Sunday Sales is pretty much in the bag, what's next?

Now that Sunday Sales (finally) is going to be a reality in Minnesota, what else can beer activism focus on in Minnesota?

For me, it comes down to 4 things:

Items that would help out small business owners such as liquor stores, breweries, brewpubs:

• Remove on/off sale distinctions - allow bars to sell bottles/cans for off-site consumption and allow liquor stores to sell growlers, charge for pints and have a "taproom" - this passed in North Carolina a few years ago and has aided in the opening of many specialty wine and beer shops because they can now focus on a craft segment and increase their margins by serving pints without having to worry as much about margins.
• Eliminate distinction between brewpubs and breweries. Today brewpubs (Town Hall, Northbound, etc) can sell growlers but cannot distribute beer. They can serve other people's product and have a liquor license. Breweries cannot serve other people's product or wine/liquor but can distribute. By eliminating this distinction, breweries could have guest taps, and even apply for a full liquor license if local conditions warrant. This would allow locations to also get into distilling (think Bent Brewstillery) and be able to serve their own product. Brewpubs would be able to distribute and would essentially become a brewery.

Additional items that would help breweries:

• Eliminate restrictions for off sale (64/32 oz "growlers" today, but see next point) based on brewery size.
• Eliminate restrictions on off sale container formats at breweries. This will allow breweries to brew more one-offs in cans/bottles/whatever they want that they don't have to send to distribution and can sell right out of the brewery.

Some version of these two would go a long way towards keeping us competitive with other states, encourage beer tourism and give small business owners viable high margin income streams to be able to compete with larger competitors.

I developed these 4 items from observing other states in my travels and seeing the impact some of these things can have on the local economy. My cynical side tells me some of these will never pass here. The distributors/unions will not be a fan of some of these as it will further reduce their (already too high) power. There will be liquor store owners that don't want to make the capital investment in a "tap room" and they will probably object. There will be restaurant owners that will object to allowing on sale in additional locations. I think they key to any of these passing is making the pie bigger for everybody. May be tough to get the distributors in on that.

Some version/variant of all of these is already in play in many states and Minnesota can be a leader in this which will continue to help expand the economic importance of our beer and spirits industries.

Getting a ride

My wife and I went to an Oktoberfest celebration on Saturday. We've been in the habit of taking a car2go to our destination when we both want to drink, and then finding an alternate way home. Having used UberBlack multiple times, but finding it a bit expensive, we're always on the lookout for other options. I'm frequently able to make the bus work, which obviously the cheapest option by far. But sometimes it's not particularly convenient.

Thankfully, the City of Minneapolis approved additional options over the summer, opening the way to lower cost services such as Lyft and UberX. The taxis are also trying there hand at a better experience locally with TruTaxi.

So, Saturday we were out in Northeast at Bauhaus Brew Labs. We took car2go over there and judging from the number of them parked outside, were not the only ones. We walked over to Indeed Brewing afterwards for one, then to the SuperAmerica on Broadway. We had to be downtown in 40 minutes. The bus was not an option due to time and distance. So I used TruTaxi for the first time to request a cab. After hanging for a minute, it said our cab driver was assigned and he'd be there in 5 minutes.

Then we waited. And waited, and waited. The app lets you see where your driver is. He was over the river in north and not moving. It also lets you call him. Frankly, after waiting for that long, I cancelled. And decided to try lyft for the first time.

Lyft is a one button experience, you click and it summons a driver. We were assigned a driver that was 5 or 6 blocks away and she was there in minutes. Was greeted in a very friendly manner and she figured out where we were going without much fuss. Was super nice to talk to and just a great overall experience.

Then I got an invoice from TruTaxi saying they had charged me a cancellation fee of $.01 cent. I almost disputed on principle but decided it wasn't even worth my time. I deleted the app immediately and probably won't be using it again. I admire them for trying but the experience was terrible.

Lyft will become a regular option in our stable of transportation options for sure.

Weight Loss Update - Down 64 lbs

When I last updated on my food choices and my lifestyle change back in April, I was several months into a ketogenic diet and had lost about 50 pounds. Here we are almost 4 months later in August and as of today I'm down almost 64 pounds. So clearly, things have slowed down, but I'm keeping to my low carb high fat diet. I stalled for a while, hovering in the 50-60lbs lost range for a few months.  But I'm back on track and I've lost 10lbs in the last two weeks. So what's been going on?

A few things contributed to my stall. My one vice in this changeover was that I never stopped drinking beer. As you may know, beer is sometimes referred to as liquid bread. It's counter to what I'm trying to do. Early in my dietary changes I could get away with occasionally having a few beers without it seriously impact my loss, but as my body mass has decreased it hasn't been as easy to get away with consuming beer. A few beers sends me into a week-long stall.  So I'm in the middle of a 30 day challenge to stop drinking all alcohol. Not that hard for me - it's a bit of a damper on my social life, but so are studying for exams and my kids.

The second factor was that I stopped tracking my food intake in mid-April. I was going on the theory that you eat until you're full and that you shouldn't have to count calories. This didn't work particularly well for me because while I could hold my calories in line with maintaining my weight, I was struggling to create a deficit which would promote weight loss, even with moderate exercise. So I'm back to tracking my foods, even if it is a mild inconvenience.

Related to the tracking was the protein creep. Some information on ketogenic diets indicates that if you let your protein intake increase enough relative to fat that it will have a gluconeogenesis effect similar to if you were eating carbs. This may have been happening to me but since I wasn't tracking foods, I didn't know for sure.

So after my family vacation in which I stayed low carb on food but ate whatever I wanted within that bound for a week and had a few beers or cocktails  every day, I decided to tighten things up. And I can already call it a success after 3 weeks.

Even the easiest form of this lifestyle where you cut carbs and don't track foods is tough for a lot of people, but the tracking adds another layer. But it helps me to stay accountable and not let my portion creep start to get out of control. And it's helping to keep my protein in check. I've actually loosened up on the carb restriction in the diet, occasionally having a few blueberries, an ear of corn, or some squash.

When I hit the sweet spot, it's not unusual to have days where I drop a pound. It evens out with other days where I don’t lose anything or even go up slightly. I weigh myself daily first thing in the morning (after I've used the facilities and before I eat or drink anything).

I'm eating 1500-2000 calories a day without any struggle of feeling hungry. I've backed off on the eggs and bacon, breakfast staples that i ate a lot of early in this dietary change and I'm drinking bulletproof coffee which I use 2 TBSP of Kerrygold unsalted butter (available locally at Whole Foods and Trader Joes, harder to find in most mainline grocery stores) and 1 TBSP of coconut oil. I put that with 10-16 oz. of coffee in a blender on high for 30 seconds and enjoy it. It tastes not unlike a latte to me and helps keep me full all morning.

Otherwise, I eat a lot of salads with a high fat low carb dressing like blue cheese or ranch. I've cut the protein dose of chicken or red meat to just one meal a day and have limited my cheese intake but still have a bit every day.

All said, I feel better than I have in years. I have more energy, I can do things with my kids without getting winded, and I'm just generally enjoying life despite a lot of stressors.

I'm really excited that I'll probably be able to keep up maintenance once I'm to goal weight without having to track long term and still be able to have a few beers here and there. Because even though I stalled for a while, I was able to maintain my weight and not have any substantial gains over the past two months. And that was with eating whatever quantity I felt like eating within the bounds of the dietary lifestyle I've chosen.

I'll do another update when I'm closer to goal weight - I do think it's going to take me another 6 months to a year to get there, but I'm confident that I can do it.

Book Update - June 2013

What a year it's been on the reading front. 21 books down as of yesterday. Not bad for a mid-year total and I'm on pace to read over 40 this year, which would be the highest total achieved since I started tracking in 2011.

The Kindle Paperwhite and ebook lending from the Hennepin County Library has played a key role in my book reading this year. I'm reading a number of old series from fiction authors and most are available in eBook format. Recently, I've gone back to some paperback and hardcover books too, because there's still nothing like reading a paper book. While I greatly enjoy the conveniences of electronic, there's still a joy for me from turning the pages and the smells and tactile responses that accompany reading paper books.

Because I'm cheap and I'm not always good about putting in reservations in at the library before the hold list hits triple digits, I've not read too many new releases this year, but that's OK, I've always been more of a back catalog spelunker anyway.

I'm caught up on John Sandford's Prey Series, having read Stolen Prey in January. His new one, Silken Prey just came out but I'll probably wait til I can get it from the library. Honestly, it's time for Lucas Davenport to hang it up. When you have a series and you're getting into the mid-20s on books, there's only so much more you can do with the characters. I still enjoy reading but they're pretty tired. At this point, we've been with Davenport for a good chunk of his life and he's managed to evolve the character through the years to keep it interesting, but I don't expect there to be many more books in this series.

On that front, I also read Sandford's Virgil Flowers series up to the most recent book. It took a book or two to warm up on me, but I'm a fan. Good entertaining, and mildly mindless page turners. I'm about half a dozen books away from polishing off the entire Sandford catalog.

I've also been making progress on James Patterson's Alex Cross series - I really enjoy Cross and his adventures - a smartly written detective series with entertaining recurring characters, both protagonist and antagonist. It's another page turner that I can get behind and I look forward to reading every time another eBook becomes available (the old books are still pretty popular).

Besides those series, I've one-offed a lot of nonfiction - recently taking in 3 non fiction travel books by Paul Theroux. I really enjoyed The Old Patagonian Express and also read The Great Railway Baazar and Dark Star Safari. The latter got a little long winded for me, but the first two train adventures were entertaining. I'll be working my way through his non-fiction for the rest of the summer, I'm guessing - it's good cabin reading.

After hearing an interview with Warren Littlefield on Bullseye with Jessie Thorn, I checked out his autobiographical Must See TV and read it in 2 days flat. It was fun to read about the behind the scenes of many shows that I watched growing up, and it really was appointment television.

I finally finished Reamde by Neal Stephenson, after about 5 false starts. Decent read, but his info dumps get really tiring, and this one was no different.

I also read a couple of Micheal Lewis books including the classic Moneyball. I enjoyed it, and I look forward to finally reading the copy of The Big Short that's been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of years.

I was sad to hear about the passing of Vince Flynn a few weeks ago. While I often didn't agree with his politics, I enjoyed him as an author and it reminded me that I have 3 or 4 books to still read of his.

I've still got many series that I'm in the middle of and more books to read than time, but that's what I love about the hobby.

On Social and RSS

A few weeks ago I wrote about Fever, a self hosted RSS reading solution with some unique features. After a couple more weeks of use, I think it's going to be my near-term solution to the Google Reader death while I wait to see what else comes along in the next few months.

When evaluating what I wanted for a future reading tool, I ultimately want to use something with good integrated social features (Fever does not really have much other than hooking into other social sites - which it does pretty well) that a critical mass of my friends and acquaintances also use. Google Reader was this for a time, but since the splinter off to Google +, it's really a subset of what it once was, and now that's going to get even more splintered.

In the near term, people seem to be moving to several services with mixed levels of social integration and slightly different features. Some are using Feedly which seemingly doesn't have much in the way of integrated social, though admittedly I have not spent a lot of time using it. Others are using The Old Reader, and a few people are using Newsblur. I have accounts on all of these services and even kicked in for a one year subscription to Newsblur because I like their mobile clients quite a bit, but I find myself hardly ever using them.

Ultimately, nothing is a complete solution right now, and Fever comes the closest for what I want to do, minus the social features. I'm starting to think we'll never achieve critical mass in the social realm on another service again, but maybe that's OK. I've just not used many of the other tools as link finding because I find them to be pretty inefficient for those purposes. Facebook has a link view, but I'd have to do some fine tuning of who shows up in there to make it worth my time, and a lot of my friends that I enjoy links from don't link there. Twitter doesn't have such a view that I'm aware of (I wish it did) and I find it hard to keep up with interesting links there sometimes. There are some third party tools but I've never found them to be of much help (probably because I don't follow enough people).

Fever's spark/kindling model is starting to work well for me and I'll write about that more in a future post.

How I've lost almost 50 pounds, and set myself up with a sustainable way of life

I talked about my weight loss journey a few months back, after I'd lost about 20 pounds. Here we are two months later and I've lost another 25 pounds and I'm closing in on 50 pounds lost, with roughly another 50-60 to go to get to my goal weight. And a lot of people have asked how I'm doing it, so I thought I would share.

All about "Keto"
Standard disclosure before I begin - I have researched this way of life extensively, and there are lots of materials emerging to support it. I admit that I was very skeptical about it when I first encountered it, but I'm another example of living proof that it works. And when you start to understand the science behind it, particularly how our body deals with sugars, it starts to make a lot of sense.

About a month into my weight loss effort, I switched to a ketogenic (aka "Keto") diet. It's also known as "Low Carb, High Fat". The Atkins diet is similar (though they've focused on "replacement" foods a little too much). Paleo (aka Primal) is a cousin diet that you may have heard of. They all focus on eating a different ratio of Carbohydrates to Fat and Protein from the "Standard American Diet".

Keto is the most carbohydrate restrictive version of this diet. Most people on a ketogenic diet limit themselves to around 20g of net carbohydrates per day. Net Carbohydrates takes the total carbs and subtracts out carbs from Fiber. So eating high carb foods that are high in fiber is ok - many leafy green vegetables and some nuts like almonds. 20g net is very low considering many people consume 300-500g or more a day of carbs.

And as far as fats go, the key is to eat healthy fats. And this is where people have to go against 30 years of what they think they know about foods. Saturated animal fats are not bad for you, it's the saturated animal fats in conjunction with a gigantic carb load that's bad for you. I eat animal proteins, and stay away from most poly-unsaturated oils like vegetable oil, canola oil and soy oils. I cook with olive oil or coconut oil, both are great alternatives to some of the other oils we've moved to. No margerine, but I do eat butter. With all of these animal products, the grass-fed beef products and butters are the healthier ones - even in the meat sphere, mass production has lead to shortcuts that have made many meats less healthy for you.

The ratio of fat/protein/carb on Keto as a percentage of calories is roughly 65/30/5, though this can vary quite a bit depending on your makeup. (an excellent calculator is located here) This is very different from what most people eat, and it's way different from what I ate before. I thought I was being healthy eating my lean cuisine frozen meals, and low-fat dressings with salads and other low-fat products but I just kept getting fatter and fatter and fatter. The true a-ha moment with this way of life that it's not the fat that was making me fat, it was the carbs.

What I eat: a typical day
My typical meals in a day looks like this: I eat eggs every morning, usually 2 eggs scrambled with 1/3 cup of cheese. I don't cook them in anything but I put salt on them. I add meat some days, and other days I don't.

That gets me through until lunch - which generally consists of whatever meat we had for dinner the night before, a huge salad made with romaine lettuce, spinach and arugula with a low carb olive oil based dressing or a good blue cheese and a couple pieces of string cheese. If I'm at home, I'll make some lettuce wraps with deli meats like roast beef and salami, and some bacon.

Dinner is a meat, usually a decent quantity - and we mix up red meats, chicken, pork and turkey. Some Keto purists stick to skin on chicken but I like my chicken breasts just fine - just need to supplement with additional fats to keep the ratios in check. We pair with a vegetable, cooked in olive oil and a salad with spinach  romaine lettuce, arugula, mixed greens or some combination low carb vegetables or a big salad.

So, to summarize, I can eat most kinds of meat, and I eat a lot of veggies - lots of lettuce and spinach, and broccoli, asparagus and other green vegetebles. I shy away from carrots, green peppers and onions, which are slightly higher in carbs, but I still eat them in moderation. And I completely avoid other root/starchy vegetables like potatoes. And I don't eat any fruit currently, though some berries can be consumed in moderation. Fruit is the thing I miss the most and likely will add back when I get closer to my goal weight.

I don't eat any starches, any grains, any legumes, any processed/refined sugars. This was the biggest dietary adjustment because some form of rice and breads were daily staples in my diet.

Water is also key, I try to drink 128oz of water daily. It's tough some days, but I keep a 32oz Nalgene bottle at my desk at work and usually drink 2-3 of them during the day, with another 32 consumed in the evening. It's much easier to get dehydrated on Keto, I've found.

Challenges
One challenge is beer. It's not great for me with what I'm trying to do - loads of carbs. I'd already cut my consumption back to a few drinks a week, and I kept drinking for the first few weeks when not on Keto. I've stopped drinking it almost entirely but I still have one or two every couple of weeks, and it hasn't drastically thrown me for a loop. But I'm not going to lie - this a very difficult diet to stay with if you're a craft beer enthusiast who drinks frequently. You can also drink most spirits with diet tonics, which I do on occasion - it doesn't have any carbs in it but the burning of alcohol can slow weight loss and add calories.

Another challenge is going out to eat. When you cede control of the cooking to someone else, inherently there are things that you won't be able to control. At a casual restaurant, a burger without a bun or crazy sauces is still a good option, as is steak or any meat dish that's not cooked in some kind of sugar based glaze. There's always at least a few things on the menu I can eat with modifications to the side dishes or pairing up with a salad. But still, I've had times where it felt really restrictive because so many things are served with carb-laden items even at very nice restaurants.

There are also a lot of low carb "replacement foods" - you've probably seen the atkins stuff they sell in the stores, and artificial sweeteners are a mixed bag. Some people eat them, others don't. There's a lot of different artificial sweeteners and sugar alcohols coming onto the market that aren't particularly good for you. Personally, I have a Coke Zero or a Powerade Zero every once in a great while. It hasn't derailed me too badly, but I still tend to shy away from it. I use a sweetener called Stevia which comes in a droplet form on occasion. It's a natural sweetener and it works pretty well to satisfy the sweet tooth. Things taste MUCH sweeter once you've been on Keto for a while since your sensitivity to sweet increases. It's pretty amazing how much sugar dulls your taste buds. But the replacement foods are mostly a waste of time for me because I find that psychologically they tend to hinder my progress.


Other thoughts
One other thing about what I'm doing - I don't like to call this a "diet" in the context that tends implies that it's something I'll do for a period of time and then stop. I prefer to call it a lifestyle - implying that it's something that I plan to sustain. And it's been really sustainable so far. I'm able to eat far fewer calories and not have the cravings or feeling hungry all the time - cutting all the excess carbs out causes you to be able to do that, and I really think that is the key for me. As someone who was likely eating in excess of 3500-4000 calories a day or more sometimes, I'm able to keep my calories generally in the 1500-2000 range, which is below my maintenance calories and allows the weight loss to continue.

The beauty of all this is that I do track my food intake but not nearly as strictly anymore, and you don't really have to pay as much attention to it because you will not be as hungry and you will be able to keep your calories below maintenance a lot easier than with simple calorie restriction alone.

And believe me, I was skeptical that I could do this because I was a carb addict. Sugars, breads, starches were all huge parts of my diet, and a lot of it really hidden in ingredients to mask the fact that low-fat foods taste like crap. Carbs are an addiction like anything else, and they cause so many health issues and dietary problems that I think we're really just scratching the surface. I remember reading Gary Taubes' excellent book Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It a few years ago and thinking "there's no way I could ever do that" and here I am doing something even more restrictive and it's not painful in the least.

The food industry doesn't want you to eat this way because it's more difficult for them to mass produce fresh foods that can't be stored for long periods of time. But I really believe it's a direction we need to go to reduce obesity and other epidemic health issues in this country. And from the looks of it more people are signing up.

If you're interested in this diet, feel free to reach out to me, I'm happy to help you along or answer questions. I really appreciated others that have been there for me, like my friend Dez, who has lost 90 pounds on Keto and he's been an amazing inspiration.

Last - some resources if you're interested:

• The Keto reddit group - a great source of inspiration, recipe ideas, and just general information. I've used it as a pick me up many times when I was feeling down 
• Keto in a nutshell - General primer about Keto
• Keto FAQ
• Low Carb High Fat for Beginners-excelleng guide to low carb high fat (this blog is great in general - it's written by a doctor from Sweeden who is a big believer in LCHF)
• List of acceptable Keto foods and their carb counts.
•  Calculator to figure out what level of nutrients you should eat
• Article on configuring MyFitnessPal to set up goals for this diet. 

Some other reading:

• 11 Biggest Lies of mainstream nutrition
• Ketosis: Advantaged or Misunderstood State
• Low Carb High Fat Lifestyle and My Family - the post that started it all for me.

Books:

• Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It by Gary Taubes
• Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease by Robert Lustig

Review of Fever self hosted RSS web reader

I talked about the Google Reader demise a few weeks ago, and the search is on for a replacement. In an attempt to assess the current solutions, I'm going to write a couple of posts about the different ones I've been trying. One of the intriguing near term solutions (available today) is Fever, a self hosted web based solution. Several geekier types in my social circles had already switched to this prior to the Google Reader announcement, and it works somewhat seamlessly with the Reeder app for the iPhone, which I was a heavy user of with Google Reader.

The self-hosting part of Fever is a bit of a challenge for me, seeing as I did away with my hosting a few years ago because I didn't have the time or wherewithal to continue to deal with it.

I stumbled across this 2010 post from MacStories which motivated me to try it out - seemed low risk and relatively inexpensive, and in the near term, I wouldn't have to deal with the crushing load on some of the other alternatives. So I took the plunge and installed it on a Nearly Free Speech instance. It took a little bit longer than 10 minutes, but not much.

I'm pretty happy with it so far. The web interface is slick and well designed with keyboard shortcuts for just about everything you could possibly do in the program. It has a sharing interface with a few key services built in and the ability to add more as long as they support a share link (I was able to add Google+ in a few minutes and it's as seamless as Reader was). This is key, as I want to be able to add services besides Twitter and Facebook and most other services don't bother or give you the interface.

You can set it up through cron to refresh feeds periodically as well - this was easy on my host as they have a GUI to add scheduled commands. I'm not 100% clear on if it's working all the time, but it does seem to usually come back with feeds somewhat updated if I haven't visited for a while. The downside if you don't do this is that you'll wait for the feeds to refresh for a few minutes if you don't have anything cached already. This is particularly noticeable on the iPhone clients. I think you could also just leave it up in a browser window on a running computer and it would refresh every 10-15 minutes.

I'm Feeling Kind of Warm
While Fever can be used as a straight feed reader a la Google Reader, it's unique feature is that it bubbles up hot topics into a Hot List using a degree scale based on the temperature of the human body (hence the name "Fever"). It does this by dividing feeds into two groups - the Kindling and the Sparks. Kindling are your must read feeds, and Sparks are other feeds that you'd want to influence your Hot list but not necessairily read all the time. I haven't used this feature much yet and haven't added any sparks - Gabe over at MacDrifter tries to quantify this feature and his review is worth a read if you're considering Fever.

Some of the suggestions for using sparks I've seen elsewhere include putting mostly link blogs there, or putting a feed from Pinboard or Instapaper or other services there. It's something I may or may not get to, but as some of the other reviews point out, it's not necessary to use Sparks to use the service mostly as a straight reader.

Mobile Devices with Fever
Shaun Inman, the Fever developer, is a Mac/iOS/Web guy so there's no support for Android devices - a showstopper if you're an Android user. He admits this in his Google Reader fallout post (a few other caveats there to be aware of as well - he's full time on another project right now so his support is minimal). I'm currently an iOS user, so no issues there. I hooked it up to Reeder on my iPhone and also bought Sunstroke, another iPhone only Fever client.

Both Reeder and Sunstroke are good clients - Reeder is the same experience on Fever as it is on the Google Reader back-end (except it takes longer to refresh if you don't set up the aforementioned cron job). Sunstroke handles the Fever specific features of the Hot List better than Reeder, but that's the only major difference.

Sadly, there is no viable native iPad client.  The iPad Reeder app is not compatible with Fever yet - it's due for a refresh and I'm sure that might get pushed out a bit as the developer of that product figures out what else he can use as a back-end with Reader's demise. Adding Fever functionality to this client would be a great solution for me in the short term. The web interface is passable in Safari on iOS, but this is definitely a gap that I would run into sometimes. I'm hoping with Reader's demise that we get more apps that will hook into Fever's API as an option, but I'm realistic in that this will probably never be a big enough userbase for some clients to support.

Conclusion
Fever is not for the casual user, or for someone that doesn't have any server side self hosting experience. But I don't have tons and I was able to figure it out, and once you set it up, there's nothing terribly technical about maintaining it. The host I'm currently using is inexpensive, at the most I should have to pay a dollar or two to self host. I'm planning on firing up full service hosting at some point in the next year and I'll move it over there if I'm still using it.

Fever is also probably not a good idea if you're a heavy consumer of feeds on your iPad, at least until a native client comes along.

If you primarily consume on your desktop and iPhone, though, this is a viable solution - which you will not have to worry about scaling or going away anytime soon. It's in your complete control.

I'm going to keep using it while continuing to check out other services. I'll write up the other two services I'm trying, Newsblur and The Old Reader, in the coming days. I'm also intrigued by Feed Wrangler, which should launch in the next few months.

Goodbye Google Reader, it's been real

By now, you've probably seen the announcement that Google Reader is being retired effective July 1st, 2013. Over the last 7 or 8 years, it's by far been my most used web tool, and increasingly was the back-end for a couple of apps on iOS both on my iPhone and iPad.

Quite a few people dismissed Google reader a while ago, and were not phased by this announcement (even saw a few "People still use Google Reader?" around the internet). Many preferring to load up Twitter or some other source with content to page through and draw links from, allowing the good stuff to bubble up to the surface. I've never gotten into this method of consumption - I only follow 250 accounts on Twitter at any given time and mostly individuals, not many companies, or RSS type feeds from blogs. I find that Twitter has sub-par tools for managing too much noise, and isn't really interested in developing them at all.

I still prefer subscribing to a lot of things, organizing and ordering them in a way that allows me to skip the heavy traffic sites when I don't have time while still seeing all content from my friends and other lower frequency blogs that matter to me. Reader was always really good for this once you had it optimally set up.

So to say that Google Reader shutting down was a bit of a fork in the cog of my information consumption is an understatement.

No Surprises
It also wasn't (or shouldn't have been) that big of a surprise to the loyal users of the service. Back in 2011, Google removed all the social features built into Reader (and used by a small but hardcore base of people) and forced everyone to share with Google+ as the main sharing mechanism. I'd say 10 out of the 40 or so people I interacted with on the old Reader social platform moved over to G+, the rest stopped using it at that time. People were mad. Google Reader was a great product back then and it was consistently iterative. Now a clunky redesign and a complete neutering of its features didn't bode well for the service.

But some of us continued to use it. I explored alternatives - NewsBlur looked promising but not many people went there and I was after a better social experience. It also cost money, and Google Reader didn't have any implicit costs to use. It's hard to compete with that anywhere, especially when the product is so dominant. There were not many other options that allowed you to use a web interface which doubled as a back end to other applications. So with Google Reader I continued despite the annoyances.

I got into Google+ sharing as much as could be (and for those of my non-reader friends that follow me there, I often have them tell me that I'm the only one that posts anything in their feed.) and I'm still a moderately heavy user of the service. At the same time this was going on, a contingent of people I used to follow on Friendfeed made their way over to G+ and started using it as a replacement or compliment. Between these two crowds, I have a small but active group that I follow there.

What do we do now?
So what to do in a post Google Reader world? There are several competitors being built from the ground up. They all got slammed the other day in the wake of the announcement. Newsblur is still trying to get back on its feet, and The Old Reader and Feedly are spotty as they get hit with several times their normal load. Several other services have been announced including a promising one from iOS developer David Smith called Feed Wrangler, and there will probably be a few others that come into this space now that they barrier to entry has been removed.

Personally, I took the plunge with Fever, a self hosted solution that is pretty solid. More on that in a future post.

Necessary Lifestyle Changes

I've never been particularly skinny. I was a tubby kid growing up. When I hit a growth spurt in middle school I shot up to 6'3" and that was the slimmest I've ever been. This mostly continued through college. Since college, it's been a slow decline. My diet has gone through periods where it was atrocious. The health issues I was starting to have and the continual pressure on my waistline and pants were just depressing. I've never made a serious commitment to a dietary change to support myself being healthier. I haven't gotten consistent exercise. I've tried and failed a few times. I've read lots of books about the subject, but I've never been motivated enough.

Having kids changes your perspective and also makes you realize that you want to be around for them and see them grow into adults. The history of heart disease and cancer in my family cannot be ignored, and while I'm already at genetic risk, the things I was doing to my body were not helping.

It was time to do something. Christmas was a great time with family. It was also rock bottom for my dietary habits. Cookies and candy out the wazoo. Processed foods, baked goods, just lots and lots of eating for a week. The only things healthy I ate were the meals my mom cooked for dinner. At the end of my vacation, I stepped on the scale in my parents guest bathroom and was appalled at what I saw. I weighed 306 pounds. My mom made a deal with me to lose 40 pounds by July when we have our mini-family reunion. I accepted her challenge.

I got home and immediately fired up SparkPeople.com to track my food intake. I've had moderate success with it before but never stuck with it. It pushes the restricted calories and exercise approach, but doesn't get too drastic with anything.

I started out with that for a week, trying to hit the ranges it recommended, but not doing any other restrictions otherwise. I had one or two bad days, New Years Eve being one of them. But I figured I had cut my calorie intake by at least 30-40% from what I was eating during the holidays. A good start. I also started drinking lots and lots of water. I've always had hydration issues so it's probably good to work on that also, and it does help you feel full and contributes to faster weight loss.

After a week, I had already dropped about 8 pounds. Having been through this before, I know that was a lot of water weight, but it was encouraging. Things were going well, but I knew I wanted to do more. Straight calorie restriction works for me for a while because it steers me away from most foods I shouldn't eat, but I've had issues sustaining it in the past. And from reading various books like Gary Taubes Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It and other resources about Paelo and low carb diets, I knew that I wanted to also try to severely restrict carbohydrates.

Modern diet literature comes at dietary structures from many angles on what you can and can't eat. Despite their different angles, they all share one thing in common - refined sugars and processed carbohydrates are bad for you, they are toxic and inflammatory and will potentially shorten your life span and increase your risk of disease and cancer. Unfortunately, we live in an era and in a country where billions are made selling crappy food to us. And I think most Americans get sucked into that, and there's a large machine protecting it. The reality is, in a shift to low-fat over the past 30 years, we've loaded everything up with sugars to compensate, which is even worse. I have Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease by Robert Lustig in my queue to read. He also put out this video which I have yet to watch, but it's along the same theme. This stuff is everywhere right now, as doctors discover that 30 years of carb loading is screwing us all. Most of Taubes' book is about this dietary shift and what we need to do to reverse it.

With that in mind, and after a lot of research in various places. I decided to try cutting out processed carbohydrates and refined sugars out of my diet as much as possible. So for the next two weeks after the initial week, I tried that. I kept fruit and higher-carb vegetables in my diet. But no more sugar or artificial sweeteners and no more grains or starches. I cut sodas, flavored waters, juices, breads, baked goods, pasta, ice cream, and basically anything with refined sugar or processed carbohydrates, and any root vegetables. I was hovering around 100g of total carbs and 60-80 net carbs (net carbs subtracts carbs from dietary fiber, good carbs, if you will).

Refined sugars are pretty easy for me to cut out - I already wasn't drinking regular pop, or eating much candy or baked goods (tending to binge on these things when I did ate them, which was causing me heartburn issues galore). Other processed carbs like breds and pastas are harder. It's a chunk of my family's diet and pasta was a staple for meals.You do get pangs for this stuff the first couple of days/week that you try to eat this way. It's tough.


The results have been great. After a month, I'm down 18 pounds to 288 from my peak of 306 just after Christmas. I feel so much better already, pants are already fitting better that were basically goners in my closet. I'd switched mostly to pants with that elastic waste-band cheater thingy. Won't need it much longer. May even go down a pant size or two. My heartburn is basically gone. I feel pretty good. I have more energy. I'm sleeping better and I'm not getting sleepy during the day.

I started out going back to the gym and I've stopped for a few weeks, mostly because I wrenched my back and aggravated an old injury getting too aggressive on an elliptical machine. I will go back in a few weeks, and may have to make some adjustments to my diet to have the stamina to do it.

I still have a long way to go. My immediate goal is to drop 40-50, but if I could drop closer to 100 and be around 200, that would be amazing.

In the past week, I've decided to further reduce my carbs now that I've gotten over the grain hump, and I'm starting a ketogenic diet (aka Low Carb/High Fat). This is a diet that severely restricts carbohydrates in order to switch your body to burning fat. It's a diet that's emerging as a healthy weight loss diet which is easier for people to stay on. The nice part about it is that you can still eat animal fats and other healthy fats and protein in decent quantities, so I can eat a big part of my meals with my family. I first heard about this diet from Dez, who is on his own weight loss journey and doing very well with it. It sounded like something I could get into given my dietary habits and food preferences. After reading r/keto for a few weeks to get ideas and understand the diet, I decided I was ready.

I will write more about these changes as I go - as I've found other people a great source of encouragement in this journey so far, and I also think it will help hold me accountable.

Book Update December 2012

I read 29 books in 2012, and for the first time I probably read more books digitally than I did in paper. I also read countless articles in Instapaper, on the web and in magazines.

I received an Amazon Kindle Paperwhite for Christmas and I love it so far - I can tell it's going to increase my use of digital books. I was a late adopter of digital book tools, but I don't regret that - the tools have really matured and they still have a ways to go, but Amazon makes it really easy. The local Hennepin County Library has a decent lending library, and using it with the kindle is easy as long as the publisher doesn't make the book USB only, which many of them still do (but otherwise, it's a plug in, click and drag thing, so it's not a huge deal, but still - having to plug it into a computer seems like old tech). Most of my reading was done on my iPad 3. It's retina display is a huge step forward in reading off an LCD but at the end of the day it's still an LCD display and it makes me bleary eyed. So the e-ink Kindle will come in handy.

I'm proud of my 2 books a month average. I could probably read a book a week or just over 4 books per month if I really put my mind to it, and watched less TV and read less items from the internet, but I enjoy the balance. I also take breaks from reading books and seem to go through spells where I read more.

I didn't read that much that was particularly memorable. I nearly completed reading the "Prey" series by John Sandford. An easy reading thriller/mystery series set in the Twin Cities and featuring a strong protagonist in Lucas Davenport. Some of the later books in the series were starting to get old hat, and somewhat repetitive. It's probably good that Sandford is going to hang it up on this series after another book or two. But it's been a good run. I'm in the middle of Stolen Prey, the last Prey novel. I read some other Sandford books too - I started into the Virgil Flowers series and I read one of the Jason Kidd novels - The Fools Run (which feels horribly dated - it was tech focused but written in the late 80s-but it did give me that nostalgic feeling). Look forward to more from Sandford.

Other notable books I read this year include Ready Player One by Ernest Cline - an enjoyable novel about a futuristic virtual reality world, The Ghost in the Wires - Kevin Mitnick's autobiography, and I started the Lost Fleet Series by Jack Campbell (and hope to finish in 2013!). Trying to keep my reading varied and split between fiction and non-fiction but I definitely read more novels this year.

Upgrading an old PC to repurpose as a file server

Back in 2005 I purchased what was, at the time, a near top of the line Dell Desktop, a Dell Dimension 9100.  It was a great computer for a number of years as our primary desktop.

It ran Windows XP out of the box, which until recently, I'd never touched the installation of, despite having upgraded other computers to 7. It had a decent size drive for the time, 250GB and 1GB of RAM out of the box. It came with what was a top of the line Pentium 4, a chip that still holds up reasonably well for general computing today. The beauty of this machine is that it is a expandable dream with a great case. I'm a little sad that it was one of the few models ever produced in the failed BTX form factor that never really took off, because it would be a great case to continue using well into the future.

Over the years, we slowly replaced it as our day to day computer with laptops and such, but it was always my central repository for files. When I took baby steps into using Crash Plan a couple of years ago, it was the first machine I set up for backup (I've since converted to a family plan because we got another laptop that my wife uses). I've tried to keep all my photos on this drive, as well as a backup of my entire music library.

Over time, I've done upgrades - the original DVD drive was replaced with a burner back when that stuff still mattered. That drive died recently, I haven't bothered to replace it, even though I could get a replacement for 20 bucks, you really don't need them anymore-booting from USB keys is easier anyway, and I have two other burners on laptops on the rare occasion that I need to burn something (usually a DVD of pictures for my mom). In 2009, I put another 2 GB of RAM in and replaced the video card with a more modern version (which is still holding up well today - and works better with windows 7 then the discrete GPU in my 2008 era laptop).

Most recently, I decided that I was done with XP on this box, wanting to be able to utilize Windows 7 for more modern file sharing and management. A friend also talked me into installing Ubuntu which I'm also experimenting with. Microsoft is going to stop updating XP soon as well, and it's just time to upgrade or retire this box. I looked into building or buying a new box, but it's still cost prohibitive given our other financial priorities.  I would like to dip into the Mac universe again at some point, but not for a file server that would be used primarily with Windows laptops (and also a cost prohibitive option right now).

So, the domino effect of upgrades began. The nice thing about this box is that it has the modern PCIe architecture with multiple open slots. I updated my router to gigabit ethernet recently and replaced all of my switches with gigabit, so only natural that I'd pick up a Gigabit PCI Adapter Card for the main file server box. After that, I bought a copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade . I considered upgrading my laptop to Windows 8 and trying to transfer the copy of 7 over to the desktop, but decided I wasn't ready to mess with Windows 8 yet. I will eventually upgrade my old laptop to Win 8 as an experimental device, but not yet.

Incidentally, bought and tried to install Windows 8 initially on this old desktop at the low upgrade price, but the installation failed and it reverted back to my XP installation. I didn't try it again - the other thing that started happening is the hard drive was clicking during the Windows 8 install. Behavior which I did not hear once I went back to Windows XP. But it was pretty obvious that something was either incompatible with Windows 8 or this drive was on its last legs.

When the Windows 7 upgrade showed up, I installed it from a USB Key. I made a back up using the Windows Easy Transfer program. It was very easy. (just wanted another duplicate to have along with Crash Plan). Immediately, the disk drive started clicking. Not in a good way. I restored all the files to the C drive with the transfer program. But, by the next day, the system booted into the recovery partition and wouldn't boot or re-install windows. I tried installing ubuntu but that also failed. I know a drive that is toast when I see it. It was the original 250 GB drive from 7 years ago, so I'd say it had a good life. It made it a lot longer than the external 750GB drive that died on me earlier this year.

Deciding that I wanted to continue using this machine as a file server for as long as I could, I purchased a 1 TB 7200 RPM Western Digital Blue drive from Amazon. I also bought a USB 3.0 PCIe card to use with the USB 3.0 external drive. Once all that arrived and I installed, I loaded Windows 7 back up to the new hard drive, creating a separate partition for documents and leaving space for Ubuntu. I also installed Ubuntu but I haven't used it much yet. Eventually, I'd like to run a file server off of it, but that's going to take some time. I had to use a registry workaround to install Windows upgrade media on a fresh drive, but it worked like a charm.

Instead of using Windows Easy Transfer again, I recovered from Crash Plan, to a folder on the desktop. The easy transfer program was nice and easy but it also scattered about many files that I didn't want anymore, and I wanted to isolate them. The recovery process on Crash Plan is pretty straightforward, once you figure out how to re-link an archive on an external drive (which took me some time, not an obvious thing in the software or in the restore directions on Crash Plan's site). It also took a bit of searching to figure out how to re-enable the ability to "adopt an old backup" functionality (comments in this post) once I had restored, and I'm still not 100% sure if that's working properly.

Adopting a backup with Crash Plan is supposed to take all the files and match them up to your existing backup, even if you've moved them around (which I have). I want to avoid sending another 100GB through my internet connection if I can avoid it, and so far, so good with that.  (although there is little information about how this process actually works for the more technically inclined). It was still chugging away at processing the backups a good 12 hours after the install, but it didn't seem to be adding to the archive again so far.

With the installs and upgrades out of the way, I'm moving all of our photos and documents onto this computer to serve as the central repository. I have pictured scattered over 3 machines, the same Apple photo-streams gone wild on multiple boxes (which I am going to consolidate into one on this box), and a lot of duplication that I am attempting to de-dupe. My approach is to move everything onto the documents partition on the server box, and then run a de-duplification program to identify and delete duplicates. This is going to take some time, but I'll come out the other end with a full set of data.

I'm pretty happy with the performance of my newly upgraded box. There is a noticeable performance improvement with the 7200 RPM drive. (so much so, that I'm contemplating putting a small SSD drive in to stick the OS on) The USB 3.0 card makes transfers to and from the external drive a breeze and it's really fast (so much so, that I wish the laptop we just bought last spring had USB 3.0. Sadly it doesn't.) The Gigabit Ethernet card is making file transfers on and off the box really fast from either wired or wireless connections. The processor and system bus are truly the limiting factors on this box now. It even runs Aero Glass on Windows 7 without a problem - the video card that I upgraded a few years ago doesn't choke on it at all.

All of this upgrading and Hard Drive replacement is significantly easier with Crash Plan and a large external disk drive - I wouldn't have wanted to try and do this even a few years ago, but now the materials and backup solutions have become so cheap and easy to use that it's easy to upgrade the hard drive and be back up in running in a day or two.

Barring motherboard or other major component failure, this box will probably last me another 3-5 years as a file server, and it's even quick enough to use as a general web browsing computer in a pinch. I don't think MSFT will discontinue support for Win 7 any time soon, considering some large enterprises (like my own) are just finally moving everybody onto it. Really shows you how much things have slowed down - my previous desktop only made it a bit over 4 years before it got relegated to the trash pile.

I'm going to upgrade that last Gigabyte of RAM in the Dell box to take it to the max of 4GB since it's only $25 to do so at this point, and I may mess around with the storage options a bit more since there's space for a second or third drive. In the end, I've been able to make a bunch of cheap upgrades under $300 total that have served this machine well, with some parts that I can likely bring with me to the next PC rebuild. And in the process, I've re-organized my family's files so that it's all in one place.

Cutting the cord is an abject failure

I can't quit you, Comcast, I can't quit you.

Last year, when we were headed into a period with a shifting cash flow as my wife started her in-home daycare business, I made the decision to try and switch to USI Wireless. I wrote it up here. I think it must have been working pretty well when I wrote that, as I seemed pretty satisfied with the service.

And quite honestly, we made it through many months with the service. There were sacrifices, like streaming video didn't work very well, and you'd have to wait 10-20 seconds for a youtube video to start, but for the most part, it was a reasonable service for checking email, looking at Twitter and Facebook and other general work. I tried to work at home a few times, and it was slow, but I could do it, as long as I wasn't doing file intensive work on the work servers (and that was probably due to the latency and low send speed more than anything).

Over the summer, we started to have issues. I had to reset my router/wireless AP a few times a month because it would hang, so I wasn't entirely sure if it was the router or the USI wireless that was having issues. The router was still having some issue post USIW but it was worse when I had the service. Then we had periods where it would get abysmally slow. Then it would be fast and usable for a few weeks, then it would get abysmally slow again.

We had the antenna for the unit installed in an optimal location on the outside of the 2nd story of our house. I had to run a somewhat convoluted wireless setup with a wireless repeater in the basement. It worked OK but probably contributed to speed issues on my overall network as well as probably introduced some local wireless signal strength issues. USI told me they could do a Ethernet drop but I never took them up on that because it seemed like the issues were mostly from their equipment to mine since I could achieve peak WAN speeds some of the time, and I just lived with the computer to computer LAN issues. But this may be an inconvenience for some people considering this product - they can't always install the router in an optimal place, so if you're not hard wired, you may have to stick your wireless router/AP in a sub-optimal location in your home.

Flash forward 11 months. I was already planning on going back to Comcast simply because the USIW wasn't cutting it anymore, but a few weekends ago it was grinding to a halt. So I logged in, found a good promotional deal from Comcast and signed up online. Was back up and running with them after a quick call to activate my existing modem.

USI was easy to cancel, and relatively hassle free - except that they sent me a notice saying they were going to bill me for a renewal, which I ignored.

I was very satisfied with them as a company, their service was good the few times I needed it, and the price was really good for service that was still better than the fastest DSL option. But it can't hold a candle to what Comcast offers.

USI is currently piloting fiber installations in a few Minneapolis neighborhoods and I won't hesitate for a second to switch to it if they begin to offer it in my neighborhood - right now they are charging 60% of the price for double the speed of Comcast. Even if they upgrade the wireless product at some point, I might be willing to try it again - I'd really like to reduce my dependency.

As for TV, well, ironically, now that we have cable back with Comcast I'm feeling more strongly about being able to cut the cable ties. We're not watching much original network or cable programming at all anymore, just a handful of shows during the week. Having kids has caught up with us, just no time to get into new shows. So as things have fallen off in our stable of aired shows, they have been replaced by things on Amazon instead. And with a 20Mb connection from Comcast, that streams anything in HD just fine. Sports is still the lynchpin here, as I subscribe to the Red Zone NFL Channel and watch a fair amount of NBA, NFL and MLB on cable. Still, I envision a day where the cost will exceed my willingness to pay, given Comcast's continued price increases.

iPhone 5 impressions after a month

With our iPhone 4's on their last legs as telephone communicating devices due to various issues with speakers and mics, I got up to pre-order the iPhone 5's at 2am when they went on-sale. Unfortunately, due to a snafu with the plan configuration software on Apple's website, I had to abandon that effort, and AT&T was no better. Both sites offered me different plans that I did not want. I'm assuming that was caused by our grandfathered existing plans. I finally pre-ordered two phones around 4:30 pm on the first day of pre-orders in an AT&T store where I didn't have to change anything, and was told to expect a 14-21 day wait.

Our phones finally arrived on October 1st, nicely within the 14-21 day window. I tried to order Applecare+ for them over the phone but was told that I had to take them into a store to get them checked out. So I decided to try out Squaretrade, which had no requirement like that and was comparably priced. We'll see how that works out. The process to acquire the Squaretrade warranty is really easy - you just have to upload your receipt.

First impression of the iPhone out of the box was how light it was, and also that the build quality was better than I was expecting given some people's complaints about it being prone to scuffing, etc. I already have a couple of dings on the outer band from dirt getting into the case. It does seem to scratch easier and since the black model has a coating, it's immediately noticeably  But I've never been one to treat my devices as they are in a museum. We kept our old phones to use as music players around the house, and I expect we will do the same with the iPhone 5's, so these devices will likely not have another owner.

The phones went right into cases that I had purchased the day before. I've never been a naked phone person as it gets dropped and just generally mishandled too often for me to take my chances. (hence why we also purchase the extended warranties/damage protection even though they are generally considered a waste of money). My wife has dropped her phone multiple times already in the first month, so I'm glad it is in a case.

I backed up both our old phones to iCloud, so I started an iCloud restore to both of them. This took all night to complete on my slow internet connection, due mostly to the number of apps and photos that were still on our camera rolls. Katie's phone actually got stuck in restore mode, draining the battery by constantly trying to connect but not actually downloading her whole camera roll. I finally fixed that the next night by restarting her phone.

My first impression upon actually getting to use the phone was that it was significantly faster than my old phone. Everything is snappy. The camera loads very quickly and takes excellent pictures. I'm jumping 2 generations, so I'd expect that, and it didn't disappoint.

The larger screen size is appreciated more than I thought it would be. The extra home screen icons are a nice benefit, as well as the ability to fit more content on the screen in apps like Mail, Tweetbot and Listary. The new technique for integrating the touch sensor with the screen is nice, it does make it feel like the screen pops a little bit more.

iOS 6 is a nice update with a lot of new subtle features, but not a a ton of major updates. Maps changed, tons has been written on this. I have mixed feelings about it, mostly from a search perspective, their local database is not as good as Google's, there's absolutely no doubt about it. Simple searches for things like Gas in my area omitted gas stations, a search for Hardware pulled up a store that's been closed for over a year, and other things like this just on searches in my area. I've found some substitute apps like Quick Route, which uses Google's database on Apple's map tiles in iOS 6, but none of these solutions is perfect. To be honest, Google Maps wasn't always perfect either but it's probably still the best for local search. Yeah, you can use an html version in Safari but it's a sub-par experience at best.

One area that I'm not thrilled with is how the Music app now handles iTunes match. In iOS 5, you could download music to your phone on an individual track or full album basis, and then pick and choose which tracks remain on your phone, deleting items you didn't want to store locally. I used this quite a bit to load and remove items locally. On iOS 6, Apple manages the downloaded tracks for you based on free space. It doesn't give you a way to delete the tracks manually when iTunes Music Match is turned on. You can delete tracks off the phone, but you have to flip music match off, delete the tracks, and then turn it back on. It's a bizarre head scratching change to what I thought was otherwise a well designed service. Since I am using my iTunes library less these days due to Rdio, I am considering not renewing my Music Match and going back to managing tracks the old way. I hope Apple addresses this in a future update, and I'm not the only one.

Much has been made about the integration with Facebook and the feature where you can integrate the address book. I was leery about using this feature at first, mostly based on anecdotal evidence from other platforms, where Facebook contact data permanently merges with the data set used locally on your phone. Apple does a very good job of keeping the data segregated from your built in contacts unless you explicitly hit a button that merges the data onto your phone's data set. For people that it can match up, it shows a unified profile when you click on their name, and it's pretty evident where the information is coming from. This unified profile works pretty well out of the gate, though I had to adjust some of my friend's names to get them to match up. Since I use Facebook only with people I actually know, I've actually found this to be a somewhat useful feature for filling in contact information gaps on a few occasions already. I honestly wish more of my friends would put their phone numbers and address information into Facebook, but I understand the reluctance to do so. I feel like Apple handled this integration very well given privacy concerns of past implementations of this on other platforms, and I plan to keep using the feature.

One other feature that I'm enjoying more than I thought I would is Passbook. Here's an example of Apple going out and evaluating NFC, probably deciding that it wasn't ready for prime time yet, and coming up with something of a stopgap solution which may turn into a more permanent one should NFC never fully take off to its potential. I would kill to get rid of my wallet as it exists today and just carry a phone around. I think we're still a few years away from being able to do so, but Passbook could and probably will go a long way towards reducing the size of my wallet. I'm already using it for Starbucks and Walgreens on a regular basis (having never had a physical Walgreens rewards card, since they just started rolling the program out) and I'm hoping most of the other loyalty programs that grace my wallet find a way to get on this platform soon.

One challenge I'm still having is the phone seems to have a much higher latent use of data. I'm using this term to describe data use that's occurring in the background or by system processes that's not explicitly triggered by the user. Apple's always been really good about giving the users control over this data, but something on the iPhone 5 and iOS 6 seems to be violating these settings. I'm using double the data I was before, and I haven't changed any use patterns that I can determine would be driving this increase. My wife is also using more data on her phone, though she's such a light user that it's a huge deal. It's just really curious, and Apple does not give the user the tools to figure out what's using the data, and blocks apps that try to do so. This is one area where they need to improve.

Overall, the iPhone 5 is a nice upgrade from my iPhone 4 that will serve me well. Many of the things I liked about my old phone are true here. It's comfortable and familiar, and I like that, for now. I'm still not ruling out looking at Android, we'll see what things look like in another two years.

Figuring out what to do with writing

I work in corporate finance for a major bank supporting a business line. I spend most of my days knee deep in spreadsheets and reports. I write and receive a lot of emails. Most are a couple of sentences. They do not challenge me as a writer. I love my job and what I do right now, and I have no desire to change my main career focus at this point of my life. I envision a time where I'd burn out or tire of working with numbers all day, but now is not the time.

However, I want to write more than I have been. I am a voracious consumer of the written word. I typically read for several hours a day on my iPad, both novels, as well as shorter form pieces in Instapaper and on the web. I want to rededicate some of the time I spend reading to writing. But this is where I struggle.

What should I write? I have a lot of interests that I could write about on a blog, this one, or another one I create. I've kicked around starting a blog focused on technology and how it integrates into a young family's life. There's a bunch of daddy bloggers out there covering this angle. I dislike reading most of them because they tend to judge, preach, or just act like general assholes. I think there's a place for something else but I also see myself falling into that same trap.

I should write more about my kids and their lives. We have a blog for my daughter that we haven't updated since her sister was born, and a domain parked for her sister. I'm not really sure what to do with these. I never want to write them. Serious lack of motivation.

I see a lot of Apple and technology oriented writers making a living writing and freelancing, building up multiple income streams. I don't desire to be that serious about it at this point in my life, but I like the way some of them approach it and some of the things they do might be applicable to what I eventually want to do. I don't aspire to be Kottke, but I like his style.

A lot of ideas are floating around, and I know I can do anything I set my mind to, it's just an issue of making the time to do it and having the motivation to do it. The motivation is growing stronger and I can find the time.

So this is the first step, just to put this out there and think about it a little more.

Podcast Update

Listening to Podcasts has really become a regular part of my life over the last 2-3 years as the podcasting apps on iOS have evolved to the point where it's relatively frictionless to download and listen to shows. I enjoy being able to listen to relevant content in the car instead of the radio or music.

What I use to listen:
I currently use Downcast, which out of the myriad options I find works the best for me. The only downside to Downcast is that it can be slow as molasses if you subscribe to a lot of podcasts. iCloud sync is also not perfect and it's caused me some issues. It is also very feature laden, which I appreciate, but for the more casual listener may be a little unnecessary. I've tried other options in iOS like Instacast and I used Podcaster for a long time but I keep coming back to Downcast.

My Listening habits evolve:
As far as listening goes, I used to be a big listener of the TWiT network with Leo Laporte and crew, but lately I've gotten away from the TWiT network completely, deleting the last show off of my podcast client last week after realizing I'd been deleting it for the past 2 months. Similarly, I listened to a lot of ESPN podcasts (the "Today" podcasts and some of the ESPN Radio offerings), most of which have gone by the wayside.

I got more into the 5by5 network in the past 6 months, which I discovered via Marco Arment's twitter and blog feed, which then spurred me on to listen to other shows on the network. I've settled on a few podcasts that I listen to from there.

The newest network to garner my interest is 70Decibels, run by a British Guy named Myke Hurley. I found this network through somebody linking to the Homework Podcast and from there found a couple of other shows that I like. It's in a similar vein to 5by5 but things feel a little more fresh and there's a wider variety of voices on the network.


Shows I listen to nearly every episode:
 Economics and Money
NPR Planet Money - A great podcast on the global economy. Generally less than 20 minutes and focuses on one subject. I learn a lot from this podcast as it tends to be a great explainer.

Frekonomics Radio - a podcast that intersperses 5 minute segments on APM Marketplace with longer podcast that explorer economic topics in a way similar to the books of the same name. I'm a big fan of Stephen J Dubner.

APM Marketplace Money - Good personal finance show that is weekly and one that can be listened to in the background. 

Technology
Build and Analyze - Marco Arment and Dan Benjamin - 5by5 network - Theoretically about iOS development and development in general. An area that I don't have a ton of interest in, but I find they spend more time talking about strategy and things that do interest me a lot more. And also hobbies and lately, kids. Marco's a really smart guy and has a good take on everything iOS.

B&B Podcast - Ben Brooks and Shawn Blanc - 5by5 Network - two dudes in the iOS/Mac Sphere with popular blogs that I read. Very conversational, and could be a conversation that I'm having with one of my friends a lot of the time.


General Interest
This American Life - Podcast version of the weekly radio show produced by WBEZ in Chicago. One of my favorite radio programs of all time. Almost always a compelling listen and I've been a listener on and off since the inception of the show in the late 90s. I stopped listening for a number of years though, but the nice thing is that they fill in with old episodes pretty often. Still annoying that they only serve the last week's show in the podcast feed but I also bought their iOS App at some point and it streams all of them.



Comedy
You Look Nice Today - another Merlin Mann vehicle on the comedy side of things. These guys have awesome off the wall conversations and make me laugh a lot. Not published very frequently.

11 Minutes - Similar to You Look Nice Today, a funny (and short - hence the name) comedy podcast. Can be really funny and random/off the wall.


Productivity/Work/Lifestyle

Homework Podcast - Dave Caolo and Aaron Mahnke - Relatively new podcast aimed at people that work out of the home. While not directly useful in a lot of ways to me - I don't work at home that often - there's other concepts that are interesting here, and I like the hosts. I'm also doing some work for my wife's business at home and I'm thinking about doing more freelancing and other types of work in the future, and this is also helpful to think about that.

Mikes on Mics - Mike Vardy and Mike Schechter - another relatively new podcast which goes over productivity tools and how to get things done.

Back to Work - Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin- 5by5 Network - I like Merlin Mann, he tends to be a bit eccentric but he's one the kings of productivity and worth listening too.


Other
Big Brother Gossip Podcast - seasonal while Big Brother is on the air. Love their take on the show and it's a good way to get a recap when you don't have time to follow more closely.

Shows I generally listen to but skip if the subject matter isn't interesting to me or I run out of time:

WTF Podcast - Marc Maron - good interview podcast with comedian/entertainer Marc Maron. He's a great interviewer and very entertaining. Have to quickly skip if it comes on while my daughter is awake as there's a string of f-bombs right at the beginning.

Nerdist Podcast - another good interview oriented podcast that also features the guys from the nerdist. I like Chris Hardwick and the other guys on this show are entertaining too. They interview interesting people.


NPR On the Media - Good show on the media business by WNCY in New York - the media business is still an interest of mine, even though I'm no longer interested in a career in it as I once was. Usually a segment show with 4-5 in depth segments, but occasionally they do full length episodes on one topic. The May 25th show about the future of television was fascinating.

Hypercritical - John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin - 5by5 network - I'm on the fence on this one. Siracusa is an interesting guy, though he tends to go deeper into a lot of subjects than I could possibly care about. But some subjects do interest me. He's a big TiVo user and where he talks about TiVo is always interesting to me. But Macintosh file systems ad naseum? Not really my bag.

BS Report with Bill Simmons - ESPN - I tend to listen to this one more in the fall when in NFL season, as during baseball season he tends to talk ad nauseum about the Red Sox and Yankees, and I don't really care about that. I don't even read Simmons column any more but I still like to listen to him talk with various people. He also will probably talk a lot about 30 for 30 when that starts again in the fall.


NPR Fresh Air Podcast - segements from the radio program of the same name. The podcast is no longer the full radio program, which is kind of nice since it was too overwhelming before.

The Talk Show with John Gruber - Gruber is kind of arrogant and that's annoying, but he's also entertaining and that's worth listening to most of the time. He's also well connected in the Apple community and has interesting insights. He recently left the 5by5 network and Dan Benjamin to do his own thing.

New Podcasts that I'm still evaluating:

Enough - The Podcast - Patrick Rhone - 70Decibels - I enjoy Patrick's writing and recently started listening to the Podcast which I find very conversational and listening. I'm guessing this one will end up on my always listen list.

Cooking With Brett and Myke - 70Decibels - Show on a wide variety of subjects. Jury still out.

The App Orchard - Podcast about applications - iOS and Mac mostly. It's shorter, generally a half hour, and interesting to hear about new apps. Warning -This is not good for your wallet in the iTunes store though. Another one that will probably end up on my always listen list.

The Bro Show - General Tech news podcast, focused on the Apple side of things. I'm not sure about this one - these kids of shows are sort of boring to me and tend to rehash things I've already read elsewhere. This is also why I ditched a lot of the shows on the TWiT network.

This is an ever evolving list as I'm pretty liberal with deleting them when I get bored with it, which seems to happen after a while.

Time
You might be thinking - how does he have time to listen to all these podcasts? It's a good question. I have an average of an hour a day commute total (half hour each way). I listen to podcasts a lot at night around the house while doing chores either on my headphones or on the speaker dock, and then I end up listening to them while I'm playing with my kids or trying to get my 4 month old to go to sleep. I manage to make it through quite a few, but I am also liberal about deleting if I get behind. I also listen at work occasionally, but the work that I do is not generally conducive to listening to spoken word podcasts with any kind of comprehension. I also tend to listen at at least 1.5X and often times 2X which helps. The other thing for time is I try to avoid listening to daily podcasts altogether. I found that I was skipping them more than not and the content was just too much for me.

My Twitter Vacation experiment.

I've often thought lately that I should just cut myself off from the stream of social networks I enjoy every day for a couple of days, just to see how that goes. Not to this kind of extreme, but a trial of sorts.

I was at Town Hall Tap with Katie on Thursday night enjoying a rare night out when this came up, and Katie bet me that I couldn't do it.

A few minutes later it was on - 3 days starting at midnight Friday the 11th of May to Midnight on Monday May 14th.

And for good measure, I decided to extend it to Facebook, Google + and the like, and also avoid Google Reader as much as possible.

Day 1 was easy as I was at work and I have many days where I don't look at these things at all while I'm working. It got slightly more difficult when I wanted to see what food trucks were available, but I knew if I just walked out the door of my downtown office building I'd see something I wanted. I'd been wanting to try out Hola Arepa and they're always on that block of Marquette, and sure enough, they were there. Crisis Averted!

It was a little trickier in the down times on my Friday commute and while I was waiting for the food truck (long lines at Hola Arepa!). Normally I'd do a quick peek onto Twitter during these times, but not this time. I kept a podcast playing as I usually do and I did read a few things in Reeder and Instapaper which were not off limits.

The weekend was better - I do tend to zone out on things on my iPad or phone during the day when I'm home with family, sometimes to the detriment of whatever is going on in that room. It was easy to stay distracted with the kids and be present. It was definitely noticed by Katie.

The thing I did realize is how incredibly plugged in I am to this stuff and how it's probably mildly unhealthy. I did feel a little bit of withdraw symptoms throughout the 3 days, not unlike quitting smoking or other addictions I've faced in my life. That was a little wild because I did not expect that at all.

I don't feel like I missed out on anything urgent. Katie said to me at one point "Do you really need to be one of the first thousand people on earth to know about Maurice Sendak dying?". Good point, and probably not. I did miss out on the premiere league crazy championship game, but if I was really more of a fan I probably would've had that on anyway.

I was able to go back through my friends list this morning and catch up on their weekends, and just let the rest go.

If you are one of those people that's never far from a Twitter client, I highly suggest trying this yourself - it was very therapeutic. It made me realize the extent to which it was ingrained in my life and to evaluate ways in which that was probably not good for me.

So I'm back to Twitter this morning with a barrage of Tweets, some from a list I made over the weekend when I couldn't tweet. But there are some general principles I've created: 1) don't use when the kids are awake and present in the room with me. 2) don't use when out with the wife or interrupt other 1:1 time with wife. 3) don't constantly check and feel the need to read every single tweet in the timeline (I don't follow too many accounts). 4) Feel free to let it go for a day or two if life's just too busy.

Should work for now...

The cult of Apple strikes again

Lock me up and throw away the key. I pre-ordered a new iPad yesterday. If I wasn't Apple crazy before, I am now. Koolaid drinker. Whatever, I don't even care.

All kidding aside though, the increased screen resolution and beefed up graphics could have been the only change from the iPad 2 that I bought a year ago and I'd still buy it. I still notice a difference between my iPhone screen and iPad, and I will often switch to read things on my phone because of that difference.

I have an ailing laptop where the screen goes in and out of working. This was a problem a year ago, but now, I don't even care. It sits in a dock and we use it as a deskptop (sparingly) For the things I was using it for on my lap, the iPad works just fine. I use it daily, it's become my go-to consumption device at home. I have kids. I spend a lot of time at home surfing the internet. On the few occasions I did travel, I did so only with my iPad. It works for me. I have no desire to get another laptop type device right now.

I bought the 64gig AT&T model yesterday, the same model I have in the previous version. I only used the AT&T connection a handful of times but it was enough to convince me to get it again.

Marco Arment has an excellent post if you're thinking about buying one about things to consider. Totally agree with this:

The Retina screen alone is going to be a huge improvement for the tasks that people do most on iPads: reading and web browsing. It’s also going to be very significant if you like viewing photos on your iPad.

and

Nobody outside of Apple knows what the next iPad will be like, but it probably won’t come for another full year, and it will probably be a more incremental update (faster, better camera) compared to this update with the Retina screen.
If you prefer to skip generations, I bet it will make good sense to buy this one and skip the next one.

 That's pretty much where I'm coming from.

MG Siegler over at Tech Crunch:

It’s one of those things where it may be a little hard to tell at first because the images on the screen are the same. But when you look closer, you get it. And you’ll never be able to use a non-Retina iPad again. The new iPad display makes everything look like a printed photograph. By comparison, the old iPad display makes everything look as if I’ve taken my glasses off. Blurry.

Yep.