Morgan Hill Review

Although FourWayFree is based in Southern California, their concert next Saturday (January 31st) at the Ann Sobrato Arts center will be a bit of a homecoming: bassist Berle Dixon and guitarist Jeff Nunes used to own and operate the Music Tree in downtown Morgan Hill.

According to Peggy Zagelow, who gave me the heads up on this show, “[t]heir musical style is sort of like Dave Matthews, John Mayer, Ben Harper, primarily acoustic with added complexity of sax/flute/etc and a fun, upbeat style.”

The concert starts at 7pm and costs $15 - with a local young classic rock cover band opening. The venue is Ann Sobrato Arts center - on the grounds of Sobrato High School - a very nice auditorium with great seats that all have a view of the stage. There is an orchestra pit where people can dance without blocking the view for others. All ages are welcome, the under-18 cost is $9.

You can buy tickets either through Ticketmaster or in person at the Music Tree in Morgan Hill or the box office at Sobrato High School (Tues/Thurs 2-4pm).

Check them out yourself at CDBaby (click on “play all songs” to get a great overview), at their MySpace page, or on iTunes.

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It seems one of my roommates is finally ready to make the leap out into the “real world” and find his own place to live.  I’m pretty excited for him and we discussed the idea of a farewell party of sorts.  Since he’ll most likely be leaving March 1st and we’re both movie junkies it didn’t take long for the discussion to morph from “farewell party” to “Oscars party ideas” (in case you’re not up on your award show dates, the 81st Annual Academy Awards will be held on February 22nd).

We pulled some great concepts from Celebrations.com: invitations shaped like ‘Oscar” himself (itself?), Oscars Karaoke (only movie songs allowed), and even an Oscars drinking game for his college buddies (drink when any of the dozens of award show cliches occur).  It’s been a lot of fun (and manageable on a tight budget).  But it leads me to wonder what parties will be missing.  Do you have your polans for Oscar night, yet?  Feel like sharing?

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Every Tuesday night one of my roommates goes to the movies at the Cinelux movie theater in Tennant Station along with another client and one of my co-workers.  They go on Tuesday to take advantage of the $5.00 Terrific Tuesdays pricing.  Since Special Engagements ar enot included in this discount pricing they always check the website to make sure their film of choice is available.

Yesterday they went to see Defiance and only noticed after the film that they were actually charged the full $7.50 for their tickets.  When my coworker realized this he spoke to the Assistant Manager and informed him that the film was not marked on the website as a Special Engagement.  Without batting an eye the Assistant manager apologized, informed him that they’d had problems with their “website guy” and handed over four free passes for a future film.  Now that is customer service.  Not only that, but they then got the problem fixed in less than 24 hours as the website now correctly lists the status of this film.

Sure, my coworker was recognized as being a weekly regular, so this may well have contributed to the theater’s generosity, but it’s still a perfect example of what cutomer service really means and I wanted to take a moment to applaud their efforts.

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It’s that time of year again.  If you haven’t started doing so yet it won’t be long before you start dragging out boxes of receipts and paperwork to begin preparing your taxes.  Assuming that, like most people, your (so called) fair share this year is more than you expected and or thought fair yourself you’ll be looking for ways to reduce that debt without having to go to jail for noncompliance.  Well, have you considered donating your old car to get a tax write off?

I know, I know, it’s too late to get the write off on the taxes you’ll be paying in April, but it’s never to early start for next year.  Especially once you take into account that you won’t know the exact value of your donation until after the car is sold.  That’s because the federal government prohibits non profit organizations from assigning values to material donations. However, your donation is valued at the full retail value of the car. So this is how it works…

1. Call your charity of choice to find out the procedure in your area
2. Turn over the car and wait for it to be sold
3. Once your vehicle is sold, you will be notified of the sale price and all the documentation that you will need to claim the deduction on your tax return will be sent to you, including a donation receipt and the IRS Form 8283.

That’s all there is to it!  So it’s not difficult, but it can take some time.  You’re thinking about taxes now anyway, right, so why not keep that forward momentum by donating to your favorite charity as well?

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Welcome to the premiere edition of Weekly WordPress Roundup!

What Is It?

Weekly WordPress Roundup is a hybrid between a blog carnival and a weblog.  Every Monday morning the editor of that week’s roundup makes a single post linking to the “best” WordPress articles they’ve come across that week.  The choices are made from their own web surfing and from articles submitted via the Roundup’s blogcarnival.com page.  If you’re interested in hosting the Weekly WordPress Roundup, just drop an email to: philaahzophy@gmail.com

On To The Entries…

Due to a combination of factors (this is the first edition, the concept only occurred to me last Thursday, there’s been no promotion thus far) there are only a very few articles in this week’s roundup. I fully expect to see a wider selection of articles in future roundups.

WordPress Plugins-

If you use Lester Chan’s amazing WP-PostRatings plugin to allow visitors to rate your posts, then you’ll probably find Using A Default Rating With WP-PostRatings Plugin, posted at Philaahzophy very useful.

Meanwhile, Ajay from Weblog Tools Collection offers a wonderfully in-depth review of Referrer Detector, which displays a specific greeting message to visitors that come from different urls (aka referrers).  This is perfect for promoting your posts via social bookmarking sites, or advertising your RSS feed or favorite posts to visitors who found you through a search engine.

WordPress Themes-

Gilroy Review, this site’s sister blog, has published the second Thursday Themesday.  This week’s edition offers up a glowing review of Scruffy, a “grunge” theme by South African web designer Cobus Bester.

WordPress Tips-

WordPress For Dummies offers a great overview of several different methods to deal with spammers in Eliminate WordPress Blog Comment Spam.  Starting off with Akismet, the article also covers other ways to prevent spammers from devaluing your blog.

Speaking of comment spammers… If you’re tired of wading through all of the automated spam that shows up in your Akismet folder, check out WPRecipes’ How to: Deny comment posting to no referrer requests.

Quick Online Tips discovered what could be a serious problem for bloggers using WordPress 2.7 and receiving large numbers of comments.  Read all about it in WordPress Comment Pagination Causes Duplicate Content Pages

WordPress Hacks-

One of my favorite WordPress related sites, WP Recipes, came out with a solution to one of my biggest WP pet peeves: tag clouds tend to look horrible in the sidebar.  Check out their simple recipe for How To: Creata A Tag Page On Your WordPress Blog.

Very little is more frustrating than forgetting your WordPress admin password.  However, as long as you still have access to the database there’s a solution posted over at Haggard Hosting: How To Recover Lost WordPress Admin Password Or E-mail.

General WordPress News-

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg turned 25 yesterday!  Happy Birthday Matt!

And finally, Google has decided to set users of its Blogger/Blogspot blogging platform free (at last!), with version 1.0 of Google Blog Converters officially released yesterday as well.  Maybe the rush of Bloggers to WordPress is their birthday present to Matt

—–

That’s it for this week’s WordPress Roundup!  Look for next week’s edition over at Philaahzophy on Monday, January 19th!  Submit your WordPress-related article (or someone else’s that you find worthwhile!) to the next edition of Weekly WordPress Roundup using our carnival submission form or by emailing it to philaahzophy@gmail.com.  Future hosts can be found on the Weekly WordPress Roundup homepage.  If you’d like to be added to the list, just drop an email!

As always, comments, links and social bookmarks are very much appreciated!

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Zaira and I just returned from dinner at El Toro Brewing Co. in downtown Morgan Hill. Despite the pleasure I take in trying new restaurants, it’s taken me quite some time to experience (and therefore review) Morgan Hill’s own little brewpub.  That’s for a few reasons: 1) I don’t like bars, and this distaste extends to brewpubs, 2) I hate sports bars, and El Toro was judged Morgan hill’s #1 Sports Bar by the Morgan hill Times, and 3) I seldom go to restaurants alone (particularly new ones) and Z’s only with me Thursday thru Saturday nights., and I don’t think either of us would have a good experience at El Toro on a weekend evening.

Tonight there was a big college football game on, but El Toro was not oo crowded and the folx there weren’t rowdy at all.  They did seem short staffed, though as our waitress (didn’t have a nametag, but she’s a cute young blonde) seemed to be working the entire downstairs all alone.  Still she gave excellent, friendly, and apologetic service, earning a nice tip from us.  Speaking of costs, our bill came to just under $22.00 which isn’t bad at all considering the food we received.

I ordered the Hawaiian Burger (pineapple & teryiaki sauce) while Zaira ordered the Brewhouse burger (standard cheeseburger).  Both were large (1/2 pound patties) and the meat was of excellent quality if not totally top notch.  They also came with fries (skin on, just the way I like ‘em) and a pickle (which I can’t comment on as Z swiped it from my plate).  I’d give the food four stars out of five overall and five of five for the type of restaurant.  At those prices there’s definitely no room for complaints on either portion size or quality.

We probably won’t return to El Toro, but that’s through no fault of theirs.  We just aren’t fans of the brewpub environment.  Anyone without such an aversion, however should defintely put El Toro Bewing near the top of their Morgan Hill dining list.

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Enough serious stuff (cops, beds, diapers, saving the earth), it’s time to have a little fun!

What you’re looking at on the left is the new MagNext Virtual MMORPG.  My “character” is the black and silver sphere in the witch’s hat (actually called a Sorceress hat in the game).  I’m about to enter the iCoaster arena where I’ll roll along a coaster track and try to complete the missing pieces before I fail and fall to my doom.  The picture below and right is me failing and falling to my doom.  Good thing I packed that parachute!

I was really excited to play with this new, free, MMORPG because I’ve had so much fun playing with my real life iCoaster from MEGA Brands that I got for Christmas (Santa said a full size roller coaster wouldn’t fit in my stocking).  It turns out I actually had much more fun playing the car ‘racing’ game where you have to navigate around barriers and over speed bonuses in order to coast as far as possible in your MagNext racer.

I was actually trying the game out as a favor to one of my regular sponsors,  MEGA Brands, and in hopes of finding an online activity that I can share with Zaira when she’s staying at her mother’s house.  Although I had a blast I don’t think there’s enough social interaction involved here for a 12 year old girl.  Younger players would probably have a grand old time collecting Magz in order to soup up their magnetic sphere and competing in all of the various games available.  The site is kid safe and best of all, it’s free, so what have you got to lose?

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