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

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

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

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