originalcynk

Every time I bike over the Golden Gate Bridge, my heart goes out to all the poor tourists struggling to avoid getting hit or frozen. It seems that Bay Area visitors are left out in the wild when it comes to pre-conceptions of the city versus reality. Here’s a quick list of cautions any guest of San Francisco should keep in mind:

• It’s freezing here. Perhaps you’re visiting during the 5 or so days a year when the thermostat actually cracks 75 degrees. Chances are, you’re not, and instead, you’ll be afflicted with freezing windy fog and/or chilly nights. The temperature can easily drop 30 degrees around dusk. Therefore, come dressed for cold weather- windbreakers, jeans, and closed toe shoes. You’ll save the $24.99 it takes to buy a cheesy SF fleece in Chinatown, as well as much misery and mockery.
• Summers suck. At least, in San Francisco. The fog pretty much stays put for the months of June, July, and August. The best months to visit are May and September. Granted, the surrounding areas are much warmer and sunnier, but they’ll also be overrun by other tourists.
• When biking, stay on the right! I can’t believe how many tourists biking over the bridge meander all over the lane. You may get hit by an overzealous biker training for a race, and at 25 mph, that hurts. And you’ll get yelled at. In fact, you’ll get yelled at anyway. Just please stay to the right, for your safety and everyone else’s (and this includes the people hopping off their bikes in the middle of the lane for photos).
• Curb your wheels. If you’re parking in San Francisco, be sure to curb your wheels, which means turning the wheel so that if the brakes give way, the car won’t roll into traffic. There are few signs for this, but there will be expensive tickets. Also, the meter maids are extremely dilligent here. You will not get away with a 10 minute overtime in a 2-hour zone.
• Get out of Fisherman’s Wharf. It’s such a shame that tourists are stuck in the unclassiest part of the city. Branch out! In fact, buy this book, Stairway Walks of San Francisco, and get to know the neighborhoods intimately. The Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill, and Nob Hill walks are close by and particularly lovely.
• Avoid eating at chains. San Francisco has phenomenal food and wine, and the chains do a disservice to the fresh produce, meat, and dairy that’s raised around here. Check out the tiny cafes or ethnic restaurants that are off the beaten path, and avoid the tourist traps such as Ghirardelli Square, Columbus Ave, and Union Square. The only exception is In-N-Out. Everyone will understand why you love this fast foodery- and be sure to ask about the secret menu!
• Yelp and NextMuni rule. There are two sites which justify having a data plan on your cell phone while you’re here- Yelp and NextMuni. Yelp is the best source- albeit a tad controversial- for community reviews on any business here, from restaurants to dentists to hotels. Their ratings tend to be quite accurate, to the chagrin of the less popular establishments. NextMuni will tell you when the next highly-unpredictable bus will arrive. Because the taxis here suck. You will very rarely get one when you need it, and if you do, there’s a good chance the driver doesn’t know where he’s going anyway.
• There is no nightlife. Everyone goes to sleep early here. I attribute it to the gorgeous sunrises and so much to do during the day. So don’t expect much of a night scene, especially on weekends. If there are people out and about, it tends to be bridge-tunnel-and-peninsula people who are more raucous and out-of-control than the natives.

San Francisco is truly a lovely city, so please don’t let incorrect assumptions color your expectations. Take it for what it is- a gorgeous friendly place with a ton of hills and a well-positioned Patagonia store right next to Fisherman’s Wharf (after all, they have much better fleeces than those in Chinatown).

Inspired by an article in the SF Chronicle, I cajoled some friends into trying out a “wine club.” It wasn’t too hard- I promised copious amounts of good wine and good company. The ensuing event went way beyond all our expectations. Not only was the wine club a blast for all who came, it also became our favorite way to learn about wine, such as which varietals each preferred to the subtleties within each varietal. Here’s the deets on how we set it up if you’d like to try it out yourself:

The setup:

1. Select a varietal and a price limit for your wine club session (for example, chardonnays that are less than $30).
2. Invite up to 12 guests.
3. Have each guest bring (1) 1 bottle of wine within the price range, (2) 1 plate of wine-paired food for 12, and (3) $10.
4. Have on hand 24 paper bags for wine bottles, tape, a marker, and a spittoon.
5. An extra you can also have on hand is a “control” bottle, i.e. the cheapest bottle of the varietal at Trader Joe’s, such as Two Buck Chuck.

The party:

1. When a guest arrives, have them put their bottle of wine in a bag and remove all foil. Plus, put everyone’s $10’s in a pot.
2. Tape each bag so the neck shows, mark each bag with a unique number, then pop the corks.
3. Round 1: Drink! Eat! Be merry! Have everyone taste each bottle (small pours- so everyone can taste at least twice), and score which is their top 3. The spittoon will come in handy to make sure everyone can get through all the tastes.
4. Have each person grab a bottle and stick it under the table. Shuffle bottles around, then have everyone stick a bottle into a new bag. Bring the newly bagged bottles above the table, tape, and mark each bag with a unique letter.
5. Round 2: Drink more! Eat more! Be more merry! Have everyone taste each bottle again and score which is their top 3.
6. The Unveiling! Once everyone’s done tasting and is thoroughly trashed off their rocker, rip the bags off each bottle and figure out which letter and number corresponded to what wine.
7. Tot up the scores, giving 3 points for each #1 rating, 2 points for #2, and 1 for #3. The top scoring wine’s owner gets the pot!

Other things you can do during the tastings is guess which wine in the first round was what wine in the second round, which bottle was the “control,” and the price actually paid for each bottle. Also, afterwards, try comparing the professional wine ratings, such as Wine Spectator’s or Robert Parker’s, with your own. For my wine clubs, rarely has the most expensive or highest professionally-rated bottle of wine won- more often than not, the Two Buck Chuck reigns supreme, such as this photo testifies from our Sauvignon Blanc session, with the wines ordered left to right by score.

However you set up your own wine club, I’m sure you and your friends will have a jolly ol’ time. Cheers!

Perhaps you’ve seen MBTs around- weird clunky sneakers with awkwardly rounded bottoms and huge price tags. They claim to help tone legs and butts, reduce cellulite, and lose weight. So of course you wonder: do they work?

In short, yes. But not necessarily the way they want you to think.

I got a pair out of desperation. My lower back was killing me, and I had heard through a pilates friend that her pair had helped her maintain her core muscles and posture. Strong core muscles are the therapeutic prescription for back pain since they help support the spine. I was getting a bit lazy on my core exercises, so I hoped the MBTs may help me maintain the muscles with less effort.

Unfortunately, MBTs are rather ugly, plus they run small, so it took a couple weeks through Zappos and local San Francisco shops, such as Nomadic Outfitters, to find a tolerable pair. Once I did, I started wearing them all the time, just to see if they really worked, despite their suggestions to “ease” into them.

Happily, I noticed a bit of soreness at first in my lower abs and gluts. “W00t! They’re working,” I thought, and I started walking around more on purpose. Then, a lot more. For example, one day I walked from the SFGiants ballpark (whatever it is called now) all through Union Square, Japantown, then the Marina, running errands along the way. When I got home, I was tired, but much more to my amazement, nothing hurt! I’m used to having my feet, then lower back, then knees start to ache if I walk too much in regular shoes or sneakers (generally takes an hour or two- less on hard surfaces such as a marble floor in a mall). In MBTs, I found that for whatever reason, I was able to walk for much longer. And what do you know- now that I’m walking for longer periods of time, my legs and butt are toning up and I’m losing some weight.

The MBTs have a rounded bottom that force you to be more aware, partly subconsciously, of your posture and walking efficiently. You can’t exactly slump around in the shoes since you’d fall off your rocker, literally. It’s easier to stand upright in the shoes than to slouch due to the instability, and this helps build your posture and core, plus any collateral musculature such as around your knees and ankles. One note of caution: they suggest that you take shorter steps and avoid locking your knees to make sure you don’t jam any joints.

So would I recommend these shoes? I do, with some caveats. If you’re already running 10 miles a day, you may not find walking an extra mile that helpful. If you don’t have many chances to walk or stand, then wearing expensive shoes as you sit won’t do that much. However, if you’re on your feet a lot or are looking to walk around more in comfort, these will help you out, especially if you have a weak core or poor posture.

One of my close friends, Clara Shih, recently published a must-read book titled THE FACEBOOK ERA, which prescribes how businesses can capitalize on social media. I couldn’t be more proud of her. She’s currently traveling around the world on a book tour- if you get a chance to see her, be sure to say hi!

Preview Excerpt: THE FACEBOOK ERA, by Clara Shih

At the behest of an old friend, I forced myself to allocate a 1 week vacation out of my job search. Destination: Buenos Aires, Argentina. I stayed at his home in the San Isidro suburbs, a quick trundle down the regional rail from the city center. Since it was a vacation, I spent a good amount of time relaxing by the backyard pool, but I also managed to explore a bit too. My favorite neighborhood was Palermo, which is the tree-lined Greenwich Village meets Noe Valley part of Buenos Aires. There are adorable cafes, shops, and restaurants all around, with the heart of my favorite part, Palermo Soho, on El Salvador (near Armenia). I also walked quite a bit around Recoleta, which is more Miami-esque, with tall and beautifully restrained apartment buildings.

For such a modern city, I was astonished with how undiverse it was in terms of race- I starkly stood out as a tourist, which kept me from carrying around my digital SLR too much due to worries about getting mugged. It didn’t help that I had a hard time picking up the accent in the dialect of Spanish around the city, so be forewarned that this is not your high school Spanish class. Also, people in Buenos Aires love their dogs, which means you should keep an eye out for dog poop on the rather uneven sidewalks.

Shopping

Around the Palermo Neighborhood

The wonderful part of shopping in Buenos Aires is that the exchange rate is wickedly awesome. At first glance, the prices appear to be the same as those in the US, such as that beautiful dress that could go for $300 in the US asking for 300 pesos. But, then you realize that there’s 3.4 Argentinian pesos to every dollar. Jackpot! This was not a good discovery for a shopaholic like me to realize. Here were my favorites, all in the neighborhood of Palermo:

• Cora Groppo - a women’s clothing shop, with distinctive architectural pieces, the sort where seams, folds, and piping shape cloth into fascinating structures.
• Doma - gorgeous leather shop, with beautifully retro leather coats and bags. They seem to specialize in waxed or finished leather, so there’s a slight patina that gives their pieces a more urban air. I went bonkers here. Ask me about my new brown leather hooded trench.
• Humawaca - another beautiful leather shop, this one specializing in wallets and bags. There’s an architectural component to their designs, with lots of boxy leather swatches put together with sleek lines. I picked up their billeta, which zips apart into smaller wallets as the need arises. If it’s ever stolen, it’d be a hard call between whether the thieves wanted the credit cards and cash or the wallet itself.
• Maria Cher - a local Argentinian designer, who makes voluminous yet austere work clothes, such as shirts that billow around or architected pencil skirts, and really only look good on the local anorexics.
• Rapsodia - A women’s clothing shop with a free-spirited hippie vibe like Anthropologie or Free People, but better made and more distinctive.

Restaurants

A Table at La Dorita

For eating, I went to many more neighborhoods as my host tried to indoctrinate me to the meat, cheese, and postres culture. I tried to hold my own, I really did, but I weakened by the end and started ordering more salad than steak. The food was very good, but I found that the best of San Francisco was comparable with what I found in Buenos Aires. However, I believe most food in Argentina is better than most food in the US, so it’s hard to go wrong. Here’s my favorite restaurants:

• Cabrera - I never actually made it here, but it’s the famous (or infamous) steak house where you get a steak the size of a banana bread loaf. Per person.
• Las Cholas - this boistrous restaurant is located in the Las Cañitas neighborhood, with their premiere dish being “Gran Bife Las Cholas”, a huge monstrosity including a large piece of steak, with mashed squash, french fries, and grilled vegetables. My host actually managed to eat his entire plate. I went with the more mundane Bife de Lomo, a tenderloin of sorts, with a garden salad.
• Croque Madame - a super cute French-inspired cafe, with an indoors and outdoors. It’s in the patio of the Museo de Arte Decorativo in the fringe between the Palermo and Recoleta neighborhoods.
• La Dorita - a delicious Argentinian Parrilla, or grill, in Palermo. It’s so popular, they spread across the intersection. Both are the same, although if you’re outside, you’ll probably end up downwind from some cigarettes.
• Havanna - the famous “alphahores” (aka “alpha-whores”) are an Argentinian treat: crispy cookies sandwiched around buttery dulce de leche, coated with sugar or chocolate. Havanna shops are sprinkled around like Peet’s Coffee, and you can also buy a few boxes for gifts in the airport duty free.
• Krishna- among all the steak and cheese, there’s also wonderful vegetarian restaurants around Buenos Aires, such as Krishna in Palermo. I got their veggie platter which included fresh carrot salad and brown rice, a welcome respite from the typical heavier menu items.
• Weinert - not a restaurant but actually a delicious Malbec to keep an eye out for.

Activities

Argentina v. France

There’s lots to do other than just shop in Palermo or eat steak. Here’s a few activities to check out:

• The best tours are given by Eternautas, and their “Images of Buenos Aires” is a great tour to start off with. One warning- there’s only 3 stops on the tour, with the rest being drive-bys, so there’s not many opportunities to take pictures.
• My friend took me to a tango show at El Viejo Almacen, which means the old inn. It’s a cute small place, with an enthusiastic cast of performers. Tango shows are much more than just dance- they also include musicians and singers. If your Spanish is as shaky as mine (especially in a country with such a distinctive accent), be prepared to be the only one in the audience not singing along to the famous tango songs crooned by the crowd-pleasing singers.
• I didn’t get to try it out, but if you’d like to learn tango, the top school is apparently La Viruta, which has evening classes at the end of the week.
• The MALBA museum houses some beautiful selections of modern South American art. Sadly, no photos are allowed, and their postcard selection is woefully bereft, but I still vividly remember two paintings: an impressionist portrait of a girl wearing a red scarf on her head, and a white painting of a nude implied on linen canvas.
• If you don’t get to an actual soccer game, you can always catch one at a cafe, such as a chain called Plaza del Carmen, such as its location at the corner of Scalabrini Ortiz and Santa Fe. You can stake out a table, order a cafe and some postres, and cheer or groan along with the crowd as the many televisions broadcast the action.

Overall, Buenos Aires was very beautiful, and I can’t wait to go back. I was lucky that I had a fabulous host with kind friends who helped take me around, but it’s also a very walkable city, and one of my favorite things to do was just wandering around the neighborhoods. Next trip there, I’m definitely budgeting time to visit the wine country of Mendoza, the Iguazu Falls, Patagonia, and Uruguay (for the beaches). Who wants to go?

It’s not that I dislike movies so much as I feel that they offer a lousy value proposition. For $10 and 2 hours, would I really get as much out of the experience as I could other forms of entertainment, such as reading a book, having dinner with a friend, or watching a favorite television series? The problem I have with movies is that you have to commit an awful lot upfront before truly knowing (reviews notwithstanding) whether it’s worth the cost- 1 hour could be wasted before you realize you don’t like the movie and would have rather spent the time on two episodes of West Wing. On top of that, you’re probably engaged enough that- much to your irritation- you might as well see the ending. It’s hard enough for me to find a free 2 hour slot in my day; I want to make sure that what I do in that time is well worth it, and movies have had a low enough success rate for me that it hasn’t been worth the effort when compared to things I know I’d enjoy more (and that I can partition into more manageable time portions).

In this age of things getting ever faster and hectic, is it no surprise that the traditional movie industry is losing traction? Do people have the time to watch movies as much as they did 10 or 20 years ago? It can be nice to kick back and lose yourself in a potentially enjoyable cinematic experience once in a while, but more often than not, I’d rather curl up on a couch with my needlepoint, and root for President Bartlet in 45 minute easily-paused segments.

Earthquakes will happen, and there will be another big one soon, where buildings will collapse and people will be hurt and killed. At a nearly perverse level, I’ve been preparing for awhile. Perhaps this is because I grew up in a suburb (surrounded by paranoid parents frantically worrying about all the disasters that can befall their kids), or perhaps it’s because I have a weird affinity towards brainstorming edge cases (and sadly, this isn’t constrained to my shrinking world of coding), or perhaps it’s because the most brilliant quote I’ve heard from a minister is “Preparation is an assault on Murphy’s Law” (and I swear, Murphy has a personal vendetta against me), or perhaps it’s because I’ve been coached by my family, who’ve been here in San Francisco for generations, on various preparation must-do’s.

Whatever it may be, it scares me how unprepared my friends are. Oui, I mean you. When the next big earthquake occurs, the following will happen to someone:

• the building you’re in- home, office, friend’s place, random shop- will collapse.
• even if it doesn’t collapse, everything inside will topple over, trapping people and blocking exits.
• there will be fires.
• there will not be enough rescue crews so no one will come immediately.
• you’ll have to survive on your own without electricity, water, food, shelter, or any clothing or shoes beyond what you’re wearing. It will get very dark.
• you’ll have no way of contacting others or hearing news.

Not pretty, eh? Fortunately, there are a ton of resources out there on preparing for this sort of thing, including the must-see 72hours.org site, put together by the city of San Francisco (which includes a convenient pdf version too). You really must do everything listed here. And you have to start somewhere. So here are what I consider the top 10 must-do-right-now tips for my wonderful albeit precariously unprotected friends:

1. Put together a “Go Bag”, aka a disaster pack, and leave it somewhere easily accessible. A Go Bag is a pack of critical items that you can grab and take with you as you run outside after the earthquake stops. 72hours has a checklist of what should be in it, including food/water/first-aid/backup-glasses, cash, warm clothes, boots, flashlight, and extra keys. I’d also add a charged backup phone (especially for iPhone users- you can reuse the SIM, although the data plan won’t work. And a paperclip to extract the SIM), as well as an umbrella.
2. Store disaster supplies in your car. If your house is badly damaged or you’re driving somewhere and get trapped, your car will become your home. Store another Go Bag (or at least the supplies in it) there. This is part of the reason I have an SUV- I can live in it and drive on anything if need be. These items should already be in the car of anyone driving in snow country. Also, try to park in places where your car will be accessible if buildings start falling (yep, that usually means the street). Bonus tip: I store my camping supplies- such as sleeping bags, tents, and stoves- in easily accessible tubs near my garage entrance, just in case I can grab those quickly too.
3. Keep your car gassed. During the NYC blackouts, most driving stalled since the gas stations- now mostly run on electricity- couldn’t pump gas. If you need to flee fast, including in the case of a terrorist attack, have enough gas in your car to get somewhere far, hopefully including a working gas station that isn’t emptied out.
4. Send family and close friends key information. The worst thing you can do to people who love you in the case of an emergency is to not give them the means to communicate or help. Say you get badly hurt and your friend took you to the hospital. They start asking your friend about your insurance information, medical history, reaching the parents (since friends aren’t allowed in the OR or told confidential medical info, such as the diagnosis). What can your friend do? Recently, I had to go through this (fortunately (!) my friend is okay), and it was scary as sh*t. If we didn’t happen across her phone (fortunately (!) unlocked), and figure out how to call her dad (to then call the doctor), we wouldn’t have been told what was wrong with her, why she was in the ICU, and she could have died without her family even knowing something was wrong.
5. Have a non-California SMS contact where you can say “I’m okay and am at…”. In an emergency, the cell-towers will become overloaded. SMS messages have more luck getting through than phone calls. Presume you can only get one through the craziness- make sure it goes to the most critical person who can then tell everyone else what’s going on, and arrange to get you help.
6. Sign-up for emergency alerts. San Francisco put together an amazing free service called AlertSF which will send you txt messages of emergencies and what to do. If you don’t have a TV, radio, internet connection, or a working phone line, this could become your only source of information of “what’s happening”, nearby shelters, and areas to avoid.
7. Store key documents in a deposit box and in a fireproof safe. If your house collapses, catches fire, and burns to the ground, that is not the time to think, “D’oh! I forgot my wallet!”. Especially during disasters, you’re going to need cash and credit cards, id, and medical information. Afterwards, you’re going to want to prove you had insurance and what you lost. Put all those documents somewhere safe from fires and water (putting documents inside ziploc bags in that fireproof safe will guard them from the water used to put out the fire).
8. Secure all heavy and precarious items at home and work. That bookcase is going to fall over, that mirror is going to crash and break everywhere, that poster will fall off the wall and shatter, and that TV will fall over and explode. Look around you, especially your bed and desk, and make sure there’s nothing that can fall on you. Also, minimize unsecured glass items to reduce tiny shards everywhere (yeah, that vacuum won’t work right then. Accept it and move on). This includes using putty on the base of figurines or vases, reducing how much glass you hang on the walls, and putting latches on kitchen cabinets.
9. Know how to act during an earthquake, especially how you should crouch under a desk away from windows or mirrors, and do not run outside until the shaking has stopped. Since so many people in California grew up in other states, many are unfamiliar with basic earthquake drills and could instinctively do the worst thing, such as run through spots where things from the roof will drop on your head. Once again, 72hours has a list of what you should do.
10. Know your area: fire stations, hospitals, police stations, routes that don’t use bridges, the seismically unsafe areas. In the silence after a disaster, you’re going to want to go to where you can get help and information. Know where your local emergency services are. Also, know where not to go, such as routes that rely on bridges (I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not go on one after it’s been shaken like a polaroid picture) or seismic liquifaction zones (look ma! quicksand!). Here’s a USGS map that shows what areas of San Francisco are the most prone to liquifaction and will also probably be the most prone to collapsed buildings, fires, and exhausted emergency crews.

Apologies for the Chicken Little tone here, but I can’t emphasize enough how dangerous things will get when the next Big One hits. Doing just a bit of preparation now will not only make things much easier when you most need it, but it will also increase your chances of survival. Please please please prepare! (And don’t make me drive over hell and high water in my SUV to rescue you. ;-D )

As is inevitable with the change of the year, there’s the urge to review the year gone past and to predict the year to come. As a product manager in the now-defunct Yahoo! Brickhouse, I was lucky enough to be tasked with watching for industry trends; a few stood out. Here are my observations of notable developments from 2008, and what I’ll be watching for in 2009:

Mobile

Finally, after years of buggy handsets and tyrannical carriers that made the US mobile offerings among the weakest in the world, the Apple iPhone and the Google Android OS are boosting the US mobile street cred. Granted, there’s still alot of catchup needed in basics such as MMS, GPS integration, transaction support, and network coverage. However, what I find exciting is the open platforms that make it easy for 3rd parties to build and distribute mobile applications- from simple mobile web sites (such as Twitter’s WAP site and NextMuni) to rich client apps (such as Shazam). This development throws open a world that used to be extremely silo’d, non-standardized, and subject to the whims of close-minded execs. I hope more silly “rules” of mobile will continue to fall, such as the separation of email/txt/im/voicemail, background processes being incompatible with privacy (particularly for location-based services), and financial transaction roadblocks. Which brings me to:

Transactions and Fraud

At some point, we will be able to use our phones like credit cards, but interestingly enough (although not out of character), I believe the impetus will come from abroad as opposed to within the US. We all know about the famous Japanese vending machines that transact with cell phones instead of cash or credit cards. Beyond this, though, are developments from groups such as United Villages which enable rural communities in India to transact with mobile phones instead of having to walk miles to a bank or somehow find a working computer (let alone electricity and a network connection). Startups like Mobillcash are breaking down boundaries with carriers to let people transact with cell numbers (and approve via SMS), and students are even building as their term project apps to track who-owes-who.

Of course, with increased financial transactions come more opportunities for fraud. I’m surprised there haven’t been more anti-fraud developments, but I expect this to change as the financial crisis simmers down and people begin looking into loans and credit scores again. When this does happen, I hope there will be push-back by people having to pay to access their own credit reports more than once a year or to activate credit monitoring services. It should be easy enough for sites such as Mint to make purchase monitoring a more upfront feature. In fact, I’d pay for them to regularly check my credit score instead of some bloated afterthought of a service through the credit agencies.

Pulses

Over the last year, I’ve become a full-fledged Twitter addict. It started at SXSW as a way to find out where the hot talks and parties were. It turned into a way to get a pulse of what my friends were up to, as well as share what I’ve been doing. Now, I use it to also read headlines and get a pulse of the world, following such tweets as the WSJ and GigaOm. In fact, I rarely use RSS readers anymore, instead opting to read the quick headline tweets- interspersed with my friends’ observations and commentary- and clicking through on the most compelling stories.

With the internet teaming with so much information, parsing it quickly is becoming ever more desirable. Search helped filter out the most relevant parts. Next will be tools to help consume more information faster, such as quick pulses and social network prioritized news alerts. Twitter is my favorite way to easily gauge a pulse of what’s going on now in my community, industry, and the world. Could Facebook or FriendFeed provide this sort of pulse? I think it’d take a significant revamp of their strategy, simplifying the UI drastically to bring in non-social-network news easily. Google or Yahoo could be better positioned to execute on this since it’d explicitly utilize yet go beyond the social networks.

Content

First, I am very impressed with the Amazon .mp3 store and its integration to iTunes. I may discover some songs through the iTunes store, but I rarely buy through there because of the DRM. After all, what will happen after I upgrade my computer 3 more times? It’s legitimate use, yet I am treated as a thief. Second, I am likewise very impressed with Hulu and Netflix streaming. They successfully remove time from the equation that limits video consumption, and do so in a way that makes money. I’m even more impressed when thinking about the negotiations and contracts those companies pulled off to make it possible.

Ian Rogers, the CEO of Topspin, got a lot of press coverage with his keynote speech where he stated he doesn’t care about the death of CDs. Musicians are finding audiences and support through other means now, reducing the need to rely on the predatory large music labels. I see what happened to music extending to video and interactive video (a.k.a. games). All modes of content consumption that relied on DRM to maintain antiquated methods are finally losing ground. Just as Creative Commons is spreading to fields beyond art, the internet “threat” is finally becoming less a doomsday but more an opportunity for market-changing innovation across every copyright-centered industry.

A Toast

Beyond all the developments that made 2008 one of the more memorable- Obama, Olympics, financial crisis, etc- there are also many promising signs in the tech industry. I’m so tempted to go crazy poetic right now (”smashing barriers”, “opening walled gardens”, “bureaucracy be damned!”), but instead I’m going to leave it at this: keep breaking the rules, yo.

After much procrastination, I am finally updating this blog and pledging to continue contributing at a rate faster than once every six months. There’s alot of back-end to fixup, so I’ll be messing around with that, and once that’s done… oh who am I kidding. When is it ever done?

In my quest for healthy yet filling and cheap yet delicious snacks, I have happened upon The One: the roasted sweet potato. I just slow roasted one in the office’s toaster oven (bogarting it for an hour and a half, but who toasts after noon?), and I am now contentedly stuffed with nutrients simmering happily in me belly. For less than a dollar. And less than 160 calories.

So to all of you fellow chronic hungrys out there, here is my list of wholesome snacks that fill you up without making you feel cheap and lousy:

• the sweet potato
• the hard-boiled egg
• the non-fat european-style yogurt
• the banana
• the oat biscuit (nairn’s in particular; the fruit and berries flavor especially)
• the buckwheat tea (okay, this is a bit cheating since you’d still feel hungry afterwards, but it staves off pangs for a little bit)
• the Annie Chun’s noodle bowl (korean kimchi rocks; hot and sour blows)