Author Archives: bluedepth

Williamsburg – November 15th 2010

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Today was the official beginning of the Sage Millennium Symposium. This is the direct result of all of the user base griping about how we missed this place and how we wish we had a little conference all on our own, like the way it used to be. Much like a magic genie, Sage granted us our wish and here we are again, for my coworkers who joined me in this trip it’s old-hat to them, it’ll be my first time staying at Kingsmill Resort.

We arrived last evening and I found this place to be very expansive, definitely charming, and a great place to “Get away from it all”. The price tag, well, that’s definitely on the high side, but the quality is unmistakably there. My room is laid out very spaciously and everywhere they could have skimped out they did not, which earns my respect.

Last night we went to the Red White and Blue, which is a Blues-themed Memphis style BBQ Rib restaurant in Williamsburg. The food was okay, the ribs were done well. What more can you ask for while traveling into a tourist trap?

Overnight everything went well, my iPad doubled as a noisemaker/alarm clock very nicely as well as a book, a newspaper, a game of Uno and a window into the world of all my collected RSS feeds that I aggregate through Google Reader.

In the morning we all visited Colonial Pancake House. We’re in the middle of Pancake House Central and this one got a 5-star review so we decided to give it a shot. There wasn’t much that was remarkable about the place, the food was good, the atmosphere was what you’d expect and the prices were fair.

After breakfast we talked for a little while and then my coworkers settled on hitting the local outlet mall. I didn’t have anything else better to do since the meat of the convention wasn’t due to begin until 2pm, so I tagged along. We found it easily enough as the two coworkers who had been here before knew the path to the outlet mall very well. I pulled in and parked, scanned the shops and immediately noticed the kitchen outlets, which are (I think) identical to the ones in Michigan City. We only had an hour and then one of my coworkers who knew I was fond of Under Armour pointed out that UA had a factory store in this particular outlet mall. UA is kind of like my Kryptonite, I’m quite fond of their clothing and seeing the store put a foolish grin, even for a short flash, on my face. As we walked along everyone sort of split up and went their separate ways. I joined my boss on a search for a replacement tote-bag to replace the flimsy bag provided by Sage when we registered the night before. We weren’t able to find anything for her and as we walked we met up with our other coworkers and while they went looking in a nearby shop I decided since there was only about twenty minutes left that I should at least check out the UA shop. It only took me ten minutes to pick out some things I liked and went to try them on. I did buy some Under Armour, but it was on the clearance rack, $10 off plus 20% after that so I wasn’t feeling too upset about the cost. Under Armour is mighty expensive stuff, but it’s durable and it’s one of my few vices that I get to indulge in from time to time.

Afterwards we put all our winnings in the back of the rental SUV and headed back to Kingsmill. We heard the welcome song-and-dance from Sage regarding their database software, Millennium, which powers our alumni and donor record database.

Sage laid out the Millennium roadmap for us, telling us what to expect in the future and some of us were mildly jilted that they delayed the “Rip out that damned Java!” request we lodged with them last year. Now we’ll have to wait for version 8 to roll around, we’re currently on 7.6.1 and we’re dallying with the notion of upgrading to 7.7.1 or 7.8, maybe on the outside chance, 7.8.2. This software is very competent at what it does, there have been some missteps and from what I can perceive they essentially rushed a RDBMS product into a “web enabled” paradigm by using shortcuts. In the short-term this worked great, they were able to convert their Windows only application interface with one that worked via a web-browser. On closer inspection this greatness tarnishes because you can only use IE6 or IE7 on Windows XP, not Windows 7. (Windows Vista works, but it’s abomination, so we don’t speak it’s name). The key sticking point is that the software relies in very specific and vital parts on loading the Java runtime library. In ways, they cheated. They got a product rushed to market and it worked well as long as you had all these backup-singers in place to provide the parts to make the entire production work. This would be not-an-issue if it wasn’t for the fact that in order to use this core-to-our-business-case software, we are effectively stuck using Java 1.5.11. This in and of itself isn’t harmful, but this old copy of Java is vulnerable and opens up computers to a heaping batch of security vulnerabilities, add to that damning fact that another piece of software we use, BSR’s Banner requires an updated jInitiator and JDK update which forces a machines JRE to the most updated version, breaking Millennium. So we have two products we need so that we can do our jobs and Java is the pinion of suck that we’re stuck upon. Removing Java is only the first step, as they really ought to only push their web-based product (and it’s the only thing that they can really push, so get to it!) and that product really ought to be W3C compliant. If that was the case then all my users could have the freedom to select whatever operating system they liked to interface and use the database. They could use Chrome on Ubuntu or even Safari on the Mac. The benefits of switching out Java for AJAX and Javascript are pretty compelling, even as such that by doing so they would effectively enable other non-Java OS’es to be able to login, such as iPhones, iPads, Galaxy Tabs, and Androids. Technically one of our staff could query our database on a color Nook. It’s not the particular devices that I’m in love with (despite the fact that I am quite smitten with my iPad) but rather that standards are respected, that the software follows a logical and plain design and works well, simply.

After the chat and the disenchantment discovering the delay with tearing out Java we waited around for the Welcome Bash at 5:30pm. Sage puts this welcome on whenever they have an event like this one, open bar, nibbly bits, the works. I chatted with a new Millennium client that’s coming out of Boston, MA. The school starts with a B, I’m terrible with names unless I have business cards and as dumb luck would have it, I totally forgot to bring business cards with me on my travels this week. Duh. We waited and schmoozed until about 7pm when we had to gather everyone up and head to an Italian restaurant here in Williamsburg called Donelos or something. We did more eating, more chatting, and only now did I have any time to myself. I was going to call Scott and relate to him the days events and then I looked down at my watch and felt wrong to make a call after 9pm. So, instead of a call, I thought I would write a blog entry and share this with all of you. Tomorrow we’ll have presenters and I’ll write a lot of ‘neat ideas’ that ‘I’m definitely going to get to work on’ until I actually get to work and that occupies all my time and this entire batch of ‘neat ideas’ falls by the wayside. It always seems to happen this way. When I don’t have life pushing me around I can get all creative and clever with the database, but without fail, life butts in and I’m right back where I started.

On high notes, I have discovered Whitley’s Virginia Peanuts. These are hand-picked giant peanuts in a variety of preparations. I ended up buying two little 16oz. sacks, one Honey Roasted and the other Honey Toffee. They will serve as snacks during this week when I can’t get free of my meetings and end up missing the snacks they lay out for us just outside our meeting halls. These peanuts are exceptionally good and the lady in the little shop we went into had a great sense of humor.

I’m thinking about contacting my family out here and see if they’re available Tuesday or Wednesday night, perhaps I can manage to get the rental SUV for the night so I can get down to VA Beach and then back up again, we’ll see how my coworkers feel and if my family has time.

Federal Budgets

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Watching bloggers go bonkers reporting that Social Security may be cut to balance the government’s budget has me laughing all the way to Apocalypse. What is it that people thought? Social Security is a time-shifting Ponzi Scheme that isn’t illegal because the government runs it. It gratifies the liberal in me and makes absolutely no sense economically especially when we have an upside-down-triangle shaped population as ranked by age (thanks WW2 baby boom!).

When people catch wind that an entitlement as big as Social Security or one as fundamental as Medicare is threatened everyone instantly closes their eyes and power-stuffs their head into the sand – wham wham thhhwap plork!

I tweeted a while back that it would be an interesting time when the government was faced with Social Programs vs. Military Spending. This particular versus is an insidious one, because if either side wins it’s an economic apocalypse. It’s a Catch-22 as well, since you can’t keep this kind of spending going forever, eventually China will go apeshit and demand that we take the borrowing we’re fleecing them for seriously. In many regards, USA(SSI vs. DoD) Vs. China. If we cut Social Security we’ll have outrage, panic, and most likely a spike in heart attacks. If we cut Medicare we’ll have a lot of dead elderly as medical care will become catastrophically unaffordable. If we touch military spending then we’ll harm the military-industrial complex and the massive flow of cash out of the DoD and back into the general economy will squelch and then we’ll have another economic collapse. So, if we all play a very good game of pretend, we can ignore that problem as long as none of us do any kind of simple mathematics. That is until China can’t stand the Catch-22 they are in with us and stop lending us money. They know that it’s disaster if they stop, but eventually they’ll have to, and then we’ll stop buying all that cheap chinese plastic crap and their economy will tumble as well.

This is epic level drama whore material. “May you live in interesting times!” Indeed a blessing and a curse! Afghanistan nearly broke the Soviets, and it’s going to break us. What’s the practical upshot? Massive hyperinflation as the US Treasury prints billions of worthless dollars in a last-ditch effort to keep the mighty US economy from total collapse. Those of us who are filthy debtors are going to be the only ones dancing in the streets as our debt, which is not keyed to inflation quickly pay off the numbers, and then we’ll follow the rest of you down the whirling economic toilet hole that is our collective future.

All it takes is time. In the meantime it will be interesting to see how the Federal Government responds to these ever-mounting pressures. Which will buckle first? Entitlements or Defense? Anyone care to toss the dice?

D’oro

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Right before I woke up this morning I was enjoying a rather exciting dream in the mode of spectator and this dream was about a very interesting chemical called D’oro. D’oro is a colorless, tasteless, water-like liquid that served as a kind of industrial fuel in the dreamworld I was in. One of the actors in the dream mixed a few drops of this chemical into a glass of water and handed it to a villain in the dream. I instantly knew what was going to happen as it played out before me, that D’oro, when ingested causes a person to become more and more thirsty, and as they drink more water they expand with the mass, unable to stop. Eventually the thirst wanes and the D’oro and the water combine in the body, the ignition point of the fuel drops beneath body temperature and the victim spontaneously combusts leaving a patch of muddy water-soaked ash in a little heap on the floor. The villain drank the mixture and instantly started to puff up, then he looked surprised and after a few moments there was a fantastic blaze of light and all that was left was a little patch of muddy ash on the floor.

I woke up soon afterwards and decided to write it down so I could share this with all of you. It might make a great plot point in any RPG’s if people want… 🙂

Letter to Levin

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Dear Senator Levin,

I just read on the Wall Street Journal that you and Senator McCain have made moves to strip the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” from the defense spending bill. I would be enraged, I would declare that the democrats have effectively turned their campaign promises to us inside-out and displayed the lies that they are. I would claim these things if I were really an American.

I can’t serve in the military, I can’t donate blood despite the need, and I cannot marry. I am not equal under the law and by evidence because I am robbed of my 14th Amendment rights I am easily written off, easily ignored, and issues that matter the most to people like me matter not one jot to those in the Federal Government.

On November 2nd I voted. I went to the polls and I cast my party ticket for the Democrats. The idea that people like me have to find someone to be our champion, to secure our basic rights before the law, and then to have them trample us, to use us via glittering campaign promises which are barefaced lies hurts the most. We have no party to turn to except the Democrats, despite our apparent leprosy.

The problem isn’t just with your decision to strip DADT from the military spending bill, but rather with all the democrats including our President whom I pleaded with when he was just a senator from Illinois to please run for the presidency. I would have never thought it possible that a man and party I idolized would betray us.

In the end I’m just another ignorable voice, one of millions who just fade into the woodwork and don’t really matter. When I go to vote next, I don’t know what I am going to do. Vote for someone who can’t possibly win or for someone who doesn’t really care about people like me. It’s a horrible thing. The only thing that comforts me is that nobody lives forever and with new representation perhaps someday we’ll have someone who thinks that equality is something more than just something to put on a bumper sticker.

You’ve more friends with Senator McCain than with your gay constituents.

Thanks.

Uncle Henry! It’s a Twister!

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Just endured a Tornado Warning here at work. Everyone proceeded in a calm and orderly fashion into the basement of Walwood Hall and all in all we did quite well. The only thing I could really complain about was the stairs to access the area, for older folk with bad knees it’s definitely takes some time.

Once we were down in the basement technology shined. Everyone gathered around me and my iPad. I also had water, a fire extinguisher, and my Ready.gov emergency preparedness kit in a man-sized duffle bag. Several things I noticed were a lack of timely (where minutes count) updates from the National Weather Service, The Weather Channel app being sluggish to load and not having up-to-date data, again, in a timely fashion. I could access all the network resources I needed to, which was comforting. I have to find some source on Twitter that has as-close-to-realtime weather data as possible. For the entire event the only procedural problem was doubt surrounding the all-clear signal. Custodial Services delivered a premature all-clear that was in contradiction to the warning provided by the NWS. Which to follow? Who has authority? WMU really needs a centralized “GO” and “SAFE” system, what we have with the NWS is okay, but the confusion and doubt surrounding the “SAFE” declaration is rather upsetting.

Perhaps there is a technological solution, I’ll have to investigate. If anyone has any experiences, please feel free to comment and share them here. TIA!

 

Happy Damage

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Several years ago my stepfather came to visit and helped us gut and refit the main bathroom in my home. We replaced many of the fixtures including the tub, which was a cast-iron built-in affair that weighed 300+ pounds. After ripping it out, we replaced it with a better and much more well-insulated Vikrell tub. When we installed it I made a rather bad decision when it came to the tub drain. I selected a drain that had a cantilevered plug. If you pushed it down on one side where CLOSE was embossed the drain lid would plug the drain and you could take a bath. By pressing OPEN on the opposite side you would break the seal and the drain would pop open and the water would empty from the tub.

I do not like to take sit-in-a-puddle-of-water baths, I 100% prefer simple military-style showers: In, Wet, Wash, Rinse, Dry. No fuss, no muss, no dillydallying. Scott however depends on hot baths to help him sleep and help his asthma. This tub-plug has been a definite source of irritation as of late as it’s been getting more and more difficult to operate the drain assembly. Over time I started to see this fancy drain assembly as a problem and not as a convenience. Last night Scott took another bath, and when he exited he pushed the OPEN side of the drain lid and deep down the drain lids carriage snapped off. This morning I noticed the lid was at an odd angle and I decided to investigate before my after-workout-before-work shower and the entire lid and it’s support assembly came right up and out of the drain. The drain itself was not damaged so it leaks, but you can see where the carriage snapped off. Now I have a simple tub drain hole where the lid used to be.

My initial response and my reaction to discovering this was to thank my stars that this drain assembly failed. I’ve been quietly rooting for this exact thing to happen and now that it has I can replace the overwrought cantilevered-lid bullshit with a nice, old-fashioned rubber drain stopper. In this regard I see it as a kind of natural evolution, something stupid broke and made room for what should have been there all along, something from the past, something simple and convenient and RIGHT.

So tonight after work I will go to Lowes and look into buying a 19th and 20th century drain plug. It is going to make Scott’s baths and anyone else who would like to take a bath in our house so much happier. This event has also taught me that some things are unnecessary and some things have been over-designed so they beg failure. So something that Scott initially felt bad about was actually a cause for celebration!

Inbox Zero

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Ever since my institution migrated to Web Mail Plus (I like to call it wimp for short) I’ve made it a workplace priority to never have anything stored on it that I can’t store someplace else. From the beginning, with our institutional migration to this new system I’ve been critical of it. I have no faith in either the dependability or privacy of the new system. The old system I did have a measure of faith in because my email was stored on my server in my machine room, not 10 feet from where I sit now. Now my professional email lives in Ann Arbor Michigan, in a place I have never seen and managed by people I have never met. There is a batch of paperwork that has been signed which should give me a sense of security, but again, it was one batch of strangers signing documents with another batch of strangers and a very nebulous promise that nothing upsetting would occur from this transition. As it is, I have developed a series of reflexes based on my zero-trust model that I use with strangers, especially institutional strangers. My livelihood is far too valuable to trust to the likes of my coworkers and peers. It’s nothing against them, but it’s a mix of wariness and “If you want it done right, do it yourself” mentality that so far has kept me happy and things working well in my life.

These reflexes regularly lead me to a state of geek nirvana, something called Inbox Zero. It’s a state where your inbox is totally clean, utterly empty. Nothing is malingering, loitering, and filling your mind with a fog of worry that if there are items there, you are somehow missing something or you haven’t completed something. Mostly it’s the sense that if there is something in there, I haven’t attended to it properly and that sits on my mind. It’s a kind of annoying background noise that lowers my happiness and sense of order, a fog of doubt. While this fog of doubt doesn’t really upset me or negatively impact my life, it contributes to my general sense of irritation and it’s one of those little passengers that contribute to stress breakdowns and spiraling vortexes of rage that I sometimes get trapped in. By eliminating this fog from my environment, it’s one less little niggling thing to wear me down.

My professional email gets only a few broad categories of information sent to it, that I have to attend to:

  • DBA Tasks – Highly structured task requests that usually include attached data. These almost always have a due date and a list of people to report to when the task is complete.
  • Help Desk/Office – More nebulous, mostly people asking for things or issuing trouble-tickets over email. In our office there is no single way to issue a trouble-ticket, people can walk up and verbally deliver one, they can email it in, leave voicemail, or try to ambush us as we walk through the office doing other tasks.
  • Organizational Chatter – Even more nebulous and needless are the myriad messages regarding the activities of the Trustees, Campus News, and little reminders sent out for events and/or meetings. I don’t claim they are worthless, but they are a kind of ‘hair that clogs the pipes’.
  • Vendor Spam – Generalized and unfocused bullshit from vendors we have or have had relationships with. Mostly this stuff is meaningless dreck related to things we will never need or find useful or even care about. These usually include anything sent from Dell, or HP, or the “Who’s Who” people.
  • Miscellaneous Bullshit – Very regularly I get meaningless messages from utter strangers with no content or worthless content. These are akin to email mosquitoes. They serve no real purpose, but there isn’t a reliable way to force them all into extinction. The best you can do is just swat them when they arrive.

So my strategies for handling these messages are as so:

  • If a message is worthy and important and has some sense of a due-date I forward it to my Toodledo account, which creates a task of the email with the body of the message as the meat of the task and the subject as the task title. This pushes the tasks that should originally go to toodledo in that direction. One of the side-effects of our transition was a massive retardation when it came to workflow. Our old system was great and nobody understood how to use it. The new system just doesn’t have the wits and the fact that nobody gets it is rendered meaningless from its absence.
  • If a message contains some hard nugget that I want to always retain I copy the relevant bits into an Evernote Note.
  • Everything else is bullshit. I have trained my Mac Mail.app using its Bayesian filters to separate utter bullshit from possible bullshit, so I just dump whatever mail puts in Junk right out and then toss the rest out after giving it a cursory glance.
  • If there is an item that isn’t task based, but does have a date – such as a meeting or some sort of event, I hover my mouse over the date parts and my Mail.app detects this and offers me a choice to create a new iCal Calendar Entry for that event. Talk about handy.

At the end of the day at best, or the end of the week at worst I should always be able to return to Inbox Zero. There is no reason to store items in the wimp, everything else can be sorted either into Evernote or Toodledo or the files taken out and placed in Dropbox with appropriate Finder comments attached. That all being said, I do store some things in my wimp account, mostly things that I probably should keep for documentations sake, especially if a coworker is going to wear their ass for a hat sometime in the future, it’s good to be at least a little prepared for those sorts of things. I principally store promises and protestations that something won’t ever happen again in my wimp account, and when they screw up, at least it’s handy there. Wimp glories in a 10GB quota. I use only a human-hairs worth of that quota and I have no desire to ever really make use of wimp beyond that. It’s a necessary evil, a funnel, not a bucket. I’m sure organizationally that bucks the conventions, as they wish it to be both a funnel and a bucket, but I have more faith in other buckets than what is in wimp itself.

A very old cure…

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I have an annoying skin tag on my left thigh and when I run or go caching or any other lots-of-walking type activity it always gets chafed and starts to sting. It’s about the size of two rice grains next to each other attached very loosely. A few days ago I did a 20 minute Wii Fit Free Run and the chafing got so bad I was walking funny for a few days afterwards. This skin tag has to come off.

I have a choice for removal. I could get Peroxide and Alcohol, sterilize my own snips and just shear it off and then put on a band-aid and let it heal up. I could waddle over to a dermatologist and pay $200 for him to do the same thing for me, or, well, is there an or?

Turns out, there is an “OR” to this. There is a homeopathic/old-wives-cure for moles and skin-tags, it involves a poultice of Castor Oil and Baking Soda. So at the start I mixed 1 tsp of Baking Soda and 1 tsp of Castor Oil together into a thick paste and mixed it in a little bowl. I then got a box of band-aids and I dab a little of the poultice on my skin-tag and then cover it with a band-aid. The conventional wisdom states that in two weeks the tag should be gone.

I can say that it’s been three days using the poultice and the tag is indeed shrinking. It used to be long with a narrow floppy part, that’s gone. The damn stuff actually works! It’s odorless, white from the baking soda, and by all popular accounts it won’t leave a scar or a mark, just smooth flat non-taggy skin. I’m fine with not having to use scissors and put up with all the pain, bleeding, and possibility of infection. I love how something from the 19th Century or even before that still works today. So much better, this kind of medicine. Turns out Castor Oil also fixes a huge host of skin disorders, I wonder how it’d work against Athletes Foot. I’ve got stuff for that when it flares up, but I still wonder.

Wii’ll Fit

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Ever since I returned from visiting my folks in South Carolina I’ve been using my Wii much more, and my Wii Fit program with the balance board. For the past 14 days I’ve been following a rather extensive exercise regimen:

  • Yoga: Deep Breathing, Half-Moon, Warrior, Sun Salutation, Standing Knee, Palm Tree, and Chair.
  • Strength Training: Single Leg Extension, Sideways Leg Lift, Torso Twists, Rowing Squat, Single Leg Twist, Lunge, and Jackknife.
  • Aerobics: Hula Hoop, Basic Step, Basic Run, Free Run
  • Balance: Soccer Heading, Penguin Slide, and Balance Bubble.

Mostly I’ve trimmed this list to most of the Yoga, and Strength Training as I do my workouts at 6:30am and they last me about 45 minutes until 7:30 or so when I get dressed and head to work.

There have been some noticeable changes in my body while using these programs on the Wii Fit. My overall balance has greatly improved. I no longer find myself toppling over when I’m on one foot to put on my socks, I don’t fumble about when I’m trying to put on shoes and I feel more centered in general. My general workout is to do the most pleasant Yoga poses in the morning as a warm-up, then run through the Strength Training series at least once, and then double-up on Torso Twists, Jackknives, and Rowing Squats. My goal is to lose weight and tone my abdominals and lose my love handles.

All the Wii Fit in the world will just make me sweat and feel good that I’m getting my 30-minutes-a-day exercise in that everyone says will keep me healthy. In order to really see some progress and to lose weight and BMI, I have to eat less and eat better. The quality of my food really can’t get much higher, I’m cooking 99% of the food I eat and I’m sourcing damn near everything from basic raw foods, removing processed foods where I can and such. That brings me to eating less. There are some very handy strategies I already know in order to achieve this goal, such as drinking 500ml of filtered water right before a meal, stuffing myself with green vegetation, and eating the ‘main course’ in a normal bowl or small plate.

This is way more important now that autumn has arrived, the change in the seasons brings on overeating, eating sweet and or fatty foods, and generally plumping up over the colder months to come. I’m planning on hitting the Wii Fit every day and eating smart in a bid to prevent my personal plumping, which almost always coincides with our Halloween Event, Thanksgiving, and all the eat-and-sleep that is coming.

My goal is to reach 200 pounds. I don’t know how long it will take me to get there, but I do know that’s where I want and need to be in order to avoid the traps coming for me down the road, such as prostate cancer, hypertension, and diabetes.

SmashBurger Kalamazoo – A Return

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Last Friday my friends Justin and Jeramiah asked to try SmashBurger Kalamazoo. For them it was the first time, for Scott and I it was our return. I promised that I would give SmashBurger Kalamazoo another shot around September 11th, 2010. I was a little late in getting back to the restaurant to give it another try. This was tounge-in-cheek because a beloved family member of mine sent my blog entry to the restaurant management company and they responded quickly, urging us to return and give SmashBurger Kalamazoo another shot.

Upon our return we dwelled for a brief few moments in the foyer to the entrance while our friends regarded the menu items. After we all made up our minds, we walked into the restaurant. The order process was acceptable, the person behind the counter was stumbling and trying to cope with our order but got it in successfully. In comparison to our previous visit there were some notable changes:

  • Fountain Service was at 100%
  • Restaurant was not absolutely packed.
  • Manager was not bounding like a billiard ball.
  • Servers were not wandering aimlessly asking everyone what they ordered, the numbering system is working.
  • The hamburgers were rested properly and did not fragment or run with juice.

That being said, quite an improvement. However there were some lingering problems and one I did not detect until this last visit. We were dining with my dear friend Jeramiah, who I trust completely when it comes to food preparation. He detected it before I did, and that is that the French Fries had a different taste to them. They were fried, but they carried an odd flat/dull taste along with them. Jeramiah told us that what we tasted was what happens when you deep fat fry french fries in shortening instead of a true plant oil, like Peanut. It wasn’t unpleasant, just different.

In the end we couldn’t detect any failures in SmashBurger itself on our visit, our only point of surprise was the price, again. For Scott and myself it came to $18.57. For Jeramiah and Justin it came to $21.52. I polled the table and posed the same question to them that I did the last time: Comparing SmashBurger Kalamazoo to Culvers Kalamazoo, which one would you choose and why? The answer was unanimously for Culvers, and the reasons were “better food” and “cheaper prices”. The prices for what we got were really remarkably upsetting, still.

Of course, for due diligence I must also state that Jeramiah became extremely ill the next day and had to miss work because he was very ill. The illness was most likely foodborne as it affected his digestion. I can’t pin anything on SmashBurger as none of the other of us got sick, but my trust in a restaurant is savaged when I or someone I know gets sick from eating at a place. Once bitten, never again.

That being said, we are done with SmashBurger Kalamazoo. We will never return to this restaurant and we won’t include it when we are thinking about places to go when we are hungry. The food is not very compelling for the price and the prices themselves are too high.

Entertainingly, the people who own and run SmashBurger Kalamazoo also run at least two other “Food Traps”, FireBowl Cafe and Wine Loft. While I haven’t been to FireBowl Cafe and wouldn’t comment on the quality or price, I did attend Wine Loft’s inaugural opening and I have not been back since. The food quality follows the design that we see in SmashBurger Kalamazoo, meh food for unacceptably high prices. Seeing that two out of the three properties this holding firm own are off-limits, it makes it a handy guide to figure out whatever else they own and avoid that out-of-hand. We can simply assume it’s not very good for too much money, and instead patronize other establishments that are better and worthy.