Anthony Cerreta

Places to take parents and family on vacation in Los Angeles, CA

Anthony — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:43:26 +0000

Day 1: Barney's Beanery
Day 2: Bike to Venice Beach + Downtown Culver + Gyenari Restaurant
Day 3: Getty Center Museum + Beverly Hills Rodeo Drive
Day 4: Redbull Flugtag in LongBeach + California Pizza Kitchen
Day 5: Disneyland
Day 6: Hollywood Blvd. + The Sunset Strip + Santa Monica Enterprise Fish Company + Santa Monica Loews Hotel for sunset cocktails
Day 7: LAX Airport

Day 7 will come way to soon but the memories will be great.

…and my personal favorite, riding the Matterhorn at Disneyland, taken with my G1.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Funny Charts and Graphs

Anthony — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:18:39 +0000

My cousin found some funny charts and graphs that I wanted to share with my analytically-minded friends online. Enjoy!

@AnthonyCerreta

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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5 Riddles

Anthony — Wed, 19 May 2010 03:15:42 +0000

Five Riddles emailed to me from my Grandma. I was able to get one [semi] correctly – how about you?

@AnthonyCerreta

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: JUNE CERRETA
Date: Mon, May 17, 2010 at 5:18 AM
Subject: 5 Riddles

1. A murderer is condemned to death. He has to choose between three
rooms.
The first is full of raging fires. The second is full of assassins
with loaded guns. The third is full of lions that haven't eaten in 3 years..
Which room is safest for him?

2. A woman shoots her husband. Then she holds him under water for
over 5 minutes… Finally, she hangs him. But 5 minutes later they
both go out together and enjoy a wonderful dinner together. How can this be?

3. What is black when you buy it, red when you use it, and gray when
you throw it away?

4. Can you name three consecutive days without using the words
Wednesday, Friday, or Sunday?

5. This is an unusual paragraph. I'm curious as to just how quickly
you can find out what is so unusual about it. It looks so ordinary
and plain that you would think nothing was wrong with it. In fact,
nothing is wrong with it! It is highly unusual though. Study it and
think about it, but you still may not find anything odd.. But if you
work at it a bit, you might find out.
Try to do so without any coaching!

THE ANSWERS TO ALL FIVE THE RIDDLES ARE BELOW:

Answers:

1. The third room. Lions that haven't eaten in three years are dead.
That one was easy, right?

2. The woman was a photographer. She shot a picture of her husband,
developed it, and hung it up to dry (shot; held under water; and hung).

3. Charcoal, as it is used in barbecuing.

4. Sure you can name three consecutive days, yesterday, today, and
tomorrow!

5. The letter e, which is the most common letter used in the English
language, does not appear even once in the paragraph.

How did you do?

Posted via email from ntho: anthony cerreta

Place Shifting vs. Time Shifting

Anthony — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:32:46 +0000

Download now or watch on posterous

video-2010-05-04-09-24-15.3gp (2427 KB)

John Watson, Executive Director, AT&T Digital Media Services, discusses his earlier experiences observing how consumers shift their viewing preferences during live sports.

Video captured at the Digital Hollywood conference at Lowes Hotel in Santa Monica, California. The panel was discussing "Ubiquitous Video to the Consumer: The Technology & Content Enablers – Broadband, IPTV, Mobile & TV". 5/4/2010.

@AnthonyCerreta
…from my g1

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My kind of town, Chicago

Anthony — Sat, 01 May 2010 08:41:00 +0000

Chicago is Gorgeous in the Spring

I recently attended an advanced Google Adwords training seminar at the Hilton Suites Chicago at 198 E. Delaware Place. With tall skyscrapers intertwined with old buildings, an above ground train and a Magnificent Mile, Chicago is a music infused city with a deep sports history. Downtown Chicag is truly beautiful to visit in the spring when the trees are blossoming and the streets are lined with blooming flowers. Here are some pictures and videos of street saxophone musicians I took. Even the Pringles man made it out!

@AnthonyCerreta

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Snacksquare – get real-life offers on Foursquare

Anthony — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 20:38:34 +0000

Snacksquare is a merchant tool that allows businesses owners to market real offers and discounts to customers who check-in to the business location from their Foursquare account. Fresh out of the FaceySpacey.com bakery, Snacksquare has been generating a lot of Tech Buzz and has has received reviews by Mashable (http://mashable.com/2010/04/15/snacksquare/), TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/15/snacksquare-foursquare-directory/), KillerStartups (http://www.killerstartups.com/Mobile/snacksquare-com-a-tool-for-location-based-marketing), KTLA (http://www.ktla.com/news/cyberguy/stv-cyberguy-snacksquare-41510,0,6428602.story) and has even received it's blessing from Foursquare itself! http://twitter.com/foursquare/status/12248226307

Snacksquare is FREE during Beta testing! Dive-in and help test out the waters at http://SnackSquare.com

Snacksquare will get business venues known on Foursquare and get people sharing their tips and checkins at the venue to bring more people to their venue. And they will get people redeeming their specials on snacksquare.com and sending the specials to their mobile phone via SMS. They will also get an analytic platform to track redemption. Eventually they'll get tools to push sms messages to potential customers that check-in near their venues. Foursquare a hot event. a Hot sector right now, and Snacksquare will put businesses at the cutting edge and intermix their name with Foursquare, Bravo, and Starbucks and the other very few that are testing the waters here. YOU can browse Snacksquare.com or Foursquare.com/businesses to see everyone else testing these waters.

1) Snacksquare lets merchants add their foursquare venues

2) Snacksquare monitors and encourages customer activity from these venues (and continue to do so over time)

3) SnackSquare gives the merchant tools to easily add all these customers as friends

4) SnackSquare specifically facilitates adding customers as friends so that business owners can get the phone nimbers of the foursquare users and so we can get real-time information about when these foursquare friends check-in

5) Snacksquare let merchants create campaigns (which we call "ALBA" for automated location based alerts) that sends sms text messages to these foursquare friends as they checkin near by their venue. Think Mail Chimp meets Sales Genie powered by Foursquare.

6) Snacksquare forces it's merchants to change their Foursquare username to their company, i.e. so Joe Smoe appears as Dippin' Dots. This is how Snacksquare maintains an opt-in process, or at least does their best at it. The idea is that the foursquare visitor we found through their store will receive a friend request from a company name and if they choose to accept will give out their phone number just like they do to anyone else they accept as friends. Snacksquare also provides unsubscribe functionality for the customer as well.

When you first login, you will be redirected to an iframed Foursquare page. You can just click the yellow link in the top left. Basically, we're about to take your foursquare account and make it the basis of our Snacksquare account. But there's no need to do that. If you run into any problems, just hit me and I'll be on top of it to make your experience in the merchant panel painless.

ENJOY:

MY STORES:

MY SPECIALS:

MY CAMPAIGNS:

MY CUSTOMERS:

CREATE CAMPAIGN (REGULAR):

CREATE CAMPAIGN (ALBA):

CREATE CAMPAIGN (ALBA CONTINUED

STATS & BILLING:

PAYMENT INFO:

COMPANY INFO:

IFRAMED FOURSQUARE:

note: Snacksquare's unique way of forcing merchants to do foursquare only actions such as changing their user name to a company name. Snacksquare also helps navigate the user to creating a new Foursquare account to use as the basis of their Snacksquare account if they don't want to give up their personal account.

INVOICE:

PRICES:

http://www.snacksquare.com/prices

HOMEPAGE:

@AnthonyCerreta

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How would you answer these three questions?

Anthony — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 03:22:31 +0000

Well, what do you say? I know, it's a tough interview…

@AnthonyCerreta
…from my g1

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Different things I see lying around Santa Monica

Anthony — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:49:23 +0000

Too much partying last night?

[If you can't tell, it's a piñata.]

@AnthonyCerreta
…from my g1

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Are you a Media Temple User? Notice of Upcoming MySQL Database User Password Change

Anthony — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 07:21:31 +0000

Today I received an email from Media Temple that there was an "impending change to the passwords for all database users on your (gs) Grid Service". Unfortunately there has seems to have been a brute-froce hack attempt on Media Temple servers”. Nonetheless, the website hosting company is not only changing the passwords for our databases automaticcaly, they are also automatically updating our database configurations in most popular CMS applications (such as Joomla, Drupal & WordPress)

As owner of a few databases (and responsible for many more at matrixx), this is why I recommend Media Temple. Now if I could get everyone to update their site to "most major CMS applications" …

@AnthonyCerreta
…from my g1

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: "(mt) Media Temple"
Date: Mar 12, 2010 7:31 PM
Subject: Notice of Upcoming MySQL Database User Password Change
To: "Anthony Cerreta"
Dear Site Owner,
This is a preliminary notification about an impending change to the passwords for all database users on your (gs) Grid-Service. Due to recent developments regarding System Incident #1167, we have found that this action is a required safety precaution: http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/gs-investigating-potential-exploit/
We will send you an additional email notification 24-hours prior to the actual change.
VERY IMPORTANT:
Please do not change your database user passwords back to their former value(s). Returning database passwords back to previous versions may allow malicious parties to gain future access to one or more of your databases. If you do choose to change one or more database passwords back, you will be notified by (mt) Media Temple and your site may be temporarily suspended.
In an attempt to make this a more seamless process, (mt) Engineers have developed custom scripts that automatically find and update the database configuration files used by most major CMS applications (if installed using standard methods). The scripts were designed to auto-update the following:
- Drupal
- Joomla
- Expression Engine
- Magento
- Miva
- phpBB3
- WordPress
- vBulletin
- ZenCart
- all standard Rails and Django applications
In other words: If you are using one of those applications, not only will we be automatically updating your database user passwords, we will also update your CMS/application configuration to include the new passwords. If you happen to use other database-oriented applications, the following article contains an FAQ regarding this email notification and also discusses how to update your database configuration files and/or reset database passwords: http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/1807/
While closer investigation is still underway, we believe that certain database passwords were possibly obtained by hackers via trial-and-error methods. Unfortunately, these "brute forcing" techniques may have slipped passed our intrusion detection systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_cracking
We understand that changing database passwords is not a preferred solution, but we have exhausted all other routes to try to avoid this specific action. Once the password change has been completed, you will be notified via email and our internal system will automatically open a new Support Request for your account within the AccountCenter. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at any time, and we thank you for your patience and understanding regarding this matter.
Regards,
(mt) Media Temple, Inc
Hosting Operations

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Last Call – The First Interactive Movie (Video Demonstration)

Anthony — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:32:17 +0000

What's more terrifying than a call coming from inside the house? The call coming from inside the theater. That's the thought behind Last Call, an interactive horror film in which the main character calls a random audience member for help.

Hat tip to @HelsinkiValo for finding this one!

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