Weekly Accomplishments (Mar 15-21)

• On Monday, March 15, I attended to the strangely-named “Lonely Hearts” happy hour. Despite the name suggesting matchmaking, it was a get-together for DC techies who didn’t go to South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, TX. As I expected, only 5 people including me showed up, but it was mostly blamed on the short notice announcement. The event ended up being a discussion of the things missed at the festival and some general geek-talk about the current trends and projects.
• The sorta monthly (we skipped February) dinner of the DC Sandbox Network & friends took place on March 16. Kudos to Paul Gleger and Dan Nechita for finding a great place – Mai Thai restaurant. It was good to catch up with some old friends and to meet prospective members over great Thai food & the Caps beating the Panthers. Though, personally, I think that Sandbox is accepting too many career-minded rather than entrepreneurial people.
• Friday brought the end of the ISP nightmare I had been living at my day job. After almost 2 weeks of fruitlessly trying to find out the installation date from Comcast, we cancelled the order and ordered through a smaller reseller. Despite us ordering just one week prior to move-in, they managed to step it up and make the order their top priority. Honestly, I don’t believe in small telecom resellers because they often lack the resources for adequate support, but in the case of Cavalier I’m pleasantly surprised. Comcast failed us badly – even the famed Twitter Executive Support Team didn’t help much (they lost $400/mo.).
• And I finally visited my parents up in Brooklyn (haven’t been there since last Thanksgiving) over the weekend. I was supposed to relax, eat mama’s freshly-cooked food, and do my reading, but I ended up translating some technical docs for an export project and doing a last-minute application for a startup incubator. Well, at least I got to play good ol’ Unreal Tournament 2004 on my brother’s 24” screen with 30 bots on all settings maxed out to relieve the stress. =)