Weekend in Sydney

My buddy Ali's family lives in Sydney, so he offered me the guestroom for the weekend and his services as tour guide, how could I refuse. Friday night we got in from the airport and went directly to an upscale bar filled with well dressed good looking people, think NYC with nicer people. After a couple hours at the bar we hit drove through the extremely seedy kings cross (crackheads and prostitutes lining the sidewalks) to Harry's Cafe de Wheels for a bite. Harry's has been around in Sydney for ages, it's a little trailer in a seedy part of town that's open late and serves tasty food to defile the temple of the body. I had a chicken pie toppped with mashed potatoes and cheese sauce, and what they called a chilli cheese dog. A harry's chilli cheese dog is bizzare, it's a hot dog with mashed peas (yes, mashed peas), onions, chili, hot sauce, and this bechamel looking "cheese sauce". Lemme tell ya, after a bunch of drinks it was delicious. The next day I took the ferry to Manly, got a great view of the city from the harbor and walked around. Went to the gym, then went out again. Sydney has this casino that looks great on the outside, and looks like the stardust on the inside. Ali's friend was celebrating her 29th, so we celebrated by going to this club in the casino with a bar that overlooked the casino floor. 80's music, and neat 'fiddich's for $6US, suffice to say, a good time was had by all. The next day was a little more sight seeing and recovery, then back to the office.

Social Networking + Product tie-ins= Metails.com

Metails.com is what happened when someone sat down and said friendster is great, but how can I use it's model to make lots and lots of money. This idea is great, a user comes on and looks through groups of friends and foafs to find out what's cool, when something catches the user's eye s/he clicks the link and is taken directly to the online retailer that sells it ( mostly to amazon). The site and the person with the link both take a slice off the top and everyone's happy. I don't think I'll join, despite the fact that it's genius. What annoys me the most about this site is that I didn't come up with it. If this thing were to get to friendster size ( and it won't), the people running it could make obscene amounts of money. Something like this could really catch on and be powerful in Japan where there is a huge culture of social status based on having the right stuff. The real questions are how can it be done better, how can they possibly protect themselves from copycats, and how could they collect and sell marekting datato really leverage the network.

Am I hot, or not?

The joys of seeking validation or humiliation from random people on the internet. I had a conversation about my looks with a recent acquaintance who shall remain namless, and we disagreed on my position in the absolute (national, not LA or bay area) 10pt scale. In order to settle this dispute we agreed to turn to the ultimate scoring medium, hotornot.com, using the only picture I seem to use online (as seen on this page, friendster, and orkut) . Feel free to click the following link, but vote honestly, a wager of drinks rests on the outcome after 200 people have rated me. Have no worries, I will neither be crushed nor get a swelled head, afterall, I know what I look like

I'm moving

Aloha all, it looks like the time has come for HarshKarma to get out on it's own and move locations.  So over the next week or so look for me to be moving to http://www.harshkarma.com,  and my cafepress shop with lou inspired tshirts will also be linked.  All I need to do next is find a good utility that can pull photos from an email account and ftp them to my blog and I'll be set.  So email or add comments for your recommendations fo software, for the time being I will stick to blogger to drive the blog cause I'm really happy with it, but in the futue I may go to MT, or dare I say it ... a full fledged cms like postnuke or something.

Ever wondered: What's My Pirate Name?

fidius.org: What's My Pirate Name? Arr, now ye can learn the name ye would have on the high seas. Those of you who follow this link, please enter your pirate name in the comments below.