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.

How to Save Gas While Dropping Off Headshots

Almost every agent and casting director will tell you that they don't want actors personally dropping headshots at their offices. Yet every actors' marketing session or career strategy session I have attended has suggested that mailing headshots alone won't work, you should drop them off in person so that you can see the office and get a little face time with an assistant. What I think this means is that it's okay to drop off headshots in person so long as you don't dress up like the UPS man and lock an agent in the closet until they agree to sign you.

While the thought of going out and seeing more of LA while furthering my career has always seemed laudible, I always found myself at home licking stamps: "sure you could drive to hell and back dropping off headshots, or you could mail them and save a ton of your time and gas."

Well, there's finally an answer to the age of old question: What's the most efficient route between home, the 22 agencies I've decided to target, and my place of work?

The TSP Solver, a great little google maps mashup. TSP is short for "Travelling Sales Person" a title that a lot of actors can identify with. It allows you to enter up to 24 addresses, press a button, and get a turn by turn route between your destinations. The great part is, it selects the most effecient route between those points, saving you both time and money. Another great feature is that you can choose between home->destination (on your way to work), or roundtrip (on your lunch break) routing.

Thanks go to Thrillist.com for the heads up on this useful tool.

Improve Your Dialect Work: Learn IPA

If you've ever had difficulty understanding someone who speaks the same language as you but has a strong regional dialect (Louisiana, Cockney, etc), then you understand that while words are spelled the same way around the world, they are pronounced in completely different ways.

An American might say:

Park the car in Harvard yard.

While a person from England might say something more akin to:

Pahk thee cah in Hahvuhd Yahd.

One of the keys to dialect work is breaking down the differences in how specific sounds are pronounced. If you've ever taken a dialect class you were probably introduced to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It's an alphabet created by linguists in order to accurately record different dialects exactly as they sound - not how they're spelled.

Unfortunately, IPA can be difficult to learn, especially if you're just working on your own.

Which is why I was so excited when I found "Sephonics", it's a freeware PC program that helps you quickly get up to speed with the English subset of IPA. Definitely worth a look from any actor serious about improving their dialect work. The following is text lifted from the Sephonics website:

Sephonics includes seven different exercises for practising English
pronounciation and the phonetic alphabet, including a phonetic memory game to
relax between the lessons! There are also exercises where you learn to match a
sound to a phonetic sign, transcribe from phonetic text to ordinary text, and
much more! Sephonics is freeware.
Sephonics requires Windows 95 / 98
/ NT / 2000 / XP or better.