BoulderDash – Ignighter Road Trip Part 3
At the end of Part 2 Jerry Rig and Alan Wrench were relishing their new manly alter-egos. They honeymoon wouldn’t last long though…
We woke up on the third day of our trip to find that somebody (the consensus points to me Rig) had left the headlights on the night before. The car was dead along with our Mr. Hyde charade. Needless to say, we didn’t have jumper cables. And while we had a conceptual grasp on the process of jumping a car, neither of us had ever taken the lead. We know, it’s pathetic. However we were fortunate enough to get some much needed help from the very kind Omahanian woman who worked at the check-in/concierge/valet/wake-up service/general maintenance desk.
Thanks to our new friend, we did get the car running. Now all we had to do was get the hood shut properly and we could be on our way. Unfortunately, we needed the manual to do so. Not a joke.
Once we got the hood shut we were back on the road, feeling ready to conquer the last leg of the trip and move into our summer digs in Boulder. The only obstacle left it seemed – aside from the incessantly pouring rain and disconcerting proximity to deadly twisters – was lunch.
Food stops along Rte. 80 in western Nebraska don’t come up too often. So when we passed a “food exit” at 12:45 we knew it would be best to pull off and eat rather than risk the chance that we wouldn’t come across another for hours. And we still weren’t passing any damn food stands selling freshly picked ears of corn on the side of the road! Share your product with us Nebraska, you’re the Cornhuskers! I always keep a used tissue in my pocket in case I come across a stranger who wants to know what Jersey is like. The point is, you have to share your culture with your fellow Americans. But I digress.
And do you want to know the reason for the digression? I’m trying to avoid reliving the following horrendous scene.
We decided to eat at Taco Bell. It was disgusting. I ordered a chicken quesadilla and a chicken taquito. From what I could tell, they consisted of the exact same three ingredients and only those ingredients (cheese, tortilla, rubber chicken) the only difference was that they were rolled up into different shapes; one looked like a half-circle while the other looked a lot like Joey Fatone.
The shape of the creation would ultimately prove inconsequential. The rubber chicken had its strangle hold on me and it wasn’t sitting well. The moment I got behind the wheel I felt incredibly queasy. We drove through the pouring rain for about 20 more minutes, with me trying to breathe while Dan laughed and continued bringing up gross details about the food we had just eaten.
Dan: I think your Fatone roll-up had some beak in it. It wasn’t supposed to crunch like that was it?
Me (between slow breaths): Shut up Dan.
Dan: I still don’t understand why you ate ALL of it.
Me: Me neither.
Why did I eat the whole thing? Ughhhhh.
We made it as far as the next turnoff when I knew I couldn’t drive any longer. We pulled off the highway into a deserted convenience store. I ran to the bathroom to refund my “meal” and Dan followed. With the camera.
Once the beak was out of my system, Ignighter was back on the road for the home stretch. A few hours later we were in Boulder! Road trip successfully completed!
While the trip sure had its ups (calzone) and its downs (vomit), it was definitely something we won’t soon forget. And Ignighter’s upcoming summer in Boulder promises to be an unforgettable experience too. It’s something we’ll try hard to hold onto forever. Because in the words of Kid Rock:
“Now nothing seems as strange as when the leaves began to change
Or how we thought those days would never end
Sometimes I’ll hear that song and I’ll start to sing along
And think man I’d love to see that girl again”
In our next post we’ll explain what exactly it is that Ignighter is doing here in Boulder, CO for the summer. It’s pretty exciting stuff!
Our New Lead Developer
Part 2 of the Ignighter Road Trip will be coming shortly, but before that we wanted to introduce the newest member of our team.
Kevin Owocki is Ignighter’s new lead developer. Kevin has 7 years of software engineering experience, and he has run a handful of small scale web companies. He’s an avid runner and ultimate frisbee player. He loves exploring the outdoors, meeting new, interesting people, and chatting about technology and startups. Ask him about his unique ability to relate nearly any situation to the plot of a Simpsons, Seinfeld, South Park, or Family Guy episode. Kevin is psyched for a landmark summer, and we’re really excited to have him on the team!
BoulderDash – Ignighter Road Trip Part 1
The Ignighter team is spending the summer in Boulder, Colorado and we’re extremely excited and fairly exhausted.
Dan and I left Wednesday morning on a 3-day adventure from NY to CO and arrived last night. We laughed, we cried, Dan snacked (a lot), I vomited (a little). The following is the first of 3 installments recounting our journey.
First some background on our wheels:
Finding a car to take on the trip was quite a hassle, but thanks to Dan’s dad for making many trips to Long Island car dealerships, we finally secured a great ride to have for the duration of the summer. We pimped out our brand new Civic with the same instrumentation that I would imagine an F-16 keeps on board,
We didn’t even have to pay $15 per checked bag!
a Magellan GPS and a Sirius Radio. The GPS was essential for reminding us to continue driving west on Rte. 80 (which we did for 97% of our drive across eight states).
Satellite radio was the fuel that kept our brains from shutting down which would have been the case if we had been forced to listen to Iowa and Nebraska’s radio programming – ever heard of a “corn debate”? Me neither. And at $6/month, the brain fuel was far more affordable than the more than $4/gallon we were pumping into our whip.
We learned that the Sirius Hits station currently plays a 7-song rotation, each song we had completely memorized by Des Moines. This was our soundtrack for the drive:
Fall Out Boy (featuring John Mayer) – Beat It
Leona Lewis – Bleeding Love
Nickelback – It’s Not My Time
Lifehouse – Whatever It Takes
Usher – Love in this Club
Flo Rida – Low
And our anthem for the trip:
Kid Rock – All Summer Long 
On a side note, does anybody know if this song has been released yet? I started to get the shakes this morning because my body wasn’t used to not hearing it every half hour and when I checked iTunes, it wasn’t there.
On another side note, you have to love any musician who is self-confident enough to rhyme “things” with “things”. And this rhyme isn’t just a one-time cop-out nestled between two other better rhyming couplets. It’s actually the refrain of the song.
“We were trying different things
And we were smoking funny things”
The song is amazing. One of the best things I’ve heard in a long, long thing.
OK, Now on to the trip:
The first leg was from NY to Chicago. We did it in 13 uneventful hours through NJ (land of Liberty and Prosperity), Pennsylvania (8 hilly, twisty hours of nothingness), Ohio (Rest Stops so beautiful and spotless that Dan actually ate a prosciutto panini off the urinal), 
Indiana (Gary was killer), and finally to Illinois.
Chicago is a special city to us since we went to college there and it felt great to be back in the beautiful windy city.
We arrived in Chicago at night and grabbed dinner and a beer with our old college pal Dr. David Davidson and stayed separately at 2 friend’s places who conveniently lived a few blocks away from each other. Both friends were incredibly hospitable and both places were gorgeous. Dan stayed at Jess Schneider’s sci-fi apartment complete with Delorian-style cabinets
and freshly baked banana muffins for our road trip.
I stayed with Dr. David Davidson in his big-ass apartment overlooking Lake Michigan.
In the morning it was up and out. After a quick deep dish slice at Gino’s East we were presented with a Frostian dilemma.
We ultimately chose Iowa, mainly because it was the most untraveled, but also mainly because we found ourselves in the Exit Only lane.
In Part 2 the adventure really heats up. We reveal the crime-fighting alter-egos we were forced to adopt along the way, an epic calzone, and a tale of a dead car.
A Must Watch
We at Ignighter are always confused about the fact that it seems like there’s a vast disconnect between an idealized mentality about dating and the way actually it happens in real life. Sites like Match and eHarmony basically have the user create their own blind date. This sounds pretty unpleasant and certainly doesn’t reflect the way we behave in real life.
We feel like Ignighter on the other hand, does accurately reflect the way we date and meet people in the real world; with our group of friends.
That being said, we really love this video that our friend JM shared with us. Not only is it hilarious, but it’s right on target in terms of representing the real way dating happens today.
My New Bumper Sticker Says – Save the Bloggers
Just last week we reconfigured the design of the Ignighter Weblog and added a couple new posts. At the time it seemed completely harmless, what could possibly be dangerous about spending 4 hours playing around with WordPress blog templates and typing into a box? Apparently, everything. Little did we know that we were skating on ice thin enough to beat out Keira Knightly for the part of a waifish Shakespearean boy. In retrospect, spending that much consecutive time on the blog was one of the most foolish, utterly idiotic things we’ve ever done.
Our newfound appreciation for life comes In light of this New York Times article from Sunday. The article goes into detail about the intense stress that frequent bloggers – most notably Tech Bloggers – undergo as a result of trying to cover as much web news as possible and to be the first to do so. According to the article, constant bloggers have been gaining and losing large amounts of weight, not getting nearly enough sleep, and two prominent bloggers have recently died from what is suspected to be an indirect result of blogging too much. I’m not kidding. Bloggers have actually been dying.
At the outset of the Ignighter Weblog, I wasn’t so good about blogging frequently. Maybe I could inherently sense the dangers associated with a hard-blogging life. But recently I’ve seemingly thrown caution to the wind as I’ve been hitting the blog sauce pretty hard.
So from now on if a couple days go by and I haven’t zealously blogged, don’t think of it as “oh they’re being lazy bums again”. Instead try to take the approach of “ahh those poor guys must be too scared to blog today”. Because the truth is, we probably are. It’s not that we don’t love blogging. In fact, that’s just the problem.
Now that dangers are being associated with the blogger life, I predict that many will have a new found respect for them. Insiders are even saying that on next year’s list of the world’s most dangerous jobs, it could actually come in at number 3; Just behind deep-sea fishing and coal mining, but a hair ahead of Olympic Torch carrier.
In fact I’m feeling like a bit of a daredevil myself, and I love it. Little things like redesigning the blog layout now seem way more exciting, kinda like the modern day equivalent of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But also not entirely like that at all.
I guess the real lesson to be learned here is that blogging, like most things in life (alcohol, extra virgin olive oil, books), are great in moderation but fatal in excessive quantities. The Times quoted Michael Arrington, founder and co-editor of Tech Crunch as actually being surprised that he’s physically alright (despite gaining 30 lbs. in the last few years), “I haven’t died…At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen….This is not sustainable.” These people seriously need to cut back. I mean we all love hearing about what new languages Facebook is now available in, but do we really need to hear about it at 4am?
Maybe for the sake of these bloggers and their families we need to take a stand. If we make a concerted effort not to read their blogs in the middle of the night, then I predict that they’ll stop the nocturnal postings. In the article, Arrington jokes about how it would be great if all bloggers could reach an agreement to not post in the middle of the night, but he knows this is an impossibility. What they’re missing though, is that the power to save these croaking bloggers lies in the hands of the readers. You know what I’m sayin’?
Talkin’ About Ignighter
Today is a slow news day so we figured we’d fill our readers in on a little of the press/blog coverage we’ve gotten recently. Now keep in mind, for the most part this stuff is about a month old. We wanted to post it then, but we were just so consumed with booking guests for A/S/L Check.
Here are some links:
Newark Star-Ledger Article
This article ran on the cover of the NJ section in Jersey’s Biggest Paper, The Star-Ledger. Sopranos fans may recall that this was Tony’s go-to source for reading Mafia news, browsing obits, and catching up on innovative dating sites. Tony, Syl, Paulie, and Bobby would’ve made a pretty solid Ignighter group.
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This blog basically gives the Cliffs Notes of the Star-Ledger article.
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This is a pretty cool site aimed at informing entrepreneurs, investors, and bloggers about the newest, coolest startup ideas out there. Each day they have a vote asking their readers which startup (out of 10 each day) will be the most successful. We got 66 votes and the second place finisher our day got 18. We were expecting to win something cool like a DVD player or a Series A VC funding, but no, apparently the winner doesn’t get anything. Apparently it’s not even a competition at all. Oh well, I think we’ll still call us “the winner” anyway.
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We had a chance to meet this charming blogger. What a guy!
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PopGadget
This is a Tech/Innovation blog aimed at women.
But I Don’t Wanna be a Pirate
The wonderfully funny, All-American Joe Clabby brought to my attention recently a scene from Seinfeld in which George is talking about a date he has planned.
George: Well I think I’m better off going one-on-one.
Jerry: I don’t know why you want to play man-to-man when you could play a zone.
George is afraid that if he takes his new lady-friend out on a group date with Jerry and Elaine, she’ll see Jerry as the funny one in the group and leave George.
Elaine: He thinks that if a woman sees a guy put on a better show, she’ll walk out on his show, go see the other show.
That brings us to point six in our list of Why Ignighter Rules and Conventional Online Dating Blows: “The Group Setting Helps Weed out the Loners and Boners.” When you’re on a group date, your friends keep you honest. If you are one-on-one with a stranger you met over the internet (a la match.com date) you can misrepresent yourself so that you become exactly what you think your target audience (your date) is looking for.
After charming the attractive attorney earlier in the episode, George is nervous that the group setting will reveal his true identity.
George: You see, this is what I do with women. I start out too strong, now I have to become real, that’s when it all falls apart. What good is real? They don’t want real, they want funny.
In this analogy, George represents just the boners we’re talking about; people who adopt a fake persona to impress their dates. The group setting doesn’t allow for this misrepresentation. It forces people to be themselves because that’s how we naturally act when we’re with our friends.
George is better off on Match or JDate where they play man-to-man and there’s nobody around to call you out when you’re lying. Jerry understands that it’s much more natural to play zone, he’d use Ignighter.
And a quick note on weeding out the loners. Because you can’t start an Ignighter group alone, antisocial loners simply can’t use it. We’re not trying to discriminate, I promise. We are just trying to cultivate a fun, social atmosphere. People who have absolutely no friends to bring along would probably have more fun on a Second Life group date anyway.
Adam
We’re Big in Japan, Part 2
A while back we wrote about our strange appearance on Japanese Blog Nice Meets (this was back in our Sparkker days). Well it turns out that group dating is kind of a big deal over in Japan and was even before they got wind of Ignighter. They’ve yet to find a suitable web application for facilitating this cultural phenomenon though, so hopefully Ignighter can fill the void. The following is a description of what the Japanese call “Gokon” or “Compa” (Compa comes from the English word, “companion”).
Basically a man and woman plan what usually starts as a dinner and each invite 3 or 4 of their friends. This is the groundwork for the group date and doesn’t sound too dissimilar from Ignighter.
However there are many rules inherent to the Compa which of course do not exist in the free-spirited world of Ignighter:
1. The guys must arrive early and the ladies are expected to arrive late.
2. Daters aren’t allowed to sit next to their friends so they alternate boy, girl, boy, girl.
3. A toast, or Kanpai, is made and they all say “L’Chaim”.
4. They go around the table and introduce themselves, talking about their jobs, hobbies, and favorite house-mates on Oxygen Network’s Bad Girls Club.
5. They start drinking. A lot. Yumm….. Sake Bombs….
Because of the rigid social mores existing in Japan, alcohol plays a very important role in loosening up the Compadres (please note: I don’t think they really call themselves this). Compadres have even been known to exaggerate how drunk they really are (speaking of acting drunk, this Kid Nation clip is a must watch!) just for an excuse to act slightly more uninhibited.
For a firsthand account of a Compa, check out this blog:
Adam
It Used to be a Watermelon, Now it’s more like a Summer Squash
Tomorrow (Tuesday December 4th) Ignighter will be presenting at the NY Tech Meetup. This will be the first public demonstration of Ignighter and therefore the first time that any of us will have had tomatoes thrown at our heads.
But seriously folks we’re pretty excited about the opportunity to present to about 500 of our fellow NY Tech nerds and web entrepreneurs. The NY Tech Meetup is a great place for us to premiere our app. And we couldn’t ask for a cooler venue than the IAC building and the world’s largest HD video wall.
Check out the mention in Silicon Alley Insider, one of the top NY Tech/Digital blogs. I’d invite all of our faithful blog readers to come and support us, but unfortunately I’m pretty sure the event is full. If you’d like, you could show up anyway, and line up on the West Side Highway like you’re waiting for Spice Girls tickets.
While preparing for the demo we did come across some recaps and anonymous commentors of previous NY Tech Meetup demos. They are unkind to say the least. One that scared me the most said something along the lines of, “maybe we would’ve enjoyed the demo a little more if the presenter wasn’t blocking the screen with his huge head”. If you know me (or rather if you’ve seen me), you can probably imagine that one stung more than others. In fact, I’ve spent the day chewing celery and practicing the ancient Peruvian tradition of Cranial Binding in an attempt to tone up and slim down my big noggin.
The one good thing about the negative comments is that unlike hecklers at a comedy show, Tech hecklers – Techlers – wait until they’re home and in the safe, warm, anonymous confines afforded by the top bunk of their Batman and Robin bed.
We’ll be sure to let you all know how it goes…
On another note, if you have a couple minutes please take our Online Dating Survey, it’s quick and completely anonymous. Thank You!
Adam
Chief Ignighter Friend Maker
