Over the weekend, I was involved in an event at the Los Gatos Opera House. Since I had first met the staff there, a lot of changes have happened – and it appears that all of it was for the better. The food is good, the prices are reasonable and (most importantly to me) without surprises, and it’s a nice change from the usual hotel ballroom/country club thing. The staff, especially Tony, is excellent. I’d recommend that you take a look at this venue for your next event. The lamb chops are great!

One minor downside – it’s in Downtown Los Gatos: which isn’t as super easy to find as other places, and may also have limited parking depending on the time/season.

Here are some photos I’ve been accruing from the event I was at over the weekend.

I like to keep my car looking good. When I brought my crashed car to the auto body shop, they remarked that it looked excellent. Thanks!

So, what do I use?

For cleaning the car, I use P21S Bodywork Shampoo. I do this about every 3 weeks or so.

My front tires are pretty gross from brake dust usually, so I use Eagle One A2Z. I also use some brushes to scrub off the dust.

About once ever 6 weeks or so I use P21S Carnauba Wax. 

Recently I’ve started to use Paint Cleanser and Paint Sealant. For the first time, I tried the P21S Paintwork Cleanser and the Wolfgang Deep Gloss Pain Sealant. I think I’ll probably do this once or a twice a year. The Sealant does a great job of forming a durable coating on the car that makes dirt simply rinse away – but it doesn’t have that deep glossy look that the wax provides.

Some day I may clay bar my car myself as well – but I don’t think I’m at that point yet.

There are some who question whether or not this a good use of my time – after all, it certainly wouldn’t be hard to pay someone to do this. In general I’ve gotten this down so that I can wash and wax my car in just a little under two hours. In fact, on Friday I was able to do just that, and right before the rehearsal dinner, so that my car would look nicer on my wedding day. (Of course, my car wasn’t actually used at my wedding on Saturday, so that use of time was very questionable.) There’s also the zen aspect to this where for once I’m actually not at my computer and am doing something relatively peaceful outside.

That said, every few years I do get my car detailed so that the interior is cleaned up – for some reason I simply don’t have the patience to deal with the interior as much. It’s probably fume related, and it’s just not as much fun either.

Well, there you have it. This page has some pretty good information on detailing your car if you’re looking for more information.

“An open letter to people who wear Bluetooth headsets that blink“. (Thanks Scott!)

My Citibank Premier Pass Elite Mastercard takes days to post transactions. If I buy something on a Monday, it’ll typically show up on the website on Wednesday or Thursday.

On the other hand, my Fidelity Visa card actually posts temporary authorizations on to the website. Temporary authorizations are the charges that vendors put on your card to make sure transaction will go through. Typically it’s the full amount, but sometimes it’s just $1 for quick verification purposes – and then the full amount later.

In this example, I had just been to Roll Bowl 2 hours ago, and already the charge appeared. Pretty neat!

Recently I tried to buy something from a Famous retailer online (that I’m not going to name). After placing my order, I got this e-mail many hours later:

Unfortunately, we are having difficulty processing the payment information we received with your order XXXXXXXX, and it has been cancelled. Our previous attempts to contact you via e-mail were not successful. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

First, canceled was misspelled. But that’s minor compared to the second problem in this mail: I never received any other attempts to contact me via e-mail.

Still I wanted the product, so I tried again – double checking my billing information and using a different credit card.

I got the same message again.I tried with my other other credit card, same message again.

I called and their customer service rep simply told me that my credit card was denied. All three of them?

It’s they’re loss I suppose.

Moral of the story: Verify your automated e-mails.

SunRocket Postmortem: Virtual Everything Means No One Really Gives A Damn – Consumerist

So they leased their lines, outsourced their call center, and except for an office in Vienna, VA, were for all intents and purposes, a virtual operation.

Beware doing business with companies that have no fixed assets (remember Amp’d?). Makes it much easier for them to treat customers like a one-night stand.

I like Consumerist and all, but I happen to not agree with this lesson learned. The problem isn’t that SunRocket didn’t have any fixed assets – the problem was that they have a fundamentally unsound business model. Go and see my post about subscription businesses and why they are hard.

After this bust happened, I found it amusing that a lot of people were looking at moving to Vonage. I wonder when they’ll go out too!

 Here’s something you probably didn’t want to know:

What is the Nutrition Information for Items in the Costco Food Court?

I was wondering about this after I ate 2 slices of Costco combo pizza. I kinda wish I hadn’t.

(It’s up to the reader to decide if I wish I hadn’t eaten them, or looked up this information.)

I find the Pew reports really interesting. Here’s a snippet from a recent one:

Pew Internet: Home Broadband Adoption 2007

47% of adults have high-speed internet connections at home as of early March 2007, up five percentage points from a year earlier.

For those of us living in Silicon Valley, the idea that only 47% have broadband is pretty unthinkable. Here we have broadband galore! Heck, there’s free WiFi in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and a few other cities. Meanwhile, in places like South Korea, broadband penetration passed 70% in 2003.

Yet, we as a nation only made a 5 percentage point gain year over year. In fact, this was one of the slowest years of broadband uptake according to the report:

The fact is that the United States of America is a pretty huge country, and we have people living scattered throughout. It’s going to be really hard… no… really expensive to get everyone on broadband as we don’t live in densities like they do in Korea, Japan, etc. How will people in South Dakota and much of New Hampshire ever get broadband? I suspect that there’s probably a good correlation between Starbucks availability and broadband penetration.

Another point is that the definition of broadband is kind of fuzzy – my parents’ broadband is 992kbps where as mine is 15,132 kbps. Yep, mine is almost 15x faster. And it’s not like my parents live in the middle of nowhere either!

For those of us working Internet applications and services this is something to keep in mind: broadband isn’t everywhere, and it probably won’t be everywhere for a long time. And even then, the speed won’t be all that consistent – some people will have super fast access, and some people won’t. We must build products and services that are usable by all of these people, if we want to have the largest possible customer set.