Happy Birthday Jitba!
disclaimer: This post absurdly overdue
It was my first ever jiminthebigapple dot com party. Amy did an amazing job and pulled off a complete surprise. She even had her parents there all the way from switzerland! At least thats what I tell myself they were in town for. The event was the 4 year marker of the launch of this website which also makes it my 4th year in NYC.
Having city birthdays might seem strange to some, but as I found out July 31st, it is a totally normal occurrence here in the big apple. I felt kind of bad at first having everyone there for a silly city birthday, but then I came to grips and realized everyone is just looking for the next excuse to have some fun. I was happy to be that excuse. Thanks amy for an awesome night!
Click here to see the photos that survived the night.
Astroland Closes - For Good
Astroland closes its gates for good. Caveat: We heard the same story last year. Are they serious this time?
4th of July - Swimming in the Rain
More photos and videos here
Road Trip Photos - Up
I have uploaded the Road Trip 2008 photos onto my flickr. I still need to sort through the actual bachelor party sets and upload a combined album. I also want to aggregate all the twitter posts onto a page as a road trip log.
Filed under Auto • events • friends • On the Go • photography • Travel • (PermaLink)
I’m famous (not really)
If you watch about 30 seconds in you can see my head just to the right of Sarah Lacy’s head. She is broadcasting from the 16bit part at last weeks SXSW interactive festival. That makes me sort of famous, right??!?
Sarah Lacy Publishes Awkward Moment
Pretty ballsy to put a clip of the most talked about interviews in tech (for fault of yourself) on your own site. Sarah is one if the hosts of Tech Ticker on yahoo!. Clip below:
Schwag
I hit the trade show SOOOO hard today. Below is a photo of all my takings. So happy, but how am I going to get it all home? FedEx?
Terrible time change
Hit up the parties last night.
- Google Party - line was too long to even attempt. Down and then around the block
- Avenue A | Razorfish Party - Pretty sad. They shut down the open bar before the party was over as the waitress said “They ran out of money.” Not exactly the image you want to give off. I guess the 6 billion bill gates gave them ran dry.
- 16bit Party - Had to sneak in the back as they were doing one in one out at the door and the line was thick. The cool thing was they had a freak show. Girl with no legs, elephant man, lobster girl. Some of them even played in the band there. Kinda weird, definitely different.
The panels yesterday were varied. Went to a nice one on creating SEO friendly rich media (flash, video, audio etc..). Interesting stuff as the guy from google was contradicting some common practices on how to serve up different content to search bots than a site serves up to its users. The practice is called cloaking.
Tentatively for today I am going to these panels.
- A/B Testing: Design Friend or Foe?
- Social Strategies For Revolutionaries
- Keynote Interview with Mark Zuckerberg
- Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users
- SEO 3.0: Optimizing Search & Social for 2008 and Beyond
- SXSW Web Awards Ceremony
Utterz.com Moblog Interview
Sitting down in the hallway - Lee from utterz.com walked up and asked if he could do a few second interview with Jeremy, Mike and I to showcase the service. Below you can play the audio from the interview and see the awesome group shot of us sporting our new utterz.com wristbands. Utterz.com lets you instantly post to the web - audio, video, and photos. The quality is so so but I guess that is the trade off for instant access.
Jitba take over
For those of you who follow this blog - the next 5 days or so I will be posting from Austin, Tx for the SXSW interactive festival. I will be posting lots of links and a few short posts about what is going on.
updates will appear below
On my way
On my way to SXSW although sitting in the very back of the plane. Starting to get pretty excited looking over the upcoming schedule and panels. Stay tuned for updates throughout the 5 day event.
Impromptu SXSW interview
I am heading down to SXSW in austin tomorrow for the interactive portion of the show. I somewhere marked down that I was going and that information ended up in the hands of Paul Walhus (see previous comment). He wanted to chat about my company Media Refined Inc and my overall view on the tech geek fest.
On another note I am testing out Vimeo and have uploaded the interview to the service. The video appears to lag compared to sound at times but seems to catch up. I think it mostly has to do with the quality of the original. Makes me want an HD camera.
Video below (warning: video is 15 minutes long). sorry about the opening scene nose pick.
Jim Crews Interview - SXSW 2008 from Jim Crews on Vimeo.
heading to aruba
Amy and I are off to Aruba for the Thanksgiving holiday! This is my first time to take a real vacation on a holiday… either I am traveling home or staying in NY for the festivities. It couldn’t come at a better time as NY is getting their first snowfall this morning while Aruba’s high is around 90F today. I hope everyone has a great thanksgiving!
If you want to be jealous and aren’t yet, you can view some photos of aruba here
Wait… what do we do?
Last week amy and I decided to head downtown to get out of the neighborhood for the night and check out a new place for dinner. We walked around the lower east side looking in the windows of the restaurants we walked by. After stopping a number of times (cuban, mexican, thai) we saw an Ethiopian place that caught our eye. I told amy “Well I don’t think I have ever eaten Ethiopian” and she had an equally blank stare on her face - so we went in. The restaurant was very small, maybe 4 or 5 tables, and moderately decorated. The wait staff was friendly and brought our food out quickly.
We started the meal with some wine and an avocado and tomato appetizer. The waitress brought the dish over - which consisted of finely chopped tomatoes, chopped avocados mixed in a zesty dressing - served on a thin flat piece of bread. Amy and I sat and waited for some silverware and discussed how good the appetizer looked, until i finally realized that - we weren’t getting any silverware. Finger food. I looked around at the other tables and everyone was diving in digit first. Amy actually called the waitress over to clarify that she wanted us to eat this half soup appetizer with our hands. The answer was yes. Everything is served with Teff - a wheat alternative mashed up into a flat tortilla like stack. You basically just grab the teff pancake and scoop up some of your dish.
We had a fun night and got to try something new. Ethiopian as you can imagine is very similar to a lot of Indian food you might be familiar with, very similar spices and food combinations.
Back from the hills
Amy took me on a great trip this past weekend. We went fly fishing in the housatonic, went to the warren fall festival… about as small town as you can get, wine tasting at two beautiful vineyards and had sunday brunch at an amazing Inn on the edge of a lake. 
for the photos you didn’t see or I didn’t link to - see them here