Borgata to be first Atlantic City casino to go 100% smoke-free

In an effort to best accommodate our customers — smokers and
non-smokers alike — Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa has submitted plans to the
NJ Department of Community Affairs (DCA) that will make the resort
the first 100% smoke-free casino in Atlantic City. To accommodate smoking guests, Borgata will offer several outdoor lounges that will be designated smoking areas. These outdoor spaces will offer guests a comfortable, climate-controlled environment reminiscent of Borgata.

We feel this decision will best maintain the fresh, upscale atmosphere
associated with Borgata, while accommodating both
smokers and non-smokers alike.

Subject to NJ DCA approval, the plans will take effect in compliance
with the Atlantic City smoke free ordinance.

Just this morning, I booked a room for Kim and I for our anniversary. (I proposed to her at a suite at the Borgata.) Not sure if it will be smoke free by then, but we can hope.

3. DietShui.
The Idea: Find reviews for diet books. a.k.a. MoneyShui for diet and health books.
The Problem: Same as MoneyShui. It needs content to be of use to people.
The Solution: Same as above.

2. NoteTrain.
The Idea: Take some prose writing and convert it into a “train” of sentences presented one line at a time.
The Probelm: Two fold here: (1) We haven’t been spreading the word on this one and (2) It’s kind of pointless.
The Solution: Let people know how fun this is and how useful it can be. I use it to send Kim love notes. It’s different.

1. SearchRascal.
The Idea: Keep track of search result rankings for keywords your tracking.
The Problem: Just launched and no one knows about it. We need some people using it to justify the server costs.
The Solution: Push on our SEO buddies to spread the word a bit. I’ve submitted the site to some blogs and stuff but no one is picking up on this. Perhaps the idea isn’t as awesome as I thought it was. Nah, I doubt that. We need a little bit of publicity to get this going. The site really is useful to SEO professionals and anyone who wants to track search rankings for a website or group of queries.

This comic there got me laughing a bit…

… even though I don’t really condone the “make me a sandwich” behavior, attitude, or stereotype.

Enjoy!

We just launched Sweet WillYums, which is important to you for two reasons.

(1) They make something called Uncle Eric’s Granola Biscotti, and it’s the best baked good I’ve ever eaten. You should buy some… or check out their other goodies.

(2) The site is built on top of Wordpress, using our very own e-commerce plugin. It’s not ready for mass distribution, but we’re using it to launch at least 3 other sites right now. Sweet WillYums integrates with PayPal, but other sites will use everything from an email-based order form to Authorize.net and other payment gateways.

Have a good weekend.

We usually wing it and have never before written down the “recipe”. But Kim’s sister asked for it. Here’s what Kim wrote back:

(The Very Best) Mac and Cheese (Ever)

Boil and salt water; cook 1 lb. elbow macaroni to al dente.

Put the following ingredients in a microwave safe bowl and cover with plastic wrap:
- 1 lb. white american cheese (we like clearfield) sliced then torn into smaller pieces
- 1/4 lb. yellow cheddar cheese (shredded or just chopped up)
- 3 tbsp. butter
- 1/4 c. of milk (can always add more later)

Microwave the cheesy stuff in 5 min. segments stirring every 5 mins. until melted and not chunky. Thin the cheesy stuff as needed with milk to a little bit more runny than you would think it should be (the pasta soaks it up and it gets thicker). I sometimes throw in a little paprika, pepper, chives, parsley, etc. to spruce it up.

While the cheese is cooking away, heat up 1 can of stewed tomatoes (not Italian style) in a small saucepan. Mash up the stewed tomatoes with a potato masher and thicken with a little corn starch and water. Watch that you don’t turn up the heat too high because they can burn and/or boil and spit lava-hot tomato goo at you. Ouch!

Combined the cooked noodles and the cheesy sauce and put it in an over-safe casserole dish.

Cover with the stewed tomatoes and sprinkle top with italian bread crumbs.

Bake for 20 mins. or so. at 350 degrees.

To serve, open a bottle of white wine and give a toast to Jason and Kim!

This is absolutely not the best stuff to eat if you are trying to lose weight. But it is mighty tasty. So try it out sometime as a treat. Then come back and thank me.

We went back and forth as to who was who. And to be honest, his arguments were much better than mine. I think the last had something to do with the fact that the real Jason Coleman must have been born in December (I was born in June) because that’s when the OTHER JC (Jesus Christ) was born. Something like that.

In any case, this guys knowledge of Jasons in the bible and Greek mythology was well ahead of mine. I tried to pull the "JASON is on the calendar" trick (you’ll figure it out), but he was aware of that one. Although he said he just realized a couple years ago, whereas I BEEN knowing that crap since I could first read.

We both agreed that neither of the posers at www.jasoncoleman.com or www.jasoncoleman.net were even in the running to be THE REAL Jason Coleman. And Jason Coleman from Big Huge Games is cool, but also out of the race. I’ll let the domains speak for themselves.

In other news, I just watched the very funny interview with The Fake Steve Jobs at WallStrip.com. It’s good stuff and made me realize that I better pick-up www.fakejasoncoleman.com, and I did. You never no when you’ll become famous and have blog stalkers. Also, think it and be it. Everything zen, everything zen.

Oh, and yeah, I’m not linking to those other sites because this is all a scheme to get the #1 Google result for "Jason Coleman". They’ll get no link juice from me. I’m still confused about this whole Google thing. I mean, I’m practically an Internet mogul here and I can’t even claim a search for my name. I AM consoled a little bit that I’ve managed to claim sexy wine guy.

By “soft launched”, I mean a kind of “beta”. We want a few people to come to the site to test it out, but don’t want Digg or Techcrunch-style coverage just yet. So this small blog posting should get the 20 of you who follow this blog to check it out and will also get Google crawling the site.
It’s a pretty cool site, and I’ll definitely be talking about it more later.

The site is built on top of WordPress, and when we were first installing WP we did not check the “I would like to include my website in search engines…” option. I didn’t really know what checking this did… I assumed some kind of submission to Google and Technorati. Since the site was still in development and I knew I was going to submit the site later, I left it unchecked so Google wouldn’t know about the dev version of the site until it was ready.

Well, it turns out that leaving that option unchecked actually adds a no-index and no-follow meta tags to the header of every page, asking Google and other crawlers to stay out. This is obviously a bad if you ever expect to get search engine traffic. We didn’t notice this until after we launched the site and a search for “inspirage” was returning a link to the website, but with no title or description.

You can go into the WP options and change this setting after installation… that’s what we did. Meta tags removed.

It’s been about a week and still no update on those search results though. My guess is that Google isn’t crawling the site. I’ve read that they won’t crawl the site for 180 days or so. Maybe our links in this blog post will put it back on the radar. I’m also going to submit the URL through Google’s quality form. And maybe installing Analytics on the site will wake Google up to the fact that Inspirage.com is crawlable. We can only hope.

If anyone out there has had the same problem and knows a good solution, let us know.

I vowed to always get a facial before any vacation. It just puts you in the mood. I was so excited about my discovery that I couldn’t stop talking about it at my bachelor party, and my friends couldn’t stop joking about the implied innuendo.

Anyway, I was thinking of facials because we just launched a new site for Dr. Harriet Comite at www.comiteskin.com. Shortly after, Kim bought me a facial at their Advanced Skin Care spa, which was amazing as always.

If you live near Reading, Pennsylvania and are interested in spa treatments ranging from manicures to Botox treatment, check out their office in Wyomissing.

If you’re a tech nerd like us, you might want to follow their site too. There are few qualified people blogging about the world of spas and skin care right now. If the group at Advanced Skin Care can continue to put out great content on their blog, I think they’ll have no problem booking appointments in the future. There’s an opportunity for someone in this space to take control of the blogosphere much like EnglishCut and Stormhoek did in their respective fields. I wish them luck.