For 2008, Washingtonian Magazine rated Citronelle the best restaurant in Washington DC. There are a lot of places to eat in a city as big as our capitol, so you can imagine what an honor it would be to get this rating. We had to go and see what all the hype was about, so a few of us headed into Georgetown for a night of French fine dining. One of the really cool things about Citronelle is that some of the food is made to look like one food, but made with another. I’ll get more into that when I go over what we go to show you what I mean.

We were originally going to get the promenade gourmande, which is a preset menu. We decided against it because if you do promenade gourmande, everybody on the table has to do it…and we wanted to have more of a selection. Here’s a selection of some of the stuff that we got throughout the night:

We all started off with a pre-appetizer (amuse bouche) to get the pallet ready. From left to right we have quayle egg, salmon, and a chicken lollipop:

For my appetizer I had the lobster “begula” pasta. This is one of the foods that are meant to look like something else. It’s mean to look like caviar, but in reality it’s actually pasta balls covered with ink squid, with lobster underneath. This was to die for.

Stephanie got the escargot, which had a great presentation:

Andrew’s appetizer was another one of those look-a-like foods. He had the “egg symphony”, which was four different plates meant to look like a variety of eggs, but were something else. For example on the bottom left it was actually slices of mozzerela with cheddar on top of it:

For my entree I had the lamb:

CD and Marcel had the chateaubriand, the presentation was absolutely amazing:

For dessert I had the chocolate soufflet:

Andrew had the breakfast sampler dessert…another look-a-like food:

Rather than explain everything, here’s a little video explaining:

Here’s a shot of all of us afterwards, I’m the guy in the font between the two girls:

Citronelle isn’t for the faint of hard. Dinner for the 6 of us including 2 bottles of wine and a bottle of champagne was about $1,600. It was quite an experience in fine french cuisine. There was an obvious amount of effort spent in the presentation, and it showed. If you are looking for a very nice dinner, you can’t go wrong with Citronelle.

Citronelle
3000 M St. NW
Washington, DC
Georgetown
T: (202)625-2150
Wheelchair Accessible: Yes
Kid Friendly: No
Cuisines: French, Modern
Price Range: Very Expensive

Back when I was getting my Corsa exhaust installed on the Viper, I happened to see the new Audi Q7 SUV transformed into a stretch limo:

I love the way the Audi Q7 looks, and to see it in a stretch limo format was very cool! This post over at Autoblog regarding a white Q7 limo reminded me of what I saw and to make a post about it.

If you want to rent one of these 14 passenger SUV’s Royal Luxury out in NY has one. Prices start out at $450 for 3 hours.

Sunday was my 26th birthday, and I threw a bit of a party on Saturday at my house to celebrate. What I realized is that I took a couple videos before everybody got there, and took barely any pictures…when I was planning to record the whole night. I’m pretty sure the alcohol had an affect on that But hey, it was my birthday, and I think it’s a valid excuse right?

I had about 50-60 people show up at the house, we had 2 kegs, a backup 30 pack, a fully stocked bar, and a big Gatorade jug of margaritas. All of it was gone by this morning! We also had a beer pong tournament with 3 separate tables and 15 teams with a $150 pot to the winner. The beer pong tournament didn’t get started until about 12am, so when I was taking some of the video we only had one table setup. My team won the 1st round, but we got knocked out in the 2nd round. My buddies Mike and Chris ended up winning, they are really good, and usually win tournaments.

On Sunday morning, a bunch of us headed over to Friday’s for lunch…trying to get rid of our hangovers. We all hung out for a bit, and then after doing some cleaning, headed over to Sakura Steakhouse with a friend for a birthday hibachi dinner.

The house is pretty dirty, we’ve got a maid coming tomorrow to clean it up, and then we’ll be getting the carpets steam cleaned. Between the alcohol and cleaning the house, cost of the party was about $700 or so. But it was well worth it, and I had a blast. Thanks to everybody who showed up!

Here’s a little video compilation of more of the beginning of the night:

I’ve been to a good amount of higher end well known steakhouses in the past, but Morton’s was probably the most common one that I had not been. Morton’s is a pretty famous high-end steakhouse, with a ton of locations through the US, and even a few internationally in places like China. I want to say there are at least 7 between my house and Baltimore, which is only a little over an hour away from me!

So I called up a friend, and we headed down to the Tyson’s Corner location. From what I’ve been told, the best comparison is Ruths Chris Steakhouse as they both originate from Chicago. Here’s a few pictures of some of the food:

For an appetizer, my friend and I split shrimp alexander and the bacon wrapped scallops. I’ve actually had a friend cook the shrimp alexander based on a Morton’s cookbook, and I thought his came out better. Regardless, they were still very good here! I had a filet mignon as my entree.

My friend had the ribeye as his entree, and you can see the same appetizers on the left.

For dessert I had the key lime pie. I’m a big key lime pie fan, so if I happen to be at a restaurant and they have it, I have to order a slice. The key lime pie at Morton’s was very good.

My buddy had the hot chocolate cake, which looked excellent, and just oozed out chocolate.

Overall the dinner was great, we had salads, appetizers, sides, entrees, deserts, a couple drinks, and cappuccinos, and the dinner ended up being around $175. Although everything was great, if I had to choose between Morton’s and Ruths Chris, I think I would choose Ruths Chris. You can’t really go wrong with Morton’s though

In the background I’ve been working on a new brand of company to work as a sort of umbrella company for my endeavors. The name of this company is dPit Media. To start things off, I’m trying to come up with a few logo concepts, and it’s always good to take a look at what’s out there for a source of inspiration.

I went out there and found as many companies as I could find with the word “media” in their name. Out of the hundreds that I looked at, I picked out the best 69 logos. I think that having the name “media” in a company brand is fairly common, so I think this will be a great resource for others.

Stay tuned to the blog (or feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed) for updates regarding my own logo for dPitMedia.

24/7 Real Media

1105 Media

Adconion Media Group

Ariamedia

Ashweb Media

b5 Media

Backbeat Media

Blaze New Media

Blueprint Media

Bootcamp Media

Breeze Media

Casale Media

Church Media

Churchplant Media

Congruent Media

Digicog Media

Dunamis Media

E8 Media

Ecstatic Media

Edvens Media

Evolving Media

Federated Media

Fling Media

Glacier Media

Glam Media

Go Media

Greentech Media

Gunpowder Media

Hyperx Media

Idearc Media

Imagex Media

Immersive Media

Jello Media

Logicbomb Media

LS Media

Manticore Media

Maxgen Media

Media72

Media Crumb

Media Inspiration

Medianomaly

Media Temple

Medicon Media

Millennial Media

Mindset Media

New Brand Media

Premiere Media

Primal Media – Concept for PrimalMedia.com

Redux Media

Resolution Media

Respiro Media

Resurgent Media

Right Media

Sabotage Media

Shock Media

Simplify Media

Sling Media

Split Media

Spring Media

Third Screen Media

Trademark Media

CMP – United Business Media

ValueClick Media

Vibrant Media

Virgin Media

Visicom Media

Volo Media

Yojo Media

Yul Media

If your “media” company wasn’t in here, but you think it should have made the list, feel free to comment below with a link and I’ll check it out. If I find enough more, maybe I’ll do a part two. Also, between the time of writing this and when it actually went live, I’ve come up with my logo for dpitMedia. I’m going for a retro sort of theme, so let me know what you think:

For a long, long, long, long time I’ve been talking about doing a new custom design for this blog. It was one of my 2008 goals to finish and launch this design, and I’m happy to say that it’s finally here!? If you’re reading this from the RSS feed, come on by and check it out.

This new design was built entirely from the ground up, so there was no modifying a theme, and there is nothing else like it out there. I’m still using Wordpress as the software that runs everything in the background. I was the one that designed the site, and had a developer code up the site and integrate it into Wordpress (Thanks Mubs!). Let me give you a complete walkthrough:

Featured And Standard Blog Mode

You’ll see on the homepage that there are two blogging modes, featured and standard. By default you come to the site seeing featured blog mode. This is simply the headline for the post, and a quick little intro paragraph about it. At the top of the page the most recent post is featured.

If you go to standard blog mode, you’ll see that it’s just like a regular blog, and shows the full versions of the last 10 posts.

I think the featured mode is more unique and looks cleaner, but I know that some people will still prefer your standard blog, which is why I decided to offer both.

Single Post Page

I spent a lot of time making a regular post page look good and work effectively. At the top of each post page you’ll find the “featured” box which just shows you the headline, a big featured image related to the post, a quick intro, the author, how many comments, what categories it falls in, and the ability to promote the post through a variety of social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

At the bottom of each post is where I really spent most of my time. The first box you’ll find under a post is the “Save/Promote This Post” box. This is simply a box with some social media buttons, as well as a Digg button on the right which shows how many Diggs the post has.

Below that box you’ll find the “Related Posts/Subscribe” box. This is a clean format which provides up to 5 related posts to the one you’re reading, as well as a few links to subscribe to the sites RSS feed. I hope this helps out with increasing the number of RSS subscribers. If you haven’t already subscribed to my feed, make sure to do so.

Below that box you’ll find the comments section. I really cleaned this up a lot. FIrst of all, comments and trackbacks are now separated (you’ll find trackbacks at the bottom of the page). Each comment is now in a separate alternating color comment box to make things much more readable. Each post also cleanly shows the name of the commenter (linked to their website), the date, and their avatar. The avatar information is being pulled in from Gravatar, which is a site that allows you to create an account and show your avatar at many sites, linked by your e-mail address. Wordpress 2.5+ has Gravatar functionality built into it, and I think we’ll see more and more sites supporting it, as well as more and more commenters using it. If you haven’t added your Gravatar yet, head over there and open a free account.

Another cool thing I can do is utilize a “promote” feature. If I’m writing a post in Wordpress, I can add a custom field called promote, which will automatically add some code next to the headline of a post. Right now it will make a StumbleUpon badge appear, but that can be changed to whatever I want. This will hopefully increase social media submissions on posts that are really worth it.

Sidebar

On the sidebar I’ve cleanly made sections to show the categories of the site, a few my recent posts, as well as 5 of my most recent Twitter updates. I’m hoping the usage of the Twitter updates will increase my followers. Feel free to follow me on Twitter if you aren’t doing so already.

Advertising

This is something that will most likely be tweaked over time, but I’ve built in advertising in a pretty effective way. First off I want to note that all my ad serving is being done by Google Ad Manager. Ad Manager is a pretty powerful FREE ad server, it’s still in beta, so you’ll need an invite to use it. I come from a background using Doubleclick as an ad server, as well as having used OpenAds, so it may be a little complex to use for some at first, but I felt right at home.

So my concept in advertising right now is when I’m ready to sell an exclusive “package deal” to an advertiser
. What I mean by that is basically a site takeover, one advertiser would get all of the ad spots on the site for a premium price for a set amount of time. This will allow an advertiser to get very effective advertising. There are three set spots for an advertisement on a page right now.

There is a top small banner in the red bar, a 250×250 in the top of the sidebar, and a long thin banner either after the third post on the homepage, or between the save/promote box and related posts box on a single post page. An advertiser would be able to get all three spots, as well as a link in the RSS feed at a flat monthly rate. The spot would be exclusive to that advertiser and no other ads will be run.

I will likely be slightly changing around the sizes and/or positioning of the ads for something for effective (or to meet IAB guidelines). When the blog is generating more traffic, I would change the format to include more ads, and not provide exclusive deals. If you’re interested in doing an exclusive takeover for a month, contact me.

Bugs

There are a few bugs here and there (Mostly IE6 stuff) that I already know about, and will work on fixing over the next couple weeks. If you happen to find something, please make sure and let me know.

Suggestions/Feedback

I really hope you guys like the new design. I put a lot of time and work into launching this, and I hope it will be better overall for the growth of this blog. If you have any suggestions or feedback, I’m all ears. You can either contact me directly or post a comment below.

This past weekend I attended the Spring Meet from the College Park Tuning club at the University of Maryland. They run this event every year, and it has gotten quite popular. The last time I had gone was a few years ago, and a good amount of cars showed up, now it’s in the tune of 1,000’s of cars.

Every car that attends, also submits at least $1 or a can of food that is donated to charity. Last year over $5,000 was provided! I ended up showing a few hours late, so apparently I missed out on a lot of cars, but there was still a lot of people there, and well worth the hour drive. Take a look at the pictures:

Here’s my Viper as well as my buddy Jason’s RT/10:

A custom Dodge Charger limo:

The event had a mobile dyno, here we can see a Firebird getting some numbers:

Nice blacked out Porsche:

A few nice Nissan 350Z’s. The blue one has a Veilside widebody kit on it:

This was one customized Hummer with an awesome suspension on it. No detail was untouched:

Here’s the system in the back of the Hummer. The picture does no justice, but the subwoofer (An MTX Thunder Jack Hammer 9900) in the car is absolutely huge. It’s 350lbs, 22″, and capable of being louder (in decibels) then an airplane engine! I believe it costs about $6,000!

Continue Reading »

I just ordered a mothers day gift for my mom, and I think it’s one of the best things you can get out there in terms of perfect for the parents type of gift. What exactly is it you may ask? A Kodak EasyShare WiFi digital picture frame. What makes this so great? For people that don’t live at home with the parents, you can simply upload pictures to a Kodak photo gallery, and they show up on the picture frame. How awesome is that!?

With my brother going to college next year and me living a few states away, this will be a great way to send our mom our latest pictures without her having to do anything. She simply plugs it in, connects it to the network and it’s good to go. It even has an MP3 player and built in speakers so we can also include video!

I can’t see how any other mothers day present can top this! I scoured around the net for the best deal, and ended up purchasing at Buy.com. I paid $138 with free shipping. I got $10 off for using Google Checkout for the first time.

What did you get your mom? I just hope she doesn’t read this post!

I’ve recently been spending a lot of time working on the new design for this blog (Which I hope to launch as soon as next week!). One of the parts I was working on was a “promote” feature, where I could choose to put some sort of social media promotional button on the top headline of a post in order to better promote people “voting” for a post. I was planning on using your standard Digg badge that we’ve seen everywhere, but then I really thought about something that bothered me about Digg.

I’ve had posts that generate a good amount of Digg’s, but they happen over time. Digg works more like a popular “news” site in the fact that content has to be Dugg enough times within usually 24 hours or less to make it on the front page. That why I really like StumbleUpon.

It can literally take just one stumble to get content to generate some good traffic. Then say two months later, somebody else randomly stumbles your post…traffic can generate again. It’s not always just a one-time surge, it usually lasts a few days, and then can continue to bring traffic over time. For this reason, I decided to give it a shot and promote StumbleUpon over Digg for this section (for now). I wanted to use an SU badge, but there wasn’t really anything out there…so I made one:

It follows the same design as the Digg badge so that people recognize it and are more willing to click it. Feel free to use this on your site if you’d like. I will probably do a couple of sizing variations, while I’ll update on this post in the future.

If you have seen or made a StumbleUpon badge, feel free to let me know so I can link to it from here.

Also, feel free to add me as a friend on StumbleUpon, you can find my profile here. I sometimes forget to stumble things, but I generally try to if I really like something I see on the net.

Oh, and make sure to Stumble this post

While the title of this post may seem like this would be some sort of paid review, I am actually writing about a company from personal experience. I love to speak out about companies that I have good experiences with, because I want others to do the same.

Many of us are business owners, or people that are thinking about starting a business. Many times cash is a hurdle, and many times getting somewhere between $10,000-$100,000 is enough to overcome that hurdle. Or say you want to buy a car, dealing with your bank or a company like Capital One Auto Finance can be a huge hassle, especially if you’re not buying from a dealership, as there is a lot of back and forth.

When I was buying my Dodge Viper, I was also selling my Corvette at the same time. Since I wanted to pay cash for the Viper, I also wanted to make sure I had a safety net of money in case it would take me longer than I thought with my Corvette. I started to look for a loan option with a low APR, and came across a company by the name of First Again. The concept behind this loan company is awesome, and here’s why:

• You can only get approved for a loan if you have excellent credit
• Since they only accept people with excellent credit, it enables you to get way lower rates. I got at least 3% lower than what I could find for a used car from an actual person.
• It doesn’t matter what you use the loan for. You can use it to finance your business, buy a car, pay your credit card bills, do home improvements, etc. They call it an AnythingBill.
• Your loan comes in the form of cash. You don’t have to get a check to write out to a particular person or play any sort of waiting games.
• If you apply for a loan, and get approved, they transfer money to you right away. I literally applied for a $10,000 loan, got approved, and the next day I had $10,000 extra in my bank account. This was a huge selling point for me.
• There are no fees for paying the loan off early. I ended up selling my Corvette two weeks after getting the loan…I simply paid off the total loan right away, ended up paying that first months interest, and that was that. It was quite cheap for the peace of mind that I took the loan out for.

This was by far the best loan experience I’ve ever had, and I can easily personally recommend First Again for your next loan.

If you have any other companies that you recommend, post a comment and let me know (let me know why as well)…or if you’ve used First Again, let me know your thoughts.