URBANA Mexican Gastronomy & Mixology: Flavor Bombs My family was looking for something fun for an early supper today. We tried to get into Culinary Dropout, a new place in the Del Mar Highlands Town Center. We saw a crowd, but were were told they aren't open yet. Apparently it was a VIP crowd. Ah well. I'll have to go back. We sauntered over to the SkyDeck and perused the options in this fun space.

#thingsitried #URBANA #Mexican #SkyDeck #DelMar

Facial Recognition with webcam I kind of want to do a crazy project like an AI powered game for my cat. I want my program to recognize when my cat takes some kind of action, and do something in response. Ideally, the game would learn to amuse my cat, as tell if she is amused by looking at her. In that vein, I decided the first step would be to get a python program to interact with my webcam.

#thingsitried #facialrecognition #opencv #HaarCascade #classifier

Test Driven Development Being just enough of a software tinkerer, I have heard about a software development practice where you don't start by writing functional code. Instead, you start by writing tests that will only pass once the functional code works. This is called Test Driven Development—TDD. I have actually written a few unit tests before—dabbled at a job and also for an open source project—but really, this is new to me.

Getting started with pytest for Test Driven Development #pytest #TestDrivenDev #python

Silence of the Alarms: My Airhood Rescue Story Cooking in our house has always been a bit of an adventure—one that usually ends with the blaring sound of smoke alarms. No matter what I try to cook in a frying pan, the alarms seem inevitable. Even with the range hood on full blast, making a simple steak or burger is a guaranteed way to set them off. And it's not just the stovetop—our oven has triggered them too!

Silence of the Alarms: My Airhood Rescue Story

Cooking in our house has always been a bit of an adventure—one that usually ends with the blaring sound of smoke alarms. No matter what I try to cook in a frying pan, the alarms seem inevitable. Even with the range hood on full blast, making a simple…

Regents Pizzeria: College vibe with Chicago Style Friday night my son wanted to go to Regents Pizza. He had just gotten his math grade back up to an "A", so we had to say "yes." Besides, we all love Regents Pizza. We managed to park and get a seat. Both can be a challenge on a Friday night. Regents was bustling with a mostly college crowd, though there were some families—like us!

#ThingsITried #RegentsPizza #ChicagoStylePizza #DeepDishPizza

Delica Japanese Deli Review: Small Spot, Big Flavors I found myself in San Francisco for a work event this past week. While I was there, I met up with a friend at the Ferry Building for lunch. Our first lunch spot choice was a new place my friend had heard about called "Lunette Cambodia". Unfortunately, they were closed on Monday and we found that our second choice of "Terrane" closed at 2pm (it was 2:30).

Delica Japanese Deli Review: Small Spot, Big Flavors

I found myself in San Francisco for a work event this past week. While I was there, I met up with a friend at the Ferry Building for lunch. Our first lunch spot choice was a new place my friend had heard about called "Lunette Cambodia".…

Leads Automation: Using Old-School blog freshness estimate This is a continuation of my last post "Leads Automation: Using LLM to estimate webpage freshness" In that post I used a function - Technology

Leads Automation: Using Old-School blog freshness estimate thingsitried.com/2025/03/08/l...

Leads Automation: Using Old-School blog freshness estimate This is a continuation of my last post "Leads Automation: Using LLM to estimate webpage freshness" In that post I used a function estimate_last_update_with_llm(url) to grab the contents of a webpage—or at least the first 5000 characters—and send them off to ChatGPT 4o to try to ascertain how old it thought the blog was. It was supposed to use a lot of fancy tricks to get a good idea of when it was last updated, so that I can focus my efforts on actively maintained leads instead of long-dead ghost blogs.

#ThingsITried #LeadAutomation #WebScraping #PythonAutomation #LLMvsRegex #OpenAI #WebDataExtraction #MarketingTech #LeadGeneration #AutomationTools #PythonDev

Leads Automation: Using LLM to estimate webpage freshness If you read the second part of my Leads automation project (Little more automation for my leads: Part 2), you know that I now have a python script that will go through my gangly list of links copied from blog rolls. I paste my links into a Microsoft Word document but then save it out as HTML. The script then parses that into leads with a column for the URL, the link text, and the modified date.

#OpenAIAPI #LLM #blogging #python #thingsitried

Little more automation for my leads This is a continuation of my previous post Little bit of automation for my leads First of all, I want to point out a silly thing I did with my last version. Since I was having a hard time getting the docx module set up with all of it's dependencies, I decided to short-circuit that and just use HTML instead of a Microsoft Word Document.

#python #scripts #automation #thingsitried #blogging

송학 Songhak Korean BBQ When we went to The Friendly—immortalized in my post Discover Kearny Mesa’s Best Smash Burgers at The Friendly—we noticed some other nice looking restaurants we had never tried right on that little street by Steamy Piggy. We decided to go back and try one. My son thought the menu at Songhak looked the best, so we tried it. I always like a Korean place where I don't have to order all-you-can-eat BBQ, though that tends to be a treat when we have it.

#Songhak #koreanbbq #convoystreet #thingsitried

The Kebab Shop: Carmel Mountain My son wanted The Kebab Shop again. We were fine with it—but were not going to make the same mistake we made when we visited the Encinitas location for the second time. I wrote about our second mistake there in my post The Kebab Shop: Encinitas. This time we went back to the Carmel Mountain location in Rancho Bernardo. The place is bigger, they play waaaay better music, and they don't skimp on the veggies.

#TKS #TheKebabShop #chickpea #chickpeasalad

Little bit of automation for my leads Yesterday I wrote about trying to automate more of my manual process of trying to find suitable backlinks to my blog in my post More SEMRush. Today, I was back at the manual process, and the first thing I noticed was that I really need some kind of tracking. When I go to a blog and look around, often I will see where they list other blogs they follow.

#VSCode #python #docx #pipinstall #conda #beautifulsoup #bs4

More SEMRush I've been using SEMRush a lot more lately. I need some backlinks. Bing delisted me and I think it might have something to do with that warning in Bing Webmaster that I don't have enough high quality backlinks. One method I landed on was looking at others in the niche. Throw their domain into SEMRush. What is their authority? How much traffic do they get?

More SEMRush

I've been using SEMRush a lot more lately. I need some backlinks. Bing delisted me and I think it might have something to do with that warning in Bing Webmaster that I don't have enough high quality backlinks. One method I landed on was looking at others in the niche. Throw their…

Looks like you got all the addons I wanted to get

Got #pepperlunch for the first time & it was so bomb 😮‍💨😋

Pepper Lunch: Irvine Spectrum Center My wife and I were up making our way up to Universal Studios to pick up our son from an overnight trip with his friend. We were a little ahead of schedule and had time to grab lunch on the way. While driving I told my wife to go to my blog on her phone and check out my page…

#PepperLunch #SpectrumCenter #sizzlingbeef #OCFoodies #thingsitried

Build an automatic cover letter writer with LLMs and BAML Now I want to use BAML to do something useful. The plan is to read in a job description, read in a resume, and automatically produce a cover letter.

#BAML #LLM #ChatGPT #ChatGPTproject

Micheline’s Pita House My son wanted McDonalds for lunch. I talked him into Micheline's Pita House instead. They are both right there in the Del Mar Highlands Town Center. My son, my wife and I all like Micheline's. I actually loved it when we first discovered it, but it isn't as new to me anymore. I guess my heart desires the allure of the unknown, but new or not, they're good.

#michelines #pitahouse #delmar

Sugar and Scribe Last Saturday we did brunch at Sugar and Scribe. My son and wife didn't want to go to Snooze or Cody's, so I did some searching online. I saw that lajollamom.com had some brunch recommendations I respected, like her "local favorites." She picked The Cottage La Jolla and Sugar and Scribe. 18 Best La Jolla Breakfast & Brunch Spots: A Resident's Restaurant Guide…

#SugarandScribe #shashuka #lobbyroll

Discover Kearny Mesa’s Best Smash Burgers at The Friendly The food came unceremoniously and we were impressed with the crispy, super-smashy burgers. The fries were thin, hot and very salty. We all liked them, but they were too salty for everyone's taste but mine. My wife said she usually thinks fries need extra salt, but this was too much for her. We all liked the onion rings as well.

#TheFriendly #smashburger #convoydistrict #kearnymesa

Bing Webmaster Tools As a new blogger, I keep learning new tricks. I noticed that I have more posts coming up in Google than Bing and DuckDuckGo. I can actually see exactly how many of my posts and pages are indexed by each search engine by searching on sites:thingsitried.com I went to my trusty LLM—ChatGPT-4o— and asked what to do. It suggested that I use…

#BingWebmasterTools #SEO #WebsiteOptimization #SearchEngineTools #SearchEngineOptimization

BAMLing Through the Code: Overcoming Challenges with AI’s New Language I finally finished listening to every single episode of the podcast Data Skeptic. I'm not sure that I really needed to listen to every episode, but I learned a lot. I tend to be kind of obsessive about educational content sometimes. I made a point way back when of listening to every single episode of the Linear Digressions podcast…

#BAML #LLM #ChatGPT #AI #python

Get API Access to ChatGPT I listened to all of the episodes of the Data Skeptic podcast. Yeah. That was a lot. One recent highlight: Kyle suggested that we—the listeners—get programmatic access to ChatGPT. He meant API access. He strongly implied that if you are serious about using this powerful new tool, you shouldn't dick around—pardon the expression—typing at the prompt. I am taking this to heart.

#chatgpt #llm #api