In my mail this week I recieved a note from Yelp about some of the more interesting eateries in Seattle. I’ve found this service to be a good way to culture myself, so that I might properly entertain each of you who ascends into this foul weather to visit me. This sort of review I believe will only encourage you all to come and see the gems that Seattle has to offer (though perhaps not for another month or three–it’s still cold).

From the Yelp lsiting for Cafe Mecca, Tyler H. says:

“You know you’ve arrived in the world of slash-and-burn alcoholism when you find yourself sitting in the back booth of the Mecca drinking mimosas and eating hash browns at 9 o’clock on a Sunday morning without ever having quite made it home from the bars the night before.

As someone who managed to pull off this feat a couple times back in the day: I both highly recommend the experience. And also recommend you avoid it at all costs.

That said, as others have mentioned, this place is one of Seattle’s few definitive greasy spoon diners. Sometimes the bar section gets obnoxiously packed, but even on the weekends you can usually saddle up the the bar of the diner side with a friend and throw back a few cheap beers.”

Wow! Don’t you just want to fly up here this weekend if for no other reason than to experience, “slash-and-burn alcoholism?!”

They’ve certainly outdone themselves this time. The new Adobe CS3 apps are live, and they would be available for preorder from Adobe, if their online store weren’t temporarily down (probably from overwhelming traffic). To give you some idea of where the price ceiling is, Amazon is listing the CS3 Master Collection for US$ 2473.99.

Sure the software revisions will be exciting and useful, but I just can’t get over how gorgeous the box art is. If Adobe sold each application with a large-format poster, I’d probably pay the extra and buy all of the pieces individually.

I have two ‘tokens’ to use to invite people to the beta of Joost (formerly The Venice Project), and they expire on the 22nd. Leave a comment if you like and I’ll hook you up.

Update 21MAR07: I’m currently all out of invitations, and so I’m going to close out this little queue before it gets too long. When I get more I’ll throw up a new post. Thank you all for your interest :)

Someone in the office today showed me a card trick, and I managed to break it on my first attempt! Wasn’t that a great story? I only told it though to tell you this one.

In that same conversation, I made a case a few of you have probably heard if you spend any time around me: Slapping people in the face is ready for a renaissance (not that you’ll believe me, but I spelled that right on my first attempt–this day is going really well). There are plenty of times in a given week when I feel the urge to lightly but firmly connect my open hand with the cheek of whoever is talking at me. A slap is probably the most shocking and effective way to point out to someone that they need to come to their senses and, most likely, shut the fuck up.

Keep in mind the power that comes with slapping someone as you wade into these waters, as it is a skill that can be quite easily abused. The slap can only be leveraged against someone for whom you have displayed a great deal of respect and care. Slapping an acquaintance, or worse yet a total stranger, is like booking an appearance on Monzel and Wyatt’s favorite show.

How the fuck am I supposed to know when blue cheese has gone bad?!

John Edwards is using Twitter. While he could prove to be a lackluster participant in the community by only barely using his new text-messaging voice, you’ve got to appreciate whoever on his team told him sitting down at the cool kids table in the Web 2.0 cafeteria was a great idea.

As a primer for those of you who might not know what Twitter is or how to use it, here are three simple steps for becoming both geekier and more politically involved:

1-Sign up for a Twitter account, being sure to provide it with your mobile phone number.

2-Add John Edwards as a friend by clicking the link on the right side of his page. You will now recieve his updates as text messages.

3-Write a direct message to me (by starting it with “D osakasteve”) telling me how much you love your new geek shoes.

[Via Tim O’Reilly]

Anyone who knows me knows me knows that I would never read anything by Kevin Smith. That said, some of you probably know that I have some televised wrestling heritage, and that fact was apparently not lost on Eric when he sent me this clip:

As it is obviously hilarious, I responded to his email, sarcastically suggesting that his friends and I could raise some money to buy an Ultimate Warrior impersonation from our man Eric. Well what began as friendly ball-busting has taken a turn into weirdville. Eric has challenged Jocko and I to a Ultimate Warrior imitation video deathmatch.

There’s a suggestion on the table to cast the net a bit wider, in some absurd effort to increase the volume of political-aspiration-crushing content. I’m happy to welcome anyone who wants to make a fool of themselves–join the club motherfucker. All I can say, is that I will do my family proud, and that if I ever rise into the rarified air of my chosen industry, that this will most certainly be known as my Ballmer Developers video.

Last night people started arriving in Redmond for today’s Microsoft TechFest. The event is traditionally a private (Full-time employee only) showcase of cool things being grown by Microsoft Research, but this year ‘external’ journalists have been invited. This means I get some of the valley flying up here to my hood.

After rocking the company store, Ryan and and I met Scott, Ajay, Jeff Clavier, and last but not least my new friend Woody (seriously) for a late dinner last night at Matt’s Rotisserie & Oyster Lounge, which is a fancy-dress name for the only reasonable restaurant in the Redmond Town Center. I suppose it says something about the company one keeps when all of your aquaintances have URLS ;)

Ajay gave us some updates on his project and his recent purchases, both of which I hope to get a peek at at the end of the month when I fly down for Under The Radar. Jeff escaped shortly after Ryan and I arrived, but we were both quickly distracted by Scott’s new 50mm 1.2 lens–Oh how I long for a full-frame DSLR! Woody brought me up to speed on open container laws in the Gulf states, and Scott rounded out the night with historic tales of Burning Man (which only makes me want to go more).

An all around good evening, which managed to at least muffle the constant noise in my head and allow me some temporary happiness.

Have you ever seen them? Some people have them folded up inside their wallets, while others pass digital versions around the net like coveted treasure maps. They are menu crib sheets, and they have grown into existence like some repulsive cough medicine used to combat the common cold that is phone trees.

When you leave a voice message for someone these days you’re given a pre-flight instruction, followed by an awkward opportunity to communicate something that could be meaningful but rarely is, and finally you have a number of post-game options. Would you like to replay the message you just spoke (to be sure you properly enunciated ‘nipple-clamp‘)? Or would you prefer to re-record your message (in order to be sure your language regarding that saltwater eel exorcism is clear)?

I think it’s obvious that these sort of training wheels are doing all of us a disservice. Should the system really be built to protect the innabilities of the moronic in communicating brief chunks of information? Shouldn’t we employ a bit of Darwinian logic to the competition for each other’s time and attention? Can we stop coddling those who would rather sing us a song about their wacky screw-up involving dropping the kids off at the dry-cleaners?!

Let me be clear in that I have no issue with the concept of voicemail. I won’t stand here and tell you that we should simply deal in either realtime conversation or delayed text communications. No, voicemail has it’s place. When I want to tell my girlfriend that my train will be arriving at the opposite end of Gare du Nord from hers, and that she should follow the signs for the ‘Eurostar’ when she arrives, then voicemail is a perfectly acceptable way to do so. However it is downright abuse when my co-worker calls once and leaves no message, only to set my pocket vibrating again, and ultimately leaves a message with nothing more than a hushed, “Call me as soon as you can, or come find me the minute you get back into the office…”

Therefore we must simplify the voicemail system, and in doing so increase its intelligence. Eradicate all of these ridiculous options. No preschool explanations of what’s going to happen after the tone, and no opportunities for masking your own verbal incapabilities. Just listen to my pre-recorded message, speak your piece, and then hang up. But how does that solve the problem of long and useless messages you ask–Well I’m so glad you did.

Enriching the relationship between the voicemail service and the handset will enable everyone to do better triage. If the phone can understand how many individual voicemails are waiting and who each of them is from, then they could be dealt with in a non-linear fashion. I could decide who I care to hear from most, and simple rules and filters would ensure that the long-winded rants from my mother won’t get ignored along with the rest of the nonsense.

Thanks Sampy for the inspiration :)

And so we arrive at the finals of this little fiasco. The votes were tallied and the top five were Versace 1, Versace 2, Ray-Ban 2, Ray-Ban 3, and Modo 2, in order of popularity. However this afternoon upon returning to my friendly neighborhood LensCrafters, two of the top five had vanished.

First, in place of Pappy’s favorite Ray-Ban 2, I present its English sibling Burberry 1. Second, I have grandfathered Modo 1 into the finals, on account of it being my personal favorite. Exercise your opportunity to affect the face you’ll no doubt see a lot of, as I’m becoming far too accustomed to these blasted self portraits.