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We have finally started to settle in to our new place after our little fight with the neighbors (see the cartoon above). All of our neighbors are elderly people who are perfectly happy living next to other old people but I don’t think they care too much for us younger folk. I pissed off my next door neighbor because I parked my Uhaul truck in the grass. I calmly explained to the man that there was no other place to park the truck. His response was “Why did you bring such a big truck!” I wanted to pop him right in his dentures. He then threatened me with legal recourse if I didn’t move it soon. I love how instead of calmly talking over the issue he went straight to the legal route.

After he hobbled back to his house I continued to unpack the truck in the grass.

Here in Texas the upscale non-fat frozen yogurt craze is fairly new, as such there are a lot of different companies trying to capitalize on the craze started in Korea, moved to California and now is making waves in Dallas,TX. The store that started the trend is a store called Red Mango out of Korea, which spawned many copy cats including PinkBerry, BerryBerry, Bliss, and now Yogurtville.

One thing about the other copy cats to Red Mango is that they are all over-the-counter shops where you point to the toppings you want, and someone over the counter places the toppings for you. With Yogurtville, you choose the yogurt you like, you scoop the toppings, and you weight the result. That’s right they charge you per weight. Right now its $.35 per ounce. Pretty novel idea, the more you eat, the more you pay.

Yogurt

Another thing that sets Yogurtville apart is the yogurt flavor choices. You can pick from the original tart that all the others have. You can also choose very vanilla, strawberry, strawberry banana, pistachio, blueberry, raspberry, Belgian chocolate, hawaiian delight, and probably many more. You can mix and match any of these flavors you like.

Toppings

As for the toppings, they have a lot of the same that the others do such as fresh fruits like strawberries, kiwis, mango, grapes. Toppings that are missing that we found prevalent at BerryBerry, PinkBerry, Bliss, and others are blueberries, bananas, raspberries, blackberries, and “Fresh” pineapples (they had “canned pineapples”). As for the dry toppings they had an array of sugar cereals like fruity pebbles, captain crunch, cinnamon toast crunch, granola, and grapenuts. They also had an assortment of other toppings like coconut, mochi, yogurt chips, chocolate chips, Reese’s pieces, brownie bits, M&M’s, gummy bears, whoppers, rainbow kisses, and the list goes on and on.

Final Verdict

Yogurtville has an overall clean, modern, and energizing feel to it. You can tell alot of time and effort went into the look and feel of the place. It seems like the owner took the best of what worked from the other stores and just gave it a little tweak. One negative was the absence of fresh blueberries and raspberries that was at all of the other stores. I think this was a conscious choice by the owner to give you these kinds of flavors in the yogurt itself. It is apparent that the owner has overloaded the topping bar with cheaper toppings like candies and cereals and skimped on the more expensive fruit.

In my brief talk to the owner, I asked him how he came up with the idea for the place and he mentioned he was from Las Vegas and had plans to open 12 more in the dallas area. He also said the idea for the store was 2 years in the making with plans to franchise in the next couple months. I think with all the elements going for him, he will give the competition a run for their money.

Their website is still in the works but this will be the address: http://yogurt-ville.com

If you’re in the Dallas area, here is the address to their location:

3220 E. Hebron Pkwy #114, Carrollton, TX 75010 972.862.8000 Google Map

• It maybe a little too early for this but had some pumpkin pie with lunch. hmmm love pumpkin pie! #
• Couric-Palin Sketch–too funny! http://tinyurl.com/3zfsub #

09/25

• @kyle1point0 Didn’t know you did video art. Pretty sweet. #

09/23

• Heroes starts in 1 hour! If your Central Time that is. #
• @mrdat Does that mean you’re attacking my rows right now? #
• @loiclemeur home page is igoogle #

09/22

• @cstricklin Fifth Element is one of my all time favorites! #
• Having my new favorite breakfast item. Egg-in-Toast. http://tinyurl.com/4b9qq5 #
• Doing a little twitter cleanup. Removing people I don’t know or those I have no I idea why I followed. #
• @dvdquotes Meet the Fockers #
• Ok down from 229 to 195 following. A little more manageable. #
• Just got a new book called “Blogging Heroes” which interviews the top 30 bloggers of the world. http://tinyurl.com/bloggingheroes #
• @mrdat when are you going to change your default avatar? come on you’ve been using twitter a while now ^_^ #
• @jowyang Is your dallas event public or private and where is it going to be? #
• @fred7man I can let you borrow it when I’m done. #

09/21

• Grabbing a bite to eat then going to the Angelica to watch Transsiberian. #
• @sparekarma TransSiberian was a good film. Sarah actually picked a good one this time. I would give it a 8.6. #
• @briancline What did you think of Transsiberian? I just watched it tonight at the Angelika in Plano. #
• @geektyrant Thanks I did enjoy the film. I was shocked since my wife picked one I liked. I’m glad I watched the trailer afterwards. #

Ten Artists will interpret the element of time found in an immersive space that allows for varying yet simultaneous moments of presence.

That is the description from their website. A friend of mine, Kyle Kondas is one of the video artists participating in this exhibition. To see the works of these video artists, head over to www.seesmic.com and check out the featured videos on the right hand side. There you will see a link to Timeframe Exhibition. If you are new to seesmic, you will see the videos in a timeline on the left hand column. There are scrolls button on the bottom. Just scroll through the different videos as well as people’s video comments.

This is a new and inventive way to use seesmic which is primarily a video social network. The nice part is the instant feedback you can get from the viewers. Kudos to Christi Nielson, the curator, for coming up with a new way to display art.

I posted a few of the videos that have been submitted so far. Just click the “read more” click below. Also keep checking back to seesmic since this lasts from 09/25 - 09/27.

Here are some of the works already displayed

TimeFrame Exhibition Kyle Kondas
TimeFrame Exhibition : Fidler Video 1
TimeFrame Exhibition Kyle Kondas
TimeFrame Exhibition Christi Nielsen
Re: TimeFrame Exhibition Tiil

I received this email yesterday from the Radiohead mailing list:

After the insane response we got from the Nude remix stems and the site that was dedicated to your remixes…

Unique visitors: 6,193,776, Page Views: 29,090,134, Hits: 58,340,512, Bandwidth: 10.666 Terabytes, Number of mixes: 2,252, Number of votes: 461,090, Number of track listens: 1,745,304

…we thought it only fair to do the same with a tune that at least is in 4/4. You can get the stems (the different instruments/elements) from here

Radiohead is basically saying “here is all of our instruments from this song go and have fun!” God bless Radiohead! I could shed a tear right now. They have also launched a site for you to upload your remixes and have the public vote on the best ones. You even get a HTML widget you can put on your blog, myspace, facebook, etc. I think Radiohead is the only band out there that knows their audience and willing to go against the mold.

Well its that time in a Operating System’s life cycle. The dreaded format and reinstall of Windows. I have been fearing this for a couple of months. Just like vehicles, your Operating System gets sluggish after a while and needs a refresher.

 I’ve had Windows XP installed for 4+ years and now windows starts very slowly and just recently started randomly giving me BSOD and rebooting.The fun part of backing up all my important documents, media, software,etc. onto an external drive and praying that I got everything is the next step. This is sort of good in a way because i get to sift through all of crap and delete what I really don’t need or haven’t used in a long time. It’s spring cleaning for the computer.

This makes me think about the push to Cloud Computing or Client Server computing and wonder if that is the way to go.