I clearly recall walking into The Wit hotel in downtown Chicago sometime late in July, 2010. I wasn't bee-lining it for the elevator to head up to Roof to spend $14 on a cocktail in the open air. No, I was about to eat and drink gratis at the newly-opened Phoenix Lounge and the adjacent Italian restaurant, Cibo Matto. I had recently become a part of a invite-only group who was throwing a shindig as they do about once a month: the Yelp Elite.
For those unfamiliar with the cognoscenti of amateur online reviews, the Yelp Elite are those who produce reviews in bulk. I was invited to become YE after writing some forty reviews, mostly old haunts from college and high school with which I was intimately familiar. I had no idea what to expect of the group that tends to flaunt their status; some even tell business owners that they are YE. There are more criticisms directed at Yelp, including aggressive sales tactics and a black-box method for determining which reviews show up. For anyone using Yelp, this additional fact does tend to put a stigma on the ratings, and these high-level conspiracy complaints do not even begin to scratch the surface of how any ignorant crank can write a review.
Yet, I continue to use Yelp. Despite all of the obvious reasons why one shouldn't pay attention to the ratings on Yelp, it is still one of my main sources for finding what is in an area. Regardless of how places are rated, in large metropolitan areas they appear on Yelp in the correct category. Hence, searching for "restaurants (near) the Loop, Chicago" turns up valid results. Most importantly, those results are then easily parsed by cost, the cuisine, specific location, whether or not they're open, and many more. Finally, you can filter by "highest rated", which is where you need to start adding a grain of salt.
First and foremost, the rating a place receives is not just an average of all the available scores. This is partially where the "black box" complaints come in, as some reviews are excluded entirely or removed. As far as I can tell, their algorithm tends to put higher weight on people with more reviews, leading to the assumption that quantity leads to better quality. I'll go out on a limb and say that some simple statistical inference probably shows that people with lots of reviews tend to have ratings that hew closer to the long-term average. I believe the "black box" conditions on a user's number of reviews overall and number of reviews for similar establishments, which is why the Yelp Elite are important.
So, while I'm not a (serious) aspiring Sam Sifton, Phil Vettel, Jeff Ruby or Penny Pollack I still do write Yelp reviews. I do it partially because I like seeing my own face on a Yelp page when their algorithms choose my review as the "top review". I do it partially because I'm a strong believer that my opinion is more informed than the vast number of aspiring reviewers. I do it partially because if I don't write a review, I know that someone else will. I do it just because I like to write, and because it's a good excuse to try something new. I've also sold out a bit; I do it so that I'll be invited back as Yelp Elite.
When I do write reviews I follow some simple guidelines. If I don't feel like I can give a detailed overview, I don't give the review. I don't like to review based on a single visit, but in most cases I do. I never write a review based solely on a single dish, I always try everything on the table and keep an eye on other tables nearby. The "star rating" is relative to other restaurants in the same category, not restaurants as a whole. People on Yelp search for "Italian places in Lakeview", so I rate relative to those categories. With these simple guidelines I produce some reviews that I'm proud of, and some that I'm not. Judge yourself at my Yelp profile. The day that I can't re-read my own reviews is the day that I stop writing them.
Whether you believe Zagat, the mysterious, highfalutin Michelin reviewers, the populist Yelp or your favorite publication's dining critic, the final judge is always you. Find something that gets you good results and stick with it.
September 24, 2011
August 31, 2011
10935 miles
Writing consistently on this blog has not been my strong suit since the desire stirred within. As such, I've chosen the next topic as something less along the lines of something I hope would be useful to others and something that I am just curious about myself: my running stats over the last decade.
I've been tracking my mileage daily since the end of my junior season of Track & Field. I was recovering from a femoral stress fracture, and needed to pay attention to the patterns of mileage that I was allowing myself to run. I had been training 6 days a week on the elliptical for four months, and was getting truly sick of spinning in place in a cage inside a high school gymnasium. From before that time, I have my aggregate mileage as listed in my summer running logs and on the Palatine Cross Country website, and a rough, low-ball estimation of my mileage from my 5-7 days a week running on the 1/10 mile track at the local YMCA through 8th grade and freshman year.
The statistics that I track on my runs: total days run over some time span, miles per run, miles per day, miles per week and, my favorite measuring tool as far as distance goes, the 4 week moving average. I am a firm believer that the 4 week moving average is the best indicator of overall mileage. It allows for a better way to judge increasing mileage relative to total intensity, and at least for me mollifies the mental anguish of missing a day of running (it only harms the 4-week total by 1/4 the mileage!). Even if you are a die-hard user of the weekly mileage total, I highly encourage you to incorporate some sort of a running average into tracking your progress.
Without further ado, the numbers...
Prior to May 2004: before the femoral stress fracture I ran 3730 miles (~4.5 years).
May 2004 - August 2005 (Senior year of high school): 1702 miles with a total of 4 weeks of pure rest
August 2005- January 2009 (college through 2nd semester senior year of college): 2000 miles, only running Sep-Dec 2005, April-Dec 2006, and April-August 2007.
Total prior to 2009: 7432 miles.
As of January 1 2009, I started running again daily and have kept that up through the marathon each year. I've also been keeping more detailed statistics and analysis since my goal has been the same each year: finish the Chicago marathon. In 2009, I ran every single day between the 1st of January and the marathon. I do not plan on repeating that feat where marathon training is involved, as the occasional rest day does wonders for the body. However, I was in good shape from keeping up the uninterrupted schedule. I ran 3:45 in my marathon debut in brisk mid-30s weather. (287 runs, 1216.6 miles before, 30 runs, 101.3 miles after)
In 2010, I was sidelined for a week in late March by a cyst in my lower back that needed excising, and ran into some hamstring trouble the weeks before the marathon. Between that and the mid-80s weather, I crashed from a 1:44 half to a 4:14 total, walking most of the last 7 miles. (282 runs, 1279.9 miles before, 6 runs, 23.5 miles after)
So far in 2011, I've run 218 times for a total of 976.3 miles. I ran lower mileage that both 2009 and 2010 in February - May as I worked on changing my foot-strike a bit, but have been putting in consistently higher mileage weeks with the exception of my European vacation the remainder of the summer. With the exception of some current tightness in the shins I've been feeling fairly good, so hopefully it bodes well for a good marathon clocking this year.
Overall, my running in the last decade of my life comes out to approximately 10935 miles.
I've been tracking my mileage daily since the end of my junior season of Track & Field. I was recovering from a femoral stress fracture, and needed to pay attention to the patterns of mileage that I was allowing myself to run. I had been training 6 days a week on the elliptical for four months, and was getting truly sick of spinning in place in a cage inside a high school gymnasium. From before that time, I have my aggregate mileage as listed in my summer running logs and on the Palatine Cross Country website, and a rough, low-ball estimation of my mileage from my 5-7 days a week running on the 1/10 mile track at the local YMCA through 8th grade and freshman year.
The statistics that I track on my runs: total days run over some time span, miles per run, miles per day, miles per week and, my favorite measuring tool as far as distance goes, the 4 week moving average. I am a firm believer that the 4 week moving average is the best indicator of overall mileage. It allows for a better way to judge increasing mileage relative to total intensity, and at least for me mollifies the mental anguish of missing a day of running (it only harms the 4-week total by 1/4 the mileage!). Even if you are a die-hard user of the weekly mileage total, I highly encourage you to incorporate some sort of a running average into tracking your progress.
Without further ado, the numbers...
Prior to May 2004: before the femoral stress fracture I ran 3730 miles (~4.5 years).
May 2004 - August 2005 (Senior year of high school): 1702 miles with a total of 4 weeks of pure rest
August 2005- January 2009 (college through 2nd semester senior year of college): 2000 miles, only running Sep-Dec 2005, April-Dec 2006, and April-August 2007.
Total prior to 2009: 7432 miles.
As of January 1 2009, I started running again daily and have kept that up through the marathon each year. I've also been keeping more detailed statistics and analysis since my goal has been the same each year: finish the Chicago marathon. In 2009, I ran every single day between the 1st of January and the marathon. I do not plan on repeating that feat where marathon training is involved, as the occasional rest day does wonders for the body. However, I was in good shape from keeping up the uninterrupted schedule. I ran 3:45 in my marathon debut in brisk mid-30s weather. (287 runs, 1216.6 miles before, 30 runs, 101.3 miles after)
In 2010, I was sidelined for a week in late March by a cyst in my lower back that needed excising, and ran into some hamstring trouble the weeks before the marathon. Between that and the mid-80s weather, I crashed from a 1:44 half to a 4:14 total, walking most of the last 7 miles. (282 runs, 1279.9 miles before, 6 runs, 23.5 miles after)
So far in 2011, I've run 218 times for a total of 976.3 miles. I ran lower mileage that both 2009 and 2010 in February - May as I worked on changing my foot-strike a bit, but have been putting in consistently higher mileage weeks with the exception of my European vacation the remainder of the summer. With the exception of some current tightness in the shins I've been feeling fairly good, so hopefully it bodes well for a good marathon clocking this year.
Overall, my running in the last decade of my life comes out to approximately 10935 miles.
May 30, 2011
Information for the new you
You've graduated college and you may or may not be employed, but either way you now have far more free time than you did in school. (Sidebar: this assumes you worked your ass off at an easy major or even had a difficult major and put in barely enough work to get by.) Either way, is there a better way to fill this time than using some of that new disposable income to buy an XBox and playing Halo all day? I would argue that a good goal is instead exposing yourself to as much information as possible.
If you're like me and came late to the party, the first step is to learn how to use an RSS feed. Using Google Reader is the simplest for most of us that already have Google accounts, but I'm sure there's a schnazzy desktop app for Mac fanboys who refuse to use Google offerings. Once you log in to your Google account, all you really need is the RSS feed URLs to get started. Some sites offer a nice page that asks you what feed reader you want to add it to, others will show you the feed when you click on the url. In that case, you need to copy the URL of the feed and after clicking "add subscription" in the upper left, paste in the URL.
As a brief tutorial, you can follow along with one of my favorite comics, Erfworld (I didn't say that all information from the RSS feed HAD to be educational). If you find their RSS feed link (I usually just "find on page" and search for RSS) you'll notice it tries to open in an external feed reader (Outlook in my case). Instead, right-click on it and choose "Copy Link Address". Paste that into the "Add Subscription" box and hit subscribe. Repeat with any other RSS feeds you're interested in.
What, you ask, should you be reading? Here are a few of my absolute favorites for aspiring professionals and citizens:
If you're like me and came late to the party, the first step is to learn how to use an RSS feed. Using Google Reader is the simplest for most of us that already have Google accounts, but I'm sure there's a schnazzy desktop app for Mac fanboys who refuse to use Google offerings. Once you log in to your Google account, all you really need is the RSS feed URLs to get started. Some sites offer a nice page that asks you what feed reader you want to add it to, others will show you the feed when you click on the url. In that case, you need to copy the URL of the feed and after clicking "add subscription" in the upper left, paste in the URL.
As a brief tutorial, you can follow along with one of my favorite comics, Erfworld (I didn't say that all information from the RSS feed HAD to be educational). If you find their RSS feed link (I usually just "find on page" and search for RSS) you'll notice it tries to open in an external feed reader (Outlook in my case). Instead, right-click on it and choose "Copy Link Address". Paste that into the "Add Subscription" box and hit subscribe. Repeat with any other RSS feeds you're interested in.
What, you ask, should you be reading? Here are a few of my absolute favorites for aspiring professionals and citizens:
- Get Rich Slowly (http://feeds.feedburner.com/getrichslowly): You have disposable income, now learn how to manage it. Though a large portion of the offerings are aimed at getting out of debt, there are a lot of great messages about budgeting and saving in the blog.
- Harvard business review blogs (http://feeds.harvardbusiness.org/harvardbusiness): HBR's blogs bring together original ideas from a large number of influential thinkers in business, both academic and practical. Besides theories on simple stuff like time management and management in general they also have great discussions on topics such as inter-generational cooperation in the workplace. I highly recommend it for anyone wanting to manage or be managed (that is, everyone who isn't working utterly and completely alone).
- Seth Godin's Blog (http://feeds.feedburner.com/typepad/sethsmainblog): Serial entrepreneur Seth Godin puts forth simple and interested comments on shipping products, target audiences, and, in general, making something that people really want. I wish I could say I found this on my own, but even knowing of his books beforehand it took @nklauza to realize the blog existed.
- CS Monitor Politics (http://rss.csmonitor.com/feeds/politics): If you're like me and get most of your news from liberal-leaning sources, the CS Monitor is a great domestic news source that provides a viewpoint that doesn't always jive with everything else you're reading. The Economist's Democracy in America blog (http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/index.xml) is another good option for non-mainstream takes on mainstream issues.
These are just a starting point, so good luck with broadening your horizons.
April 28, 2011
A Beginning
I've been telling myself on-and-off since I was a junior in college that I should start blogging. The narcissistic assumption that someone else is actually willing to read my written word and an even more basic desire to write has led to the question I've always asked myself: on what subject should I actually write? My sporadic Yelp reviews led to Matt on Dining, which has been updated exactly once. Though I do plan to begin moving my Yelp reviews of sufficient quality to that blog in the near future my patience has been growing short for my plan about this blog. When food is out of the picture all that's left is everything else.
Ideas that I've toyed with have included self-improvement, travel, finance (personal and otherwise) and surviving young professional life. Rather than fight to try to pick a single subject and produce consistent content, I've backtracked on the last two years of leaning in that direction and decided to pick a whimsical blog title and write on just about anything I feel is important. Hence, WWMD.
WWMD is the acronym for two of my favorite phrases. Given that I can't seem to find a quote on Google, I'm guessing that both phrases are Original Ideas. "Words as/are weapons of mass disruption" is a favorite of mine. They destroy barriers, beliefs and, most of all, ignorance and humility. I'll write more on that another day. The other phrase? The self-aggrandizing "what would Morlock do." That one is fairly self-explanatory in a very facetious way.
If "Dear Reader" has even made it this far, the question now is why the Dear Reader ever wants to return to this blog. I'm hoping that I can bring humor, useful information, a dash of insight and a pinch of interest to your broswer, RSS feed, or smart-phone. Since I do plan to experiment with subject and writing style, please feel free to contact me with comments and I will try to tailor my future posts to the desires of the majority. I guess this is how a blog begins.
Ideas that I've toyed with have included self-improvement, travel, finance (personal and otherwise) and surviving young professional life. Rather than fight to try to pick a single subject and produce consistent content, I've backtracked on the last two years of leaning in that direction and decided to pick a whimsical blog title and write on just about anything I feel is important. Hence, WWMD.
WWMD is the acronym for two of my favorite phrases. Given that I can't seem to find a quote on Google, I'm guessing that both phrases are Original Ideas. "Words as/are weapons of mass disruption" is a favorite of mine. They destroy barriers, beliefs and, most of all, ignorance and humility. I'll write more on that another day. The other phrase? The self-aggrandizing "what would Morlock do." That one is fairly self-explanatory in a very facetious way.
If "Dear Reader" has even made it this far, the question now is why the Dear Reader ever wants to return to this blog. I'm hoping that I can bring humor, useful information, a dash of insight and a pinch of interest to your broswer, RSS feed, or smart-phone. Since I do plan to experiment with subject and writing style, please feel free to contact me with comments and I will try to tailor my future posts to the desires of the majority. I guess this is how a blog begins.
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