come back to this conversation at the end of this blog and go on and on about it, but first I want to get to the food, which for most people is the most interesting thing about a blog about expensive food.


To dissect the snooty interactions.
1) Asking if there was a dress code.
a. In the Midwest that I know it is a polite thing to signify that you are aware that you may not be meeting the standards of your host and the host is expected to respond in a hostly manner and make you feel comfortable by assuring you that you are fine. This is all relatively scripted interaction where both parties questions and responses have nothing to do with the actual facts of the situation. It would be rude to not ask about a dress code if you are clearly under dressed leading to the staff huffing and puffing about how you just assumed you could walk in wearing shorts when clearly this was a high caliber place that deserves respect. It would be rude to be told there was a dress code and you don’t meet it so get out (dishonoring the under dressed guest). The interaction of asking about the dress code and being assured that there isn’t one allows both parties to feel better about their presence in the restaurant (for the under dressed guest) and the respect they are receiving (for the staff of the high class restaurant).
b. In Philadelphia, if you don’t want to hear the answer you don’t ask the question. If you want to eat there regardless of the presence of a dress code (which is the assumption of us walking in there), you don’t ask about it and assume they don’t have one unless told otherwise. Similarly if you don’t want under dressed people in your restaurant, you politely tell them that there is a dress code and they are welcome to come back when they meet it. Therefore, by our asking if there was a dress code the response No was meant to assure us that we were fine to stay, but the process of asking in the Philadelphian host assumed that we felt uncomfortable with our dress and didn’t want to misrepresent the looks that we may receive from other patrons. To the Midwestern mind, this is equivalent to saying yes there is, but we will do you a favor by not enforcing it, so be thankful. To the Philadelphian mind, it means no there isn’t but you are in fact under dressed compared to most of the people here.
2) The seating situation is either honestly them trying to put us out of sight, or the fact that fitting 3 giant plates around one of the smallish bar tables would have been quite difficult and one of us would have to sit in the walkway.
3) The clipped interaction with the bartender
a. In the Midwest answering a question with the minimum number of words is rude. If you are talking to people you give them an answer that has a good lead in to future comments or observations on their part to show your humility in not having to have the last word and your desire to continue speaking to them. If you are in a situation where politeness is needed and you don’t want to talk to someone, then you simply answer their question with the fewest words without giving them a lead in to future thoughts or observations.
b. In Philadelphia words are always used economically. So much so that the accent involves its own grammar to remove words (e.g. “call me when you’re done work” instead of “call me when you’re done with work”). Sort precise answers are the norm of interaction. There is no difference in how you respond to people you don’t want to talk to and those you do if they aren’t talking about something that you are interested in. Ignoring people is the rude way of saying you don’t want to talk to them. Talking at a length about things that is common in the Midwest is a way to show you are interested in talking to the person or about the topic and is reserved for those situations.

The way Philadelphian’s interact seems like a very harsh way to most people in the World and especially to the Midwestern mindset. The harshness is real, but when you get used to it there is a certain beauty of efficiency in the interaction. Also, to the Philadelphian mind the ritual dance of politeness that goes on in the Midwest seems an absurd waste of time and prone to pitfalls that come of as being sanctimonious and judgmental. It is a politeness that is full of rules that are easy to break, leading to passive aggressive resentment, when no ill will is felt or intended. Also it makes the rushed Philadelphian think that you are actually interested in them and/or what they have to say because you are showing interest in it. It then seems mean spirited to find out you weren't really interested, but instead only being polite and wasting both of your time.

So again, my lessons learned here are....
There are a few ways of thinking of politeness/rudeness
1.The absence of politeness is rudeness (more common in the midwesst and by people who think Philadelphians are rude).
2.Politeness and Rudeness take extra effort and are reserved for situations when they extra effort is warranted. (Philadelphian laziness)
3.Politeness can be a way to make yourself feel superior to others, which is rude.

Food

A friend and his fiancée who are moving to town were here for the past two days taking a look around. My friend works in the restaurant industry and wanted to check out some places to potentially work. This meant I ate much food which was way fancier than my usual food consumption in much fancier place.

On Monday night we went to Pod, which looks like a brightly colored space disco. I don’t want to put any copy written pictures on my site here, but if you google pod Philadelphia you get a good selection of pictures to choose from. I had wild mushroom fried rice and wild mushroom dumplings. The drinks were named after colors… I had the purple which tasted like grape fanta. I like fanta so it worked out quite well. The bathroom was amazing, as Steven Starr always does with his design. It was sort of like a hallway of glowing doors with small red lights for occupied and green for vacant. The inside was very much like an airplane bathroom, but with a much higher ceiling and lit in the trademark ever changing color of the whole restaurant. The pictures of the bathroom hallway didn’t make it on their website. I guess that is a reason to visit.

Then on Tuesday, we went to go to Striped Bass, which I knew was fancy pants. Sandy wanted to go because the chef has won all these best young chef awards. I wanted to experience super fancy food. I didn’t do vegan, so for those of you with a high expectation of my eating habits, please forgive me. I had yellowfin tuna tartar with tapioca pearls, scallion pancakes, and kimchi. I had a lemon cucumber cooler… I think it was vodka based with cucumber juice. I love cucumber juice drinks and plan on making them myself. Sandy had a trio of foie gras, one in popscicle form with a blood orange, chocolate and peanut butter, the other in a Rubenesque form with pumpernickel bread and even a little pickle, the third a barbequed foie gras with beans and a little cornbread muffin with jalapeño butter. Heather got a soft shelled crab in a thai coconut broth.

We followed that up with a trip to the Continental Midtown roofdeck. Good drinks and a plate to fries. It was a great night to be outside, but after the fancier places, this place, which was my pinacle of fun fancy dining is something I'm becoming accustomed to. Am I a yuppie yet?

Organization 1 Internet surfing

I’m sorry about my blog not being updated. I’ve been busy cataloging my life. To celebrate the summer, I’ve delved deep into organization. I’ve decided to make all of this public, even though it will be way more detail than most of you really care for. In fact, there is so much detail, I’ve decided to make several blogs… this paragraph will be posted before each. Sorry for the unoriginality, but otherwise people will read the blog before they read the info and think I’m crazy… and I am crazy... crazy for organization.

I’ve been cataloguing every website I visit on del.icio.us/justindula. If you have any interest in what websites I look at on a daily basis or visit regularly, this is the place for you. Del.icio.us is like a way to organize bookmarks or favorites and put them online. It is based on a system of tagging where sites are categorized based on multiple categories instead of folders. So for example, this blog is tagged under blog, MyPages, and MyHumor. So if you click on the link blog, you will see other blogs I look at, if you click on MyPages you will see other pages where I add content, and if you click MyHumor you will see pages that I find funny (that I think most others may not).

There are many other content related tags related to any number of issues that I use for sites as well, like places (USA, International, Philadelphia, Ohio, etc.), work related sites (work, urbanplanning, bicycle, etc.), restaurants, film, you name it. Anyway. I have spend much of my spring on this site and I’m not tired of it yet. If you have an account, add me to your network and I can easily forward you recommended sites and receive yours.

Oh also, my sister told me I am difficult to shop for. I have been tagging pages as gift you can see it at http://del.icio.us/justindula/gift (note how easy the direct web addresses are)… This includes gifts I plan to buy for other people and gifts for myself. I wouldn’t mind receiving any of these, actually, though some of the music ones are groups where I have some, but not all of their CD’s. I’ll keep adding to it. As always, your warm wishes and friendship are all I really need for my birthday and assorted holidays. Or better yet, a visit… I LOVE visits. But if you can’t do those, these are your gift options.

Also through this site, I am starting a Philadelphia tourist site for a committee I am on for the APA conference. See all the great things you can visit in Phila at del.icio.us/Philadelphia. Also if you want to add some sites, let me know and I can give you the password.

Okay… well this is the best way to track my web presence and interests. I hope you enjoy it. It has proven a godsend to me. It allows me to organize without actually acquiring things. Therefore it is much tidier than the organization in my actual house.