I spent time this past weekend in Santa Cruz working at an organic farm my buddy Justin setup at a local high school. With help from a grant provided by UC Santa Cruz and several other foundations, the farm was built with plans to integrate it into the school’s curriculum. A class will be provided to students who are interested in learning about the process of building infrastructure with time spent outside actually maintaining the farm. The 1-acre plot of land was built with less money than you’d think using organic seeds and only water, no chemicals to feed the crops. A simple irrigation system with timer allows the farm to basically take care of itself, with the majority of human labor spent in planting and maintenance when the plants need attention.

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As promised, here is my first San Francisco landmark photo. You might recognize Alamo Square Park from the opening credits of Full House, actually I’m almost positive you’ll recognize it because it’s been burned into my mind since early childhood. The park is right off Hayes Street and entails an almost 45 degree walk uphill (over exaggerating a little) to get there. Since it’s only a half mile from my house I think I might head back more often to hang out on the grass and read a book.

You know you want to hear it:

Photo credit: Madhu

I’m here, I made it! It was rough at first - flying into SFO with two gigantic bags and making it up to my friend’s in Berkeley was an unbelievable hassle, especially when you don’t understand how BART works. I spent the first week checking out apartments that I found on Craigslist and not a single one was how it was described. “Renovated kitchen with stainless steel appliances” translated to renovated in 1984 with yellow appliances and a strange odor permeating the carpets. I’ll spare the gruesome details. As I was starting to become pretty glum, thinking all was lost, I met up with another friend who took me to his buddy’s house on Haight to chill. His buddy mentioned that he was taking off for the summer to do some traveling and half-jokingly I asked if he was interested in subletting. To make a long story short, I got hooked up randomly by a friend of a friend who by some weird circumstances was best friend’s in high school with someone I know back in Philly.

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It’s literally been a month since I last posted on here and I am really ashamed with myself. At the same time in my own defense I have been astonishingly busy. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t put my trip to Israel into words. I have a ton of pictures to prove how unbelievably breathtaking the trip was and I will post them on here soon. If you are friends with me on Facebook then you can check out the photos right now.

I’ve spent the past two weeks working on packing and moving out of my apartment in Philly and booked a flight to San Francisco for this coming Saturday the 21st. As I mentioned in this previous post I’ll be out in the Bay Area through September interning, but what I didn’t mention before is where I will be working. I’m going to be splitting my time between two companies - Vivaty a web start up with an exciting distributed platform that allows users to immerse themselves in different virtual scenes and LaunchSquad a public relations firm with deep roots in technology and social media. I can’t even express how excited I am to get out to the west coast and work with brilliant, new people.

San Francisco is going to provide a lot of motivation and some great experiences that I will most definitely be blogging about as much as possible, so please check back to see how things are going!

I have to be at the airport tomorrow at 10am. I’ll be back Friday May, 30th. While I’m out there I’m going to try to phone updates into my Utterz account which will automatically post to my Twitter.

Lots and lots of photos to come.
Shalom!

I’m sad that the blog has been a little stale lately but I’ve got a lot of stuff going on recently. First off - I’m traveling to Israel for 10 days on a birthright trip through Sachlav. The entire trip is paid for by Taglit-Birthright and we have an outrageous itinerary planned that will take us throughout the entire country and on trips such as kayaking in the Jordan River and visiting the Kotel (Western Wall). Also, I decided to rent a cell phone in Israel so I won’t use use my BlackBerry while I’m there. As I mentioned in this post awhile back I want to enjoy my vacation and stay away from e-mail and Twitter.

For those of you that haven’t heard, when I return from Israel I’ll be moving out to San Francisco to pursue internships at both a PR firm and a software startup for the summer. I’ve visited the city by the bay several times over the past few years and fell in love. I can’t wait to get a feel for the lifestyle out there and figure out if it’s somewhere I’d want to be when I graduate next year.

I plan on taking an unbelievable amount of pictures in Israel and I will be sure to post them here when I return.

This is a guest post by Becky Clawson.

Peter Spellman of Music Business Solutions talks about the impact of negative word of mouth in his latest newsletter:

I listened to a story on NPR this afternoon about the negative impact of bad word-of-mouth. Very scary. The basis for the article comes from research by the Wharton School of Business. They found that 1 out of 2 customers has a customer service problem when they shop. Worse is the fact that they then tell friends, family, and colleagues about it and embellish the story in the retelling. The overall result is that 1/2 of those that hear the bad news story won’t shop at those places they heard about. Ouch! Those that improve on the situation certainly create a business advantage.

This is so true–at least as far as I can relate. Last summer, my hard drive crashed, and after searching the Web for a nearby certified store, I found a shop and took it in for repair. They were friendly, informative, and timely in their turnaround. Great. But a few months ago, my hard drive crashed again, and this time, I asked my peers where they recommend. I told them about my prior visit to the local repair shop–no complaints to speak of–but everyone I talked to insisted that I definitely should not bring it back to Shop A. “They’re terrible. They’re always messing things up. Everyone knows that. Go to Shop B.” And so even though I had no bad experiences with the Shop A, I went to Shop B because I trusted that their bad reports were legitimate, and I just didn’t want to take a chance that I might suffer the same. Am I any better off? Who knows. Shop B did an adequate job, so I’m no worse off.

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Four of us have been growing our facial hair out for the past 2 months to participate in the annual Stache Bash ‘08 here at work. The above pic isn’t very good but we’re going to take some finals for the company blog. Just wanted to get this out there now.

The entire office is voting on the ’staches in the following categories: Most Disgusting, Bushiest, Most Interesting Style, Most Sex Appeal and Best Overall. The winner receives a hefty Starr Restaurants gift card and manly honor.

Wish me luck.

Update: Unfortunately I didn’t take the grand prize but I did win honors with “Sexiest ‘Stache”. Booya.

Blogs, Digg, Twitter — my entire day revolves around getting the news and having dialog with my friends at an instantaneous rate. I rarely ever sit down and watch TV by channel surfing, all of my favorite shows are recorded on my DVR so I can fast forward through the commercials and get on to the next segment of Iron Chef America as fast as possible. As it becomes easier and easier to achieve this, I’ve been thinking about the evolution of our need for instant gratification.

I’ve got this idea for a blog, mostly as a hobby but definitely something that I’d want to spend some time on and see become successful. The reason I haven’t gotten it together yet is because I don’t have the patience to work on it diligently and at a steady pace, piecing things together until it all falls into place. I don’t mean to come off as a brat because I don’t always get what I want, but I am very used to getting things I want immediately. With a lot of things going on in my life (work, school, family, friends) it’s hard to deal with all of the pressures and not slow down a bit to work on this one thing that I’m really interested in.

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This may be a recurring post which displays my mood or emotions in some creative form. Tonight it is a song. I’ve decided to not mention the artist because I think it detracts from setting the mood, I don’t want you to go into it with a bias. I’m sure you can figure out who it is if you really want to.

Download it here » (7.0MB)