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Trevin Chow

Blog has moved to: http://trevinchow.com

Coupage Restaurant - Worst customer service experience ever

I alluded to it previously blogging about my 30th birthday, but recent events brought this to the forefront of my mind again.  I was so upset about the events that transpired on my birthday that I decided to write a review on Yelp:

I had dinner at Coupage last Saturday for my 30th birthday and was looking forward to finally eating here given all the great things I’ve heard and read about the place.  I had a reservation for 14 people.

The food was quite good and everyone enjoyed it. The restaurant was a bit on the small side and the tables were a bit close together for my liking.  I think the proximity of tables is great if you have a party of 4 or less, since the conversation will naturally be quieter. However with a party as large as ours, or actually any party greater than 8, it might get uncomfortable given how close the other tables might be.  I couldn’t help but feel that everyone in the restaurant could hear every word of every conversation.

Following the meal, we asked for the bill from our server which included an 18% gratuity.. He was an absolute dream all night and very courteous.  However, when it came to the bill, we were told they could not take more than 2 credit cards.  Given our party size, it’s unrealistic to expect everyone except 2 people to have that much cash in hand, or us to piggyback tabs on top of only 2 credit cards

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Trevin turns 30!

My 30th birthday weekend was kicked off formally with tandem sky dive in Snohomish, WA with Chaitanya and Todd.  It’s the 3rd consecutive year that I’ve done this for my birthday and, as always,  it was an unforgettable experience.  Chaitanya had been before near Mt. Ranier, but this was Todd’s first time. So not only did I get to do my annual “scare the crap out of myself by jumping out of a plane”, but I got to help Todd lose his sky diving virginity. 

me_skydive The ants go parachuting 2 by 2, hurrah, hurrah... II

Wordle

6 or 7 people have sent me a link to Wordle in the last couple of days, so I finally decided to check it out.  The site is simple, and pretty cool in how is visualizes text.  Basically you submit it a bunch of text and it creates a visual representation of it, using the words itself with the size of each word being proportional to its occurrence.  I thought it’d be neat to create some “Wordles” based on some of my most popular blog po

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Hot Summer Days Fashion Show is done!

Tonight I wrapped up a photo shoot for the Hot Summer Days Fashion show in Kirkland at the Lake Street Nightclub sponsored by
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What to do if your mail is stolen

Over the last two days I’ve been dealing with the issue and consequences of having my mail stolen.  What  a great way to kick off my weekend :(

I came home really late Friday evening and discovered that 2 days worth of mail was stolen.  It was impossible to know everything that was possibly in my mailbox, but I do know for certain that it contained at least one credit card statement, a bank statement and a credit cart statement.

I was fearful of having fraud or identity theft committed against me, so I did some quick research to find out what exactly I should do in this situation.  Here’s the info I have gathered and figured it was useful to share it with others:

  1. Call your bank and have a “watch” put on your account. All major banks and credit unions will have this capability and most will also have the added protection of adding a supplementary password added that must be given for an
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Cool Zune scenario

I was listening to the DL.tv podcast on my Zune in my car on my way back from work today and got to the final 5

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Going all digital with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S300

I’ve been on a quest the last 6-8 months of trying to get rid of all my hard copy paperwork that I keep at home.  I had a massive filing cabinet with paperwork that included:

  • Tax filings from previous years
  • Receipts and paperwork for upcoming tax year
  • receipts
  • immigration
  • mortgage
  • car maintenance records
The list just goes on and on. It was so easy to have a filing cabinet and just throw things in there and, the next thing I knew it, I had years worth of paperwork accumulated.  Some of it was important to have the originals, some not, and most of it useless.  So I decided I wanted to go all digital with my paperwork, to not only reduce physical clutter, but also make it easier to find specific documents. I had visions of all my paperwork scanned, OCR’d and tagged so I could do a search in Vista for a particular and all the pertinent documents would be shown.

So I decided that I would go through nearly 10 years of paperwork, throw away what was irrelevant, and sort the remaining into 2 buckets: what needed to be kept in original hardcopy and what could be scanned.

I did this sorting process over a 4 day period and the net result was 3 full garbage bags of papers that I brought for professional shredding and disposal.  The rest of the documents for keep and scan was very, very small which wasn’t surprising.

Now I had to move onto the task of going digital with my paperwork life. In order to achieve this, I needed the following things:

  1. A folder structure and file naming convention that would make sense without looking at the document contents or tags.
  2. A scanner that made it easy to scan multiple sheets, double-sided in a single pass and gave me some sort of automation to easily get to a PDF
  3. Relia
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Sysinternals Live Tools available 24/7


Great news from Greg about those nifty Sysinternals tools that I’ve been using for years:


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TechCrunch launches Elevator Pitches

TechCrunch recently launched Elevator Pitches, which is a sub-site featuring 60 second video clips of entrepeneurs pitching their startup idea.   Additionally, viewers can vote on ideas and even leave comments.  Utter genius! 

I’ve gone through about a half dozen videos so far and here are my initial thoughts:

  1. If you can’t describe your business model and value in 60 seconds, then you’ve got real problems. </l
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