This evening I went with my mom to the new Reposado restaurant in Palo Alto for what promised to be a unique Mexican dining experience. It’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to review a restaurant but the Bay Area has flavors and eateries to rival the best of London’s so there’s no reason not to take advantage of the diversity around me now.
The large dining room was certainly spacious - a welcome change after London’s typically cramped dining experiences - but this meant that, despite the fairly sizable dining crowd, Reposado looked half empty at 7pm. We were seated by a friendly hostess and began our menu debate. The first snag of the night occurred when we were asked for our drink orders and I realized I had forgotten my ID, something that wouldn’t normally be required in London but unfortunately a necessity for a 22 year-old in the US. Margarita-less, I returned to the menu. My mom and I decided to begin with the Ceviche de Camaron, a prawn ceviche with lime and cucumber juice, Serrano chili, avocado, and grilled pineapple, for $10.50.
An enthusiastic but somewhat misdirected waitress returned with the Cayo de Hacha y Camaron (a prawn and scallop dish) but quickly rectified the mistake, delivering the attractive dish we had actually ordered (shown above). The lime was somewhat overpowering but the appetizer grew on us, the fried plantain chips providing a welcome sweetness to off-set the tart bite. While I don’t think we would order it again, it was a tasty departure from a typical cerviche.
For our main course we settled on the three taco plate after a seemingly endless debate. A recent review had warned against the tacos, citing too much iceberg lettuce and dry meat, but the opportunity to sample three different flavors proved too tempting and we each ordered a chicken, pork and steak taco.
Quite contrary to the negative review, the meat was tender, the lettuce in proportion and the tacos overall satisfying. Unfortunately we felt that the steak taco was the weakest in the group, featuring a toasted ancho salsa, avocado crema, and Cotija cheese which seemed to ruin an otherwise tasty meat, and a letdown after the pork and chicken. However the plate was priced incredibly reasonably at $9.75 and was a perfect portion size, especially with the earlier appetizer and the promise of desert.
We finished our Reposado meal with the Azteca Chocolate Cake ($6.75), a dark chocolate cake with a hint of chili peppers, a combination that worked beautifully. It was served with a strawberry compote and key lime cream topping. Our only comment was that the texture of the cake could be improved as the individual portion size cake may not have been as moist as we could have hoped – overall a minor critique for an otherwise delicious desert.
The food was quite tasty although no where near the best Mexican in the Bay. This character restaurant offers more in ambiance than it does in gourmet cuisine but the restaurant is new and the menu is still improving (the waiter mentioned an upcoming chorizo dish which sounded tempting). It’s location is convenient, the prices reasonable and the food flavorful. The meal was certainly a treat however the service we received was what turned the night out into an enjoyable experience. From the hostess to the wait-staff to the owner, who stopped by to ensure we were enjoying our meal, the friendly atmosphere that filled Reposado earned the top marks.
Next time I’ll remember to bring my ID and I’m certain I’ll have wonderful things to say about the bar as well!
This past weekend I once again had the opportunity to take advantage of the gorgeous Bay Area weather to hike up Windy Hill in Portolla Valley. This time, I talked a group of friends into coming with me which was quite a feat for a Sunday morning.
The trails through the Windy Hill area are well marked, but a little confusing in relation to each other. There are about 12 miles total of trails, and if you just keep walking you’re pretty much bound to make it to the top of the Hill in question (where, as we discovered, it was in fact quite Windy). We didn’t make it on the loop we had originally intended to take, instead walking up the Spring Ridge Trail and back down again for a total walk of around six and a half miles. It was a great uphill push on the way to the top and an easy walk back down, all of which contributed to a massive group appetite by the end of the hike - perfect for our post-hike BBQ.
Windy Hill certainly wasn’t as eventful as my hike along the Coal Mine Ridge the week before (no bobcat sitings at anyrate) but for an easy couple hour trek, it offered beautiful views, a good workout and a lot of fun with friends.
One of the things that I love about the internet is how it allows me to live vicariously through my friends in a way I wouldn’t have believed possible. The ability to be involved in the day-to-day minutia of people’s lives through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, blogs and more is in many ways creepy however while at home, it allows me to travel with a friend of mine who is off on her own great travel adventure.
Kate, with whom I attended high school, spent a semester in Paris during college and caught a travel bug of epic proportions. After graduating, she decided to come home and get a job before heading off but last week took the plunge and flew to Hong Kong to begin a round-the-world tour that she has no current plans of ending in the near future. After a few days in Hong Kong she’s left for Bali. From there she’ll travel through Asia, meeting up with friends, make her way to India, through Egypt, up to Turkey, and by fall of 2009, she hopes to be in the UK.
I already love reading her posts on her blog Chasing Hemingway and highly recommend that anyone interested in travel or interesting personal stories takes a look. It’s definitely going to be an exciting trip and thank goodness the internet lets me play along.
It’s difficult to believe it isn’t summer. To begin with, I’m at home for an extended period of time - something that has only happened during the summers for the last half a decade (yikes, that’s a scary thought). Also, the amount of fresh fruit and veggies I get these days are just decadent compared to any other part of the world this time of year. And of course, there’s the fact that it’s hovering around 70 degrees F during the day and is gloriously sunny - yep, California is pulling out all the stops while I’m home.
In honor of the fantastic weather, I decided Sunday morning to take a hike, literally, and wound up on the wonderfully-named Coal Mine Ridge trail system in Portola Valley for a brief jaunt through the woods. I took the Toyon trail as far as it would go (a little over six miles round trip). It was a very easy hike but beautiful and quite an enjoyable way to spend the morning.
But by far the most exciting part of my hike was on my trek back to where I had parked when I rounded a corner and saw on the trail in front of me a bobcat. It was a couple hundred feet in front of me and didn’t seem to mind me being there. I followed behind it for a while before it disappearred out of sight into the woods. I hadn’t seen anyone else on the trail for a while and so was a little surprised to see, a few minutes later, another hiker coming the opposite direction. I was still excited by my bobcat sighting and so warned him to keep his eyes peeled ahead. In response, he looked absolutely thrilled and asked if I were “familiar with animal spirit energies.”
I smiled politely and told him that, no, I didn’t believe I was. He recommended I look them up on Google when I get come because it’s so rare to see a bobcat that it must have a special message for me. I can’t say I entirely understood the message the bobcat supposedly gave me but overall it was an eventful morning and a great chance to enjoy the weather and the California trails.
In the next few weeks I’ll definitely be doing more casual weekend hiking - in this weather it would be criminal not to. I might look for something a bit more challenging or simply stick to the easy trails. You never know where my animal spirit energy might guide me.
In the California Silicon Valley, the bar is set by the big local bigshots – the Googles and Facebooks – not the struggling start-ups still living in a garage. However throughout the rest of the world, the bar is Silicon Valley as a whole, with the startup mentality, the business creativity and the culture of risk and, sometimes, payoff. So it is not surprising that outside of California and America, other emerging tech cultures seek to style themselves around the Silicon Valley model. Meet the Silicon Roundabout in London, England and Spoonfed, a London web startup that’s building a name for itself and the area.
A map pinpointing the offices of the tech and media start-ups in London shows a scattershot grouping around Old Street in East London, an area that has become colloquially known as the Silicon Roundabout in homage to the Silicon Valley of California. Moo, Last.FM and Dopplr are a few of the homegrown start-ups that have already caught international business eyes. More recently, Spoonfed, a local events listing site in the vein of Yelp or Trusted Places, emerged as another one-to-watch in the Silicon Roundabout.
Basheera Khan of TechCrunchUK writes in her review of Spoonfed, “the kicker is that it’s location- and preference-specific; tell Spoonfed which parts of London you hang out in, give it a general idea of the types of entertainment you’re into, and hey presto, you’ve got a customised guide to upcoming events….[Spoonfed has] influencers with top notch experience in social networking, big brand advertising, B2B publishing and corporate governance backing a couple of 25-year olds who pitted their combined life-savings of £8,000 against the problem they and their friends shared — never being able to find high quality information about upcoming events across all of London from a single trusted source.”
Spoonfed is ready to take on traditional listings giants with the message that it should be easy and fun to find events you will enjoy locally however their message is two-fold. In addition to a web service that engages Londoners with their local area and events, they also remind world that the Silicon Roundabout and the emerging UK tech scene is certainly one to watch.
This article is writen by Meaghan Fitzgerald, a Silicon Valley native now living and working in the UK. Please feel free to republish or link to this post on your blog, or share with your friends using the links below.
One of the most engaging projects I undertook while at Colby College was my startup business DormWise.com, a web resource for college students. I’ve struggled and stressed for quite some time over how to make use of the remains of my effort - and it was quite a bit of effort. Unfortunately the site has sat at its domain somewhat uselessly since I graduated from college and it’s been frustrating for me to see all that work go to waste. I’ve sent out some feelers to see if there’s anyone who’d be interested in buying the whole site but the amount I would get for it seems so miniscule that I couldn’t quite justify it.
A number of people suggested leaving the site in place to earn advertising revenue but there isn’t very much traffic (seeing as all of my traffic-driving skills are currently going to my full time job!). Recently, however, I’ve made a few forum posts to see if there is anyone who would be interested in taking on complete management of the site in return for 50% of the profits. It’s a fairly good deal for someone who has the skills and drive to run a website but isn’t able to make it themselves, plus I’m paying all of the hostings costs. I’ve received a fair bit of interest and at the moment I am “interviewing” online a number of the people who responded. There are a couple of people I believe would do a decent job but if you or someone you know might be interested, of course get in touch.
I’m really looking forward to engaging a few more people with DormWise and while I’m here in California, it’s a perfect time to transfer the control to someone who is excited, driven and, preferably, still in college! Hopefully it’ll be beneficial for both of us.
There are a number of different elements to online marketing and as I may have mentioned before, one techniques I have been utilizing quite a bit is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. SEO is the buzz topic of internet marketing at the moment and involves finding ways to make your website rank highly on search engines. If you did a Google search for ‘London’ for example, it’s not simply luck that the results you see there have been placed at the top of the list. Search engines such as Google carefully guard the algorithm that ranks results so that marketers and web site owners can’t take advantage of it and artificially rank more highly but there are a couple of factors that go into causing a website to rank highly for a particular search and that has created the practice of SEO.
The first and most important part of ranking highly is keyword and text optimization. You could never expect to rank for the search ‘London’ if you don’t have the word London on your webpage. Additionally, if you have the word London displayed in such a way that the search engine crawlers that automatically view, catalog and rank your webpage can’t see it (such as in an image or movie instead of in text) the search engine doesn’t recognize that your page has relevant keywords. On the other hand, a popular SEO strategy used to involve “keyword stuffing” which meant adding high numbers of popular search keywords, or the same word repeated many times, penalizes the site as search engines have developed advanced ways of determining if the text is relevant and contextual or not.
The trick in writing SEO text is to compose paragraphs that involve the most popular keywords, in the format they might appear when someone types a search phrase into Google, yet making those keywords sound natural contextually. The higher up on the page, and in your body text, the keywords appear the better. Like a topic sentence in an academic essay which outlines the rest of the content of your writing, text in the first paragraph or even sentence of an article, blog post or web page lets search engine robots know what the content of your page is about. For example, look at the first sentence of this post:
There are a number of different elements to online marketing and as I may have mentioned before, one techniques I have been utilizing quite a bit is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
This is a great SEO sentence. It doesn’t sound like I’ve stuffed keywords in to trick a search engine but I’ve managed to include three key search phrases, ‘online marketing,’ ‘search engine optimization’ and ‘SEO’ in the first few lines of my post. Here is an example of how I could have written my first paragraph that would have meant the same thing to my human readers but might have caused search engine robots to view my post as less relevant to people looking for online marketing and SEO information:
There are many different elements to my marketing job, all related to driving more traffic to the Spoonfed website. One of the most important parts involves finding ways for Spoonfed to rank highly on popular web search results.
In that case, I didn’t use any key search phrases, and I probably wouldn’t find a way to fit those key words in until much farther down in my post, causing the robots to believe those subjects are less relevant to my post over all.
This has been a longwinded and fairly technical way to get to my main point which has been nagging me ever since I began to learn about SEO. As the pressure increases to rank highly in search engines, bring traffic to websites and create pages that Google and the other leading search engines can recognize and rank, how much will this change web writing? While of course talented writers will always find a way to incorporate keywords naturally, the need to be understood by artificial Google robots can easily lead to a stilted and unnatural writing style – just look at the top ranking results on some Google searches. As print authors are more and more turning to the web, and web authors are more and more looking towards SEO strategies to bring traffic to their site, what happens when those authors find themselves not writing for a human audience but for a robotic one?
I find it unlikely that such a writing style would ever be more appealing than natural, well-crafted prose. In what is possibly a unrealistic and utopian vision of the SEO future, some sort of AI English teacher-style robot will troll the web, knocking the web crap out of the rankings no matter how many keywords they work in. One can only hope.
One of the things I like about Twitter is that I can choose to follow and read the updates of people with similar interests that I might otherwise never come across. When they make updates, sharing ideas, news and links, sometimes I find incredibly valuable information for myself. This happened today when one of my Twitter friends posted a link to a young entrepreneur’s scholarship hosted by the blog I Will Teach You to be Rich. The scholarship is decribed:
The I Will Teach You To Be Rich Scholarship for Social Innovation is an annual $2,500 award for anyone in their twenties who has demonstrated entrepreneurial excellence and is planning a socially innovative project. The award can be used for a special project, service initiative, founding a company, creating a community organization, or any other entrepreneurial venture that scales to help others.
I’ve decided to apply even though I’m sure there will be some stiff competition given the buzz I’ve heard about the scholarship. The application is due in a few days and it’s been interesting to consider my answers to the questions “what are your milestones for success” and “how will you get others interested in your business”. This is also an excellent opportunity for me to spend some more time developing an idea I had during the holidays for a new company based upon a number of my interests and that I think might appeal to the nature of the scholarship. Wish me luck, the semi-finalists are announced Feb 2nd so I’ll keep you updated.
In the month since I last updated a lot has happened. There was Christmas, and New Years, I baked about twelve different kinds of cookies, a pie and a cake, I spent 10 hours in an airplane and 10 days getting over jet lag and I have spent as much time as I possibly can with my family.
Busy, you say, but not busy enough to warrent a 1 month hiatus from blogging. True, although you’d be surprised at how much time decorating Christmas cookies can take. No, the real reason I’ve been MIA from the blogersphere has been because I’m still in California. While my original plane ticket had me returning to London on December 29th, the British Home Office had some other opinions and my visa has been delayed due to a massive backlog of other applications.
So there’s nothing for it but to enjoy the sun and warm weather, home cooking with my family, chance to work from home (read: in my pajamas) and appreciate my time here before I head back to London in a few weeks. In the meantime I’ll be putting in some posts about my work, as that’s what’s consuming most of my time these days. Happy New Year!
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