Friday, May 19, 2017

Bowie Restaurant Project: (97) Taco Bell (Bowie Gateway Center)

Taco Bell,
16300 Heritage Blvd,
Most Recent Foursquare Check-in: 4/12/2017
Total Foursquare Check-ins: 1
Pre-Foursquare Visits: No
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

I will recall this quote by a friend from the review of Bowie's first Taco Bell:
Nobody WANTS to eat at Taco Bell--myself included. But when you need 4000 calories in under 4 minutes, for under $4, there are worse options!
Well, now Bowie has a second Taco Bell, and the same thing still applies. One day I hadn't brought my lunch, so I thought I'd knock out another review of a new Bowie eatery. I went on-line to speed the process. It was actually nice how you could customize the order to add lettuce and onions or leave off sour cream. You couldn't, however, order a Dr. Pepper, only a Pepsi. So I placed the order for inside pickup so I could get my own drink. But then it would not let me place an order. I tried installing the app. The app installation took the length of the drive, but I still decided to use it to order from the parking lot to make the customization easier. It didn't work either.

When I went inside, I just went with "no sour cream" because I lost the energy to further customize. It turned out that the Pepsi was broken, so I had to get Dr. Pepper anyway. And the food took way more than four minutes. I'm not sure why I am giving it that extra half star.

Thursday, May 04, 2017

Google Local: 200K Views and Two More Photos

In March, I hit 100,000 views of my photos on Google Local, and I noted that four photos made up about 70% of those views. I started trying to figure out how to increase my views.

Well, this week I've hit 200,000. And now it's six photos that make up 70% of my views.
#6 Rubio's, San Diego, CA, 17,375 views, August 2016. (Was 16,470 last time.) This is the dumb picture of my drink, some hot sauce and my order number. It is a good example of how some photos stop getting me hits after a while.
#5 Wendy's, Chantilly, VA, 22,665 views, August 2016. (Was 21,600 last time.) This one has also stopped garnering hits.
#4 Office Depot, Bowie, MD, 22,854 views, December 2016. Though not a new picture, this got a lot of views in the past two months. It further confirms my "interior pictures get more hits" theory. And it's a terrible picture.
#3 Jumping Jack Sports, Ashburn, VA, 24,891 views, January 2017. (Was 14,840 last time.) This continued to get hits, though the weekly tracking e-mails Google sends me says it hasn't been a top photo of mine since April 11.
#2 Michaels, Bowie, MD, 30,952 views, December 2016.  Another one from last December that has really taken off in the past couple of months. Not as bad as the Office Depot one.
#1 Arby's, Beltsville, MD, 32,053 views, January 2017. (Was 21,263 last time.)

So interiors of either chain restaurants or non-grocery chain stores seem to have done the best. My top two last week were interiors of Dollar Trees, so that seems to continue to be true. I have not done a good job at accelerating my views. I had 10,966 in the past week. While that's slightly above the 9,246 I had for the week I saved the e-mail in March, I had three weeks of 17,000+ in April. I really don't understand the algorithm well enough to figure out how to turn that around. All I've figure out is more pictures are better and interiors beat exteriors most of the time.

Tuesday, May 02, 2017

Geocaching Update: Four Caches in April, One Souvenir and One County

April was another relatively slow month for my geocaching. The opportunity to make finds that checked certain boxes was the main motivator.

Geocaching reached three million active caches in April. To celebrate, Geocaching HQ released a "souvenir". Souvenirs are digital achievements. Most of them that I have are geography-based, so I have one, for example, for finding a cache in Austria:
A number of geocaching souvenirs are date-based, and this one was awarded for finding a cache the weekend after the three million mark. I had one on my to do list for some time. It was hidden inside a "little free library" (a place where people can exchange books). I had trouble finding it, but I poked around, and eventually it fell on me. That earned me this souvenir:
That was Souvenir 32 for me. (Earlier in April, I got #31 retroactively for finding one in Germany. Previously, souvenirs were only issued for individual German states, but I got the newly-issued Germany one.)

My second of the month was an unexceptional one inside a lamppost. It was outside a CVS I needed to visit. I hate to criticize cachers who put these things out there for other people to enjoy (so I won't link to this specific one), but it really a half-hearted container that didn't protect the baggie containing the soaking log. Oh, well.

My third find was also in a lamppost, but a lamppost near Potomac Mills. This allowed me to claim my first cache in Prince William County, County 33! Also, my first cache in Minute 38 of 38 Degrees North (20 down, 40 to go).

My FTF streak came to an end at three months. Still, I hated to have the month end without finding an April 2017 cache. When I miss a month (like September 2016), it can be surprisingly difficult to go back and fill it in, as caches get archived. So I headed out behind a strip mall to find a recently-placed one. I got it, keeping me at 72 missing months. It was a neat container, but I don't know how long it is going to survive.