We are the mundane
We had our annual Santa bar crawl last night. While I didn’t make an official tally, I’d say we probably topped 100 people on the tour. We had an absolute blast. This was our seventh one and it’s really taken off these last couple of years.
Here’s a bunch of photos from the evening.
I stopped by a local music festival this morning to see Natalie Berrena sing with one of her groups, Pure Cane Sugar. To my surprise, I ran into ex-girlfriend Diane Wooding at the show (you can catch her in the lower left corner of the video)
Diane is back in town this weekend for her high school reunion and stopped down for the show because she knows Natalie (they were roommates for a week at Pat Daugherty’s place in St Martin – remember this post and photo?)
Organizing a bar tour. The A-Z bar tour worked well in Philly. I’ve got my Santa Crawl going like gangbusters in State College (approaching 100 people now). And now I’m about to start another one.
I had this inspiration about 3 weeks ago. Are you familiar with Foursquare? It’s the current hot thing that some are predicting to be the new Twitter/Facebook. It’s a location based game/social network where you check into establishments via your smart phone. If you meet certain criteria, you earn a virtual “badge”. The person who checks into a location the most number of times over the last two months is that location’s “mayor”. The NYC based company was founded a year ago and has really taken off in the last few months (they have more users signed up than Twitter did in the same time frame). They are going through a second round of capitalization and the VC companies are throwing money at them Rumor has it that Yahoo wants to buy them for 100 million (not bad for a year’s work) but I don’t think they’ll sell.
Businesses love the concept because it helps them identify and reward their best customers so there’s a natural business related side to it. It doesn’t have the monetization issues that things like Twitter have struggled with.
I’ve been playing with it since they opened it up to the world a couple of months ago (I’m the mayor of about ten places in town) and have become addicted. One of the things that the company is looking for is ideas for badges. They offer badges for reaching certain clip levels – check in at 1, 10, 25, 50 places and you get a badge for each level attained. They have a super mayor badge (mayor of ten or more spots). They don’t always tell you what you have to do to earn some of the badges, so, sometimes when you get one, you’re a little surprised – check into bars four nights in a row and you get the Bender Badge, check into four bars in one night and you earn the Cronked Badge, check into a place with three members of the opposite sex and you get a Player Badge, check into ten places with another person and you get a BFF Badge. You get the idea (the best badge might be the North Pole badge which you get by checking in at the North Pole – there were two guys who were actually racing to be the first to do it last week – the one who won was a 16 year old kid).
For some reason, I got this idea (and it actually happened in the shower one night) for a badge. Four seemed to be a magic number that some of the badges seemed to revolve around (not surprising for a company with four in their name). My though for a badge: a minimum of four friends, four bars, in four hours equals a FourCrawl Badge (short for a Foursquare bar craw). I rushed out of the shower dripping wet and registered the domain name. I then spent the rest of the afternoon setting up a website, grabbing the Twitter name, creating a Facebook page, starting a Facebook event, contacting Foursquare to sell them on the badge idea, and recruiting some of my friends to do one the following weekend (target date was to be April 3rd).
I was pretty proud of what I had accomplished in just a few hours.
But my accomplishments paled in comparison to what this optometrist in Tampa was pulling off.
The day after I set all this up, and fortunately before I had promoted it too much. I see a blog post from a guy in Tampa who’s trying to sell people on the idea for a Foursquare Day to be held on April 16th (4/16 naturally). Holy Mackeral – what a great idea and I’m pissed I didn’t think of it. I immediately change the date of the Fourcrawl to 4/16 and sign up for his Foursquare Day idea.
Within days, his idea EXPLODES. It is unbelievable how quickly people embraced this idea. Within less than a week, the Foresquare people are officially on board. With in two weeks, people are organizing things all over the world – there are well over 100 cities worldwide signed up for this thing. It’s now being called the world’s first global social media holiday. Here’s a story that the local Tampa paper did on the guy ten days ago. A couple of days ago, the mayor of Tampa proclaim Friday officially Foursquare Day in Tampa (I saw a blurb that the mayor of Manchester NH did the same today – Shannon – are you in, Manchester can’t be too far from you?).
Here’s the complete official list of locations doing something. At least my State College Fourcrawl was one of the early ones.
Next year I’m going to follow the lead of the guy in Tampa and aim a little higher with my Fourcrawl (although given how freaked out this town gets over people drinking, the mayor is never going to sign off on it).
What’s a Withings you ask?
It’s an internet connected scale.
The scale is wirelessly connected to the internet with Wi-Fi. Everytime I weigh myself the scale connects to the internet and updates my weight and body fat content (it uses electrical impulses sent through my feet to measure my fat) on the Withings website and on my Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault accounts. It also sends a tweet out via my UncleLar twitter account which is connected to Facebook so my Facebook status is automatically updated too.
The Withings site also provides widgets which I can put on websites like this one to track my progress. Here’s how I’m doing so far (although I’ve only had the scale for a couple of days, I’m about a month into a campaign to lose a lb a week so I can get back down below 200 by around the end of September).
Hope you’re having a great day! Where’s the birthday banner?
from Natalie
Tonight marks our sixth annual State College Santa Crawl.
Our annual romp in Santa costumes started out as a little thing that I created (with encouragement from my buddy Brian Allen) back in 2004. Our original group consisted of five of us.
This year we could have upwards of 75-100 people.
I’m also trying to ratchet up my coverage of the event by experimenting with live coverage of the goings on with my iPhone (I already know that lighting conditions are going to make it a challenge but I’m going to do the best that I can).
If things work out as I hope, the window just below will have a live feed of our activities (as much as I can without killing the battery in my phone) while the second window below will have a collection of the videos that I’ve made throughout the evening.
First – the live feed:
Live Video streaming by Ustream
There’s nothing there at the moment but the festivities will begin somewhere around 8-9 EST (I might put up one or two test videos earlier).
Come join us vicariously.
I dread the opening of the new school year. It’s the time that I am most vulnerable to coming down with something. All I can figure it that all the kids coming back from PSU from their summer vacation bring new bugs back with them. Classes started two weeks ago and sure enough I’m battling (hope it’s not swine flu).
Two of the last three years I managed to dodge a bullet by basically shutting down doing much of anything once I sense something coming on (usually it’s with a slight cough, throat tingle, or nasal congestion). Of course, last year, not only didn’t I dodge the bullet but I got hit with a cannonball.
I’m in shutdown mode now. I’m battling a tingly throat along with a slight cough. Knock on wood that it doesn’t explode into another asthma bout (or worse).
As someone who’s gone overboard installing iPhone apps (I have over 100), I got a big kick out of this “commercial”.
Spent the weekend in Dewey Beach DE where the latest rage in bar shots is the “Tidal Wave”.
Here’s a video I shot of a bunch of Santa Clauses (more on that later) doing Tidal Waves (yes I did one too but I couldn’t videotape myself) at the Starboard in Dewey.
The shot can be anything that you’d like, it’s the water in the face that gives it the name. The shot was taking the bar by storm and people were lining up to have water thrown in their faces 
OK – now the Santa suits story.
There’s a group in Philly that sponsor’s their version of a Santa Claus bar tour (similar to the one that I run in State College but on a slightly grander scale). Their tour is called the “Running of the Santas”.
“Rudolph’s Revenge” is their July version of the Santa Run. It’s a bus/ferry trip from Sea Isle City NJ to Dewey Beach that departs Friday night and returns on Sunday with the centerpiece of the trip being the Revenge Party at the Starboard.
Here are a couple of photo’s I took at the Starboard during the Rudolph’s Revenge party.
Next year I might bring my Santa costume, or I might try the Starboard’s Dewey Beach version of Pamplona’s “Running of the Bulls” festival instead – or maybe both.