Mark "LeahAndMark.com !" T.'s Profile

Well. It used to be alright. Now I get speeds like this: http://www.speedtest.n... - and it's been like this for 3 days.

And then I found out that they're capping some users for using too much bandwidth - which in our case would be... Netflix!

http://forums.clear.co...

Yeah. We're gonna have to cancel. .25 Mb/s isn't even acceptable for regular internet use - nevermind trying to watch movies online... Lame. Disappointing.

Free is great! Free food + free drinks is even better! And then you have some of the best of Atlanta Yelp attending and what else would you want?

Nori Nori was awesome the staff was super nice and accommodating, and the restaurant's much nicer than you'd expect from the outside (not that it's a dump from the outside, but you can't see anything at all.)

I arrived about an hour late so I didn't really eat any of the food but I did drink some (as seen in my photobooth pictures!)

I don't know - it's just nice to hangout with Yelp Elite friends and talk about food and everything else. Good Job Team!

This event was pretty awesome. Lots of food, lots of drinks, lots of people, and me. See? Awesome.

Good job Kathleen! It's like you've been doing this for a year or so!

The best part of the night?! My gift from the gift exchange!

Robocop!

There aren't too many indian restaurants up here in Sandy Springs - but Viceroy was much better than we had expected. The food - is actually good. Even their buffet - of course, the buffet line stuff isn't nearly as spicy as one might want it to be, but they have a whole section where you can add the condiments and add the heat if that's what you want.

We're in Sandy Springs remember?

Still - all of the front staff are direct from India and some of them have the thick accents and broken english to prove it. (Okay, it's not really that broken).

The prices are a few more dollars than you're probably used to having to pay for Indian food - but it's generally worth the price.

Oh - and they do put generous amounts of butter on their nan, so if that's not for you (it's alright with me) - just ask them not to put the butter on it and you'll get some pretty good stuff.

JUNK FOOD CHINESE IS WHAT YOU WANT. You don't want to pay PF Chang prices for General Tso's or any of the other Americanized Chinese food dishes. You want to pay junk prices for junk-food chinese and you don't want to have to go far - or better yet, you want it delivered without paying Zifty.

Honestly, one of the best things about moving to Sandy Springs is that we now live 2 seconds away from Hong Kong City. A hole in the wall Chinese pickup/delivery spot that makes it like it should be - cheap, plentiful and at proper takeout prices.

None of this $9 for orange chicken or any of the other Americanized Chinese food staples and extra for sides. The lunch specials are great (even though I don't work close enough) but even dinner is pretty reasonable - and if you're not a freakin glutton like I am - you will definitely have enough left over for lunch the next day. YES. It is the epitome of a perfect junk-food Chinese takeout spot.

I missed having one of these nearby when we lived in Inman Park - sure there was Burger Win but that spot felt tooooo dirty (and we even LOVE streetfood), and then Chin Chin II had decent JFC but tried be 'upscale' and charged too much for cheap food.

I GENERALLY SUCK at celebrating birthdays. What compounds that fact is how generally AWESOME my wife is at celebrating birthdays. So even though we're under some considerable budget constraints this year, I still wanted to take her out for a nice dinner with good food, a few surprises, and not spend a car payment.

Imagine her surprise when moments after we sit down, without ordering anything, our server drops off a cocktail for her - and then soon after that, appetizers appear - and then entrees and then desserts - all without the server ever taking our order.

It's a nice experience to sit down and just have dishes brought out to you - with each one being a surprise (to her).

Earlier in the day I had provided a list of everything we would order to the maitre d' who then gave it to our server when we arrived - so all my wife had to do at her birthday dinner was enjoy the food brought out to her. Forget menus. Just bring out food.

The food here is good. It's upscale Southern cuisine and although it's not health food (like some complain) - it won't let you down. The fried chicken is everything you want it to be - with the proper breading but not the overpowering seasoning that so much fried chicken has these days - couple that with really moist insides and it's essentially perfect.

We had a low key birthday dinner with the added surprise of a few items being taken off the bill - take care of your servers.

DIALOGUE IN THE DARK IS an interesting exhibit/experience. I'm not sure what is included in the installations located in nations outside of the US - but I'm pretty sure the one in Chicago and Atlanta are essentially the same. The stories are true. It really is everything that those commercials make it out to be.

When the exhibit begins, you're sitting on lighted cubes which start to dim until the room is completely dark. Much more dark than any other room you've probably been in over the last few years - especially for any extended period of time over five minutes. It's an interesting feeling - of being in an open black space.

Like other descriptions of the experience have mentioned, you go through several rooms, all of them designed to be common spaces that blind people must live in and go through on a daily basis - like crossing the street or moving around your own apartment (but I'm trying not to give it all away so that you can experience the surprise for yourself when you go.)

As far as your other senses being 'heightened' - for myself, I know that I really had to use the obvious sense of sound to a larger degree, but also memory and spatial awareness - things we usually don't have to deal with since with vision we instantly process the information right before we need to use it. With no light and only information available at the time of it's use or circumstance - everything else has to be kept in your head, such as where you initially hit a wall, the path that it follows - once you step away from the wall you have to remember where it is - and this goes for the entire layout of the room - if you explore enough to map out the room in the short amount of time your group gets in each space.

Because you generally follow a path with some open spaces of probably around 6x6 - you don't get to experience the vast open darkness as much as I would have liked - because you'll quickly hit a wall. For myself, it was when I was in the middle of a room, without the security of a wall to follow - those were the times when I felt most uncomfortable. And I think realistically, these are the times when most people would also feel the most disoriented. Without that automatic frame of reference and degree of security, you're truly left to rely on your other senses.

When you run your hand along a wall, even without sight you 'see' the wall and where it's leading you in your mind's eye, for those of us with vision it's natural to continue to rely on our 'sight' even when we don't see anything. Rather than relying on other senses in their own right, we'll use touch, and sounds to help us create pictures so we can at least 'see' in our mind's eye. The effect I'm describing is a bit like watching TV with the sound off - you'll use visual cues to create the 'sounds' in your head - but for most people, sound is still connected to a visual memory. For those with sight, nearly every sense memory is tied to a visual memory.  Smell a pizza and you automatically conjure up an image of a pizza or better, a memory of eating one. One might argue that even blind people create these visual images in their heads - but what about the ones who are born blind and have never really had visual inputs that resemble anything we know?

At the end of our tour, our guide told us of another one of the guides who had lost his sight when he was two years old and had forgotten colors - not only that, but when he dreamed, he dreamt in sound. I can hardly begin to imagine what that would be like.

Now, among the many goals of this exhibit one of them was also to give jobs to many blind people who otherwise cannot work. The unemployment rate among blind persons is around 70%. While it's easy to say that obviously blind people cannot do many jobs because many jobs do in fact require sight - the fact is that all of us people who have our vision, have created a world where everything we do relies on vision. The many rooms you go through in Dialogue in the Dark really enables people to finally begin to experience what blind people have known all along and that none of us really could understand any other way - that there are many perspectives, views, and parts of this world and this life that we are missing out on because of how heavily we rely on our sight.

And I must admit, I didn't realize that I thought any of what I just wrote until now. If you would have asked me yesterday what I thought soon after having finished the experience, I probably would have just said it was like walking around in the dark for an hour. It is so much more than that.

You should go to this and not only experience it, but also take the time to reflect on the experience afterwards at some point (days, or even a week later) and not let it slip away like we do with so much visual input that we're bombarded with on a daily basis.

Metro Cafe Diner... is awesome in a 1980's neon-retro sort of way.

The food is alright, the bar is a loser, and I have no idea who regularly comes here on a nightly basis that would constitute the need for having karaoke available EVERY night of the week.

On the night I went with Leah F., Rick & Amanda W. - we ran the Karaoke Mic. When you can easily sing 4 or five songs without a serious wait, then you know that this is your night to sing everything you ever wanted and anything that you really shouldn't.

However, as the bar filled up with regular folks who were definitely not there to hear or sing karaoke, it only became more fun - As Amanda W. belts out a song by Danzig, Rick dedicates Fat Bottom Girls to all the 'large broads', and I end the night butchering Wilson Phillips song - Hold On -

You know we had a great night but that's because we made it happen.

Dancing Goats is awesome for those times when you don't feel like being in a cozy little coffee shop full of college students or art wannabes clammoring for outlets so their laptops live on while they avoid doing school work and instead update their facebook or wordpress blog.

Just a quarter mile down the road from Java Monkey but completely different, Dancing Goats is much more accessible with it's own substantial parking lot, and there is arguably more seating. Also, it's just a nice place for anyone with kids, or a dog, or friends, or wanting to do work.

Starbucks is Jealous of Dancing Goats. They wish they had coffee that was anywhere near as good as the DG-blend. With free WiFi, and some of the absolute best plain sugar donuts on the planet, this place is an easy winner when we think about getting coffee these days.

Located next door to a StarSux and barely noticeable from the street or even the parking lot, Bagel Boys Cafe is quite an awesome secret in Alpharetta and it's sad that it took me a whole year to actually try this place out.

Clean, corporate looking-but-not and with food that actually taste good - I tried hard to not come back and avoid spending the money, but I failed miserably on a weekly basis.

The coffee is some of the best I've had - and that's only because they usually have a cinnamon hazelnut blend that's as awesomely fake sounding but delicious tasting as it can be.

Couple the coffee with their bagel melt - and I'm done - all for under $5.00 - I probably lose 20 minutes on my way to work when I stop here, but knowing that if I don't I'll be sitting there at my desk, in a cold cubicle and a starving stomach - and I realize that I have no choice at all in the matter.

Add this to the very short list of reasons why I don't feel so bad about living in Decatur and working in Alpharetta.