Archive - April, 2010

The Joneses to Open Next Week

April 9, 2010 in Affluence, Suburban Life, The Joneses with 0 Comments

Alpharetta is set to make its debut on the silver screen. Roll out the red carpet. Are you ready? And what better way for this to happen than with a movie about materialism and keeping up with the Joneses? Can this play any better with my blog’s theme? I love it!

This movie starring David Duchovny and Demi Moore was filmed all over Alpharetta almost a year and a half ago. I’m surprised it took them this long to finally open. But nonetheless it is here. The premise is that Duchovny and Moore are new neighbors in a posh gated community in the burbs. But looks are deceiving. They are really slick marketeers trying to sell high-end merchandise and toys to the affluent locals. The story sounds interesting and strangely believable. You can read reviews for the movie here or check out the trailer.

The neighborhood shots were filmed at The Manor Golf and Country Club in Milton. This neighborhood is no stranger to pop culture. One of the Real Housewives of Atlanta lives here. There were also scenes filmed at Muse Hair Salon in Alpharetta. Muse got a lot of publicity out of this, something which I’m sure will make for good business in the future.

I can’t wait to see the movie and pick out other locations around town. And while Alpharetta will be duly proud of its new movie stardom, will the joke actually be on us?

The Joneses opens on Friday, April 16th at a theater near you. Look for me there. I’ll be the one driving the new BMW (yeah I wish).

Reviewing the Review Websites

April 9, 2010 in Foodie Friday, Reviews with 1 Comment

Every Friday, Roots in Alpharetta features an article on food and dining in a series I like to call Foodie Friday.

I’ve come to rely on a few online restaurant review websites. As web 2.0 and social media continue to grow, the influence of the online review portals multiplies. Here is my take on those that have the biggest footprint in the Alpharetta area. Each of these places have their own uniqueness so try several and see what you like best.

urbanspoon.com

Growing very fast. As someone who writes reviews, I don’t care for them much. On the site you give a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. Such a binary opinion isn’t very granular. But what I’ve found is that after a restaurant gets dozens or hundreds of these binary reviews, urbanspoon tends to get it right. The truly outstanding joints percolate to the top.

Urbanspoon is very good at integrating external blog content into their site. There are not a great deal of food bloggers in the northern burbs, something I hinted at recently. But nevertheless, they can direct you to cool content elsewhere. I’ve also found that they are more likely to be the first site to have reviews of brand new restaurants.

yelp.com

By far my favorite. Yelp mixes social media with online reviews. I’d say the functionality leans more towards the reviews and less towards social media. But you can have friends and vote on your favorite reviews. Yelp tends to be bigger in the cities where they have a paid community manager on the ground (of which Atlanta is one of them). The average yelp users also tends to be younger, a Gen-Y type person.

Yelp’s presence in Alpharetta was pretty thin a few years ago. Today they are much larger. I find the reviews to be well written and funny. If you’re reading reviews of a restaurant, I suggest sorting by the “useful” tag and go from there.

Citysearch

Losing ground in my opinion. For a long time they were just about the only game in town for Alpharetta reviews. That all has changed. They still have a lot of local reviews but I find that they are not as deep and well written as yelp. Still worth looking at.

Others

I don’t know of any other sites that have a large presence here. Higher end review sites like Zagat and Gayot simply lack depth in Alpharetta. Yahoo and Google are a decent alternative, and of course they integrate well with other features on those sites. Google probably wins on the sheer number of reviews, but I find them to be almost complete devoid of detail. You’ll find reviews like “I like this restaurant. They kick ass.”

Things to look out for… Watch out for shill reviews from business owners or their acquaintances. In general you want to trust reviews from people who have reviewed a LOT of other local restaurants. If a reviewer isn’t active on the website, I wouldn’t rely on them much. Yelp does a great job here. They will simply hide reviews like this. This practice is getting them into some hot water, but it keeps the integrity of the review process in check. I appreciate that and I think general users of the site do too. Other websites are not as proactive so it is up to you to filter these shill reviews on your own.

Most of these sites have feature-rich apps for iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Yelp and Urbanspoon have some very cool mobile apps, with neat location-aware technology.

Alpharetta to Extend Greenway… a Little Bit

April 8, 2010 in Cubicle Life, Suburban Life with 0 Comments

The city of Alpharetta has voted to extend the Big Creek Greenway from its current end at Webb Bridge Road up to the end of Marconi Drive. This is only about three quarters of a mile. Doesn’t seem like a lot really, but it is one step closer to Forsyth’s Greenway. It also opens up access to Windward. There will be a very small parking area here at the cul-de-sac on Marconi. They are also building a tunnel under Webb Bridge Road just for the path.

The trail is starting to get very close to cubicle land. This might be a nice lunchtime diversion for folks working at McKesson. But from here, the path is uncertain. Crossing Windward will be a problem. If the city is willing to spend the dough to tunnel under Webb Bridge, then you’ve gotta think they would be willing to do the same for Windward. Or perhaps a pedestrian bridge?

It appears that the future path from Forsyth’s current end at McFarland will follow the new Ronald Reagan Blvd. If they ever build it, this will be real close to the proposed Taubman Mall. I think this will take away from the woodsy feel of the path. It also means that Alpharetta will have some choices to make on how to get to McGinnis Ferry Road. Will they continue to follow the creek and cut through the Windward golf course? Or perhaps they can go north and follow Alderman Drive near LexisNexis and Equifax? Stay tuned.

Ancestral Roots

April 6, 2010 in Peter Kilborn, Rootless with 0 Comments

This post continues a discussion on the Peter Kilborn article on being Rootless in Alpharetta.

There is a place in rural North Carolina where a street bears my surname. There are also a few small family cemeteries with my last name on them. I guess you could say this is where my ancestral roots are located. It really is just a place where my family landed in the middle of the 18th century. My line move away more than 100 years ago. But when I hear someone talk about the word “roots”, I think of this swampy place in eastern North Carolina. If I were to pick up my family and settle there, I would be more rootless than I am here in Alpharetta. Sure, the locals would be better able to pronounce my last name, but I wouldn’t know anyone. And I’m pretty sure they don’t have a Starbucks on every corner there. I’ll stick to Alpharetta for now.

Is this the kind of roots that Peter Kilborn is talking about in his article? Maybe. There are streets in Alpharetta named after the original settlers of Milton County. Maybe your last name is Haynes, McGinnis, Mayfield, Mansell or Kimball. I’m not exactly bumping into people with those last names amongst my fellow cubicle dwellers.

I got to thinking about all this when I read this recent article on the Manning family of Alpharetta. It is one of those feel good articles about a very deeply rooted family in Alpharetta. The article has a lot of stories about the old days, when none of this was here, etc. And sure enough, they have a street and even a school named after them (Manning Oaks Elementary). It is a cool article.

But even this Manning family didn’t completely stay put. The article talks about some living in Duluth and Winder. So where am I going with all this? At some point Alpharetta went from being a sleepy little town to a place with one hundred thousand cubicles. These cubicles need to be filled with skilled technical people with advanced degrees. It is very unrealistic to expect the Manning families of the world to be able to supply all those workers. And plus, I’m sure many of them found reasons to move out of Alpharetta too.

So yeah, there are going to be rootless people that come to Alpharetta and a lot of them. Human beings will always be somewhat nomadic in nature. I don’t think this is a bad thing. I’ve said it before on this blog… this is where I want to be. I’d rather be here than the swamps of eastern North Carolina. That means I’m not gonna get a newspaper article written about five generations of my family staying put. Then again, maybe in seventy years they will interview me talking about how I remember when Windward Parkway was only four lanes and we didn’t have flying cars.

The Restaurant Randomizer

April 2, 2010 in Foodie Friday with 0 Comments

Every Friday, Roots in Alpharetta features an article on food and dining in a series I like to call Foodie Friday.

Where do you want to go for lunch? I dunno. Where do YOU wanna go? I dunno.

Ever been stuck in this endless loop? It happens all the time to me. In many ways we are lucky to have so many restaurant choices in Alpharetta. But at a certain point, it is overwhelming and hard to make a choice. But don’t fret because I have the perfect solution… The restaurant randomizer!

We started something like this at work many years ago. We just made a large spreadsheet of every restaurant close enough to go to for lunch. Add a random picker and you’re all set. Well, except being the nerdy technology people that we are, we added a complicated ranking system to the selection process so that the truly shitty places would come up almost never. This is overkill.

As a sample, I’ve created this Restaurant Randomizer spreadsheet for my blog readers. I probably should put my computer science degree to work and built a web-based randomizer for my readers, but who has time for that? I whipped this up real quick today and listed every restaurant on Windward Parkway. There are almost fifty of them! That doesn’t count maybe two dozen more that are a block of so off Windward at Highway 9. But nevertheless, it is the concept here that I’m going for.

Here’s how to play… each person has to agree to trust the randomizer, but each person also gets one and only one veto. So you click the “New Restaurant” button and see what comes up. Maybe it suggests Ray’s New York Pizza. You’re not feelin’ like franchise pizza today, so you exercise your veto. Next up is The Red Hen. You might not be totally cool with that pick, but you’re out of vetos. Your lunch partner thinks the Hen is good and off you go for some overpriced breakfast grub for lunch.

There are several things like this online that basically extend on APIs offered by yahoo or yelp or something. I kinda like Wheel of Lunch as an example. The problem with these is that you have to zero in on a zip code. My lunch options usually span three or four zip codes so I don’t like being pigeon holed like this.

So make your own list, maybe starting from my own. Add or remove places as you see fit. Don’t want high dollar expense account places like Vinny’s or Cabernet? Just remove them. Think driving up to Norman’s Landing on exit 13 is worth it for lunch sometimes? Throw ‘em on the list!

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