Are you a fan of Hot Chocolate?
I admit, I am. Love the stuff. In the winter I can’t get enough of it, around the holidays we actually went and checked out a bunch of 5th Avenue Store windows with a thermos full of hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps. As far as I am concerned there are few things better to warm you up on a cold day then sipping on hot chocolate (hot apple cider is up there, as are some teas… Coffee just doesn’t do it for me).
Anyway, City Bakery has declared February the month of their Hot Chocolate Festival. Every day in February City Bakery will be featuring a different type of Hot Chocolate. Starting tomorrow head over to City Bakery to help celebrate February as Hot Chocolate Festival Month.
This by far represents the most work I have done for a single post.
Before I bore you with the details of what I did I will give you the actual post:
We are all familiar with big brand logos, for the most part we are aware that there is some mass-marketing machine behind them that has conducted massive amount of research and focus groups to get just the right shade of blue to use for the new at&t logo. Now what is interesting is the design work that goes into logos we are all familiar with that are not associated with major brands and how they were developed.
This week there has been the story going around of the Biohazard symbol. Apparently it was developed in the 1960s and it was developed by the folks at Dow Chemical for use by everyone. And yes, it turns out there were focus groups used to create it along with some other guidelines and the color was chosen for visibility (that would be Blaze Orange).
Okay, that was the post I was going to write. Now the work I did to get to this point:
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Have you ever wished that you could look up a whole bunch of reviews for a restaurant at one location? Well, now you can. Urbanspoon acts as a Meta-Review site for restaurants, collecting reviews from various sites like New York Magazine, the New York Times, Time Out New York, New York Sun, CitySearch, even Michelin. Plus bloggers can even link reviews from their blogs to the site (as we are working to do now with our restaurant reviews).
Of course there is also the requisite spot for user reviews as well. Currently UrbanSpoon is available for most US cities and, of course, the more you participate in the site, the more definitive it becomes and the more useful as a tool. What is clearly missing are the Zagat’s reviews.
* Remember that bank account you had when you were a kid? You are probably wondering now ‘whatever happened to that?’ Well, with any luck it was a savings account and the bank has been acquired by three or four other banks over the years and it is still sitting there making money.
The real question is how to find that money. May I suggest MissingMoney? MissingMoney is a website that works in most of the fifty states, simply type in your name, hit enter and it searches for all unclaimed finds in your name or in a name similar to your name (like M. Cipriano instead of Matt Cipriano).
Pretty nifty (until you make your claim on the funds and discover that you are owed less then the price of a postage stamp) and could be worth checking out. And if you all of a sudden discover that you have millions in an account that you had forgotten about remember who told you about the site I am totally willing to accept gifts, the more generous, the more willing I am to accept them.
* I specifically chose the dancing dollar because I knew Josh would be bothered by it
Oh my lord, this will change my life.
What do you do when you find something that you want to read online but you don’t have time? Bookmark it and hope you’ll come back later?
Create a note on paper or in a word document?
Leave that tab open on your browser even though it will clog up your screen?
Print out the article?
Now you can just click “Read Later” using http://www.instapaper.com and find the article later at the site waiting for you. Awesome!
The staff of American Madness would like to thank the 