Author Archives: JustinLL

Sacramento’s Park Ultra Lounge Dances Up

The Park, where you can eat play and drink, is located near the heart of downtown Sacramento across the street from 3 Fires Lounge.  (Yes, there seems to be a little theme at this intersection of town.)  The Play piece of The Park is its Ultra Lounge.  On its way to becoming, if not already, Sacramento’s premiere nightclub.  If, and not only because, in addition to being perfectly located, it offers dance music AND a dance floor. Something other local lounges seem to have forgotten and, sadly, left out.

Let’s not sell the Lounge short, this place has a lot going on in addition to music and dancing, which are just my favorite parts.  Catering to a lot of big, flashy money, Park Ultra Lounge has gone to all extremes to ensure a classy establishment ready to please.  Seating is plush.  Lighting is decadent.  Staff is friendly.  Drinks are reasonably priced for the setting (Voss Water – $4; Jameson – $7.25; Sapphire – $7.75).  The package is worth the cover.  They feature an amazing first bar, but also offer a second and third bar (on the dance floor and patio, respectively) which are fully loaded, unlike some venues which only keep the most-sold bottles stocked.  AND, another plus, if for some reason you happen to be sitting — table service.  You’re never very far when you find yourself in want, and you don’t even have to leave your conversation.

Still, there’s more.  The Lounge sells a range of VIP packages, from reserved over-sized sofas and chairs to private rooms.  Each includes a variety of perks, usually well worth the money if you and your group are up for it.  The Lounge has plenty of security, including a group of police officers that show up later in the night to keep an eye on things.  The Lounge introduces you to a really neat hand washing experience, which has nothing to do with the bloke dispensing hand towels.  You’ll have to live it to get it.

Undoubtedly, the Lounge has a dress code, described as upscale.  It’s not as stuffy as it sounds, no business casual nonsense and you don’t have to wear a dorky, button-down, striped shirt.  I’m not a fashion kid and I managed to gain entrance, which is saying a lot if you’re familiar with my disdain for dress codes.  Although, you can imagine, if I’m willing to alter my attire, my look, myself, for a good night out, this place is worth the extra effort.

Which brings me to my final point, and the real reason you’ll find me frequenting the dance floor at Ultra Lounge.  The women are gorgeous.  Absolutely!  (Approaching Q’s in Santa Barbara, CA levels.)  It makes the dress code, the cover — the whatever other hangups you might typically have about a place like this — tolerable;  for the women.  A lot of whom show up with groups who think knowing how to dance is a requirement to getting on the dance floor.  Umm…okay.  Believe me, it’s not.

Check it out.  You won’t be disappointed.


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Sacramento's Park Ultra Lounge Dances Up

The Park, where you can eat play and drink, is located near the heart of downtown Sacramento across the street from 3 Fires Lounge.  (Yes, there seems to be a little theme at this intersection of town.)  The Play piece of The Park is its Ultra Lounge.  On its way to becoming, if not already, Sacramento’s premiere nightclub.  If, and not only because, in addition to being perfectly located, it offers dance music AND a dance floor. Something other local lounges seem to have forgotten and, sadly, left out.

Let’s not sell the Lounge short, this place has a lot going on in addition to music and dancing, which are just my favorite parts.  Catering to a lot of big, flashy money, Park Ultra Lounge has gone to all extremes to ensure a classy establishment ready to please.  Seating is plush.  Lighting is decadent.  Staff is friendly.  Drinks are reasonably priced for the setting (Voss Water – $4; Jameson – $7.25; Sapphire – $7.75).  The package is worth the cover.  They feature an amazing first bar, but also offer a second and third bar (on the dance floor and patio, respectively) which are fully loaded, unlike some venues which only keep the most-sold bottles stocked.  AND, another plus, if for some reason you happen to be sitting — table service.  You’re never very far when you find yourself in want, and you don’t even have to leave your conversation.

Still, there’s more.  The Lounge sells a range of VIP packages, from reserved over-sized sofas and chairs to private rooms.  Each includes a variety of perks, usually well worth the money if you and your group are up for it.  The Lounge has plenty of security, including a group of police officers that show up later in the night to keep an eye on things.  The Lounge introduces you to a really neat hand washing experience, which has nothing to do with the bloke dispensing hand towels.  You’ll have to live it to get it.

Undoubtedly, the Lounge has a dress code, described as upscale.  It’s not as stuffy as it sounds, no business casual nonsense and you don’t have to wear a dorky, button-down, striped shirt.  I’m not a fashion kid and I managed to gain entrance, which is saying a lot if you’re familiar with my disdain for dress codes.  Although, you can imagine, if I’m willing to alter my attire, my look, myself, for a good night out, this place is worth the extra effort.

Which brings me to my final point, and the real reason you’ll find me frequenting the dance floor at Ultra Lounge.  The women are gorgeous.  Absolutely!  (Approaching Q’s in Santa Barbara, CA levels.)  It makes the dress code, the cover — the whatever other hangups you might typically have about a place like this — tolerable;  for the women.  A lot of whom show up with groups who think knowing how to dance is a requirement to getting on the dance floor.  Umm…okay.  Believe me, it’s not.

Check it out.  You won’t be disappointed.


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CRC Foreclosure Crisis Documentary

The California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC) sent an email earlier this week saying they’d updated and re-released a documentary they had on file.  Here’s a bit of what CRC had to say about the video titled Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money: How Greedy Corporations Destroy the American Dream

[The documentary] shows the crisis affects everyone. Mo’ Money tells the story of borrowers who were lied to and ignored by their mortgage loan servicers, and the people who are working to keep them in their homes. It also reveals how this disaster could have been avoided if regulators and government officials did not ignore predatory lending practices.

How has the foreclosure crisis affected you?  Have you had to deal with a difficult lender, or are you taking advantage of declining house prices?

Journey To Electronic Mailing List

For quite some time I’ve been looking for another/better way to maintain the list of folks I write to regularly on a group mail basis.  Then a few weeks ago that guy Josh said something in an email that really got me moving on the idea, because I needed a better way for the recipients to control whether or not they were part of the emailing nonsense.  So I set out on my path to investigate Dada Mail , Mailman , and PHPList .  That  same week, Jason Calacanis says he’s no longer going to blog, but he’s going to maintain an email list.  So, I signed up for his emails and noticed he was using Mailman.  This was a great place to start, but I wasn’t ready to commit.  Figured I should give a few of them a trial-run before committing to one specific list-serving software.  So that’s what I did.

I spent a few nights going back and forth between the few that seemed to be the most popular on the scene, and were also free to use.  Those being Dada Mail, Mailman, and PHPList.  PHPList did not last very long.  While it was relatively easy to install through my web hosts cPanel, it was not the most intuitive to maintain.  (I used four of my own email accounts to test each software.)  PHPList did have the coolest-looking logo, but that wasn’t a big enough selling point.

From there it was almost a tossup between Dada Mail and Mailman.  These two essentially accomplish the same tasks, and do so pretty well, so it comes down to just a few quirks.  (Mine or the software’s, I don’t know.)  I must have switched my mind three or four times after I’d thought for sure I’d settled on one or the other.  Ultimately, what irked me about Mailman was the difficulty in removing messages from the archive.  There is no web interface, that I could find, for doing what seems like should be a relatively simple enough task for a high-level piece of software.  Dada Mail had no problems with this task from its web panel.  However, the way that I was intending to use Dada Mail required a separate Perl script to run as a cron job that accessed a POP3 mail account.  I eventually decided this was a bad idea, as it was cubersome and slowed things down just a bit too much.

It could have gone either way, but I eventually loaded and launched with Mailman.  My first list post scheduled for August 1st.  And let’s be honest, if it’s good enough for Calacanis, it’s got to be good enough for everyone else, right?

Caribou Wilderness Camping/Backpacking

Well, we made it!  As I mentioned back in mid-June, Thompology and I made it out through the Caribou Wilderness.  (Our route is highlighted in the picture.)  Accompanied by my dad and Thompology’s cousin Jesse, we set out for several days of good times, and let me say — mission accomplished.

Just a few of the details:  We established base camp at Echo Lake, which is not in the Wilderness area (lower right of photo.)  We started the trail at the North end near Cone Lake, an elevation of 6,739 feet.  We made our way south, stopping to camp for a night on the West side of Long lake, where we set up camp, took a dip, and were visited by an unruly attack deer.  (We made it out alive.)  The next morning, we took off and made our way to Hay Meadow on the South end of the trail, an elevation of 6483 feet.

Overall, the trail is roughly twelve miles if you don’t wander off the trail, get turned around, and start off in a wrong direction, which we did on several occastions.  (We like to explore.)  The total elevation change is less than 700 feet, so it’s a mild walk.  Not too technical, and easy on the lungs and legs.  The path is very well marked, but for some reason we still found a need to consult the map at least seventeen times in the six hours it took us to make it from one end to the other.

Upon our return to base camp, the resident Ranger found us and said the Cypress Lake trail was the one to check out next time we made the trip.  “Some of the most gorgeous country.”  Perhaps we will check it out.  As for now, it’s time to settle back into the working world of daily life.  Maybe let the bug bites heal, as well as the sunburn, and get ready for the next adventure.  I think it rhymes with Portland.

Susie Burger — Ham, Not Burger

If you find yourself hankering for a good burger, and you’re in the midtown area near 29th and P streets, take this friendly advice from me and Thompology:  Do not eat at Susie Burger.  The food is overpriced, undersized, and lacking necessary burger flavors.  See how that doesn’t work.  One thing they do well, though, is make you chuckle.  Our meals came with sliced pickles in a baggie that included some mini carrots.  I put the pickles on my burger, but I could not figure out what to do with the carrots.  Thompology ate his carrots separately from his burger, but noted that they tasted like pickles.  If I’d have known that, I would have put them on my burger as well (I like carrots,) but he didn’t tell me till I was done eating.  (His meal came much later than mine because he deviated from the standard menu item — he wanted it done his way.)

The layout is exploits a poor design inside and out.  Not that layout has anything to do with food quality, but it was bothersome and distracting.  The ordering line cuts across the finishing line, which impedes access to the hamburger condiments, ultimately delaying the eating process and resulting in mild irritation to the mind and stomach.  This can probably be fixed.  But even a savvy, efficient layout with super cool decor will make up for bland, expensive food.

I’m not a Susie Burger fan, and I do not suggest eating here.  There are plenty of other burger joints around the Sacramento midtown grid, so save your money and eat somewhere else.  You can thank me later.

Susie Burger is owned locally by the Haines Brothers, who own the Riverside Club and Bistro 33.  I like those places.  But here we have the brothers attempting to target a new audience.  Either they’ve clearly missed it, or clearly it dones not include me, and I’m a hamburger lover.


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Socialbrowse – Twitter For Firefox?

I’m a huge fan of using humans over computers and algorithms to filter search results.  Sure, information retrieval (IR) has come a long way, but it’s still missing something and the search folk know it.  Precisely why Google is attempting to incorporate a digg-like rating system in its search results .  (Rumor has it that Google is offering up to $200MM to acquire digg .)  And Google’s latest rival Mahalo, human powered search, is hear to help. Humans are still better interpreters than computers.  No Surprise.

Anyhow, the point being Socialbrowse, a Firefox addon , does just what you’d expect it to do if you can read the name — browse socially.  (Think StumbleUpon and del.icio.us, but more intrusive.)  Socialbrowse is similar to Twitter in that you select whose browses you want to follow.  It’s public information when someone tags a page into one of a variety of categories.  A notice pops up in the lower right of your browser every time a new page is tagged by someone you’re following.  (This is where it can get annoyingly distracting, so don’t install the addon to a work machine.)  You can click through to the page, or ignore it.  I typically ignore all the popups and use the sidebar option when I’m ready to see what folks have recently enjoyed.

The idea here is to let other people surf the web and filter through the trash.  You don’t have time for that.  And if you don’t like the pages someone is suggesting, unfollow him.  It’s as easy as that.  I’ll admit that I’m not the greatest at tagging pages  (last one was July 15th).  For some reason, knowing that people are going to know I approved the page makes me far more selective of the pages I’m willing to suggest.

Socialbrowse is beta and requires an invite code.  (I have a few left if any of you Firefox users are interested in giving it a try.)  They are still in the process of creating a logo for their product, which is why I’m missing a graphic for this post.  But you can win $125 by entering the create new Socialbrowse logo contest. If you’re a regular web surfer then this is an addon you’ll enjoy.  Get it early, get it often.  Socialbrowse!

New Hotel Bar — 3 Fires Lounge

Bar at Marriotts Residence Inn on 15th & L

Aside from a sandwich board sign, there isn’t much going on to let you know this place exists inside the Residence Inn, which would lead one to believe this bar is meant only for hotel guests, except that it’s not.  It’s meant for all the passers-by to enjoy.  Hence the sign on the sidewalk.

Positioning themselves nicely on the corner of 15th & L, they’re walking distance from the after-hours Capitol workers, making this is a decent place to visit at the just-after-five-o’clock hour.  Stop on in for a little bit of that Happy Hour loving, we all love to have make us Happy.  It’s the usual discounted beer, wine, and commonly made mixed-drinks you’d find at any Happy Hour setting, but what sets 3 Fires Lounge apart from the rest is its Happy Hour menu; small plates going for three to five dollars, offering a variety of salty treats to tantalize your taste buds.  I’m a fan of the Cilantro Ceasar Salad, which is regularly priced at $8 but goes for $5 during Happy Hour.  Unfortunately, my favorite small plate, the Frizzled Squash Blossoms (loaded with cheese and chorizo then deep fried), did not make it to the Happy Hour party, but still well worth the time if you’re willing to pay full price.

It’s a two-sided bar with one side facing the hotel lobby, so sitting on the west side is a good idea and makes it easy to forget you’re in a hotel.  The ambiance and decor are what you would expect in a lounge that sells a nine dollar Jameson.  Quiet atmosphere, comfortable sofa-chairs, plenty of low lighting, four televisions (which seem to host a little too much Larry King Live), local art work for 2nd Saturday Art Walk participartory actions, free coffee, and a wonderful serving staff.  The bartenders are friendly and patient, which is an absolute must when encountering the loudness that is our laughter and commentary while seated at the bench reviewing the surroundings.

Definitely consider 3 Fires Lounge for a few snacks before making your way East to enjoy the rest of your night — It’s a nice place to meet your friends after work.


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I Am My Niche

This says more than it means just as much as it confuses the situation all together, so let me clarify, or maybe muddle it a bit more, whichever helps most, hopefully.  And it goes something like this:

There’s a lot of talk, or advice, going around about covering the topics with which you’re familiar but also that aren’t heavily covered already.  (A niche.)  So?  Ta-da!  Here I am, right?  I mean, there’s some sense to it.  Of course I’m going to know all about me, and understand why it is the factors that push me to and fro cause me to behave and respond the ways I do.  It just goes without saying, and it’s not as crazy as it sounds.  Not to mention, I’m pretty certain no one else is writing about me, and if someone is then I’d like to know about it.

Here is where it takes a turn for the better, though.  I’m not meaning to write about me as I would in diary form.  No, I have an email blog for that particular activity.  This here niche I’m intending to cover is all the goodness that comes about as a result of the stuff that happens to me which is written about in the email blog.  Simplified — A bunch of cryptic gibberish about the goings-on that are my life is what I write in emails to people I call at home; and whatever I can learn from those happenings, or whatever ideas pop into this oddly shaped head of mine, is what I aim to pen in this here space.

Whether you read me here, there, everywhere, or no where (which doesn’t work too well,) know that I’m always writing something somewhere for, or to, someone.  Today, here and now, it’s this and it’s for you.

Thanks for reading.

It’s Being Done Differently Now

It was time.  I had to do it.  I changed the site layout, or “theme” as it is referred to in the loop.  I’m announcing this obvious fact for the folks in the feed-readers; they can’t see a layout change.  For the most part, at least.

Anyhow, like I was saying.  It was time.  The previous layout was too dark and difficult to read (look at.)  I’m not a fan of sites that use light-colored text on dark backgrounds.  It doesn’t make any sense to me.  Don’t get me wrong, I like the _look_ of it, but it does not read well.  If you’re planning to have anyone read your stuff, it needs to be easy on the eyes.  I don’t want to get into a long UI discussion (although, maybe I should), but trust me when I say that this new layout is much better.

I’m not sure if the spark for change came from a talk I had with a fellow blogger, or a conversation I had with a colleague about her business’s web site.  Probably it was a combination of the two and, either way, it sent me out tinkering with all sorts of pre-developed WordPress themes.  (An added bonus to using WordPress is the many site layouts that are freely available for personal use.)  After several hours of working with Gimp and creating my own CSS from scratch, I decided it was a better idea, and also much quicker, to mash together a bunch of already existing lines of code.  (Why re-invent the wheel, just make it more round.  What?  I mean make it roll farther.)

This was only half my problem.  I spent a bit of time this evening, searching for a reason as to why my PHP was not working with WordPress 2.6, which I had hesitantly upgraded the site to late Monday evening after trying it on another site I host.  2.6 was working great everywhere I used it, with all my plugins in tact and new features working flawlessly.  But then I loaded up my new layout, which, silly me, I was testing locally on a linux box running WordPress 2.5.  (Imagine that!  It was working in one set of conditions, but not another.)  “Warning!”  “Error!”  “the function() requires a string at line 18.”  Oh my.

What I’m getting at, is that there are going to be some kinks for a few minutes, and I’m doing my best to work those out of the mix.  So, if you would be kind enough, bear with me a minute or two, and, if you notice any errors, please draw them to my attention so I can remedy the situation.  I’m just getting back into the old smell of PHP and, honestly, I was never a CSS fan.  However, it’s proving to make a whole lot of sense now that I’ve plopped myself in the world of web site development. (Is it still a client if you do the work for free?)

I’ll leave you with it so I can get back to it.  My next goal is to clean up the tags and categories.  Both of these are useful tools when used correctly, but we’ll have to let that sit a moment.