OK,

I have the new blog engine up and running. I have made a few posts and am going to keep futzing with it as time permits.

I am going to be making my posts on the new blog, rather than this one.

As previously stated, I plan to keep the TechnoSnobs.com domain, but re-purpose it.

So here goes, my new blog can be found at http://ben.dominguez-benner.com/blog

I really need to hit the hay.

Laterz

I don't want to post a link to the new blog just yet, I still need to futz with it some more.

But I got it installed tonight, I need to consult with the WordPress master (Jeremy) about a particular plugin that he is using that I want to use.

I bought some new domains as well, I am going to be changing up how I do things around here.

I am going to keep the Technosnobs.com domain, but I am going to re-purpose it for purely techno geek stuff, so code, geek projects, etc.

More about all of this will unfold this week, I swear.

The winds of change are in the air. (The hot, hot Texas air.)

Bedtime for Bonzo.

Laterz

Jeremy beat me to the punch on making a post remarking about how hot it had been this past week.

I ran to HEB (grocery store) today and well it felt like it was the hottest it has been so far this season.

I am sure that it was more likely not the hottest day so far, but rather the fact that I was outside around 2pm and in a parking lot (that had been collecting heat all day).

Regardless of whether it was or wasn't the hottest day so far, even the breeze was hot.

Not "sort of warm", not a "mildly refreshing" breeze, but hot, sort of like a hot breath on the back of your neck.

Needless to say I got inside the store quickly and made my purchases.

I have a little bit of a cold. Speaking of which my OJ should be ready, I am going to go and drink a glass of OJ and take a nap (which might turn into tomorrow, but who knows).

Laterz

So it is about 10:30 AM in Manila right now. I talked to Gina a couple of hours ago, she arrived safely and has already completed her first day of work at the customer's office (technically she is into her 2nd day of work right now).

She said that the flight was not too bad and this time around she made a couple of friends.

Apparently Hotels.com has opened a call center in Manila, she ended up sitting next to a couple of guys from the Hotels.com's Dallas office.

She described them as Sales Guys and that they were going to Manila for three weeks. Apparently they are rotating sales folk through the Manila call center as part of training. (She didn't say whether it was the call center's training or the sales folk's training, my guess it is the call center's training.)

Apparently, the this was the first time for these two sales guys to visit Manila, they didn't know how LONG a flight to the Philippines was going to be. Having known a few sales folk in my time, I am sure that it was merely a lack of reading the ticket and doing the math. Because in the end, knowing how long you are going to be stuck in the airplane doesn't really matter, it isn't going to make the time go by any faster.

However, from what I am told a bag (of holding +2) containing a bunch of McD's food. The bag was rumored to contain chicken nuggets, cheeseburgers, snack wraps and I am sure there were some french fries.

They might have been thinking that it was the last time that they were going to see American food for three weeks (if you can really think of McD's as food). Gina said that one of them proclaimed 'The Stash' as emergency food in case the food on the flight was bad.

Gina said they seemed surprised when she told them that McD's existed in the Philippines.

Wait till they hear that KFC is making a killing in Taipei.

The Hotels.com guys had the same travel arrangements as Gina (For the most part).

Fly Coach and stay in a really NICE hotel, or fly business class and stay somewhere not so nice.

Both Gina and the Hotels.com guys choose to fly coach and stay someplace NICE, the Shangri-La hotel chain.

However, Gina is at the Edsa and I believe she said the Hotels.com guys were at the Traders one (across town).

Gina is getting to be quite the experienced international traveler, she told me that she helped the Hotels.com guys get through customs in Manila, since they were rookies.

I do find it sort of interesting that the Hotels.com guys are going to be working US hours (for the most part, they start work at 11PM Manila / 10 AM Central), while Gina starts her day at 9AM Manila / 8PM Central.

Just for the record I am stealing a bit of the wife's thunder here and blogging vicariously through her, because well she has been to the Philippines a few times now since her last blog post and I am not sure she is going to post anything up on FiveDogQuartet.com or not.

For me, it is just the same old with working and playing too many video games.

Speaking of both of those things call to me.

Laterz

I stopped and got some McD's for breakfast this morning, as payback for Jeremy bringing in some breakfast tacos yesterday.

After arriving at the office and wolfing down a tasty (yet hella bad for me) hash-browns and a sausage biscuit, I started to try to read some email. Try as I might I could not get to the Internet.

After a quick systems check I determined that it wasn't my laptop, so I poked my head out of the office to ask if the office Internet was down.

Yup. Down again. (Hasn't gone down in a while, but when it does it tends to stay down for a while.)

I declared the '15 minute' rule in effect and told my staff that if it wasn't fixed soon then we would need to head home and work from there.

The 15 minutes passed and it was time to take off and head home or to a coffee shop, that is what Jeremy and I have done.

I just talked with Gina and she is going to head up here to '"It's A Grind.", I have been here at this coffee shop before, it has comfy chairs and decent coffee.

There is a haircut place two doors down, I might head over there at lunch as I am in need of a trim.

Well back to the grind. (Pun intended).

I had to swing by the office to take care of a few things before I can go home.

I am wrapping up and will be heading home.

I hope to make a couple of blog posts tonight before the memory fades on this past weekend's adventures.

Laterz

I need to make some time tonight to do a better post than this about my dad's thing.

But first let me state, that we all have something that we are known for, maybe it is something we can do, or a particular way we do something, regardless each and everyone of us has a unique thing.

My dad's thing is standing on his head.

Back when I was little he would do it at the offices of a business that participated in a blood drive, now he does it at places he travels.

To commemorate Gina and I's wedding day, my father stood on his head there too.

The photo looks very good in black and white (I need to find the digital copy and put it in this post).

My dad has his own website, where he can show of his unique thing. www.tomstandsonhishead.com

He has recently been to South America (various countries) and South Africa, he can be seen standing on his head in those places.

Take a look and if I come up with any photos of my pops standing on his head I will upload there here (and send them over to him so he can add them to the collection.)

Time to shutdown the laptop and get out the BrainWash cafe.

Laterz

We ate at Nick's Lighthouse last night. As it turns out that is the same place that Gina and her friend Brenda ate at when she was in San Fran last time.

I started out the crab adventure looking to eat a crab all by myself, but the idea of clam chowder inside of a bread-bowl was too much for me. I ended up ordering the sourdough bread-bowl of clam chowder, Gina ordered a full crab and we split an order of fried calamari (which was EXCELLENT).

My chowder was good, the bread-bowl was really good. I also had an Anchor-Steam, a local brew that is quite popular and tasty. Gina had a Corona with her crab. I stole a couple of the smaller pieces of her crab for myself.

I am not a crab hater, but it isn't the first thing that I crave when we hit a seafood place like the Fisherman's Wharf area. But for me the trip to the Fisherman's Wharf area was more about the experience of eating down in that area (being a bit touristy) vs eating fried fish or shrimp.

Gina loved the crab and as always with crab had a great time cracking it open (with little use of the utilities they provide).

During our trip down there, Gina thought we were going to miss the wharf and had us get off the street car early. As it turned out I think we were still about 2 miles from the wharf at that point. We enjoyed the walk, but the last block or so we definitely felt it was time to sit down and eat.

We were accosted by a street salesman along the way, trying to pitch us on a weekend in Napa Valley at some swanky new $100M hotel that has the USA's first, only and largest 'wine cave'. His pitch was nice and informational at first, but then he cranked it up into the high pressure area, Gina hates sales people, particularly the high pressure kind. I sort of have an affinity for sales people, I love to see how well they do in their pitch.

I love talking with a good sales person, someone who knows their product and is a true practitioner of the craft. I HATE and have no issue being a bit rude to BAD sales people. Often BAD sales people reek of desperation or just flat out don't care about what they are doing.

Gina gave me the perfect out as she just sort of said 'OK, I am done.' and walked away. I told the guy that I had to leave as I had 'lost my wife'. He continued his hard sales push and ceased to be a good sales guy. In part, yes a sales person does need to have a level of persistence that one can call 'annoying' but a GOOD sales person knows when they have lost the (immediate) opportunity and knows when to stop, as not to damage what (little) relationship with the prospect might exist.

Anyway, the food was GREAT.

We grabbed some taffy from a store there across from restaurants.

Along the way over to the Trolley cars I saw a 'Trader Joe's'.

I have read about the store and wanted to witness what it was all about. It sort of reminds me a of a miniature Central Market.

Another one of the things I had read about was 'Two Buck Chuck', which is apparently a good wine that is only $2/bottle. However, I wasn't sure the name of the wine was actually 'Two Buck Chuck' or something else.

We wandered around the store until we found a wine that was $1.99, the name is Charles Shaw, and the nickname for Charles is Chuck.

We bought a bottle of Shiraz and Cabernet, I will let you know how those turn out.

Well, my laundry is done, so I am thinking that we should pack it in and head back to the hotel, drop off the laptops and head out for the next adventure.

I think we are going to hit up the Timbuk2 retail store and see if we can find the ASPCA while we are here.

Laterz

Gina decided to come with me to BrainWash, seeing as I had woken her up beyond her ability to go back to sleep with the clickety-clack of the keyboard while typing my last blog post.

This meant that we would both have the fun of an adventure of going to a strange Cafe+Laundromat. The walk over from the Hotel was not too bad, as far as the distance goes, but the area we had to walk through is definitely in a revitalization stage.

Gina informed me that the Yahoo! Travel description for our hotel said not to go in the direction we were going as far as walking to get to BrainWash. When I asked the Concierge how to get to the corner of Folsom and Langston, he didn't say anything along the lines of 'Be careful you might get mugged.'

That meant that overall I wasn't too worried about the walk over to the laundromat.

However, along the way I must say that there were a couple of times where I was glad to be making the walk in broad daylight vs dusk or evening.

Gina and I split the 'Blue Collar' special, it was a tasty scramble of eggs, bacon, onions, peppers and I think some tomatoes were in there. The hash brown/home fries were excellent, Gina loved the toast and I ordered an English muffin on the side, which was honestly one of the best (if not the best) English muffin I have ever had.

Gina helped me out using the wash, as I am not accustomed to using pay washers, I am sure if left to my own devices I would have eventually found the hard to read instructions on where to put the soap.

My stuff is in the dryer right now and should be done in about 20 minutes.

The free wifi here along with the excellent food made me think about Jeremy's side project, Grubfi.com.

After breakfast, we broke out the laptops, we definitely are a modern couple. Gina informed me that her beanatx email address (@sbcglobal.net) had been suspended. I was pretty sure I had paid the Uverse bill, since I had been on the phone with customer-service just the other day. However, it turns out that I had not.

However, the customer service agent informed me that her email address should not have been suspended by me forgetting to pay the bill on time. So I have now been on hold with customer service for about 20 minutes.

I am pretty sure that my being on the phone is annoying the gentleman next to us, he looks like he came to drink coffee and enjoy himself and not have two out of towners get on on their cell phones.

The coffee here is pretty good.

All for now about the BrainWash, next post will be about the wharf and crab last night.

Laterz

I am not necessarily convinced yet, but pretty close to it that The Benner household (of Cedar Park) needs another set of luggage, particularly a roller-bag of medium size.

We have two HUGE roller-bags, one medium and I think a pair of small (overhead sized ones).

Then I have a couple of duffel bags, one very large blue one that I got from one of my Aunts (David's sister) the other is green, I bought it at Academy that makes a great overnight bag.

I however also happen to take the green duffel with when we go to Michigan as space is limited in the car when we drive up (because the dogs have a lot of luggage, crates, chewies, beds, etc). When I take it to Michigan I manage to pack about a week's worth of clothes into it.

That is what I did for the trip to San Francisco, I managed to pack enough clothes to make it to Saturday. However, that means that I don't have clothes for Sunday or Monday.

I didn't think it would be a big deal to find a laundromat near the hotel, and I was right.

I found, BrainWash, it is a laundromat and a Cafe.

I had originally thought about dropping stuff off there on Friday morning, however that didn't work out. So I am going to head down there in a few minutes. Google maps says that it is only .5 miles away, so I am figuring about a 10-15 minute walk, depending upon how lost I get along the way.

Gina and I had fun yesterday, I will try to blog about that from BrainWash.

Gina has arrived from Austin.

She stopped by the booth as Brian and Bill were packing up the booth (I helped a little but, I guess you could say I was supervising).

We are preparing to take off to the Timbuk2 store or maybe just down to the wharf for crab and beer. (we are not completely sure yet)

Apparently the Internet provider here set a cookie on my laptop or recognizes the MAC address from my room earlier today, as I am able to get on the Internet here in the NEW room without having to pay for the Internet again.

The wife says we have to go, so this is a short and sweet post to just let y'all know that Gina has arrived and we are taking off for the day.

Hopefully we will snag some pics along the way.

Laterz

I am not sure what I was expecting in regards to how busy the trade show floor would be.

Last year the trade show seemed to be about 1/2 the size of this year. And since I was attending the conference last year (vs exhibiting) I honestly didn't go down to the trade show floor except for when they sort of forced us down there (lunch and free beer).

There was a mad-dash when the trade show doors first opened, everyone was going for the free t-shirts. Which reminds me I need to try to get mine tomorrow.

I spent a good chunk of today in the booth. We have a schedule and I was there when I wasn't schedule, but I am not complaining, I was stuck there because I was talking with people. It was not as if I was stuck there waiting for someone to come and 'tag-out'.

I had some very good conversations and some conversations that ultimately won't lead to any business, but at least the conversations were interesting.

Well I am done with email and looking to grab a snack (read dinner).

Jack called me a little bit ago and told me that he was heading to the Pub nearby.

I think I will scoot on down there.

Laterz

I have been working throughout the day here during the sessions, but as Stowe Boyd might say I have been practicing 'Continuous Partial Attention', I am listening to the conference presenters and typing away at a couple of different things.

However, I am in between projects and starting to (finally) run low on power, if you can trust the power gauge it says I have 27 mins left, I am going to see how correct it really is.

But I will say that I have managed to be on the laptop for almost 4 hours so far (maybe going on 5).

I am current sitting in 'Building Next Gen Web 2.0 Apps', the material is good and speaks true to some of the stuff that I have experienced at Jaduka over the last 12 months.

But one of the things that I wanted to post before shutting down is that I am sitting near the wall, near the outlets and there are several folks camped out along the wall and on the seats near the aisle next to the wall, all tethered to the wall, in (you guessed it) the eternal search for power.



** Low Battery Warning Just Kicked On *** (says 15 mins)

Gotta go.

(Update: The laptop went into sleep mode at about 3% remaining approx 11 mins remaining.)

Laterz

I made it to San Francisco just fine.

I am a little tired, in classic fashion I managed to only leave enough time to take a cat nap before having to get up and head out to the airport.

A colleague, Brian Haverty (San Fran Local), picked me up from the airport and we headed off to lunch. I unfortunately forget the name of the place, I will try to find it later. But it is a taqueira that seems to specialize in burritos.

I had a carnitas burrito with black beans and I asked for some cilantro to be thrown in there too.

It was a good lunch. It is a little chilly, so Haverty drove home to grab a coat. He showed me his house, it is very nice. I had the opportunity to meet his wife, Karen, while we were there.

After grabbing his coat we stopped at a Starbucks and got some coffee (very useful as I was starting to get rundown right about then).

After talking a little shop and finishing up the coffee, Haverty drove me over to the hotel. It is a swanky hotel.

As I was checking in the front desk clerk (think her name was Charlene, might have that wrong) she informed me that the mini-bar works on a new system (think she called it the 'sense-o-matic') and will charge me for anything that gets moved, so that even if I tried to store some leftovers in there I would likely get charged for a $10 tin of almonds (or cashews).

I asked her if I happened to accidentally hip-check the mini-bar fridge if I would just end up owning everything in there. She laughed and informed me that the mini-bar is housed in a larger cabinet. I told her that I can be a little clumsy in the morning and wouldn't want to end up with a HUGE bill.

I signed up for Internet ($14.95/day, ouch) and have started catching up on the fact that I have been traveling all day.

Here is a pic of my MSU hat on the window seat.



Laterz

PS. The Juno Movie Soundtrack is fscking sweet.

I am getting ready for a trip out to San Francisco.

Jaduka is exhibiting at Web 2.0 this year, next week actually in San Francisco.

Trevor, Bill and I attended the Web 2.0 conference last year. I found the conference to be very insightful and I know that I have tried to use much of what I learned at the show over the course of this past year. (Last Year's Blog Posts)

I have taken notes on which conference sessions I want to attend. However, I am not sure which sessions I will be able to attend as the booth must be staffed!

We are going to be scheduling the booth staffing from the standpoint of morning and afternoon sessions.

This years conference sessions look good, but possibly not as good as last years. I am not sure yet.

I have to do some laundry, find an available suitcase (or otherwise make one available), pack for the trip, make sure I have all my various bits of technology that I will be needing.

It will be interesting to see if they plan for the need to have more power drops this year than they did last year.

Well I best get started.

Laterz