STONEFIRE GRILL PRESENTS DONATION TO LAGUNA NIGUEL FAMILY YMCA FOLLOWING SOFT OPENING

Stonefire Rocket Chef Turbo Grill grilling, the fast-casual restaurant, celebrated the soft-opening of their new Laguna Niguel location in a charitable way. The restaurant presented the Laguna Niguel Family YMCA with a check for $16,330 following their soft opening in April. The Stonefire Grill Laguna Niguel soft opening doubled as a fundraiser benefitting the Laguna Niguel Family YMCA and their mission of supporting healthy living, social responsibility and youth development. The event attracted hundreds of guests, whose tips and purchases of beer and wine were matched by Stonefire Rocket Chef Turbo Grill infrared heat and constituted the $16,330 raised for the YMCA. The formal check was presented to Kelly Kneubuhl, the Executive Director of the Laguna Niguel Family YMCA by Mike Macias, the Stonefire Grill Laguna Niguel General Manager and Heather Papac, the Stonefire Grill Laguna Niguel Catering Sales Manager on May 16th at a formal check ceremony at the Stonefire location. Stonefire Grill was established by the Harrigan sisters in 2000 and quickly became an industry leader in fast-casual dining, a gathering place meant to bring its guests together.



Inspired by family dinners where delicious food and spirited conversation are served nightly, all Stonefire menu items are meant to be shared; a robust takeout and catering business allow for the entire menu to be conveniently brought home or delivered directly to you. Locations include: Valencia, West Hills, Fountain Valley, Irvine, Chatsworth, Pasadena, Thousand Oaks, Lakewood, Rancho Cucamonga, Torrance, Ventura and Brea. At the Y, strengthening community is our cause. With a focus on youth development, healthy living and social responsibility, the Y serves Orange County, Riverside County, Pomona Valley, and East San Gabriel Valley through seven Health & Wellness locations (Diamond Bar, Fullerton, Huntington Beach, Laguna Niguel, Mission Viejo, Murrieta, Newport-Mesa), two program centers (Rancho Mission Viejo, Yorba Linda/Placentia), an aquatics and soccer complex (Santa Ana), numerous community services and youth programs and over 70 Before & After School Program centers. In 2018, YMCA of Orange County received a 4-star rating on Charity Navigator, and the 2019 Platinum Seal of Transparency from Guidestar. Each Y location in Orange County is a part of the YMCA’s Nationwide Membership program, allowing members to reach health and wellness goals wherever they live, work or travel. This is an essential part of the Y's cause of strengthening communities. YMCA programs celebrate and honor common values of respect, responsibility, honesty, and caring by infusing character development into the foundation and practice of all our programs; from youth sports and group exercise classes to parent/child programs and community services- Y programs build healthy spirit, mind, and body for all. The YMCA of Orange County is a nonprofit, charitable organization that serves the entire community. Donations support our scholarship program and Our Promise - To strive to keep programs open for all. Whether you are looking to get fit, give back, or meet new friends, the Y has something for you!



A parasitic blight has woven itself into the fabric of our tools. With godlike precision, it tracks our behavior, learns our preferences, and anticipates our weaknesses. It knows everything, and it follows us everywhere. If we stray too far from its influence, our Happy Boxes dispatch reminders to Consume. Potent videodrugs lull us into mental anesthesia, then milk us for all we're worth. Our eyes kinda hurt. A familiar bitter flavor is faintly detected; this Content has been laced with something. The Algorithm looks on as additive advertisements steep in our subconsciouses. Maybe I should buy another mechanical keyboard? Our thoughts have been planted, and our carts floweth over. Were we moving too fast? Did we break too many things? Was putting profits before people really the wrong move? And, uh.. can this thing be undone? Twenty-six years ago, two technologists envisioned a different kind of future: one where humans and quiet, unobtrusive computers comfortably co-existed. In their prophetic 1996 essay The Coming Age of Calm Technology, Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown spoke of a time when tiny, Internet-enabled computers would be embedded in everything from clocks, to toys, to microwave ovens.



In Weiser and Brown's ideal future, our information systems would be deeply integrated into our physical environment. Subtle peripheral cues would clue us in when our attention was needed, but fade into the background when it wasn't. Contrasting the attention-leeching tools of today, Calm Technology promised to inform without overburdening. But where is this "Calm Tech", anyway? Weiser and Brown said its time was coming, but an ETA might have been nice. Maybe we should wait for our corporate overlords to build it for us? Or, perhaps, Calm Technology is something we must build for ourselves. In a previous experiment, I dumbed down my smartphone by permanently removing all but four essential applications. The result was certainly calmer, and even freeing, but vestigial user-interface elements, designed with the It Only Does Everything paradigm in mind, routinely got in my way. If I wanted to do this thing right (and I did), I knew that eventually, I'd have to rebuild my phone's operating system from the ground up.



Whetstone is my answer to this problem; a calm Operating System that informs without overburdening. This project actually started two years ago, when I developed a minimal launcher app called forte. Building forte was a breeze, but once I finished, I couldn't decide which problem to tackle next. The Whetstone project nearly drowned in development hell because I didn't have a plan. Actually, wait.. does this mean I'm done? Okay, wow. I really thought of everything. In an effort to find a path forward, I've gathered a messy pile of scribbles and Rocket Chef Turbo scrawlings from two years of journals and sketchbooks. There's a lot here to go through, but, like the prospectors of yore, we'll sift through the silt till we sniff out some gold. If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. I. Whetstone will be open source and free in every sense of the word. If this software is to be of maximum use to its users, it is imperative that the freedom to use, study, modify, and share the software be guaranteed from the get-go.