Simplicity Rules

Adam DuVander on keeping it simple

Planning my binges with BarFlyMag

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At the risk of seeming like a complete boozer, I love this Portland bars magazine site. It’s a great example of truly local search and I have been using it to find new haunts for a couple months.

My favorite feature is the category chooser, which allows me to select several amenities and find a bar that matches those characteristics. For example, my oft-visited downtown Happy Hour list. Recently, a new friend and fellow web geek Kyle Ritter took over the site and has made the category chooser results shareable.

Now I can send my friends direct links to preppy rock and roll joints, or point someone to the very few bars frequented by both hippies and hipsters.

A shareable URL is something I’ve mentioned before here and it is one of my Five Tips to Make Your Site Work, which is available on my company site.

Friendly marriage

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Jon on Mustache Day 2005
Jon on Mustache Day 2005

My friend and roommate, Jon, was married this weekend. He will no longer be my roommate, but I’m more sure than ever that we’ll remain friends.

We met during his first month of college. I interviewed Jon to be a DJ for the campus radio station. What I most remember about this first meeting is how I mixed up his last name and the last name of his co-DJ. Today, “Jon Bartell” seems completely wrong.

It was not until a few years later that I got the following insight into how Jon lives his life. He was studying in Ireland and I was in the trenches of Salem, Oregon, with two other guys. We were trying to secure ourselves a house to rent. It was unnecessarily difficult for four young men to find a place to live together. Time and again, we were being turned away and it was getting disconcerting.

In one way, Jon was insullated. But in another, he was completely helpless, at the mercy of our search. And we couldn’t promise much to him. At this time, he said something along the lines of, “I’ll be living with the dream team. We will find a place and it will be awesome.” He was right. Our eventual home was, looking back, a total dump. We made that place a palace.

Jon showed the same optimism when his now wife left Portland for medical school one thousand miles away. And I know he was 100% comfortable with his choice to exchange vows on Saturday, knowing his life will be continually “awesome.”

Call it trust or faith, it will serve them well as they make decisions and move through life together. I wish Jon and Sharon the best and look forward to seeing their many accomplishments.

It’s a foreign fish, at least

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“There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a Walleye Pike.”

Who owns the fish?

There are fifteen hints that help you narrow down to the one possibility. I’m no logic genius and this took me about forty-five minutes, so I tend to question the idea that only one in fifty people can solve this puzzle. So, give it a try!

Political cartoons as sales pitches

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Website delivering money
I can’t decide whether this image is a brilliant boiling down of what the web can be for business or if it is purely apocalyptical. At the very least, it makes it’s point clear, like a political cartoon.

To me, the overly-obvious labels in political cartoons are funnier than the jokes themselves. The combination of clear-cut rhetoric with often passive-aggressive commentary presents a dichotomy that, like this image, is at once smart and contrived, simple and complex.