MeetWays.com: An Easier Way to "Do Lunch"

If you've ever met someone and then said "We should do lunch," you (like myself) are probably living a tired Hollywood cliche. A lot of these lunches never come together because the other party never wanted to do lunch in the first place, but a subset of these meetings don't happen because it just seems like too much work to find an agreeable meeting place.

MeetWays.com provides a very simple solution to this problem. Simply type in both of your addresses and the type of place you'd like to meet (Japanese Restaurant, Starbucks, etc) press the "Get halfway location" button and in no time at all you'll have a google maps search result of all the starbucks near the exact halfway mark between you and you're lunch-date.

Examples of where this might be useful:

• Find a meeting place for you and your rehearsal partner.
• Discover new restaurants or bars with a friend.
• Reduce the hidden power-dynamic found in friendships where one person does more driving than the other.
• Find the most convenient seedy-hotel for you and your Craigslist Casual Encounter.

Now if only they had a means of finding a mutually agreeable time we'd really be cooking with gas.

Edit (3/22/2009):

MeetInbetweenUs and aPlaceBetweenUs both provide a similar tool for finding a meeting point except they allow for more than two addresses to be entered.

Packing for a Trip with the Universal Packing List

After a trip around the world you'd think I could manage to pack for a two week trip without use of the internet. Well, for better or worse, I'm way too neurotic for that. I'm leaving for Washington D.C. (my half-marathon + family), NYC (friends), & Columbus OH (business) tomorrow. Enter: The Universal Packing List.

This website is ugly as hell, but quite useful. Simply fill out a brief questionaire about your trip and press the "Create packing list" button. In no time at all you'll have a categorized list of everything you need to bring to have a pleasantly uneventful trip.

My favorite feature is the "Things to do before you leave" section which includes gems like (comments are mine):

• Wash the dishes
• Unplug electrical stuff
• Empty all trashcans (I've forgotten this in the past which makes for an odiferous welcome home)
• Forward (or hold) delivery of newspapers and magazines (You can now do it online) 
• Pay rent

It even reminds you to pack:

• Charger to Cell Phone
• Battery charger for camera

“A Skull in Connemara” @ Theatre Tribe in NoHo

Since my return to the States, I've been desperately trying to regain my excitement for acting. Uncertain economic times, and 5 months of filming in sometimes adverse conditions drained me of my desire to seek out acting gigs. Seeking to remedy this, I devised a plan. I would see some stage plays so that I might recreate the environment in which I first fell in love with it all. I saw a number of plays; none of them particularly good. I was starting to suspect that acting was a wholly selfish act and the audience members were but hapless victims paying to be kidnapped and held in silence for as long as the actors and director deem a show should drag on.

I was losing hope. Then I got an email from GoldStar offering discount tickets to "A Skull in Connemara" by Martin McDonagh. McDonagh is one of my favorite playwrights (the next play you buy should be "The Pillow Man"). So I bought myself a ticket. I'm glad I did.

From the opening moment with Mick Dowd standing alone in his house searching for the last drops of booze at the bottom of his glass to the closing scene with the same Mick Dowd speaking a heartfelt promise to his dead wife – it was absolutely enthralling. Morlan Higgins, John K. Linton, Jeff Kerr McGivney, and Jayne Taini all give great performances. The set design by Jeff McLaughlin was ingenius in it's use of space; the opening of the second act managed to instill the same sense of awe I felt when I saw the giant-robot transformers-style set of Le Miserables when I was 7. I left the theater in an altered state, once again believing that while there are few things more torurous than bad theater – there are even fewer things better than a truly great live performance.

Also, Stuart Rogers, the director this production apparently teaches acting, directing, and pedagogy at the Stuart Rogers Studios. One must first go through an interview process before joining his class, but I'm definitely interested.