Graeme Noseworthy, the Marketing Director for Digital Media at IBM Netezza & Big Data Solutions contacted me to help develop a site that acted as a gateway for potential clients so they weren’t getting blasted with “buy, buy, buy” messages while trying to do research on what Netezza/IBM could offer them for Big Data Solutions. After numerous brainstorming sessions and meetings Analyzing Media was born. It is a WordPress Theme developed by WooThemes and then edited by myself to suit the clients needs.

You can view the site here: http://analyzingmedia.com

Sympathy, the guild I am a part of needed a better look instead of the standard phpbb3 skin. From brainstorming to completion this project took about a week. This is an extensive hack of an existing phpbb3 theme. Almost all elements have been changed to properly reflect the style we were going for.

Update: I spoke at length with Ed Morabito the owner of Cuban Revolution yesterday. I was so happy to hear that he has sooo much passion for the restaurants and that he was stunned to hear about my experience. He owned the mistakes instead of trying to put them off on someone else. In turn he gained my respect as a restaurant owner & human being. We all make mistakes but it takes a better person to stand up and say I’m sorry and I’ll do everything I can to make sure it won’t ever happen again. Cuban Revolution has a customer for life in me and an advocate on their side with everything they’re trying to accomplish. While we did discuss that our conversation should have happened the day of my visit I did acknowledge that I was happy we ended up chatting and I just wasn’t pushed under the carpet. Moving forward I’m confident there will be some changes made to make sure Cuban Revolution remains a great place to go eat and have a great meal.

Ever have that one restaurant you keep going to in the hopes it gets better? That’s what Cuban Revolution on Aborn Street in Providence is for me. This place is my unicorn. Seriously. I’ve never been able to go there and be happy with everything I ordered. There is always one or two things that have been screwed up. I’m an old school Cuban Rev patron, way back in the day they used to be in this hole in the wall in Providence where you were literally sitting on each other eating your meal. The one factor was it was always good so I didn’t mind sitting shoulder to shoulder. When they moved to Aborn Street the new venue was larger and impressive. But it seems like they forgot how to cook during the three block move.

Everything seems processed and not homemade anymore. It just doesn’t have the flair or seasoning that it used to. I went with a friend yesterday (we keep trying every other month or so) and we were both jonesing for the Ham Croquettes. Now let me tell you when these things are done correctly they are phenomenal and we’ll normally end up ordering a second order. Much to our chagrin they were all out. All out at 1:30 in the afternoon! What!? Come to find out they were out of Picadillo as well. Cuban Rev is a Pepsi place so we ordered two Mountain Dews and they were out of that as well. Needless to say they weren’t starting the day off on the right foot. We proceeded to get an order of the Maduros which as always were spot on. Nicely pan fried and sweet. Just the way we like them. We also got an order of the onion rings which without the remoulade that they’re served with would have been bland and well under seasoned.

I ordered the fish sandwich which was a drastic departure from my usual worlds best chicken sandwich. I was told by the waitress that it was amazing and really popular. She stumbled when describing it so I knew right then and there she was blowing smoke up my ass. I went for it anyways and wish I hadn’t. It came in two pieces which looked like it had been sliced after frying to see if it was done in the middle and then refried because there was some seriously burnt/fried/overdone fish in the middle of my sandwich. The garlic aioli that was served with it had a weird film on the top of it and tasted like I just ate an entire clove of raw garlic. Horrendous. My friend ordered the World’s Best Cuban Sandwich which arrived with bread that wasn’t even toasted/grilled like it always does. The sandwich was way under seasoned and I thought he was going to use an entire salt and pepper shaker to bring it up to snuff. We both didn’t eat much of our lunch and expressed our displeasure to the waitress when she came back to collect the, still full plates. We even left the sweet potato fries as they looked and tasted like cigarette butts. Burnt is burnt friends. Don’t serve it.

One of the saving graces for me would be the Tres Leche cake that they do. Often times it’s perfect and wonderful and makes me a happy camper. When they have it. 7 times out of 10 when we go they don’t have it. Yesterday they had it so I ordered a slice with one spoon. The waitress brings the cake with two spoons. Listening skills are important when working in the restaurant industry and clearly she didn’t have them. The cake was good enough to eat but not good enough to remember like it usually is. Again, disappointment.

During the meal I tweeted @cubanrevolution and let them know that the restaurant was out of a bunch of things. No sooner do we leave and we get a reply back saying everything is restocked. I don’t know how because we never saw a truck pull up or anything. There’s only one road for the trucks to pull down and we would have seen it. Maybe the stuff was thawing out? If so shame on you for using frozen stuff and not fresh ingredients. I was also told I’d be hearing from a manager. It’s been 24 hours and I haven’t heard a thing from anyone. I’d hate to take CR off my list of restaurants to eat at in Providence but it sure does look like I might have to.

These are my favorite kind of chats. I was sitting down with them, not standing looking down at them. It was comfortable and held quite a conversational type atmosphere. I think this type of talk is the easiest to have the BIGGEST impact in. With a small group hanging on your every word and throwing back questions to something you might just have said. It’s a great way to get the juices flowing and the gears in the head turning. I spent the entire ride home thinking about that talk and what I can do better and how I should go about acting on ideas that are now wildly spinning about my head. I’m going to follow my own advice that I gave to the students: “Jump in, get your hands dirty, if it doesn’t work pivot.” I’ve got a couple ideas that I’ve had in my head for the past couple of years that I’m going to launch and see if they work. You never know unless you take that risk. Hopefully if I go back and talk to these students again I can tell them that the last time I was here they helped me launch an idea that became super successful or perhaps it flopped but here’s why it did. Learning from failure is nearly as important if not more important than learning from success.

Hopefully some of the students will reach out and ask some more questions that they might not have been able to ask and we’ll start a whole new conversation and spawn some more great ideas. Only time will tell.

It was a great day and I’m smiling ear to ear.

We could all learn a thing or two from Carlos Segura (original 37signals co-founder, principal of Segura, the man behind 5inch and T.26, and one of century’s top 100 designers). This weekend we shared a good laugh over his new rate card… Gotta love this:

• $150/hr Standard Rate
• $200/hr if you want it NOW
• $250/hr if you want to watch over my shoulder while I work
• $300/hr if you want to help
• $400/hr if you worked on it first

So true, isn’t it?

From: 37 Signals Blog 06/14/2004: link

Absolute genius if you ask me.