Knaddison.com - Best Services

The Best of Denver and the Baker Neighborhood

nikki — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 16:15:26 +0000

Best Denver Coffee

Kaladi Brothers: this is the best coffee in town…we go there for takeaway coffee and buying beans, not as much for sit-down.

Metropolis: slightly closer to the Baker neighborhood, this is a great sit-down coffee shop with fabulous coffee. The free wifi is nice as well.

Best Denver Mojito

Cuba Cuba: a great date night place for dinner and drink, or a great bar to have a few (slightly pricy but oh so worth it) drinks.

Best Denver Tapas

9th Door: The 9th Door: possibly my favorite place in downtown Denver, especially the happy hour. Honey drizzled fried goat cheese ball, anyone?

Best Denver bagel

Moe’s Bagels: a local favorite

Einstein Brothers Bagels: OK so it’s a chain, but they do have a delightful Santa Fe breakfast sandwich.

Best Baker Neighborhood Bakery

Look away from the “Fat people are harder to kidnap” bumper sticker at the register of the Buffalo Doughboy Bakery and enjoy a prosciutto and swiss croissant or a pastry filled with apples and walnuts.

Best Denver Thai food

Tommy’s Thai: Great food, great price…mmmmmmmmm! For delivery/closer to home option, Thai Basil is pretty tasty as well.

Best Denver Vegetarian Restaurant

Watercourse: A great breakfast, lunch and dinner spot with wholesome yet delicious home cooked options. My personal favorites include banana bread French toast with fresh fruit or the tofu scramble with brie and basil (I was scared at first, but it’s seriously delightful). If you don’t believe healthy food can be delicious, you gotta try Watercourse!

Best Denver Pizza

Pasquini’s on South Broadway is a good sit-down option, while Proto’s Pizza is a fancier option with great thin crust creative pizzas. Another favorite, of course, is the Buenos Aires Pizzeria with its delicious pizzas and empanadas. Their sister restaurant is an Argentine steakhouse which is also a great place to try.

Best Denver (diveish) bars

Breckenridge: Wednesday nights are $2 draft nights. The 471 IPA is a little slice of heaven.

The Hornet: OK this bar fits under the category of the best I’m-meeting-someone-and-don’t-know-where-to-go slash fallback bar…

My Brother’s Bar: Great burgers and drinks near downtown/REI

The Stadium Inn in the DU neighborhood is the diveiest of the dive bars if you’re ever in the mood to a) fee like you’re in college again or b) get tipsy on $2.50 gin and tonics.

Best Downtown Denver Haircut

Visit stylist Hannah Wheeler at the historic, funky Parlour and enjoy a gratis glass of wine or beer while getting a great haircut and chat session.

Best Denver Auto Repair

Addison Auto is an independent auto repair shop for both mechanical and body repair. Plus it’s my parent’s shop:)

Best Entertainment near Baker Neighborhood

Mayan Theater: watch an independent film 3 blocks from home while sipping on some vino/beer.

First Friday Santa Fe Gallery crawl: The first Friday of every month, the numerous galleries along Santa Fe stay open until 9pm while hordes of people wander the streets sipping wine and checking out art.

Botanic Gardens: the perfect place for a picnic and wandering around this huge and varied garden.

Best Denver Independent Bookshop

We’re no longer friends if you keep going to Barnes and Noble after checking out the Tattered Cover’s two locations around downtown. This is my happy place where I go browse books and drink coffee when I’m stressed at work.

Best Denver Wine Shop

The Whole Foods of liquor shopping is Divino on South Broadway. Wine tastings on Saturdays and recommended wines for as low as $7.

Rain Skirt - The Intelligent Alternative to Rain Pants

nikki — Fri, 11 May 2007 18:35:42 +0000

Colorado is not known as a rainy place, but in the spring and summer months we do get our fair share of downpours — especially in the mountains. This past spring my good friend Libby and her man Reid took off to Central America. But before they went, they were kind enough to hook me up with a great a-line rain skirt!

The Rain Skirt Story - at least as I know it

A while ago Libby made herself a rain skirt. The idea was simple - skirts are so useful and keep cool even on hot days. When you’re wearing a cute skirt, how do you make sure that it stays dry? Why not combine her favorite piece of clothing with some protective goodness and a lot of time at a sewing machine trying out different designs to come up with the ultimate wet weather wearable? So, she did. Libby’s rain skirt made her extremely happy and led to lots of envious looks from friends who had uncomfrotable rain pants or drenched legs when their long jacket failed to protect them fully. So, Libby started thinking about making them for other folks.

The Rain Skirt Evolution

Libby has thought a lot about the best way to bring Rain Skirts to the masses. She knows that she needs them to be professional, that’s for certain. So, she started exploring vendors that make outdoor apparel and found a great company that creates lots of items for some of the big brands. They went back and forth with ideas for designs - both to make them more functional and more fashionable.

Rain Skitrs are Born

So, now the birth of Rain Skirts. Libby has formed Emergent Designs as her company to bring a high quality, fashionable, rain protection to everyone. She’s got a team of Rain Skirt Testers who are trying them out in various climates. In the fall of 2007 Emergent Designs will begin selling their skirts to the masses. Visit the store now for details on 15% off your first rain skirt purchase.

My Rain Skirt Experience

It’s really really exciting to watch this whole process come and go. Personally I’ve been testing my skirt in Colorado’s demanding and difficult weather environment. And the results are naturally wonderful. I show up after a long walk to work without a drop on my outfit. When all my coworkers look like wet rats - I still look great. What more can a girl want?

denver postgresql training

greggles — Wed, 09 May 2007 17:01:41 +0000

I recently attended a training that Kevin Kempter hosted. It was a really great two night session aimed at experienced DBAs/Developers so that they could learn PostgreSQL. Kevin has a lot of experience with postgres and wanted to help share that experience with other folks. He’s finding a growing need for PgSQL developers in the Denver area and wants to build up a user group and network here so that companies deciding whether to use PostgreSQL or not will see an available local talent pool here in Colorado.

PostgreSQL for my uses in Drupal

His presentation was thorough and well prepared showing Kevin’s experience and knowledge of the subject. Personally it wasn’t clear to me that PostgreSQL would be better for my needs than MySQL. In some quick tests MySQL was about twice as fast in my benchmarking of a local drupal site (using ab -c2 -n1000). I tried a couple different settings inside of drupal (cache enabled or not) and MySQL was consistently quite a bit faster. Kevin seemed to feel that PostgreSQL by default isn’t very fast, but with tuning it can be much faster. However, you can always tune the database and get many times better performance - so if you tune both PostgreSQL and MySQL then which one will be faster - it’s hard to say?

Either way I was very please to learn a lot more. PostgreSQL’s need for vacuuming seems like a real pain - but apparently autovacuum is on its way to take care of this automatically.

PostgreSQL Training and Services in Denver

If you are interested in training or services with PostgreSQL in or near Denver, I definitely recommend getting in touch with Kevin.

www.angieslist.com - what's the motivation behind the site?

greggles — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 03:46:15 +0000

Well, I didn’t have any idea two months ago when I first wrote about www.angieslist.com that it would have quite such a strong reaction. There have been about 50 comments on the post and it has been growing daily. Yikes.

The real deal behind AngiesList.com

So, what is the story with Angies List. Is it good or bad? I said “sucks” but that’s an obvious overstatement that is a common online phrase. Sorry for the folks that pissed off. AngiesList.com provides a good service to people and people like it. So how can I also say that it’ bad? My points were mostly that they were being dishonest with customers and that their model was flawed and would eventually be “gamed” once the service got big enough. Spammers and shills would grow and ruin it, much like they’ve wreaked havoc on other big sites that started off great when they were small.

My alternative to www.AngiesList.com

So, what’s my alternative to Angies List? Well, in fact I have two alternatives:
You should see a little block on the right side of this page (and several others) that lists all the people whose services I’ve written about on my site. Obviously I like them. So, if that’s valuable to you then great.

Trust my lijit profile which has given ratings to all the sites I like (and I’ve got a few upstream folks trusted as well, so you’ll get their rankings). If you like that system sign up on Lijit and trust me. I’ll probably trust you back. Then we’ll get a big network of trusters going and we can rate everything. Awesome. That’s the real way to do a rating system. And guess what - no cost (at least none from your wallet to theirs).

Comments are for Authenticated users only - thanks anonymous Angies List Lovers!

Yeah, and PS: I really dislike arguing with people who are anonymous. I’ve got pretty much my whole life out in public. If you want to argue with me the least you can do is share a little information about yourself. To enforce that I’m limiting comments to authenticated users. If that’s frustrating, oh well. Consider it my set of costs to keep quality higher.

Salida Colorado Real Estate - Better than Leadville, Mas Buena que Buena Vista

greggles — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 16:29:59 +0000

My friend Michael Hawley started doing Real Estate in Salida, Colorado a little while ago. If you don’t know, Salida is located at the exit (Salida means exit in Spanish) of a high mountain plain in Colorado that includes Buena Vista, Poncha Springs, and several other cities. It’s the “banana belt” of Colorado meaning that temperatures in Salida remain pretty moderate all winter long. There’s still skiing at Monarch - one of the few low price, low pressure, high quality ski mountains left in Colorado and snow-shoeing and other activities aplenty all winter. But you can also ride your mountain bike on a nice winter day.

Mike is a really great guy and I definitely recommend him for any Salida real estate needs. And really, if you’re looking for mountain living in Colorado it’s hard to think of a better location than Salida.

Golden Holistic Medicine - Kaycie Rosen, Colorado Naturopathic Doctor

greggles — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 17:22:42 +0000

Our good friends Kaycie Rosen and her fiancee Steve Grigel just moved down to Colorado after spending a few years living in Anchorage. We’re really excited to have them around again and, perhaps even more exciting, is that Kaycie is a Naturopathic Doctor and just opened the doors of her own Holistic Medicine Clinic in Golden, Colorado.

I’m a big believer in small business in general and of course in healthy lifestyles so seeing a medical clinic using a holistic approach so close to me in Denver is a really great thing. Kaycie had a ribbon cutting ceremony which included some delicious foods. She has also shared these recipes on her website such as this Quinoa Salad Recipe - both healthy and delicious!

She’s going to be writing more about Holistic Living in Golden Colorado in her blog, so you may want to subscribe to the RSS Feed or the newsletter.

Welcome, Kaycie and Steve!

2FoldStudio: Denver Graphic Design and Art Lessons

greggles — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 17:32:46 +0000

Living in Denver’s Baker Neighborhood is interesting for me - there are many many artistic people who choose this neighborhood which makes the landscaping, home painting, home architecture really neat. The other benefit is that lots of my neighbors are artists and grahpic designers - handy when I do web development.

2 Fold Studio - Graphic Design and Art Instruction

A friend and naighbor of mine has recently expanded her work and updated her website. The company is 2 Fold Studio and it’s run by Lisa Scheideler. The two major offerings are all sorts of Graphic Design kinds of work and also Art Instruction. She’s planning to offer an art studio in the summer of 2007 which should be really neat for folks in the neighborhood.

Anita Martin Graphic Design

greggles — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 19:18:57 +0000

Meeting Anita Martin

This past spring I had the pleasure of working on a project with Anita Martin. The project was relatively complex - not because the work was technical, but because the client was really a community of about 30 involved people and over 10,000 total potential “customers”. Anita was very helpful and understanding as the liason between the community and me.

Anita Martin, Graphic Designer

Additionaly, Anita is a graphic designer serving several different kinds of customers. If you’re in the market, I definitely would recommend her. Her company is Anita Martin Graphic Design and you can see Some Sample Identity, Advertising, and Publications that she has worked on.

Our Neighbor - Mixed Media Wall Sculpture and Functional Artist

greggles — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 14:36:44 +0000

We have this friend and neighbor Nancy Frazier Greager who is an artist and does mixed media wall sculpture and functional art. It’s really cool stuff in my opinion using some of my favorite materials in simple and attractive ways.

Last weekend Nikki was up at at the Loveland Sculpture in the Park festival which apparently was lots of fun, but not as good as Nancy’s mixed media sculptures and art.

Capital Tea Opens at 1450 S. Broadway

greggles — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 16:05:03 +0000

A friend of a friend of mine just opened a Tea shop at 1450 S. Broadway in Denver called “Capital Tea”. If the drinks are as good as the name then it should be great.

Also, I’m really amazed at this section of Broadway. It’s long been “antique row” with Denver’s largest assortment of Antique Stores, but now we get Pasquini’s italian restaurant and Divino Wine and Spirits which has delicious wines AND super tasty beers. Sidebar: it was at Divinos that I first had a 120 minute IPA from Dogfish Head Brewery YUMMM!

Perhaps this is the result of the future Cherokee Denver and Lionstone Group developments on the old Gates site. Perhaps it’s something that Platte Park has had coming for a long time. Either way, I’m just psyched to have these things near my neighborhood.