Syracuse Wiki

One night I was driving around trying to find a place to get some seafood. My wife mentioned that she had seen a sign in a plaza in Liverpool and I thought I remembered that there might be a fish place off Old Liverpool Road. We drove over there and encountered The Fish Company at the end of the plaza at 209 Oswego St in Liverpool; oh my goodness!

I just have to get this out of the way; fantastic! I have to say that it’s the best fried shrimp I’ve ever had in my life, and that’s saying something because I’ve tried a lot of fried shrimp. The breading is light so that it doesn’t take away from the shrimp, which seems plumper and sweeter than any shrimp I’m used to eating. Their tartar sauce, which is what I eat my shrimp with, was fantastic as well.

Going back to the restaurant for a moment, it’s a very small place, and calling it a restaurant is a misnomer. It’s totally take out, and they’re only open Thursdays and Fridays. It’s a very clean place and they have a relatively limited menu, but that’s perfect because it helps them stay true to what they’re all about, which is seafood. It’s decorated sparsely and nicely, with the fish tip jar an interesting focal point. I’m not sure if they expect tips, since it’s only the two of them, but my wife did drop in a tip.

They also offer french fries, fried zucchini, baked beans, cole slaw and macaroni salad. I got fries the second time I went, since you know I had to try them a second time before writing about them, which were cooked how I like them, and the baked beans were wonderful as well, nicely sweetened. My wife ordered haddock, which I also tasted and it was great. She got some fried zucchini and I guess that was the only thing she wasn’t enamored with.

They recommended coming on Thursdays, which we did, because Fridays the lines go around the side of the building. They don’t start cooking it until you order it, which helps keep it fresh, but also makes you wait. Because it’s so good you don’t mind waiting for it, but Thursdays works well for me. The don’t weigh the fried fish until after it’s cooked but everything else we had was pre-measured. Since I don’t eat scallops I’m not sure how they handle that.

This stuff is great, and you can always order ahead, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Give them a shot and try it for yourself; if I’m wrong well then that just means there will be more for me.  

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

For those who know what a tweetup is, there’s one planned for this Saturday, May 5th, at the Bear and Bull Pub at 125 East Water Street starting at 5PM and officially going until 7PM, but since it’s a Saturday night who knows how long it might really go. It’s being hosted by Todd Engel of the Engel Law Offices, as he’s also calling it a Kentucky Derby party since he’s a big horse racing fan, and by hosted, I mean there’s going to be food, if not drink; I’m not so sure on that second part. I do know that he told me specifically there would be “Mitch” friendly food, and since I’m Mitch I’m happy to see that. lol

For those of you who aren’t familiar with tweetups of the fun they can be, I’ll first refer you to this link to a great tweetup I was a part of back in 2010, another one where I got lots of Doubletree cookies back last April, and of course the infamous kickball tweetup last July in heat over 90°.

Tweetups are where a lot of people who participate and communicate with each other on Twitter get together for a good time, and often to finally meet someone they’ve talked to in person. I’m not going to lie and say that the first tweetup I ever went to was all that great because it was a joint event with another organization. Actually, the same thing happened at the second one but I did meet a few more people whom I’d talked to on Twitter first.

The third tweetup I went to was a great one, almost the best one. It was at Recess Coffee, a deceivingly large coffee shop on Harvard Place that actually has a phone pole in the middle of it; that’s something you don’t see every day. I met maybe 15 to 20 new people on that day, and what was fun was knowing almost every single one of them by their Twitter handle; that was a good time.

That’s basically the way a tweetup goes. You meet people who you feel you know, get to know them a little better, and it turns into a great way to network as well as meet some new friends. You’ll also meet people you don’t know and that’s fun as well. I know there are some folks hoping to schedule some other tweetups this year, and I might even have to try to set one up, as I’ve done it once and, well, let’s just say I wasn’t great at it, but it was also very impromptu.

I hope to see a lot of Syracuse people there for this one but if I don’t, at least I figure I’ll have plenty to eat.  

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

Before I tell this tale, I want to say up front that I will not be naming the company that I believe tried to scam my wife and I, as well as some other things. The reason I’m not naming the company is because overall we can’t prove certain things. Otherwise, this is a true tale and something that not only central New Yorkers need to watch out for, but people everywhere should be wary of.

A couple of months ago we were approved for a free in-home inspection based on a review by an organization calling itself NYSERDA. It’s a great program offering the opportunity to have an energy assessment to see if there are ways to help you save money on your heating bills, electricity bills, gas bills, whatever you use that expends energy.

When you qualify, they give you a link to a page where you see a list of contractors they have hooked up with that will do the free assessments for you. The first two I called and left messages with never called me back; I tried to get someone who was located close to where I live, Liverpool, but I guess they just didn’t care. The third company I called is a name I was familiar with, and even though they were further away I gave them a call and they said they would have a representative come to the house to do the assessment.

On that day the gentleman arrives, and then spends about an hour and a half going through the house looking at things, running one of those processes where they see what percentage of leakage your house might have, and then writing a proposal. When we sat down to talk about things, there were three items that I found interesting, and not necessarily in a positive way.

The first is that after he ran this process to see what kind of leakage I had in the house, his figure showed that I was losing about 125% whenever we turned on the heat or air conditioning. Whereas I will admit that even after we had ZeroDraft come in years ago to do pretty much the same thing that the house has remained fairly cold in the winter, because they were here and had done some insulation work, as well as run the same process that this company ran, that sounded a bit suspect.

The second thing that was suspect was how much we were quoted to have insulation blown into the house. As I said, we already have insulation up there that was done by ZeroDraft, and we’ve had a couple other people who put some insulation up there, so being quoted a price of $6,100 seemed a bit extreme. Of course my thing has always been that I didn’t feel like there was enough insulation blown into the house to begin with, but that price just didn’t sit well with me.

The third thing was something that came out of left field. He said that we had three minor gas leaks in the basement, that they were nothing to really worry about, and that he would send somebody over the next week to fix them for us. At this point the Spidey senses tingled, but not enough to get me to act on anything. I did mention it to my wife, and since she didn’t have much of a reaction I didn’t think much about it at the time.

The following week someone did show up from the company. I asked the guy how long it would take to fix the leaks and he said 45 minutes to an hour. I told him to go about his business and that I would be back in my office if he needed me and left him alone. During the time he was doing whatever he was doing, I kept hearing the back door opening and closing. I have an alarm system, so every time one of four of my doors is opened I hear an alarm. I just figured he was going out to his truck to get supplies to bring into the house, so I never went to check on anything. After about 45 minutes he called my name, and when I went out to meet him he told me that he needed to replace a pipe, but that he hadn’t brought the size he needed to replace it with and he would have to come back the next week. Once again, not thinking much about it I said okay and saw him on his way.

On Friday I happened to be out of town when I got a call early in the morning from my wife. She told me that she had gone into the basement and realized something seemed to be amiss, and eventually she realized that all of our paint and paint supplies were gone. A few weeks earlier, she had decided to put all the paint and supplies in one place, as they were scattered between the basement and garage, because she had some projects coming up that she wanted to work on, so she knew that those items were there. She asked me who had been in the basement in the last couple of weeks, and I told her the only people who had been in the basement were the two representatives from this company. I told her about the noise I kept hearing from the second visitor, and we both felt that it almost had to be him.

I told my wife to look in the package that held the proposal and call the company and ask for someone who I personally knew worked there to complain about the issue. My wife called, found out that person no longer worked there, and ended up talking to the first guy that came to the house about the missing supplies. He said he would investigate, which we both knew meant he would call the guy and asked him if he took anything, the guy would say no, and that would be as far as it went.

And that’s exactly what happened, so my wife told him that she did not want that guy coming back to the house at all. The guy she talked to said that he would call me on Monday to discuss things because supposedly when the second guy was here he found two more gas leaks that he conveniently forgot to tell me about when he had been at the house on Tuesday.

Monday morning, I decided to do what I should’ve done in the first place; I called National Grid. It seems that they consider any word about a gas leak, even a minor one, as an emergency. So one of their representatives was at the house within 20 minutes of my call and was down in the basement looking for gas leaks. Low and behold, he couldn’t find any gas leaks. He ran all sorts of tests, even going to the extreme of turning off the gas to see if the meter still moved, which is one way they can detect if there is a gas leak somewhere in the house. Nothing happened as you can imagine. I then called this company and reached the representative and I had him talk to the guy from National Grid, and even though I could only hear one side of the conversation, it seemed like the guy on the phone was trying to convince the guy in my house that there were leaks in specific places; the National Grid guy wasn’t buying it.

Once the National Grid guy left, I called this guy back. I told him there were no gas leaks, and that I didn’t want anyone else coming to the house to look at anything. We saw where they had put some blue stuff on some pipes, but the National Grid guy said that he couldn’t prove whether or not there had ever been any leaks coming through those pipes. However, he did say that since two of them were close together that even if they were minor leaks I should have been able to smell something at the time when they were first pointed out to me; I never smelled a thing, and my wife had never smelled anything either.

By now you see the issues. We can’t prove we were robbed because we didn’t see anything. We can’t prove we ever had gas leaks, but we can definitely prove that there were no remaining gas leaks even though this guy said there were. Without having someone else come into the house we can’t believe that 125% energy loss figure. Also without having someone come to the house we can’t necessarily prove that $6,100 is too much money for what he said they were going to do.

Still, there’s enough there to put us on edge and make us not trust them, and we get out of this without spending any new money, with an approximate figure of maybe a theft of $150 worth of paint and supplies, a figure I came up with after my wife and I went to buy replacements for what was taken. Of course the major lesson here is that if you have someone in your house that you can’t leave them alone for that period of time because you never know what they’re doing. And I applaud National Grid and the work their rep did in helping us expose what looks like an attempted scam.

As I said, I’m not going to name the company because I can’t prove anything except one item, but if you know me send me an email or direct message on Twitter and I’ll tell you who they are. Smarm!  

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

I’ve been on a crusade lately. On my business blog I wrote a post asking why independent consultants don’t get respect. In essence, my point is that small businesses often get overlooked for the big name businesses and explores why it happens.

In a way it’s really easy to understand how it happens in some ways. For instance, if I need printer paper I’m more liable to drive up the street to Staples because I know the name than it is for me to immediately think or remember that there’s some local business that might sell paper, other than Wegmans (Wegmans sells everything lol).

Still, it’s depressing that local small businesses get that same sort of treatment, if you will. Just recently I not only didn’t get a contract from a local business, I didn’t even get to put in a bid for it. The company that was hired was out of Florida; of all things! There wasn’t anyone locally who could do it? Actually, I can answer that one; only me. There wasn’t anyone in the state who could do it? Come on now, this is New York!

It’s definitely a strange culture across the board. People who do work on your house are expected to be local, which totally makes sense. Yet I find that when I talk to people about social media or website optimization and the like they’ll start quoting things they’ve heard from other sources that aren’t local; what’s that about? Often it’s the same thing I’ve said, but it’s discounted because they know me; that’s a shame.

It’s the kind of thing that really makes you appreciate what guys like Chris Fowler of Syracuse First is trying to do, which is to get businesses to buy locally. It should make more people appreciate an organization like the Professional Consultant’s Association of Central New York, the only consulting organization in the nation that not only works to bring education to independent business people, but also verify the qualifications of those folks so that if you go to the site to check out a consultant, you can pretty much know that their integrity has been checked on and that you’re getting someone the group trusts. We can’t verify how good they are at what they do specifically, but we will guarantee their character; more than any other consultant’s group in the nation does. A disclaimer is that I’m no the board of that group and I write their blog and newsletter.

The reality is that the majority of businesses in central New York are small businesses of some kind. More than 95% of the businesses belonging to Centerstate CEO are businesses with 5 or fewer people working there; that number could be higher. There’s a lot of quality people around here, and they don’t all work for Syracuse University; they just cost a bit more than those folks might.

This is not a hate post against any business in central New York by the way, no matter the size. Trust me, I’m glad for McDonalds and Burger King when I want something fast. I’m not going to hate on Sunoco because they at least try to keep some of the gas prices down. I’m just saying that we’re here and we’re trying to compete and that we love central New York and don’t want to go anywhere else. We belong to organization like the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce.

Go and read the interviews I have on this blog of local business people doing great things, trying to make a living in this area. Read about people like Rich Kudlick and Farah Jadran (who’s now also on PBS) and Isaac Bidwell. Read about places like Pier 57, Van Dusen Exteriors and Armory Massage. Wonderful people, wonderful businesses; heck, check my business out when you get a chance (yeah, shameless plug lol); I’m local as well.

We live in your communities and neighborhoods. We just want our chance to make a living; at least consider us, okay?  

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

Now that Syracuse has made it into the field of 16 in this year’s NCAA Basketball Championships, I feel it’s a good time to break out some products for sale that help you show your support for the team and, of course, potentially make me some money. I said a long time ago that I was going to be marketing things on this blog at some point, and this is really the first time I’m doing it after more than 18 months.

Here’s the thing. If you don’t want any of these particular items but I’ve got you interested in buying something, go ahead and click on an item anyway and it’ll take you to a page where you can get other Syracuse stuff, or stuff for any other university or professional team you support. That’s how these things work. And now, the stuff:

Syracuse Orange Orange Property of Basketball T-Shirt

Bursting with pride for your favorite college basketball team? Then show the world you care with this Syracuse Orange Property of Basketball T-Shirt. This Orange t-shirt features a screen print design front and center so everyone can see that you’re a big hoops fan! Lightweight rib knit t-shirt Rib knit collar Screen print graphics 100% Cotton Officially licensed

Rawlings Syracuse Orange Vault Full-Size Basketball

Dunk some hardcore Syracuse pride on your competition while schooling them on the court with this Vault full-size basketball from Rawlings. This vintage-style ball features the school name, throwback team logos and the establishment year on both sides, so you can score some serious Orange cool points with your unbelievable b-ball skills!

Syracuse Orange Navy Blue Rival Basketball Shorts

Outshine all other displays of team pride when you dominate the court with untouchable Orange spirit in the Rival basketball shorts. These tight weave mesh shorts are fully lined and feature contrast color panels with an embroidered school name at the left side and an embroidered twill logo on the left leg, making them the ideal workout or lounge wear that will maintain your supreme team style for seasons to come!

Nike Syracuse Orange Orange Elite Basketball Big Game Full Zip Performance Jacket

You already talk the talk for your Orange team, now you can walk the walk in the Big Game performance jacket from Nike! Featuring a team logo crest on the left chest, a team logo on the left sleeve, an embroidered Elite graphic on the back right sleeve, contrast color taping and Nike’s moisture-wicking Dri-FIT technology, this jacket will keep you dry and comfortable while you prove your team dominates the court!

Syracuse Orange Small Basketball Rug

A true sports fans room wouldn’t be complete without the addition of this attractive basketball rug! This high-quality rug is indoor/outdoor suitable.*Bounded edges -100% nylon carpet and non-skid Duragon latex backing- along with special chromo jet printing increases both color durability and rug longevity.Measures 29inches in diameter. Machine washable. Made in the USA.