Back in my day….yeah, that’s how this one starts but I’m really curious. Am I just getting old or is the music situation still a mess? 

Two years ago, I wrote about the Boxee Box and how it was overall a disappointment creating problems for me but not necessarily blaming Boxee. The IPTV market is still crap. You pay for the pipe and then pay for content, you could steal content but then you’re..well stealing and then you have to encode and title all of the content. Cable TV is cumbersome and expensive and I personally have 5 boxes at my entrainment center in order to watch all of the content I want to watch but, due to a slow Internet connection where I am, I still am stuck paying for cable.

Let’s talk about music.

First, let’s review our options:

• iTunes (Purchase songs, import stolen music, iTunes Match allows you to stream music to other devices)
• Spotify / Rdio / tons of copy cats ($10 a month to listen to any track you want at any time and store 2,000 – 3,200 devices offline)
• Pandora (Create stations based on songs and artists you like. Pay $25 a year to get ad free, you can’t choose what song plays)
• Amazon / Google Music (copycats of iTunes)
• Steal music (free, sometimes low-quality, sometimes you have to manually add album artwork and tags..it’s stealing)
• Buy CDs (None of my computers have CD drives, CDs for some freaking reason still cost $20 in music stores or $12-$15 online + shipping)

The fundamental problem I have is two-fold and this is a personal problem that technology can’t really rectify:

1. I live in a part of the country where the Internet sped is very poor. I can’t stream music on Spotify at my house and almost 75% of the places I drive don’t have cell-service
2. I’m getting older so I want a mix of “music I love and grew up with” and “new stuff that doesn’t sound like crap“

My iTunes library is 22,000 songs but for some reason, ‘hits of the 90s’ isn’t a Genius playlist that’s available to me despite a lot of gems in there. So while there’s a lot of music in there, I don’t have enough time to curate it into a playlist that fits my mood without staring into my phone or Mac for hours a week putting together playlists. 

So I decided to get Spotify…With Spotify, most of the songs I listen to, I own but I’m relying off playlists like “Top 90s Grunge” that someone else curated or subscribing to a playlist my friend created. Music discovery is at an all time high and I can play new-release albums for free (I’m paying $10 a month for the subscription) without committing to a new album purchase. I liked Rob Thomas growing up, let’s play his new album to see if I’m interested in buying it. I can stream new music but I still buy the CDs from artists I like because I like supporting the artists more directly. I’ll buy every album from BT or Armin just because.

Spotify has a problem.

via: 

You can have up to 3,333 tracks from the Spotify streaming catalogue synced for offline use, on each of up to 3 computers/devices at any time.There is no limit to the number of your own imported local files that you can sync to offline playlists on any device

3,333 is not many songs. I LOVE iTunes Match when I do have cell-service because I can stream a song that I am thinking about that I haven’t heard in a long time since it rests in iCloud at all times for me to listen to. Because I am without good cell connection, Spotify doesn’t work for me when traveling..the only way it’ll work is by syncing a playlist for offline access and that many tracks seems like a lot but it’s not really. Honestly, my Internet is so slow, I end up spending all night syncing my Spotify over Wifi and then deciding I want to listen to something different the next day and just using iTunes Match instead. 

So Spotify really only works when I’m at work or with the playlists I specifically have decided to sync offline. 

So Spotify helps me discover new music and iTunes is really where it gets played. However, most of the time I’m traveling through Vermont, I use SiriusXM on my stereo because it’s reliable. 

I think things would be easier if I just started buying CDs again. I’d keep a book of albums in my car and grab a specific CD I want. Digital music is too much work. Discovery is nice but streaming is not. Also, the quality of iTunes and Spotify cloud music just doesn’t compare to the physical media.

Any suggestions?

Two years ago today, I wrote this blog post. It was an overall update where the weather had warmed up and I was blogging by the river. I miss that little gazebo by the river. It was so relaxing. In that post, I wrote this:

Next week, I’m picking up a brand new, never driven Toyota Corolla. My salary sort of means I could afford any car on that lot and I’m not bragging, it’s just true but, being a first time car buyer who traveled from 17-24, I don’t have much credit so I had to get a cheap car to prove that I can pay payments on time.Believe it or not though, I kind of love the car. I don’t need a huge SUV (nor do I want one) but I’d love to drive a Mercedes off the lot but my credit said no to that. So, this $21,000 Corolla with leather trim, bluetooth, upgraded sound system, larger engine, extra bod kit and all kinds of features like a mooon roof and steering wheel car controls is mine. I’m paying for it over 36 months and I got a great deal on it considering I’ve never had a car before or a credit card for that matter. 

My first new car and it was a fun one. While I enjoyed the Corolla, it wasn’t my choice, it was the only option I had with the lack of credit history. It was also a lease, so the car was due back or I had the option of buying it when the lease was up but the buyout was considerably higher than the worth of the car after paying $315 a month for the past 24 months, that’s $7560 and then they asked me to pay $15,000 or $22,560. Not much over the value of the car but for a car I didn’t want, it was a lot.

In January, the search began for a new vehicle. I was pretty set on a Mini Cooper S, a Toyota Avalon or a Toyota FJ Cruiser. They are 3 radically different vehicles (sports car, luxury and 4×4 truck) but each catered to a desire of mine. I love going fast, I love luxury / comfort and I’m tired of getting stuck in the snow / mud on my dirt road here in New Hampshire.

A couple of things happened. The first is that Mini Cooper would require I drive 2 hours to Boston when i needed car work done since there is no BMW or Mini dealership in my area. The Avalon I was laughed at for wanting a grandma car and the body was huge, it’s a full-size and a lot of wasted space especially considering the back seats don’t fold down aside from a small hole for skis, I can’t put anything in it and the FJ cruiser well, I think it’s going away or at least no Toyota dealers in my area could get one for me. “They’re all stuck at port. we don’t know when we’ll ever get any in” and that lasted for 2 months. My dad has an FJ and I love the look of it but, trucks eat gas and have bigger tires, brakes and other parts. It’s a pricey car and lacks the technology and conveniences. It was a practical choice but I couldn’t drive any of the new models since none were available locally.

While my friend Justin was here from SF on the 17th of March, we looked at the Volkswagen Golf R. He told me it’s the perfect car for me, all wheel drive and a lot of fun to drive. I thought Golfs were cheap cars that kids bought used and added a ton of modifications. I thought Volkswagens were the black sheep of the German car makers where Audi shined and BMW / Mercedes were the crown German vehicles. I see Audis all over town but I don’t see many VW vehicles.

A few days after Justin and I peered at the Golf R through a window on a Sunday at the local VW dealership, I went to the dealer locally. Thank goodness there’s one near my work. After test driving the Golf, we set up the paperwork and I finally took it home 2 weeks later. That was 3 weeks ago and now that I have finally received all of the paperwork to register the vehicle, insurance squared away and a few tanks of gas later, I wanted to express the excitement on this blog and share with you a few photos. First, here’s the Golf R in a nutshell:

===

The VW Golf is the original hot-hatchback. Golf vehicles spend many thousands of miles on the road, retain a nice resale value and each generation is followed quickly by many aftermarket parts, modifications and tweaks that can be made. The VW GTI is a Golf on steroids and it’s faster, slightly larger and more fun to drive. The Golf R is a vehicle that comes around every few years (previously called ‘Golf Rabbit’ or R32) and it’s basically a wickedly improved GTI but with the Golf name. This forum post breaks than down better than I can. While the Golf R is around $6,000 more than the VW GTI, this Autobahn race between a Stage 2 GTI and a stock Golf R shows an idea behind just how much faster the Golf R is. 

The Golf R is dangerously fast and the German engineering is awe-inspiring. Every little thing is special. When the wipers aren’t in use, they hide so you can’t se them and engaging the front windshield cleaner also sprays wiper fluid on my front headlights. The lights move as I turn the steering wheel making it easier to see around corners. The steering wheel is ergonomic if that’s even the right word for it and the built in computer manages the entire driving experience. Did I mention how fast it is?

By default, I’d say this car prefers going 90 miles per hour. That’s the normal speed for it. If I am on an interstate in Vermont, cruising along with not  a car in sight (happens more than you think up here in the woods), I’ll realize almost once per day I’m going 90. Cruise control is your friend and keeps you in check. If the speed limit is 55 and someone on a single lane road is going 40, passing them is a breeze. You drop the gear from 6 into 4, realize you’ve just hit 80 miles per hour and then turn on your blinker to get over and let off the gas until you get back to 55. I’ve never passed a car so easily before. It’s pretty remarkable. 

Also, I’ve never driven an all-wheel-drive vehicle before. This video explains VW’s 4-Motion system. On Friday, there was an inch of ice on the ground and another inch of snow. In just the stock factory all-season tires, I was passing cars in the lane on Interstate 91 that had not been plowed. In fact, the snowy lane was easier to drive in than the lane covered in black ice. I’ve never before driven the speed limit during a snow storm. I didn’t slip or slide or feel at all that I was driving in a snow storm. The car just drove and I did a few tests in a parking lot covered in snow to get a feel for the handling. Each time the car loses control, I can steer a tad and recover easily. The all-wheel drive makes driving fun again in both snowy and dry conditions.

The 3300 pound car with all wheel drive and a heavy all metal frame means lower gas mileage than my Corolla. It averages 24.8 MPG versus 31.3 in the Corolla. Not only that, it requires premium gas and maintenance will be treated like a sports car…we’re talking sports car brakes, air filters, windshield wipers, clutch and fuel pumps. Turbocharger repairs aren’t cheap. I mentally prepared myself for that cost and hope it remains within my budget on par with how much fun this car is to drive.Right now, the gas + monthly payment are in line with just how much fun it is. Every time I get behind the wheel, I’m happy and in love with every aspect of it. 

===

As the first car that I picked and am stoked about, the car continues to impress me. It has ever amenity I want (except for cooled seats and auto-retracting mirrors). It’s insanely fast, looks sexy on the road and has every bell & whistle of the luxury offerings from BMW. It is expensive but I see myself in this car for a long time. It has been a huge pleasure to own and I am thrilled to have it!

My review of the Nike FuelBand that was posted in July of 2012 is mostly unchanged. The software is still clunky, the band heavy and the overall data collected is minimal and often inaccurate. Driving in a car for 8 hours and reaching my fitness goal is not what I’d call accurate but, the graphs show I’m very active with the most activity being while I ate a box of french fries at a truck stop. Lifting bag to mouth counted for 200 Nike Fuel points or about 5 minutes of sprinting. Yeah, not accurate.

On the last leg of my trip to Europe, I banged the fuel band against the door of an airplane and broke the band. It snapped but the rubber held it together until I got home. A call to Nike and they replaced the band in-warranty with a brand new one with the box, accessories, everything. That was pretty cool and, the new unit has a new 1 year warranty. I figured it was because the overall satisfaction people have with the device is low but a free brand new unit with a new warranty is nothing to complain about.

—

The new 1st generation FuelBand is heavier, thicker, more rigid and holds to the wrist must better. It’s harder to take on and off which should mean it holds up much longer. Besides, a water-tight fit means you really shouldn’t take it off unless you’re going to go swimming. I did go skiing at the lake last summer and forgot to take the band off and it was fine even while submerged in water but Nike doesn’t recommend that.

Primarily, aside from the stiffness of the new unit, not much is changed but the battery life has blown me away. I’m in awe of how long this unit has lated on my wrist. It has stored data just fine, logged my movements and told me the time. The unit has been functioning normally but, instead of the normal 3 days between charges, I’ve been wearing the Fuel Band for 4 weeks. I have an inquiry into Nike asking if this is normal. I just plugged in my device for my once a week sync and it’s showing 25% battery remaining, the same thing the FuelBand showed 3 weeks ago. It seems like the device isn’t aware the battery is running low. Is his normal?

So, I’m very confused as to why the battery lasted so long but a 4 week battery life on an activity tracker is very impressive. Although, I still think this is a bug because the device has been charging on my macBook via USB for an hour and still hasn’t gone above 25% battery life. But, if it’s still tracking my movements, what’s the big deal what the battery reads, right?

Update: I just did a force reset of the unit and now it’s show 79% charged. How odd though that it’s holding the charge so long. I will promise myself not to charge it again and only sync to my iPhone weekly via Bluebooth and see if this thing will keep going and going for months. If so, and it’s not a bug, great job Nike on improving battery life on these things. 

According to EnergyFiend, Red Bull is being slowly caught up with by Monster’s huge line of energy drinks. In order to diversify, Red Bull is releasing flavors. Cranberry, lime and blueberry flavors are available nationwide and I grabbed a can of each to see how these taste.

Elizabeth liked all three flavors but I think she preferred the cranberry. I liked blueberry but neither of these flavors was good enough to get me to stop drinking coffee or the occasional standard Red Bull. These have been tested for the last 6 months in the hottest clubs in Vegas and NYC and I’m assuming they were tested mixed with Vodka or some other liquor. The tastes are too sweet and really feel like they’re designed for Vodka. 

With that said, if you’re looking for a flavor mix for your Red Bull & Vodka, just get flavored vodka or flavored extract to add to a drink. these cost the same as regular red bull and the formula and caffeine amounts of identical as well.

Everything I wrote a year ago still applies. A year later, my situation is worse. Watching or listening to every SF Giants game in 2013 will not cost $119. It’ll cost me $570. At an average price of $27.21 per ticket (source), I could go to nearly 21 home games in San Francisco..well, assuming I lived there. Also, if I lived in SF I couldn’t get MLB.TV because I’d be in the Giants’ blackout region. So, why is watching one team play baseball costing almost 5 times as much a year later?

I moved to a new house.

My drive to work and the drive I make every 2 weeks to northern Vermont lacks reliable cell phone service and my new house, despite being 15 miles from an Ivy league college has a maximum Internet speed of 3 megabits. No cable provider, just DSL and 3mbps is the best I can do. My last setup allowed me to watch SF Giants games at home via a ton of devices but mostly, I watched all of these games on my AppleTV in HD streaming. The Apple devices all share one common theme, they don’t allow MLB to inject advertisements into their stream. Using an MLB application for Android or within a web browse and you will have advertisements during commercial breaks. The Apple devices don’t have those on the video streams. If you’re streaming audio, you’re tuning into the local AM station (KNBR in SF) which does have ads on their broadcast. 

I tried watching Spring Training games on the AppleTV and iPad on my new home Internet. It doesn’t work. Not even in SD can I watch these games. The same goes for Netflix and even YouTube. My home Internet won’t allow me to watch streaming content. I literally am going to video stores to rent videos. 

So, what do I do?

I add a sports package to my DirecTV service that includes my hometown sports station from when I lived in SF, CSN Bay Area. For the last few days, I watched every SF Giants game, it was great and worked great! I watched / listened to games at work on my iPad for the day games and I watched games at home. Tonight, I go to watch the 10:15 PM game of SF Giants versus the Rockies…”You are not subscribed” is the message I saw. The Sports package I paid $20 a month for suddenly doesn’t get CSN BA. I called DirecTV. They informed me CSN BA was not in my region therefore I couldn’t watch it. I told them it was working yesterday and now I discover that was a trial to MLB’s TV Package, a $55 a month package that allows me to watch every baseball game this season.

All in all, the package’s cost is $240. It says $199 online but that’s only for new subscribers. But I’ve already paid $130 for MLB.TV…too bad, so sad. 

IT seems like the scenario so far is $130 will get me radio stream (where I have cell service) to my car via Bluetooth of games while I’m on the road and it allows me to watch 11AM / noon (PST) games on my iPad in my cubicle which is nice and helps those last 2 hours of the day go by much faster. Then, for games that start at 3, 4 or 7PM, I can watch them on DirecTV via this new package. I”m in for $370 so far which would have been avoided had my  home Internet been faster than 3 megabits. 

So the other $200? Well, that’s the price of getting Sirius at $20 a month and getting MLB games in my car. Last year, my only complaint about the service was that I couldn’t listen to games while driving to and from work or around Vermont on beer runs. Well, I think the $20 a month for games on the road is just going to be outside of my price range. While it’s nice to have games in great quality and always on via Sirius, I’m just not in my car enough during those hours to shoot for it..and, when my iPhone gets a cell signal, I can stream the games via Bluetooth it’s just that Vermont isn’t known for reliable cell service.

While the MLB experience sucks in 2013, it’s still the best out there among the sports leagues and franchises. The MLB.TV package at $130 for the year for new users is still riddled with blackout and game restrictions (all Saturday games are blacked out) but, with a great Internet connection, you can watch games on your iOS and Android devices, PC and on your television. Samsung TVs even have the MLB app built in now. You need the Internet. Without MLB, well there’s your TV cable / satellite provider who will charge you about $250 for a season of games, also blackout restrictions apply. Finally, Satellite radio has you set for about $200 for the programing as a part of the deluxe package( Not an extra $20 a month but included in the $20 a month package)

The NFL, MLS and NHL leagues don’t have this sort of flexibility so, MLB is doing a good job but I don’t think it’s enough. We really need a one time fee that allows he end user to select what games they want, what features and where they want to watch or listen to those games. If I want only SF Giants games on my TV, iPad and in my car, that should be one price. 

So yeah, I spend $370 so far to be able to watch SF Giants games but there are over 160 of them and I never miss a game. It’s almost a full year of entertainment for that price. It’s just a shame that it costs so much and is so confusing. Most people don’t take the time to go through all of the fine print. Luckily, if your Internet is better than 3 megabits down, MLB.TV is probably the best option especially if you don’t have cable, it could be the only option. 

*apologies, wrote this at midnight and didn’t proofread*

via The Bold Italic:

“I won’t lie: The Giants are easy to love; they’re a charismatic bunch. The beards and the misfits and the gamer babes. The short-lived Melk Men. The pie-in-the-face locker room shenanigans. Kruk’s “Grab some pine, meat!” Kuip’s “Outta here!” Timmy’s “Fuck yeah!” The fact that they’ve won the World Series twice since I became a fan? That’s icing on the cake, or extra bases, as it were.”

DCILY is the only coffee blog I read. Relevant, entertaining and always informative and I was thrilled to see Noma featured but also surprised. My only regret in Copenhagen 3 weeks ago was that I wasn’t able to dine at this world’s top restaurant. I tried reserving a single seat 4 weeks before the trip and realized the wait was much longer. I settled for 2 days of dining instead, Relæ and Kødbyens Fiskebar.

While I wasn’t able to snag reservations, it was great to see the dinner and coffee featured on one of my favorite blogs. Check it out.

Life in the cloud. Google that. You’ll find a lot of results for cloud storage, computing and a few things about Jesus. Let’s talk about the cloud. My iTunes library exceeds 2 terabytes. The size of my first laptop was 15 gigabytes. It was a 600Mhz iBook 12″ and, according to my buddy Dennis Sellers in his 2001 Macworld review of that iBook, “The iBook is touted as a consumer portable. But for lots of us professional users, it can also more than fill the bill.” LOL. 15 Gigabytes works for pros? 2001 was a different time. Back then, the iPod was 5 gigabytes and I used it was a backup FireWire drive as well as for holding my measly 500 songs in iTunes 2.0.1. Times have changed and today, my iTunes library is larger than the capacity of 160 iBooks or, about how many were in use at my high school for student labs and teachers when I graduated in 2004.

Apple has done a great job with media management. There’s iTunes Match for which I’m a subscriber that holds all 25,000 of my songs in the cloud. When I buy movies and TV shows on iTunes, those are accessible via the cloud anywhere. I can sign into my Apple account on any AppleTV or iTunes installation and via iOS (iPad / iPhone) and stream / download video and audio that I’ve purchased. That’s pretty awesome. 

With DropBox, everything I need for work and personal projects is accessible via the web browner and iOS and it stays in sync across my devices without effort.

There are a lot of services that make locally storage completely useless. Flickr may have all of my best photos stored but my iPhoto library is 400 gigabytes. Not every great shot ends up on Flickr so I have to store that. Also, a lot of my iTunes media wasn’t purchased from Apple so there’s storing that as well. Finally, I maintain documents, presentations and multimedia going back to 1999 when I first started blogging, taking photos and turning in electronic copies of school work to my teachers using the printers and open WiFi we had in school. 

In total, I’m storing about 4.5 terabytes of data and all of my hard drives were completely full. Not even a new movie could fit on them and I was at the point where I’d have to stop backing up my computers to external drives to make space for more media. I’m not a data hoarder, I just have a lot of data from over the years and getting new music, taking hundreds of photos a month (thousands while on trips) and recording various data points about myself really adds up. 

I had the chance to attend Ultra Music Festival again this year but didn’t. I decided to pay some more bills off and re-do my home storage setup. I didn’t go NAS or RAID as I had hoped to do but I did double my storage capacity at home.

I have two LaCie D2 Quadra drives. Each had a 1 Terabyte capacity and one with a failing HDD. I ordered two 3-Terabyte SATA II drives from Western Digital (green line). Nothing fancy at about $180 per piece. Upgrading the LaCie drives was a breeze with some hex and phillips head screw drivers. This didn’t take long.

I also ordered a LaCie Blade Runner which is a 4 terabyte USB 3.0 drive designed by Philippe Starck and built by LaCie. Only 10,000 are being made but considering this drive has been on sale for 3 months (since CES) and experienced price drops, I don’t feel like they’re moving these too fast. It is a beautiful drive. I wanted to order a LaCie D2 with Thunderbolt and USB 3 at 4 Terabytes but ThunderBolt drives are still too expensive. The Blade Runner was $299 and the upgradeable drive with thunderbolt was $399 for the same capacity. Not something I wanted to spend. I’ll wait on a ThunderBolt drive for when I get a new iMac.

======

It has taken about 36 hours but I’m finally back where I was a few years ago.

All 3 computers are duplicated with hourly backups to one of the 3 Terabyte drives. My iTunes Library is on one single drive (The Blade Runner) and duplicated to the other 3 terabyte drive. My 2 Terabyte Media Drive with life archives, projects and work is duplicated to the Blade Runner as well. I have some room to spare on all of these (about 3 Teraybtes Remaining). 

======

What has this whole experience taught me? Well, I still love hard drives and don’t trust the cloud. Also, since my Internet is near dial-up at the house, products that rely solely on the cloud won’t work for me. I can’t  buy  / rent movies on iTunes because they take 8 hours to download. I can’t backup my entire iMac to Mozy or another service because it would take close to 6 months to backup my iMac to an online place. Deleting all iTunes songs and streaming from iTunes Match won’t work. I can’t even stream Spotify or watch 640 YouTube videos so I need local storage. Local storage is still a requirement for me and will be for the foreseeable future.

Maybe I’m just getting old and don’t want to rely on online storage? My home Internet is weak but there’s something valuable about having my data stored at home and the ability to grab drives and take them with me in the event of a fire. A lot of things are stored online but these backup services come and go so I don’t really trust them. 

This year, I still want to get a Thunderbolt iMac + 27″ Thunderbolt display and a proper set of desktop speakers. It’s quite a bit to spend at once but at least now my data is backed up and healthy again. I was tempting my fate by having thousands of important documents and photos resting on single drives, some which were 5 years old. All is good now and I’m breathing much easier. 

The Fishbar (Kødbyens Fiskebar) is in the meatpacking district of Copenhagen. It’s a simple please but staffed by some very excellent chefs. The service was okay and not outstanding but the food was excellent. The oysters were perhaps the best I’ve ever had. Compared to the rest of the meal, those were what really shined and, if I return, I’ll focus on just eating these. The main course of baked haddock was nice as well as the dessert but the sauces used here were intended to allow the food really shine and I feel like the sauces were really lacking. That’s the only disappointing aspect of dining here

Normandy Oysters

Clams on Rye

Pickled Herring

Baked Haddock

Baked Haddock

Pear crumble and pear marenque

On Saturday evening, I visited Relæ. This is the alternative to the world’s #1 restaurant Noma for people like me who couldn’t get a reservation. It’s also half the price but that’s not the point. Relæ had an opening and Noma didn’t. Even still, I had a terrific time and the food presented to me over the course of 2.5 hours was remarkable.

Total bill came out to $150 without ordering wine. Really special and really amazing. I took a few photos.

Bread w/ Italian Olive Oil

Baked onions, cress and pumkin seeds

Burnt cabbage, green strawberries, biodynamic beef

Jerusalem artichoke, quinoa and coffee @ Restaurant Relæ – Nørrebro – København

Fried salsify and bergamot @ Restaurant Relæ – Nørrebro – København

Chicken broth, Sødam chicken and leeks

Nordlys and orange zest with carrots

Milk, kelp and caramel

ITWorld:

Facebook was ordered to end its real name policy and permit the use of pseudonyms on its platform by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ULD) for Schleswig-Holstein last year. The social network violated the German Telemedia Act, which allows users to use nicknames online, according to the ULD.

The orders were issued against Facebook in the U.S., and also Facebook Ireland, which is responsible for all Facebook’s activities outside of the U.S. and Canada. Facebook, however, decided to fight the orders because it thought them without merit.

The Administrative Court of the State of Schleswig-Holstein ruled in favor of Facebook on Thursday. The ULD wrongly based its orders on German law which is not applicable in this case, the court spokesman Harald Alberts said in a news release on Friday.

Another win for abolishing anonymity online. If only we could do this to cesspools like Reddit.

In a follow up on this post from last year, I found this on TaskRabbit for San Francisco. It’s a job posted by AirBNB:

Wow. AirBNB is so cool. Using Task rabbit to send things to a sick employee. Just awesome. What a very cool company. 

Last May, I visited a bar recommended to me by a friend. He knew I was a huge fan of Speakeasy bars and told me of a brand new world-class bar owned and operated by a man named Olivier Jacobs that had just opened called Jigger’s – The Noble Drugstore. I spent an entire evening there for 6 hours enjoying delicious cocktails and talking to the nice staff and its patrons. During that evening, I also took a few photos and wrote this blog post. 

Since I am heading to Europe in February, I decided to message Olivier to reserve another night of drinks and photography at his lounge. Upon visiting the website, I noticed  all of the photos used were mine! No, they were not attributed to me but I’m so flattered, I don’t care. It’s really cool that they used my photos in such a pronounced way at a bar operated by the winner of Belgium’s best bartender 2 years in a row and who won many accolades representing Belgium at the world bartender competition that took place in Brazil last year.

Some photos of the site featuring my photos are below:

Here are the photos used: (1, 2 and 3)

This was an unexpected treat to find these and I look forward to thanking Olivier and his team in person when I am in Gent next month. It is truly one of the best cocktail bars I’ve ever visited. 

I haven’t ordered an espresso based drink at Starbucks in a long-time. I happen to be a fan of Clover Brewed Starbucks’ Reserve coffee. Actually, the $20,000 USD Clover machines and Reserve Coffees are two newish initiatives at Starbucks that have kept me as a customer. Without them, I would have ditched the mega-coffee chain a very long time ago. 

In an effort the provide a consistent coffee creation to every customer, Starbucks has done what any corporate capitalist shareholder owned company would do. They streamlined and automated. They may value their employees (Partners) and offer great pay + healthcare even to part timers but they are still a money-making operation. Let’s review how Starbucks has automated their Barista:

• Clover: An Internet connected Vacuum Press machine that knows exactly the right temp, water levels and pressure for every Starbucks coffee bean. The barista turns a nob and presses a button. Presto! Coffee!
• Drip coffee at Starbucks with timers and temp controls. Baristas dump a pre-weighed bag of coffee into a machine and out comes coffee!
• Semi-Automated, push-button espresso machines. Load up 5 pounds of coffee beans in the top, press a button for espresso. Luckily, the frothing process is STILL done by hand.
• Frozen baked goods and breakfast sandwiches delivered in plastic and defrosted each morning
• Breakfast cooker toasters that flash toast sandwiches are also pre-programmed assumingly the same as Clover with an Ethernet cable connected to the machine to receive pre-sets for every sandwich that comes out.
• Timed blenders to make blended frozen drinks
• Finally, pre-made syrups, powders and flavorings direct from Starbucks corporate.

Drinks are “created” in-store but everything about those drinks is pre-packaged, pre-made and, for almost every thing, push-button. The only custom thing about Starbucks is the writing on your cup indicating what you ordered.

I was thinking the other day about the future of Starbucks. Why have baristas at all? Wouldn’t it be simpler to have million dollar automated installations where all of the same ingredients are behind a wall stocked by one person and you order what you want and out pops a cup? It really is the only thing separating Starbucks from coffee vending machines at hospitals. A person taking your order and writing your name on a cup is the only thing different from vending machines. Now, Starbucks is always creating new fun drinks ideas, the reserve series of beans is putting out coffees nearly comparable to those from smaller roasters and all stores have Pour-over and some have clover machines which are automated but provide a far superior cup of coffee than the drip systems Starbucks uses. 

On one hand, Starbucks is delivering  enough to keep people coming back. They are also making strides each year to make baristas useless. I found this blog post in 2007 worth a read:

Suddenly I felt so cheated. Now ANYBODY can be a barista. Just press one button and you get instant coffee. No more grinding or pressing. I can be a barista too, just give me 30 minutes training and I’ll be brewing perfect coffee for everyone.

How long before Starbucks is just a wall of LED panels and auto-coffee creations? They’re not too far from this. 

NYTimes: 

Many young men these days have no experience in formal dating and feel the need to be faintly ironic about the process — “to ‘date’ in quotation marks” — because they are “worried that they might offend women by dating in an old-fashioned way,” Ms. Rosin said.

“It’s hard to read a woman exactly right these days,” she added. “You don’t know whether, say, choosing the wine without asking her opinion will meet her yearnings for old-fashioned romance or strike her as boorish and macho.”

Indeed, being too formal too early can send a message that a man is ready to get serious, which few men in their 20s are ready to do, said Lex Edness, a television writer in Los Angeles.

“A lot of men in their 20s are reluctant to take the girl to the French restaurant, or buy them jewelry, because those steps tend to lead to ‘eventually, we’re going to get married,’ ” Mr. Edness, 27, said. In a tight economy, where everyone is grinding away to build a career, most men cannot fathom supporting a family until at least 30 or 35, he said.

“So it’s a lot easier to meet people on an even playing field, in casual dating,” he said. “The stakes are lower.”

This article was rubbish. A lot of people in my 20s agree with me. 

The few hundred readers that have been stopping by this blog since the very beginning are well aware of some of my posts on MPG back in the day where I posted product reviews and technology opinion pieces from the local public library…not during business hours but around midnight sitting outside of the library so I could download music and write. I remember telling my parents I was going to parties with friends and instead going to the library to get on the Internet. I didn’t have Internet at home and, when I did, it was dial up. This changed in 2008 when I moved to San Francisco. Having high speed Internet was crazy at first it was very psychological because for years, I had queued up downloads, articles and photos to post when I went to the library and sat outside in the cold for hours to have internet. Having high speed always available was crazy because I felt there was a constant need to use it. I have all of this bandwidth. To not download something right now would be a waste.

Luckily, that faded and, since I came to New Hampshire 2 years ago, I got very lucky when 100 megabits per second speeds were available at my cabin. There was no cell service, no city water and you lived and died by the amount of pellets in the wood stove but I had insanely fast Internet. It was awesome. 

Two weeks ago, I moved from Canaan NH to Lyme NH. No Comcast, no Fibre and my only two options were HughesNet satellite or a local telephone company offering DSL. My home connection maxes out at 3 megabits per second down. 

I was underway on moving to the new house when this was discovered. Comcast even came to the new house to survey it. They spent 5 days looking at options to get this new house online and said it just wasn’t possible. I was SoL and stuck at 3 megabits per second with a DSL company who makes you sign 12 month contracts to get their service. Why they do this is unclear to me but Comcast assured me that they would be in this area in about a year.

What is it like losing 97% of your Internet speed within the span of a day?

It only took a few minutes to realize that the LTE connection on my iPad was 25% faster than my home DSL connection. Unfortunately, at $20 per gigabyte, running my home Internet on an LTE equipped iPad is not possible. Also, Comcast limits 250 gigabytes per month on home Internet while the new company limits me to 80 gigabytes per month. They also strictly forbid me reconfiguring their Westell modem to PPPoE so I can use my Airport Extreme as the router and thus control the Access list and choose my own DNS servers. They also informed me that if I have issues, they will only trouble shoot the Westel unit. 

So, what is the day to day experience of a 3 megabit connection for an outrageous $40 a month (I was paying $50 for 100 megabit on Comcast)? 

I can no longer rent movies on iTunes and watch them within the hour. If I want to watch a movie, it’s faster to hit the video store because streaming it from iTunes will take 5 hours to pre-buffer in 1080P. HBO Go on my Xbox and Hulu on my AppleTV are unusable. I can no longer stream HD content..I can’t even stream 640×480 (DVD-Quality content). All streaming must be 360 or 240 (Yes, the resolution of all of those iTunes Music Videos you downloaded in 2004)

Updating my iTunes podcasts, apps and syncing with iTunes Genius completely destroys my home Internet. What I mean? I couldn’t watch Entourage last night in terrible grainy quality on HBO Go because the blurry faces kept skipping and stopping. Elizabeth and I had our iPad and iPhones put away (which is now a rule..no iOS devices when streaming TV shows). I realized my iMac was downloading podcasts which happens once per day and this was causing our TV not to work.

Video conferencing with colleagues at home is no longer possible in HD. Updating Microsoft Office took 15 minutes versus 1 minute before and it is impossible to stream Pandora while surfing the web or uploading a photo to Flickr. I have to stop all streaming services, backup and download services if I want to upload photos to Flickr. 

…the best part of this experience is that I purchased It’s Always sunny in Philadelphia and had to go to Starbucks to download it. Unfortunately, Starbucks Internet is better than my home Internet.

====

Ways to cope with this huge drop in home Internet speed?

Elizabeth and I got the high-end DirecTV Premiere package and we canceled Hulu and Netflix. We spent a day or so configuring the DVR for 40+ shows that we currently watch. Not all at once, mind you but throughout the year, there are 40 or so shows I like to watch on Hulu. We also once per week look at what movies are airing on HBO, Showtime or Cinemax and mark those to be recorded from the DirecTV website. So, semi-new movies we can still watch. Plus, the new DirecTV Genie system has a 1 terabyte hard drive so I simply set it to record a lot of shows / movies I may want to watch and can watch when I feel like it. I’m now recording shows like Dexter, Girls and Game of Thrones because HBO Go won’t give me HD content via streaming.

Despite now having LTE at home, I kept my home phone because I have long conference calls and used to use Skype voice calling for these but the Internet can’t sustain long conference calls and hangs up on them when I load a web page or download large mail attachments.

In short, a very beefy TV package and essentially going back on 5 years of “content via streaming” is essential. I kept all of my music on my iTunes and never relied only on iTunes Match so I still have local music, movies and TV shows at home. But downloading larger files is basically a thing of the past. 

For now, Starbucks is the best Internet I have. I have great Internet at work but that’s work so it doesn’t count. Either way, if you’re a power-user online make sure you at least get 12 megabits down before moving some place new. 3 is total murder. 

My Facebook profile is locked down to nothing now. I don’t have any “likes” on any pages yet Facebook still says I do. I also don’t have any photos or personal info but I was tagged in a lot of photos so that still shows up. In short, Facebook is a wide distribution list & email manager because, as I’ve said before, no one emails me anymore. Everyone Facebook messages me. It’s a shame because I prefer email much more. 

Anyway, I have my Facebook safety settings setup to approve all tags so I have an action manager in FB that lets me approve everything. I deny all tags these days because there’s no point. If you want me to have a photo you took of me, email it to me (says the curmudgeon old man that I am).

I noticed something new in the past few days which is pretty annoying:

Now, I clicked “Hide” on all of these. But what about my friend who added me to Hanover, NH as my hometown. I don’t live in Hanover but I also don’t want to put on my Facebook where I live. Those who know me, know where I live and have an easy time finding it. All of this data removal from Facebook is so I don’t see advertisements. 

If you unlike everything, remove all personal info, connected apps and block all tags, apps and games, you actually experience an ad-less Facebook. I don’t have advertisements and it’s awesome. See, Facebook needs to know about you in order to serve you ads. I’ve given them nothing!

But, now that my friend added me to a city, is that auto recognized now to serve me ads? My profile still doesn’t list a hometown and I haven’t seen local ads but we’ll see if that changes. If you go to my sister’s FB page, you’ll see this:

So, Facebook still accepts her statement that I’m her brother and clicking “Hide” just puts that status to pending with no way for her to delete that pending. It’s just stuck unless you deletes me and re-adds me again and I click accept. I’m a little upset that FB lets people add you as family or list where you live. I think that’s a big deal. If I don’t want FB to know that, explicitly don’t add it and FB is letting people put down information about me, I don’t appreciate that.  Facebook is basically saying, “don’t want to give us any info, we’ll get it ourselves”

Not cool. 

With the holidays and moving, I sort of forgot this day had already come and gone. Not that it’s all that important to anyone.

Time spent living in California

Time spent living in New Hampshire

I still find it odd that I’ve been in New Hampshire as long as I have. I’m happy here but SF was always my dream city. I’ve officially lived in NH just as long. Pretty odd to say that out loud. 

I’ve linked to Paul Miller’s “Offline” project before. Paul is a writer at TheVerge and he’s taking a year away from the Internet and using sneaker net to send in his articles to colleagues. Occasionally, comments will be printed off for him to read. It’s an interesting thing and something I feel is fantastic. 

I would probably take this on as another cleanse perhaps for a month to start maybe next year but a year it seems that my work life would suffer. A lot of what I do is online. I applaud him for this. The entire series is amazing so, if you have an hour or so and an empty Instapaper queue, check it out.

There are 29 updates so far since May of 2012. Each is well-written and will make all Internet-Citizens feel a yearning for a simpler life away from the net.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/8/3007525/paul-miller-offline

Two articles, “You are Boring” and “Majestic Espresso” are just two of the many articles featured in The Magazine that I’ve really enjoyed reading. Most issues have 4-5 stories and a solid 75% of stories published are worth reading start to finish. I’m a subscriber to The New Yorker and NY Times both tablet editions. On average, I read on my iPad 1 hour per day. This is enough time to get news, stay up to date on current events and do a bit of random browsing to tech websites. Of the sites and subscriptions I have, barely 10% is worth reading throughout. It’s odd for any publication to have that much great content so kudos to Marco and his team for curating articles that appeal to learning junkies and geeks. 

The Magazine is not published weekly and, when the Newsstand icon lights up, I’m always excited and stop everything to open it up and read the first article. The layout, in-line images, clickable explanations / links within articles and author bios are very well done. It takes about 30 minutes to read each issue. For $1.99 a month, it’s perfect. I get nearly an hour of entertainment, beautifully designed that automatically downloaded. It’s entertaining, educational and fun.

I’d encourage anyone with an iOS device to subscribe now because the back-issues are not shrinking and there’s a lot of great content beginning at launch day through the latest issue. $1.99 is a steal. You’ll enjoy it quite a bit even if you’re only a marginal geek. 

I just signed up for this - http://tripsq.com/adamjackson. VERY cool. I’m a data nerd and if only they’d allow me to download this data in a nice form. For now, I’ll just take a screenshot of it.

Ryan Block is an uber cool guy. He’s the reason I started reading Engadget back in the day. I love his Apple Events Coverage at Engadget and at GDGT. Ryan and I have chatted at events and I wasn’t aware of his departure from Facebook and Instagram. The entire article on NYTimes is a VERY VERY good read! Read the whole thing here. I am posting a few choice bits below:

Facebook’s legendarily fast and loose approach to user privacy has long been something of a cliché, which is why deleting one’s account is now something of a hollow techno-political statement – the Internet equivalent to moving off the grid to a cabin in the mountains. And it’s certainly not as if Facebook has much to worry about, as no number of high-profile abandoners over the last two years have slowed the company’s ballooning growth, now at over a billion active users.

I’m absolutely over the up in arms way users petition services who make design or terms of service changes. Startups evolve and they do this often especially when the startup is not charging users for the service. To make money, which is a necessary reality to almost every startup, the TOS and user experience must evolve. That’s just the way it is. I admit that a lot of users close accounts just to prove a point which I’ve always disagreed with. I don’t close accounts if I can help it and, if I do, it’s not to prove a point. It’s because the company continually lost my trust with decisions that are made to appease their customers…advertisers or data buyers. If the users are the customers, most of the time this doesn’t happen. 

In my search for technology products and services that somehow enrich or add value to my life, Facebook and Instagram have been a net negative not only in their usefulness, but also in other, subtle ways most people don’t often consider.

I agree with this. Instagram I used for a couple of days this year and found it interesting that I had 900 followers on it before ever posting a single picture. I have 1500 friends on Facebook + about 100 subscribers. These days, I use Facebook for syndication. I look at my friends list  and subscribers all as subscribers. Facebook I’ve thought of deleting but my clickthroughs of photos and blog posts are pretty healthy on Facebook. In addition, almost eery personal conversation I have with friends and family happens on Facebook. No one uses my email anymore. They message me on Facebook. So I have to keep it around. Instagram was a nice syndication but I felt taking photos with my camera, copying them to my phone’s camera roll and uploading to Instagram with the tag #NoFilter was too much work. I’d prefer that all who are interested in my photos go to Flickr which is where I’ve been uploading photos since 2007. 

Beyond syndication, Ryan’s point is right. Maybe he and I are in agreement because we simply have too many connections on social networks? My friends like Lee who aren’t tech savvy and only have 100 friends on Facebook say my issues are not their issues. They get a lot out of social networks because only real life friends are there. This is a point I’d like to experiment with but don’t have the guts to rip out everyone I’m not friends with from my social networks. 

A decade ago, I joined one of the early social networking sites, Friendster, which struggled to find a business model and eventually collapsed as users migrated to MySpace. In the intervening years, Friendster’s brand, intellectual property (including some seminal social networking patents), and most important, user data from millions of people, were broken up or changed hands.

This is perhaps the most scary thing that I haven’t put a lot of time into. From 2005-2009, I joined every social network to preserve the username. Now, I decide really hard what I want to get out of each network that gets my email address. I have no idea what data is out there in sites that went defunct and sold the data to all kinds of companies. 

Perhaps worst of all, in an era where we meticulously prune our online personae, services like Facebook require constant diligence and maintenance. On Twitter accounts, About.me profiles, or LinkedIn bios, at the very least users are empowered by complete control in their outward appearance. This is in contrast to Facebook and any other social tool that allows any user in its social graph to associate you with all manner of unrelated career- (or even potentially life-) changing posts or images.

THIS is a profound thought and something I’ve argued on Twitter each time an Instagram-esque debacle happens. The argument I make is that we spend a lot of free time maintaining social networks with our latest profile photos, bios and syndicating status updates and photo uploads to appease small groups of followers that almost always overlap when it comes to a few social networks. We user services like Ping.FM to syndicate our thoughts and waste time keeping our finger on all of it for no reason. 

So many friends of mine say they can’t maintain a blog. They’re too busy to do that. Then quit all social networks that you don’t absolutely need and that have no value in your life. Twitter is the only network I maintain. LikedIN I check once a month and Facebook I use to keep track of Beer news, email friends and syndicate my photos & blog posts. Twitter is more like a personal life diary that others subscribe to so I keep using it. 

We’re wasting a lot of time curating our social existence to companies that don’t value us and only value our data. We’re handing over data for free to companies to do with it what they want. It’s a waste of time. We may as well be watching reality TV all day. 

We’d all be much better off simplifying our technological footprints and consolidating our trust in the few services that provide us the greatest value with the fewest unintended side effects. In the end, I’m not afraid to admit it. I’m a quitter.

Good on Ryan for posting this. 

I challenge everyone in the new year to own their content. Use services that charge you money and promise to you, its users that they won’t sell your data, won’t delete your content and, if they go away, will give you the data you gave them in a standard format. Google, Facebook and Twitter support data portability but they still serve advertisers. They’re in what I call a grey area of social networks worth putting up with. Unfortunately, the mass use of these companies + data portability makes me stick around. Others aren’t so lucky. If you don’t allow me access to my data off-site, don’t’ take my money and aren’t a mass used social tool, I simply won’t sign up or give you my information.

We should all take a stand and force freemium startups to take our money and serve the users. This would mean less startups but it would bring up the ecosystem of quality tools that respect the end user and not the advertiser. Who’s with me? 

Thanks to Shaun Blanc, I discovered this site today and quickly shared it with many of my friends who think coffee is too hard to make and waste a lot of money at Starbucks. 

http://brewmethods.com

For the longest time, I experimented with too many brewing methods at home. Pour-Over to Chemex to French Press to Espresso. I eventually settled to a default which is Chemex with a Paper filter. I picked up a Koava Cone but never figured out how to use it. It let in far too much sediment into my cup even on a french press grind.

When I settled on Chemex, I followed the Stumptown how-to page. I think this Brew Methods page is very cool. Most new coffee geeks should just buy an AeroPress, read the first guide and stick with that. I love Chemex but a lot of people don’t like how many parts it has but anyway, AeroPress  is great and the Brew Methods site rocks. 

Take up brewing your own coffee in 2013. You’ll save a lot of money. 

I took a few photos over the last days of moving to the new house. We were blessed / cursed with a snow storm. It was a nice time to move for the beauty of the scenery but moving during a snow storm was dangerous. Here are a few photos of the new house and surrounding areas.

The first time I moved out on my own was in 2007. It was March and I joined Twitter shortly after. It’s a shame I didn’t tweet back when I lived at home with my Dad. It would be interesting to see how the younger me perceived paying a piece of the rent while still abiding by a curfew. After a year in that first house, I moved closer to work but, in both cases, they were apartments. I was connected to others with a shared back yard and limits on how many people could park at my house. I had 2 parking spaces and that was it. In 2008, I moved to San Francisco to a 6th floor apartment in the Tenderloin. Still joined at the hip to others. In March of 2010, I moved to the ‘burbs of San Francisco into someone’s converted garage. It was spacious but still attached. Since August of 2010, I have been in a cabin in the middle of the woods on 5 acres of land along a river. I learned so much in that house, got rid of all of my “kid furniture” and moving into a world of proper wine glasses, cutlery and hosting dinner parties. In the cabin, I finally broke free of the San Francisco workaholic that was sure to become the death of me and into a life of 9 hour work days with more hobbies than I have time for. Those that have followed me since 2007 know that San Francisco was both my greatest success as an adult while also being the reason for weight gain, depression and total disaster for me. The city tore me apart because I wanted more than anything to succeed in that city. Everything was at stake and coming to New Hampshire has been a life-saver and I mean that literally. The cabin was my own space but I had neighbors below and beside me. It wasn’t a home.

Life is funny. Every time I think that this move, job or decision is the moment I become an adult. I have a tip of the youngsters; you are never an adult, at least in your mind. There are those moments where you say, “this is like a big kid thing. I’m paying bills and I’m an adult now” and then you buy a house, have a kid, start a retirement account and buy a car. In each case, us adults still amaze ourselves that we’re doing adult things.

This place I’m moving to is a home. This is not the analogy a lot of people use where a place you keep your stuff is suddenly a home where it’s a place you feel safe and secure in. I mean that this is a home on property with as many parking spaces as I could need with privacy and multiple levels and a basement. It’s my space with no connections. I was hammering in some nails to hang photos and looked at Elizabeth and we both simultaneously realized that no matter how many photos we hang, no one will complain about the hammering. We can blast our music, sing and dance and make noise and no one will hear. We live in a home..not an apartment, duplex or condo. It’s a home and it’s a joyous feeling.

I’m not a homeowner yet, but this certainly gives me that itch. I turn 27 in 2013 and the years from 18 to 27 have started to blur together and, although home ownership in our generation is no longer a requirement of adulthood, it is something I strive for at some point. There are still questions I should answer first. Do I want to spend the rest of my life in New England? Do I want to take the tax hit of moving to Vermont which is a far more beautiful and green state than New Hampshire? Is this a home I buy with Elizabeth or do I buy it on my own and invite her into it? How much should I spend? What are the obvious things my home should have?

The house that I moved into this weekend is large but tight. The kitchen is half the size I would need as a cook to truly take advantage of. I need more burners, more oven space, a larger microwave, a chest freezer, twice as much small appliance shelf space and a larger work area. I need a walk in pantry and a room that’s just for brewing beer with some commercial sinks for washing gear, burners with ventilation and fermentation rooms that are temp controlled. The bedroom, living room and office in the new house are perfect. The basement is smaller than I’d like it to be but it’s dark, damp and cool so my cellarable beers are VERY happy. The insulated outdoor deck is awesome and the yard and storage shed is perfect. There are 2 bathrooms and enough storage to get by.

This new house is not perfect. There are a lot of things I don’t like about it yet so it’s not a house I would buy. List was around $250K when it was on the market. We’re in a longer term lease and will probably stick around beyond the lease but it’s not a place I would buy. It is a home for me but I wouldn’t pick it for the home I raise kids in.

Despite the shortcomings of this new place, it’s my first house and the price is right and I’m happy to be here.

Moving in The Winter – I’m a Florida boy.

Little did I know what Hell was ahead of me in this move. As most of you know, the Christmas east-coast snow was rough. Over a foot of snow fell at my cabin but, by Friday, the snow was packed, plowed and roads were clear. I had moved a lot of boxes that weren’t dependent on warm temperatures onto my deck and into the garage. The deck is screened in and had never been flooded or snowed in and I woke up at 2AM on Wednesday the 26th with 4 inches of snow in my porch and boxes full of snow. 3 Hours later, all boxes were moved back inside. I went to pick up the moving truck on Saturday in town. The roads were clear and I arrived at the cabin just as a few flurries had started to fall.

By the time we departed the cabin with a crammed full 20 foot truck, the roads were messy and I was sliding all over the road. I drove commercial trucks in Florida for a year before starting with Apple. I knew what to do and handled the truck fine. However, snow driving with a truck of this size was not expected and there were accidents, abandoned cars and snow plows running all over the place. In total, 6 inches of snow fell that Saturday.

The few hundred feet long hills with 10-20% grades really gave me Hell. I couldn’t get into the driveway without having plows come out to plow for me and, at one point, I plummeted at 40MPH down a hill with locked up air brakes at a 40 degree angle relying only on fancy gear work and an e-brake to get myself out of what could have been a deathly experience.

Eventually, I finished my house and picked up Elizabeth’s house and we got completely unloaded the next morning returning the truck on time and the moving progressed through today which is 12/31. I have no Internet until Friday so I’m writing this to the iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard. After this is submitted, I’ll continue moving and unpacking / organizing will continue through the weekend since I have to return to work on January 2nd.

This move has been fun but cold and exhausting. I have a lot more stuff than I did when I moved here from California. Most of it is related to beer brewing and cellaring. I don’t have that much technology, clothes or furniture. Beer is half of my moving truck load and that’s alright. It’s a fun hobby.

This is my first home and I’m really happy. It’s nice to start the new year and my yearly detox in a new place. I have to find my juicer before tomorrow or else I’ll have some problems with that detox

It’s a brand new year. In 2003, I was a junior in High School. School and life was semi-stressful. Many of my classmates were doing Spring Break activities and going to the beaches, hanging with friends and partying during a time of rest and relaxation. I decided to do something slightly different. I packed up my car with only the bare essentials and drove into the middle of the woods and spent my spring break alone in the woods. It was a fantastic time. Since that week, I’ve tried each year to reset my palate and start fresh. I haven’t always been successful but it’s important to try.

Last year, I took on one of the most strenuous detoxes ever. Here were my self-imposed rules:

1. No alcohol (Beer, Wine & Liquor)
2. No tobacco (via Hookah or Cigars)
3. No drugs (I don’t do drugs EVER so this is very easy)
4. No meat (Once a week, I can have fish)
5. One fiber rich kale salad every night
6. No milk products (includes cheese, yogurt and ice cream. I don’t currently drink milk)
7. No caffeine (via coffee or any other supplement or energy drink)
8. Water only
9. Stretch Daily
10. Meditate Daily
11. Gym 4 days a week for 2 hours each visit (I’m already doing this)
12. Run twice a week (minimum 1.5 miles)
13. Complete 2 books in the one month span (A kick start to my yearly book goal)
14. No television. Movies only if time permits.
15. No social media. This blog will be my only outlet for 30 days. No Facebook, Twitter, Path, instant messages, etc.
16. Disabling all desktop and mobile notifications for everything except work emails
17. Complete one 7 day Juice Fast (“Excavation” via BluePrintCleanse which I’ve already ordered for the 10th-16th and will only do that & water for the week)

It was a challenge but I did it. This time, I’m going to tone things down a bit while maintaining a lot of the same overall challenges.

The reason isn’t that I’m getting lazy. The good news is that I’m moving in with my girlfriend in a few days so, as of the 1st of January, I will have a house-partner for the first time since August of 2009. 40 months after Laura moved out of our San Francisco apartment, I have to realize that a lot of these challenges are hard with someone living with you.

The great news is Elizabeth has agreed / volunteered to be a part of this detox. She won’t follow all of my goals but she has agreed to support me and take part in any goals that are my own and involve her. so, here are my 2013 – 30 day detox goals.

1. No alcohol or tobacco or drugs
2. I won’t be able to have any meat unless it’s salmon or tuna
3. I will eat only vegetables and will follow a strict vegetarian diet
4. Two out of my 3 meals per day will be vegetable juice. I usually do a BluePrintCleanse but that’s a lot of money for those juices so I’ll be making all juice myself. It’s cheaper by far.
5. No dairy products
6. No grain (this is a new one for 2013)
7. No caffeine. I’ve agreed to make Elizabeth coffee so I’ll have to make this for her but not have any myself
8. The only liquid I’ll ingest is water
9. No social media unless it’s something I blog which is auto posted to Twitter.
10. Pick back up on my 4 times a week gym routine with my new gym buddy
11. No sexual activity at all. I did this last year but didn’t document it. I felt it was a TMI sort of promise to myself

After last year, one goal that I set that was completed in a big way was my book reading for the year. I did 2 books in January and continued throughout the year completing 10+ books. That was a big one because I hadn’t finished a book since I was in high school and this year, read more books than I did my entire life. I’m proud of that goal and I’m proud to have had more vegetables this year. I did continue the gym routines but not at a pace that kept up with the amount of fatty meat, dairy or beer I was drinking.

So, in 2013, I’ll be doing my best to maintain a vegetarian and fish diet alongside the pork I have in my freezer from my slaughter in the fall and drinking more water. I’d love to lose a little more weight this year but, my increasingly rising hobby of brewing, buying, collecting and tasting beer heavily contradicts with my goals of maintaining a size 34 waistline. This is something I continue to grapple with but I think the detox free of alcohol, caffeine and increased vegetable intake will help me.

The key thing about this detox is my cravings, palate, alcohol tolerance and overall approach to each day is set straight with this 30 day break. So, I’m stoked to try a reset again. It really makes a huge difference in how I take on the new year.

The 2013 detox will be a fun one. If any of my followers are interested in taking up any of these goals, let me know!

Here’s to a new year and a new adventure. Thanks for reading and for following. \

I took some time last night to read over things I wrote in the move from San Francisco to New Hampshire in 2010. I also read a few things written in 2008 as I went to San Francisco from Florida. I hate moving. No one loves it but I grew up in a family that moved to a new house almost every year. We’d fill up a gigantic U-Haul truck and go some place new. Sometimes, it was a house just down the street and other times, it would be across state lines. Moving as an adult is different than where a child just puts all of their toys in a few boxes and grabs their toothbrush. Adult moving is serious business simply dealing with changing your address with a multitude of corporations and the IRS and transferring utilities and more. Moving in the winter was never a big deal as I’m from the south. I didn’t consider this when deciding to move this time as you tell almost everyone know you’re moving and they respond with, “it’s the dead of winter.” Oops. Reading my impressions with New Hampshire and the cabin I currently reside as voiced by a younger me 2 years ago is fun. A lot of the allure and excitement about this terrific part of America remains.

Why am I moving to a different place? Where am I moving? What in the heck is going on?

======

There are a few driving issues for wanting to find a new place. The first is privacy. I’ve enjoyed the small community that is my cabin. 4 guys live below me on the 1st floor of the cabin and the stairway is closed off. There’s a family living in the other side of the cabin where the wash room is. There were 2 more groups living in an off-set converted barn but that place burned down over a year ago. It was a nice community. We had parties, cookouts and I had people who could watch my house, feed my chickens and just keep an eye on things. It was nice and I still enjoy their company but, I can see, hear and smell everything that is going on. I like target practice with my gun in the back yard but not while I’m eating dinner do I want to hear someone else doing it. Stereos, TVs and parties can go late while I’m trying to get some sleep and I feel like I can never really be alone. That’s a big one. The second is the overall situation where I currently live hasn’t been ideal. I’m allowed to have farm animals granted I keep their areas clean and the yard doesn’t smell and that’s really nice but the rent keeps going up and I don’t feel like the owner cares too much that I’ve been here for over two years paying rent every month. Things I need fixed are ignored and it’s not a good situation to be put in especially if rent continues to rise. Overall, I’m looking for a standalone house where I can have more responsibility to pay things myself with a landlord who is present, reliable and does things by the book and expects me to be the same way. I pay on time so you should be there when I need help with an issue.

I currently reside in Canaan, NH. It is a nice place if you want to be left alone. What I mean is, most of my fellow residents are basic. They have houses, work blue collar jobs, pay their bills, have families but there isn’t really a community. Most of the people I meet here were born here and have no plans on traveling or moving away. It’s a nice place to settle down but I have a problem relating to anyone that I meet in this area. You usually make friends while hunting and drinking Budweiser and listening to rock music and going “mudding” and I don’t do any of those things. The place I’m moving to is in Lyme, NH which is in the opposite direction of my work from where I live now. The new place is an hour from my cabin but the same 30 minute drive from my work. It’s closer to Vermont and home to more people who teach or work at Dartmouth college. You wouldn’t believe the difference that makes. It’s sort of like the comparison people make between Oakland and Berkeley. Both town are in the east bay but they are worlds apart in culture, style and activities. Lyme is to Hanover (Home of Dartmouth) like Berkeley is to San Francisco. IT’s smaller, less concentrated but has similar things going on.

If you want, City-Data has a nice page for each town. Lyme, NH & Canaan, NH.  What is most telling is that Lyme’s average income is 25,000 USD more, the average home price is 200K more and the college educated population is twice that of Canaan. The average age is also higher but, it’s New Hampshire and it seems like everyone is over 40 and that’s just how it goes.

======

The new house is a downgrade in many ways but it’s a move that is in line with my renewed goals.

When I came to New Hampshire, I thought that I wouldn’t be here very long. That isn’t a low blow at my job or the state but I thought soon I’d be moving to Europe to work closer to my team there or they’d move me to Boston to be more centralized in that office. I wasn’t sure why they asked me to move here so I thought, $1400 a month is steep but it’s a cabin with 3 bedrooms, 5 acres on a river with no shortage of what I can’t do with the place. I was certain I wouldn’t be able to live the outdoors life for too long before getting pulled back into a metropolitan area so I went for something that would allow me to explore my farming roots. The past 30 months have been some of the happiest in my life.

It’s now clear that I’ll be in New Hampshire for quite some time and it’s time to renew my goal of eventually buying a home. This means saving money, reducing hobbies and living more within my means. I don’t have any credit card debt but the cabin I was in plus all of the farm related hobbies I had cost quite a bit of money and I’d like to do those eventually but I need to be patient and do it once I have a bit of land to work with and a home that I actually own. The new house is more quaint. The yard is half an acre with no capacity for a garden or chickens. There’s no river access and there’s only a master bedroom with a small guest bedroom that I’ll use as an office. The kitchen doesn’t allow butchering of an entire hog. It’s modern but not spacious. The grocery store is closer to having a pantry stocked full of food is no longer a requirement and I’ll be a short drive from Hanover so I’ll be more engaged in community activities and less sitting around out in the woods all weekend firing off guns and having bonfires. It’s a different take on things in many ways both the location and the home layout.

======

Beyond the fluff of why I needed to move to a new place, there’s another aspect to this move that is more special. Elizabeth, who moved here in late 2008 from Washington DC / Asheville, NC is moving in with me. My cabin now is almost an hour from her work. That combined with the privacy concerns I’ve listed never made her feel welcome here. I knew that if I found a new place, it would have to be dog-friendly, more modern and closer to her work. Even though I visited most of the rentals by myself, it was important to find a place that she would like.

Elizabeth and I met online in early October of 2010 while I was in Amsterdam for work. We started dating in November and just celebrated our 2 year anniversary. We’re not moving in together because that’s just what you do. I think that we’re doing it for many reasons. Some are just “it makes sense” and others are “we love spending time together”

A later realization of mine after going through the discussion on moving in was that I’m going to save $600 a month living with her over what I pay now in a new house that actually costs more than I’m paying now. That is another great aspect and one that will help me save money. This is the tangible figure. Other things like 1 cable tv bill, shared food and carpooling are all fantastic incentives for us beyond the initial reasons for moving in together. She just turned 27 and I’m 26 and both of us have had some very mature and great discussions on this move and what it means for both of us. Only time will tell for what other things are in store for us.

The only negative which really isn’t is that I can no longer do AirBNB. Sure, I could rent by the night, a second bedroom but the $100 a night entire rental of my house deal is going away. It’s sad but also fine because I’m saving equivalent to what I made at AirBNB before without all of the hassle and stress. In addition, the smaller place means no farming expenses so that should be great as well.

======

What’s next? Well, everything is signed and paid up at the new house. I have some hired help for the heavy lifting since I don’t have any male friends in New Hampshire. My last AirBNB guest leaves before Christmas and then I’ll begin packing and preparing for a New Years Eve move. The reason I’m not going home for Christmas this year is because of the move but, the free time off from work and quiet timing will be nice. Plus, I’m starting the new year in a new house and I get that nice tax write-off line item that I moved in 2012

So, that’s the full details on the move. Sorry for the long post but I tried to cover everything here and give as much info as possible for friends, family and followers who have read my blog for a long time. Thanks for reading and the warm congratulations not the move!

Sorry for the lack of photos. I promise to have some around the time of the move which takes place the last week of December.

While in Portland, I finally picked up some various salt types. I grew up not using salt on anything and then I discovered “Iodized Salt” that you can get cheap everywhere and then just this past year, I began using Morton’s Kosher Salt. I did start looking into Himalayan Sea Salt and Volcanic Salts and how they can be used to enhance foods in a different way. Well, most of the salt blocks or crystals that you buy online are expensive so, I found this place that has two locations in New Hampshire where they sell salts for $5-$20 a container for a few ounces but you can mix & match types for $50 in a 6-piece set.

I used the Italian Black Truffle Salt and Himalayan Sea Salt on a few dishes. The Salmon I grilled on Friday got the Black Lava Salt from Hawaii. It is very interesting how each of these salts can change the flavor of dishes. I’ll be doing more experimenting with these over time as an addition to my cooking lineup at home and for dinner parties. 

http://www.portsmouthsaltcellar.com

I took a 13 mile hike yesterday. It was about 33 degrees F and a few flurries of snow fell but nothing stuck to the ground. I spent 4 hours out in the woods and had a great time. i’m sore today but it was a nice time of silence among nature. I took a few photos. 

Every year, like clockwork, the daylight hours shrink and temperature drops. It’s a longstanding rule that the only time each year that farmers are allowed to take a break and sleep in is in the dead of winter. It’s time to eat the food that was raised, slaughtered and harvested, drink distilled spirits and spend time with friends and family. In some cases, farmers went to work in the cities and worked until it was time to prepare the land for another 6 months of growing. 

It’s no surprise that I find myself wondering what to do with all of this spare time. Work is consistently busy. I don’t get Summer months off and my earned time off is pretty standard. I work a minimum of 40 hours a week so that is a constant. However, from February through October, I spend a lot of time outside. This year, with more chickens, the addition of pigs and a larger garden, I was very busy. Add in my new hobby of brewing beer and it was a hands-on summer. Now that the weather is cold, I’m inside more and maybe it’s time to rest.

It’s not as if there is a shortage of things to do. There is holiday travel and time with loved ones. I’m also brewing batches of beer inside and brewing more batches that are intended for long term aging. I still want to take up roasting coffee and, of course improving my cooking and food preparation skills. 

There’s a lot to do so it’s not as if iI’ll just be staring at snow from my couch. 

It gets cold up here. It can be 30 degrees below 0. It can be windy and a lot of snow can fall. Winter is beautiful but I miss the daily chores. Maybe the return of the SF Giants spring training in Late February will add a bit more action to my schedule. For now, maybe I should open up a few more books and get some “winter reading” done.

One thing I’ll do in January is prepare my 2013 farming duties. I have some bigger plans than I did in 2012. I’ll share those once more research has been done. 

Thanks for reading!

Oh and in other news, the Winter beard is coming in bigger than ever. Each year, my beard comes back bigger and strong when the temperature drops. I took a photo to share.