Misclassified Restaurants in Search Engines

We don't go out to dinner all that often and when we do, we visit the same places. When we want to look for some place new, we do online searches or use sites like Yelp! Unfortunately, it seems that the results I get are not all that helpful. My wife asked me what kind of food I'd like for our anniversary dinner next week and I said Cuban food. I did a search on Google and came up with:

While I'd like to think that this is a fluke, I tried the search again today and got the same result. I'm not sure why I have so many problems looking for restaurants. Maybe all the tools out there are lacking complete, up to date, and honest information. Maybe that's a new business, but I'm not sure how to promote it to consumers that the data is better than everything else.

Proofreading Mass Email

Last week I changed my AT&T account to be a 900 minute plan. As part of the change, AT&T sent email confirming it. The automatic email, however, was not proofread. The bullet points should have been alphabetical (in English), numerical, or simply bullets. AT&T sent the email with the bullets being Hebrew letters.

Also, the link in the email goes to a server that doesn't exist.

Too many ways to contact people

When I was in college, I thought it was cool to have multiple email addresses; at a time when most people didn't have 1 address, I had at least two, so I put them in my email signature, along with my website and phone number.

These days, people have Facebook pages, LinkedIn page, Twitter address, blog, Flicker account, Google+, Skype, Email, etc. Up until today, I had never seen anyone list all these "contact" methods. Is it really necessary for anyone to list these? These days, I think if someone wants to contact you, they can find you without you explicitly telling them.

I use a work email address, a personal email address, and this blog. I'm a pretty easy person to find (it doesn't hurt that I have my own domain and my last unique isn't all that common).

Revisiting Rollover Minutes

When I first signed up for AT&T, I wrote that rollover minutes were pretty much a joke. I kept racking up rollover minutes and never used them until last month. I use my cell phone for work and last month I had to be in a ton of conference calls and managed to use up basically all of my rollover minutes! With my anytime minutes, rollover minutes, and then putting the final calls of the month on Ooma, I was on the phone for something like 2200 minutes. That is basically a complete work week on the phone!

The rollover minutes saved me from upgrading my plan for 1 month; as the conference calls are probably going to continue, my 450 minute plan just isn't going to cut it any more. So while I initially thought it was a gimmick, it ended up having some value to me. Now that I'm on a 900 minute plan with A-List (which I found out is being discontinued and if I switch to a family plan, I may lose it), I'm going to start accumulating rollover minutes again! For those that don't know, A-List is 5 (or 10 for family plans) numbers that you call frequently and don't use your minutes. I put the conference call numbers on my A-List, so my usage will drop to virtually nothing again.