I recently had a very good sandwich for lunch at Tyler's. It was a tuna melt that contained cranberries, apples and celery, on toasted sourdough bread. I ordered it with their garlic fries and was very pleased. I didn't even have any of their fantastically sour lemonade, because I'd stopped at Starbuck's earlier, but I'll have to get more of that soon.
Did you know that they serve brunch on Sundays? They do, from 10am to 3pm.
People complain about bad customer service all the time, particularly cell phone companies. Believe me, I can complain about Sprint all afternoon. This past weekend, I had a good experience with Verizon Wireless, so I think it's important to share that as well.
As I mentioned earlier, I attended Blog Carolinas on Friday. In preparation for heavy Twitter usage during the conference, I upgraded my text messaging plan to 1500 messages per month. I figured I'd be all set. I'd never tweeted much by sending text messages from my cell phone, as Twitter was originally intended to be used, primarily because of the high text messaging rates. I figured this was the perfect opportunity to give it a try and then, if I wanted to, I could go back to my 20 cents per message rate afterwards.
On Saturday, the day after the conference, I decided to check and see just how many messages I'd sent and received. I immediately saw that the indicator was red and had a warning that I'd exceeded my limit. Uh oh. That couldn't be good. I'd sent over 80 messages on Friday and received over 450. The problem was that I also have my parents' phones on my account and it turns out that I had added the 1500 text message plan to my father's phone. I don't believe that he has ever sent a text message before, on any phone.
I felt ill, but well enough to send Verizon e-mail and explain what had happened. I asked if they could retroactively add the 1500 text messaging plan to my phone and remove it from his. It said they would respond within 24 hours.
Guess what? They did what I asked, even though I was the one who made a mistake. Of course, it's their interest to help me out such that I continue using their services and continue text messaging, but it's rare to hear of a company's actually having realized that.
So far, every interaction I've had with Verizon Wireless has been positive. When I activated my phone, I even talked to someone with a sense of humor. That's pretty amazing. I can only hope that my experiences continue to be be positive, but I will still be more careful in the future.
Have any of you had any noteworthy customer-services experiences lately, good or bad?
I love baptisia. It's just a gorgeous perennial. Even after the flowers go by, the seedpods are rather cool looking.
These are all growing just outside the Duke library buildings and I photographed them as I was leaving work a few evenings ago.
Shortly before going to Matthew's Chocolates last weekend, my Second Most Faithful Reader and I went to the Wooden Nickel for lunch for the first time. Back when we first moved to Hillsborough, in 1989, we practically lived at Kelsey's Cafe, which used to be at the same location, 105 N. Churton Street, in downtown Hillsborough. It's astonishing just how much they've changed the place and transformed the bright and elegant cafe into a dark and wood-paneled pub with a good-sized bar. The embossed metal ceiling is the only reminder of its old self. That, of course, is far from criticism, because it looks pretty cool and I like the dark green accents.
More importantly, I was very pleased with the food. I had fish and chips and I believe it won the Glob award for the best combined fish and chips so far, rather than just one or the other. Plus, it's a local (for me, very local) restaurant and not a chain. The types of fish they use rotate and that day I had the roughy, for $11.95 and they also offered flounder. The coleslaw was good, too, because I didn't detect much, if any, mayonnaise. Overall, I was very happy. I also wanted to try a soft pretzel, but that will have to wait until next time.
My SMFR had a half-pound of boiled shrimp for $7.95, which he said was very good. They also had standard pub fare, such as a burgers and other sandwiches.
Yesterday, I attended the Blog Carolinas conference, which was held at Sigma Xi, in RTP. I had a wonderful time! It was an excellent mixture of conference and "unconference". There were both planned presentations and dynamic sessions that were suggested by attendees, who led them if the topics generated enough interest. Despite the high quality of both the planned and unplanned sessions, the best part, by far, was meeting other Twitter users. It was a tremendous amount of fun observing and participating in conversations during the actual sessions while also tweeting about what the presenter was trying to convey.
I quickly discovered that it far easier to meet new people at a conference if you are using Twitter, particularly if you are tweeting using the conference hashtag, in this case #blogcarolinas. I was effectively live blogging or taking notes on what I considered to be the main points of each session and others who were attending the conference or following along from a remote location, could see them using twemes.com or hashtags.org. Here is what our aggregated conference conversation looked like on twemes. Some presenters actually viewed the #blogcarolinas Twitter stream during their presentation, as @gilliatt did in his presentation on Monitoring and Metrics, which can be seen above.
I was using my Treo 700p and sending text messages to tweet during the conference and I actually think that both using a miniature keyboard and being limited to Twitter's 140 character message limit actually improves note taking, because it forces one to condense the information and only record what is perceived to be important, which means that it's actually a lot more engaging. I can just imagine how I would have enjoyed and perhaps benefited from college even more if I could have tweeted during my classes. The possibilities in a classroom setting, including a less disruptive way to ask classmates for clarifications or provide them with supplemental information, seem endless.
One "unconference" session, led by @93octane, was on Twitter itself. In fact, this was the most lively, if not heated, discussion I observed during the day. The argument was over whether Twitter is useful and why blogs are better than Twitter. The majority of the participants thought that Twitter was extremely useful and that comparing it to blogging tools was effectively like comparing apples and oranges. Not only are they different, there's no reason why you shouldn't eat both.
Check out photos from Blog Carolinas that were posted to Flickr.
Have you all been keeping up with everything that's been added to MyNC.com? Since I last wrote about it, they have added Orange and Wake counties and I am sure there is more to come. I recently wrote another story for the site and this time it was about St. Matthew's Episcopal Church, in Hillsborough.
Today I drove to Greensboro for a Tri-IT conference at UNCG. You can read my blog post about last year's instance of this conference, which explains what Tri-IT is all about. If nothing else, it's always fun to get together with a horde of like-minded geeks to discuss the latest and greatest web applications. The weather was beautiful for wandering around the campus today. Above you can see the Mary Macy Petty Science building, where most of the conference was held.
This is effectively a flat-topped dome in the Elliot University Center (EUC), which is a meeting place for faculty, students, staff and visitors. It contains multiple shops, at least one cafeteria and just happens to be part of the route to the Petty Building.
Overall, from what I've seen during my two visits to UNCG's campus, it looks as if it's a very nice and attractive campus with lots of open spaces and grass. It's also fairly flat, which I appreciate.
I'm paying too much attention to the election live blogging and ustream on MyNC.com and OrangePolitcs.org so I'll keep this short.
I recently had an excellent duck confit salad for lunch at the Barbecue Joint, in Chapel Hill. In addition to the duck, it had greens, goat cheese, pecans and dried apricots.
If you've never been to the Barbecue Joint before, I highly recommend it. It's an extremely casual restaurant, with gourmet southern cooking and barbecue. They win the Glob award for the best cornbread I've eaten in the Triangle or perhaps the best non-homemade cornbread anywhere. It's southern cornbread, which means that it's not sweet at all. Sweet yankee cornbread is inedible, in my opinion. Be sure to try their pickled cucumbers, too!
I know my friends are probably sick and tired of my saying how much I miss Pyewacket. I really do, though. Fortunately, Anotherthyme provides a fix in a way that no other restaurant can. I started out by ordering iced red zinger, which used to be my beverage of choice. It still is, but when I make it at home, it doesn't taste nearly as good as it did tonight. It's so tart and refreshing. I've always thought it was crucial to add Sugar in the Raw, which will actually dissolve in the the cold liquid if you are patient and energetic enough to stir it for a couple of minutes.
I tried the pork and vegetable dumplings with Vietnamese lime-tamari dipping sauce as an appetizer, which was delicious. They were served on slivered snow peas and carrots, which added a nice touch.
At the strong recommendation of our waiter, my Second Most Faithful Reader ordered the fried Tilapia with cold Asian noodles, cashews and mandarin oranges in a ginger-mirin dressing. I was very happy to steal a nice portion of this and it was excellent.
One of my favorite salads at Pyewacket was the Morning Star Salad, but it was huge. HUGE. Anotherthyme has both small and large portions, which is a fabulous idea. I still ended up taking half of my salad home, but it's a lot more reasonable, especially if you want to try more than one dish. It's an incredible salad with granny smith apples, cottage cheese, raisins, cashews, sprouts, sun flower seeds, grated carrots and Umeboshi Plum dressing.
My Most Faithful Reader had a small French Green Salad, with avocado, egg, red onions, cashews, parmesan and lemon tamari dressing. A few of you know that I'm perfectly content to eat salads without dressing, but Anotherthyme has such wonderful salad dressings that it would be almost a crime not to eat them if they were avaialble. They used to sell them by the bottle and I wish they still did.
Dessert. I'm almost speechless, so it's a good thing I'm writing. This raspberry cocotte was stunning. This dessert had a thick caramelized sugar crust that was incredible by itself. It covered layers of cheese and raspberries marinated in Chambord, a black raspberry liquor. The flavor was intense and perfect. This was the best dessert that I've had in many years and if you've been reading for a while, you know that I've had some amazing desserts.
I knew immediately that Matthew's Chocolates was my kind of store as soon as I got in the door. All of the chocolate in the display case was dark chocolate. It's a tiny shop, sandwiched between the Wooden Nickel and Gulf Rim Cafe, but it's "choc" full of flavor. In addition to chocolate, he sells coffee and iced tea.
After we finally decided which kinds we wanted to try first and the candies were weighed, Matthew put the chocolate in these nifty baggies.
These are some of Matthew's signature chocolates, berry cremes. These beautiful chocolates were very good. That's an understatement.
I chose "mendiants", which are chocolate discs, each with a piece of dried fruit on top. We also bought a few pieces of chocolate covered orange peel and chocolate covered ginger. There were many other kinds of chocolate available, some of which had already sold out for the day. There were several different kinds of nut-filled barks that looked delicious.
Here you can see the ginger, which was extremely juicy, soft, mild in flavor and covered in a thick layer of chocolate. Matthew's Chocolates opened about five months ago and I'm so glad it did. You wouldn't believe how excited I am about the new and wonderful shops, restaurants and other exciting destinations that have recently opened and are about to open in downtown Hillsborough, just five minutes from my house.
Here in North Carolina, the primary will soon be upon us. Plus, it's StarWars Day.
[via Digital Papercuts]
BookDabbler, at Loehmann's Plaza, on Hillandale Rd., in Durham, is having a going-out-of-business sale. All hardcover used books are $3 and paperbacks are $2. They have three fewer cookbooks now than they did this morning, though. They are also having a sale on assorted gifts, such as candles and glass paperweights.
I wish I'd taken a photo, because they have two very adorable Italian Greyhounds, which were worth visiting regardless.
The sale will continue until they close on May 24th.
For my mom's birthday lunch earlier this week, we all went to the Bennett Pointe Grill and she ordered a mammoth-sized appetizer portion of sweet potato fries to share, for $4.95. I don't generally like sweet potatoes, but these were great. They are cripsy and just barely sweet. They come with a habanero mango dipping sauce, which was good but unnecessary.
My whole immediate family and three friends of ours went to Taverna Nikos for my mom's birthday on Monday and it was quite a memorable experience. I decided to try the lemon chicken, which was two boneless chicken breasts, spinach and tomtatoes with square shaped pasta in a lemon-wine sauce. It was very good and enough for two good-sized portions, priced at $16.
The power flickered several times and then went out completely. I checked Twitter and saw Samantha's tweet that a transformer had blown. Fortunately, some light was still streaming in through the windows, but it was darker by the time we ordered dessert and the waitress borrowed Karl's unusually bright LED flashlight to show off the dessert tray and generally navigate the restaurant. There was some emergency lighting, but that went out eventually. They quickly lit more candles and they even had a candle in the restroom.
I took this photo of my baklava when it was quite dark. This photo was described as "lame" by my visiting friend, but I think it's pretty nifty, considering. Yes, I could have used the flash, but what's the fun of that? The baklava was a lot better than the photo, though. Their baklava used to be house-made and I believe it still is.
Before the wedding on Saturday, there was a lunch at Guglhupf that was just wonderful. The party was on the second floor and they don't have an elevator, so keep that in mind if you are attending an event and stairs aren't an option. Fortunately, they have a grand covered patio and we just stayed downstairs. Here you can see a plate of food from the buffet, which I thought was just gorgeous. I was really impressed. The turkey sandwich was made with their house-baked bread and was very tasty.
This mango mousse cake was very good, indeed.
Their fruit tarts are simply amazing. Overall, sitting outside and talking with my friend while eating all this glorious food was extremely pleasant. I'd been to Guglhupf for brunch only once before, but I clearly need to make it a habit.
