My quest to eat at Phoenix's Sketchiest Chinese Restaurants
16 years ago today, my buddy Wayne and I began a new quest: to eat lunch at each of the Sketchiest Chinese Restaurants in Downtown Phoenix.
The original idea was to eat at every windowless Chinese restaurant, which seemed like an easy way to determine general sketchiness. But alas, our first target was a place that was only a window. In fact, the regulars we spoke to simply refer to the place as “The Window.”
“Why are we doing this again?”
Huh, it’s never a good sign when the Office of the Medical Examiner shows up at your lunch spot and starts talking to the staff.
Exactly what you’d expect for take-out numbers. (Also note the menu item tucked into the corner: “P5 Pork with vegetable.”
We developed our own hybrid rating system, which combined food quality with general sketchiness of the location1. After eliminating some candidate restaurants as not sketchy enough, or slightly outside the geographic scope (the I-10/I-17 box, though the sketchiest restaurants were all in the warehouse district south of downtown), and missing out on one or two that closed down before we could eat there, we ended up visiting six total sketchy Chinese restaurants.
It took us until August to complete the quest, mostly due to scheduling issues—specifically, we both needed to have zero plans for that evening or the following day, just in case we got food poisoning. Luckily, we never did get sick, though we definitely gave up on at least one meal after just a bite or two.
All in all, it was a fun quest. I got to visit a few parts of the city that I had never been to before (cough for good reason cough), and that was interesting. As was locating possible restaurants, whether by asking our friends (“wait, you’re doing what?!”), zooming around on Google Street View, or even taking the long way home to scout out a possible objective.
But mostly, it was fun just because it was such a goofy goal to pursue. I’m a big fan of using structured quests, like visiting all the (insert topic), and this was a great demonstration that it almost doesn’t mater what that (insert topic) is. You can have fun pursuing any quest; the fun is simply in pursuing novel experiences. In fact, I still use this example all the time when explaining questing to someone.
And since I know I’ll get this question: “The Window” earned a 2D on our rating scale.
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Quality of food: rated 5 down to 1 (worst) Sketchiness of restaurant: rated A down to F (worst) ↩︎
I have a custom phone number with a 520 area code and every 6 months or so I get a bunch of calls from a hospital in Tucson about upcoming procedures or pending prescriptions. There seems to be nothing I can do about it (I’ve tried), but I sure wish this person would fix their contact info.
Grabbing a quick beverage at Fuzzbot so Jen can finally mark the brewery off her list. Brought our laptops to get some trip planning done too.
I had hoped to get my Maps plugin in order this week, but alas, I’ve been distracted by a big data center that’s now under construction in our neighborhood. Do I know anyone who has worked on these types of issues? I’m trying to get a better handle on strategy and available support resources.
I’m slowly closing in on the 6000 unique craft beer mark…
It’s Spellbinder Day at Wren Südhalle! We’re here celebrating our fav flagship beer of our fav brewery at our fav brewery location. Cheers! 🍻
Big day at my local brewery tomorrow.
Here’s a live preview of the four map plugins I built for Micro.blog:
- Maps
- Tracks
- Travelpath
- Colormaps
Each fills a slightly different need for travelers & adventurers, or anyone who wants to add some fun visualization to their posts. Still need to wrap up some loose ends + add documentation.
One my favorite π days was OTD in 2018 when my dad joined Jen and I at OHSO Brewing. They had brewed a special menu of pi(e)-inspired beers, paired with slices of various pies. My dad isn’t a fan of craft beer, so he mostly ate pie and told stories. What a fun afternoon!
Working on yet another micro.blog plugin…this one is called Colormap.
This colormap depicts which states Jen has completed in her quest to camp in each of the 50 states. This is just a screenshot, but the map key is fully interactive.
Colormap is part of a suite of plugins and related tools focused on adding more functionality to MB for travelers/outdoor adventurers. I’m hoping to release some (or all) of them this coming week.
- Maps: interactive maps with markers
- Tracks: interactive maps with gps tracks
- Colormap: color-filled maps for showing travel progress
- Progress: simple way of showing progress towards goal completion
OTD in 2014
📍 Spur Cross Ranch Conservation Area #fb
OTD in 2017.
It was expensive, but we added Tannus Armour tire liners to our ebikes today. Hoping that gives us enough piece of mind to bring them a bit further from home than we have thus far.
The MacBook Neo intrigues me only as a travel computer. Something I can watch a movie on the plane, type out some posts, do some trip journaling, edit a few photos, conduct some trip research—but without the risk of damage/theft of my primary computer/data. Probably not worth the money for me tho.
I just could not get back to sleep last night, but managed to remember there was an eclipse of the moon, so eventually wandered outside to watch it for awhile and snapped this quick pic of the sky.
Breweries I've visited + FOMO about maps
I’ve been spending a lot of time this week working on my new Maps plugin for Microblog—which, admittedly, involves playing around with a bunch of location data and maps.
Last night, for instance, I stayed up well beyond my bedtime downloading my untappd checkins1, rooting out the list of actual breweries2 (which, remarkably, untappd doesn’t export in spite of it being a data field in the app), scrubbing unnecessary data, and converting the resulting data to my plugin’s format so I could display them on a map.
The product of my late night is this map of the 611 different breweries untappd says I’ve been to:
[Interactive map — visit the original post to explore it.]
Side note: I’m currently working on a 600/6000 untappd quest goal (eg, visiting 600 breweries and trying 6000 unique beers). I’ve already reached the brewery mark, but still need to run across another couple dozen unique beers to complete that half of the goal.
While the original impetus for adding basic map functionality was to show our travel posts on a map for AdventuresAroundthe.World, an expanded plugin—that I’d apparently need to build myself, errr..I mean use Claude.ai to build for me—would also come in handy displaying progress on Jen’s various quests3. Those quest maps would require supporting multiple maps on a site, and multiple icon styles on each map, something well beyond the rudimentary script I used initially. And hence, the need for this plugin.
But the more I play with it, the more ways I could see myself using it, well beyond quest progress maps. Finished up a hike? Lemme show all those trail photos on a map. Home from a road trip? Add pins for all the places I went, each linked to its corresponding blog post.
I already have loads of custom Google My Maps, used primarily to display quest progress or for our various adventure maps. So I also built a little helper app that can extract pins from a My Maps export and reformat the data for my own plugin. I think it’ll be quite helpful for anyone who wants to transition over.
But my plan for rscottjones.com, where I plan on posting most of my adventures, is to transition it from Wordpress to Kirby CMS. It’s a huge and complex task for me, and one that keeps getting bumped further and further down the list of project priorities.
So now I’m super excited about Jen’s website, and also this plugin, and…well…I’m having FOMO about it. Which, needless to say, is a bit weird because I’m making the damn thing. It feels odd to be so excited (and even a little proud) about something that I won’t be using on my primary website, the one where most of my future maps will reside.4 I can’t scratch my current itch for posting my own maps, even though I just built a great solution for doing so.
Anyway, I guess this is a long way of saying that you should expect some maps posts here anyway. Oh, and I guess this also served as an excuse to post my Craft Brewery map too! 😉
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Super annoying that downloading your data in raw form, even just as a backup, is a “premium” feature that requires a paid subscription. I join every year or two solely so I can grab my data. ↩︎
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Of course, this list isn’t exactly how I’d count breweries. For some time, venues could only claim one venue category, so often a place that brewed beer in house might classify themselves as a restaurant if they also sold food. In the last few years, however, venues can select multiple categories, and now venues often claim categories that don’t seem quite accurate. ↩︎
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I really like how her site has been coming together. She’s mostly focused on adding “On This Day” posts for each day of the year as opposed to posting in-the-moment posts while we travel, but that’ll come with time. ↩︎
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Of course, I’ll build something very similar over there, but…that’s at some unknown point in the website, and well, I’m excited now. ↩︎
Airports I've Flown Thru
This is primarily a test of a conversion tool I’m working on in conjunction with the Maps plugin I’m releasing soon. The goal here is to provide a way to easily migrate from Google My Maps to my Maps for Micro.blog plugin.
[Interactive map — visit the original post to explore it.]
I don’t think the map itself will carry over to any social feeds, so you’ll need to click through to see anything.
I’m looking for some Microblog testers for my new Maps plugin before I prep it for public release. It’s self-contained and easily reversible if you don’t like it or have any issues, and it should be theme-agnostic, too.
Send me a message if you’re interested.
Welp, I had to cancel my participation in this week’s Miami trip this morning, just prior to heading to the airport. Bummer.
So here’s a shot of the curving pedestrian walkway leading up the lookout tower at Shark Valley in Everglades National Park, where we would have been this weekend.
I should be packing today, but instead I’ve been too engrossed in adding some more features to this MB plugin I’ve been working on. I have everything implemented for v1 and a list of possible features for v2, but still have theme testing and example maps to build, so release date remains unclear.