I really, really love music. I listened to a ridiculous amount of new music over the past year. As the year progressed, I started listening to less electronic/bass music and started listening to more indie/dream pop and hip-hop music. I listened to a lot of new artists and re-discovered some old favorites. To pick my favorite albums released this year, I relied heavily on my last.fm profile stats and my “weekly” music blog. Enjoy the list and Happy New Year!

Top 50 – Released in 2012

1. Stars – The North
2. Grimes – Visions
3. Wild Nothing – Nocturne
4. The XX – Coexist
5. Purity Ring – Shrines
6. Beach House – Bloom
7. Rusko – Songs
8. Kanye West – G.O.O.D Music: Cruel Summer
9. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis – The Heist
10. Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d city
11. Twin Shadow – Confess
12. Frank Ocean – Channel Orange
13. Say Anything – Anarchy, My Dear
14. Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles (iii)
15. Chairlift – Something
16. Passion Pit – Gossamer
17. Holy Other – Held
18. Bloc Party – Four
19. Ke$ha – Warrior
20. Frankie Rose – Interstellar
21. Netsky – 2
22. Dragonette – Bodyparts
23. Two Door Cinema Club – Beacon
24. Flosstradamus – Total Recall EP
25. Metric – Synthetica
26. Japandroids – Celebration Rock
27. Hot Chip – In Our Heads
28. Bassnectar – Vava Voom
29. Dum Dum Girls – End of Daze EP
30. Klaypex – Ready To Go
31. Imagine Dragons – Night Visions
32. Ellie Goulding – Halcyon
33. Calvin Harris – 18 Months
34. Big Boi – Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors
35. Com Truise – In Decay
36. School of Seven Bells – Ghostory
37. Sleigh Bells – Reign Of Terror
38. Lana Del Rey – Born to Die
39. Nas – Life is Good
40. Porcelain Raft – Strange Weekend
41. TNGHT – TNGHT EP
42. Zedd – Clarity
43. Grizzly Bear – Shields
44. If These Trees Could Talk – Red Forest
45. Nicki Minaj – Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded
46. Cat Power – Sun
47. Steve Aoki – Wonderland
48. Delta Spirit – Delta Spirit
49. Jack White – Blunderbuss
50. 2 Chainz – Based on a T.R.U. Story

I’ve also broken down the above list by genre:

Best Hip-Hop

• Macklemore & Ryan Lewis – The Heist
• Kanye West – G.O.O.D Music: Cruel Summer
• Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d city
• Frank Ocean – Channel Orange
• Big Boi – Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors

Best Indie/Dream Pop

• Grimes – Visions
• Wild Nothing – Nocturne
• The XX – Coexist
• Beach House – Bloom
• Stars – The North
• Purity Ring – Shrines

Best Bass/Electro

• Rusko – Songs
• Netsky – 2
• TNGHT – TNGHT EP
• Flosstradamus – Total Recall EP
• Zedd – Clarity
• Klaypex – Ready To Go

Best Pop

• Twin Shadow – Confess
• Dragonette – Bodyparts
• Frankie Rose – Interstellar
• Chairlift – Something
• Lana Del Rey – Born to Die

Best Electronic/Dance

• Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles (iii)
• Passion Pit – Gossamer
• Ke$ha – Warrior
• Holy Other – Held
• Calvin Harris – 18 Months

Best Indie/Alternative

• Metric – Synthetica
• Bloc Party – Four
• Two Door Cinema Club – Beacon
• Japandroids – Celebration Rock
• Imagine Dragons – Night Visions

If you enjoyed this post, you should check out my music blog, Album of the Week.

Lake Tahoe view from our hotel

The conditions during our first two days of skiing were less than ideal. They were good in the morning, but went downhill towards the end of the day. We made the 2-hour drive to Kirkwood for our first day of skiing. The drive was epic, with amazing views of Lake Tahoe and the surrounding mountains. Kirkwood was a fun mountain and seemed like it would be incredible on a powder day. The second day we drove to Alpine Meadows, which was only about 30 minutes away from our hotel on Lake Tahoe. Most of the mountain was covered in ice moguls, so we were forced to stay on a limited number of trails. We spent a lot of time in the terrain park at Alpine. The park was meticulously groomed and had a lot of smaller features, which was perfect for us since we were a bit rusty.

We woke up on the third day at 7 AM to 2 inches of snow outside of our hotel. By the time we got to Squaw Valley, it looked like there were around 4 inches at the base. We met up with some other friends and jumped on the gondola. It was a big powder day and Squaw was empty! Unbelievable. At the top of the gondola was the world’s first Starbucks “Ski-Thru” which was very cool. We skied powder all day at Squaw Valley and by the end of the day the mountain was reporting 15 inches of new snow. I don’t think I’ve ever had a day of skiing go by so fast!

Lake Tahoe was one of the most scenic places I’ve ever been to. Check out a few photos from the trip and a video edit that I made this afternoon.

View of Lake Tahoe from Alpine Meadows

Snowing hard at Squaw Valley

Kyle on the lift at Squaw Valley

See the full photo gallery on Flickr.

]]> http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/2012/03/25/skiing-in-lake-tahoe/feed/ 0 http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/2011/12/30/my-favorite-albums-from-2011/ http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/2011/12/30/my-favorite-albums-from-2011/#comments Sat, 31 Dec 2011 03:12:27 +0000 Jason Wagner http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/?p=2324

As 2011 comes to a close, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at my favorite albums released this year. I listened to a lot of music. With great services like Spotify and iTunes Match recently released, I found myself listening to music constantly. I continued to explore new genres and, as a result, new artists. Many of the artists in my Top 50 are new to my music library this year. It’s been an exciting year of music discovery for me and I can’t wait for 2012!

Top 50 Albums of 2011

1. Florence + the Machine – Ceremonials
2. Nero – Welcome Reality
3. CunninLynguists - Oneirology
4. M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
5. Washed Out – Within and Without
6. Wynter Gordon – With The Music I Die
7. Holy Ghost! – Holy Ghost!
8. Rise Against – Endgame
9. Kill The Noise – Kill Kill Kill
10. Joker – The Vision
11. Moving Mountains – Waves
12. Drake – Take Care
13. Rival Schools – Pedals
14. Kanye West & Jay-Z – Watch the Throne
15. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Belong
16. The Strokes – Angles
17. PANTyRAiD – Superior EP
18. Britney Spears – Femme Fatale
19. Surkin – USA
20. Phantogram – Nightlife EP
21. Neon Indian – Era Extrana
22. Rustie – Glass Swords
23. Digitalism – I Love You, Dude
24. Zomboy – Game Time EP
25. Knife Party – 100% No Modern Talking
26. Gotye – Making Mirrors
27. Toro Y Moi – Freaking Out EP
28. Explosions in the Sky – Take Care, Take Care, Take Care
29. In Flames – Sounds of a Playground Fading
30. The Weeknd – House of Balloons
31. Bassnectar – Divergent Spectrum
32. Mogwai – Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
33. Radiohead – The King of Limbs
34. Gang Gang Dance – Eye Contact
35. Gladkill – LoveLost EP
36. Coldplay – Mylo Xyloto
37. Above & Beyond – Group Therapy
38. Blue Sky Black Death – Noir
39. Destroyer – Kaputt
40. Mount Kimbie – Carbonated EP
41. LIGHTS – Siberia
42. Eisley – The Valley
43. Com Truise – Galactic Melt
44. Cut Copy – Zonoscope
45. Bibio – Mind Bokeh
46. Asking Alexandria – Reckless & Relentless
47. Sleeping with Sirens – Let’s Cheers to This
48. Mimosa – 58 Degrees EP
49. Porter Robinson – Spitfire EP
50. I See Stars – The End Of The World Party

I decided to break the list down into a few sections. I created mini-lists to group the albums by genre. This should make it easier to find the best albums in your favorite genre. I hope these lists will encourage you to explore some new music.

Best Dubstep/Glitch-Hop Albums

• Welcome Reality by Nero
• Kill Kill Kill by Kill The Noise
• The Vision by Joker
• Superior EP by PANTyRAiD
• Game Time EP by Zomboy
• 100% No Modern Talking by Knife Party

Best Hip-Hop/R&B Albums

• Take Care by Drake
• Oneirology by CunninLynguists
• Watch the Throne by Kanye West & Jay-Z
• House of Balloons by The Weeknd

Best Pop Albums

• Ceremonials by Florence + the Machine
• With The Music I Die by Wynter Gordon
• Femme Fatale by Britney Spears
• Mylo Xyloto by Coldplay

Best Dance/Electronic Albums

• Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming by M83
• Within and Without by Washed Out
• Holy Ghost! by Holy Ghost!
• USA by Surkin
• I Love You, Dude by Digitalism
• Era Extrana by Neon Indian

Best Rock Albums

• Pedals by Rival Schools
• Belong by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
• Angles by The Strokes
• Endgame by Rise Against
• Waves by Moving Mountains
• Take Care, Take Care, Take Care by Explosions in the Sky

Most Surprising Album

Britney Spears’ Femme Fatale was probably the most surprising album for me this year. I’ve never been a huge fan of Britney, even though I do listen to a decent amount of pop music. I’d assumed her career was basically over, so you can imagine my surprise when I first heard this album. While the lyrical content is rubbish, I love the overall dance and electronic vibe of the album. I found myself listening to this album a lot more than I’m willing to admit.

If you enjoyed this post, you should check out my music blog, Album of the Week.

Setting up iTunes Match

Setting up iTunes Match was a breeze since nearly everything is automatic. If you’re running the latest version of iTunes, you should see a new “iTunes Match” option in the left sidebar. This page will explain the service and provide you with a link to purchase the annual subscription. Once you sign up, iTunes will scan your music library and gather data about your collection. The matching is done by using an audio fingerprint which can identify the track regardless of the metadata you have in the ID3 tags. It took a few minutes to “match” my library of 21,737 songs. Amazingly, 19,651 of my tracks were matched! The final step in the process was to upload the remaining tracks that could not be matched. In my case, I needed to upload 2,083 songs and plenty of high-resolution album art that I have associated with most of my albums. This took a few hours on my good (30/5 Mbps) internet connection.

Once you’ve completed the initial match and upload process, your entire library will be backed up in iCloud! Any new music that you add to iTunes in the future will be automatically processed and added to iCloud. If you’re interested to see whether a song was matched or uploaded, you can add the new “iCloud Status” column to your Library view. For songs that are listed as matched, these songs will be available as a 256 kbps AAC track. This is fantastic for those old 128 kbps albums you might have in your library from the 90s. However, if you have a 320 kbps album that gets matched, it will only be available in 256 kbps bitrate for your other devices which do not actually have the original mp3 file. This seems like a fair trade-off to me.

Stream your music from other Mac OS X (and Windows) computers

My absolute favorite aspect of iTunes Match is the ability to have my entire music collection replicated perfectly to my laptop at work, without having to copy any of the files! iTunes Match syncs all of your iTunes Library metadata including playlists, play counts, “last played” information, comments, and full high-resolution album art. On the Mac, you can stream all of your music from Apple’s servers without ever downloading the music. If you want to download an album or song, you can do so by clicking on the little cloud icon. I’ve had fantastic playback this week with albums streaming almost instantly and without any stuttering or buffering. If you routinely use more than one computer and love music, this functionality is incredible.

Using iTunes Match on iOS

Most people don’t have two computers that they use on a regular basis, so it’s more likely that you will use iTunes Match on your iPhone, iPod, or Apple TV. Once you enable iTunes Match in the Settings app on the device, you’ll see a message telling you that the music on your device will be replaced with music from iCloud. Basically, you can’t have both iCloud music and locally-synced music from your Mac on the device. I’m optimistic that Apple could remove this limitation in a future software update, but for now, it sucks.

Once your device is configured to use iTunes Match, you’ll have your entire music library available. You will see a cloud icon next to albums that are in iCloud but not yet on your device. To listen to a song, just tap the song and it will begin to download to your phone. Once part of the song is downloaded, you will be able to start listening to it. iCloud on an iOS device is different from the Mac because you aren’t able to do pure streaming from iCloud. Anything that you listen to will be downloaded and saved on the device. Practically speaking, this makes sense since downloading over 3G uses a lot of data and can be slow. It seems logical to utilize the available disk space on the device to save songs that you frequently listen to. Luckily, the device is smart enough to manage available disk space and will delete the least-recently-played tracks once the device begins to fill up. It’s still a bit unclear how this works, but for now we can hope that the smart engineers at Apple made the right decisions.

Overall, I am less impressed with the iOS portion of iTunes Match. I’ve found that my Music app on the phone is quite sluggish with my huge library. For the first time it’s possible to have 1800+ albums in the Music app because the actual files don’t need to be on the device. Hopefully these performance issues will be resolved in a future update. iTunes Match is currently beta software, so some issues like this are expected.

Despite these issues, there are definitely many bright spots. For example, if you begin to play an album or playlist, the next song in the list will begin to download while the first one is playing. This means that once you buffer the first track in an album, you can pretty much listen to the entire album without having to wait for each song to buffer individually. I love that I can create and manage a playlist on my Mac and pull out my phone to see that the new playlist and songs are added almost instantaneously. Because there’s no need to sync the actual music files, everything stays in sync very quickly.

Wrap Up

I’m extremely impressed with iTunes Match so far. The benefits on the desktop are astounding and the iOS support looks promising. If Apple can allow access to both iCloud music and manually synced music on the iPhone, this would be perfection. It’s great to have another copy of my music collection safely backed up in the cloud and it’s pretty much absurd that this great service is available for only $2/month! I don’t see why anyone would pass this up.

Siri is fantastic. The main reason I decided to upgrade from the iPhone 4 to the 4S was because of this new technology. I could probably pass up a faster processor, or an improved camera, but when something like Siri is announced, I just have to see how it works! It’s akin to when the first iPad was released. Siri feels like a game changer and I don’t want to miss out on the action. There have been a lot of reviews about how Siri works, so I won’t go into that too much, but I would like to discuss the future impact that Siri could have in both our lives and the tech industry.

Many iPhone users are frustrated that Apple restricted Siri to the iPhone 4S instead of including it as part of iOS 5 and allowing iPhone 4 users access. There’s been a lot of speculation around why Apple decided to do this. Some people are suggesting that the dual-core performance of the 4S was needed in order to support Siri. Others say that Apple restricted Siri to the 4S in order to sell more hardware and push curious users (like me) to upgrade. Another theory is that Apple used the 4S as a way to limit the number of Siri users during this “beta” period. I absolutely agree with this theory. Apple announced that they sold over 4 million iPhone 4S during the first weekend of sales. That’s a lot. However, when you compare this to the total number of iOS devices sold thus far (250 Million¹), it’s a small fraction. Let’s conservatively assume that 20 million of these users are on iOS 5 after the first week or two. That’s 5x the load on the already struggling Siri servers and network. By limiting Siri to 4S only, they can slowly increase load as they sell more devices. If they feel confident that they can scale, they may open up Siri to everyone in a future software update.

Siri works by streaming your voice to Apple’s servers as you talk and then, once you’re finished, converting this speech to text and performing the natural language processing to understand what you mean. It sounds complicated, but it works extremely fast as long as Siri’s servers are humming along. (The first few days after the 4S was released, Siri was seeing considerable load/traffic and would often respond that she was unable to connect to the network. I have not seen this error in the past few days, so the situation seems to be improving.) One drawback of always sending everything out to Apple’s servers is that you cannot use Siri when you are offline. So, if you’re traveling in another country without data roaming, you can’t use Siri. Practically speaking, this isn’t a huge issue… but it would be nice if a subset of the commands worked locally on the phone.

More importantly, streaming everything out to Siri’s datacenter provides some massive benefits. Apple is able to keep a huge database of every request ever sent to Siri. Over time they will be able to extract a massive amount of information about “the world’s questions”. In addition to gathering all of this data, Apple is able to update Siri’s brain without requiring iPhone users to do a software update. As far as we know, Siri could have updated 36 times since Friday’s launch. Apple could use all of this request data to gradually add functionality into Siri. For example, they could sort all of the requests that Siri was unable to answer and begin to support them. If 100,000 people asked for sports scores this weekend, maybe that should be the next area to focus on? Siri provides Apple with incredible access into the tasks and questions that millions of users around the world are trying to accomplish. This is huge! If this sounds familiar, it’s because Google has been doing this with their big search box for years.

There are some major parallels between Google search and the functionality enabled by Siri. The difference is that Siri has access to your email, location, text messages, calendars, contacts, and other information. And, just like with Google, privacy and trust issues will certaintly come up with Siri. She knows a lot about us, and it’s important that we can trust Apple with this information. Personally, I am so much more inclined to trust Apple than I am Google. Google makes their money by selling advertisements. This means gathering a lot of information about the user so you can display better ads and make more money. In contrast, Apple is in the business of selling devices. The software and services are just icing on the cake to help lock in customers and drive hardware sales. Apple has not shown a lot of interest in pushing ads or violating the user’s privacy. I feel pretty confident that Apple will keep my personal data private.

Right now Siri only knows about a limited amount of information. Siri is able to access the data on your phone as well as information from Yelp and Wolfram Alpha. If Siri does not know the answer to your question, she offers to Search the Web (Google) for you. You don’t need to spend too much time using Siri before you get a decent grasp of her knowledge. I don’t ask Siri about sports scores or current events. I don’t ask her to tweet for me (although, it is possible). Over time you could imagine that many more services could be added to Siri which would provide a lot of value to users. Siri learns more about us as time goes on and should be able to improve her results and understanding. I’m thrilled to be living in a time where this kind of technology has become a reality. I think Siri’s future is bright.

1. 250 Million. Source: This is My Next

I’ve always been a huge fan of action sports films. There’s just something magical about watching some of the best athletes in the world travel to incredible places, ski/bike/ride ridiculous lines, and hit enormous jumps. It’s exciting to me because I can relate to the emotions they must be feeling, and I can appreciate the difficulty of the tricks they are doing. In most cases, they are getting to experience things that I’ll never be able to do. It’s like I’m living vicariously through them in some sort of dream world. It’s disappointing when you try to share this excitement with friends or family who are not particularly interested in the activity. They never seem to get it. They’re lacking that passion for the sport that many of us “core” fans have.

Many film companies have attempted to solve this problem. They strive to create films that can appeal to both passionate fans and a mainstream audience alike. It’s an extremely difficult task, but I think the guys at Red Bull Media House and Brain Farm Digital Cinema may have done just that. Legendary snowboarder Travis Rice and director Curt Morgan of Brain Farm have teamed up to create a documentary that has been 2 years in the making. The film follows Travis Rice and other top snowboarders across the globe while they ride pretty much anything that can be accessed by a helicopter. The documentary covers aspects of travel and filming that you don’t usually get to see in snowboard movies. There’s a distinct “behind the scenes” feel to the film that makes it one of the most engaging action sports films I’ve ever seen.

It’s widely assumed that this film had one of the biggest budgets ever in action sports. The hype surrounding this movie was massive. Billboards, featured trailers and ads during the VMAs, and a serious social media push really helped to reel in the mainstream audience. Red Bull was one of the biggest promotors of the film and continued to prove their dedication to action sports. One of the main reasons I wanted to see the film was because of the sheer production quality that was going into it. The film was shot on the Phantom Flex high-speed camera which can shoot 2,750 frames-per-second at 1080p! In addition to the Phantom, the Cineflex V14 HD stabilizer camera was used on many of the shoots to provide ridiculously smooth aerial footage. This camera was used in Planet Earth! To top it off, they teamed up with Dolby Digital for the audio mastering which happened at George Lucas’ Skywalker ranch. The Blu-ray will feature Dolby TrueHD 7.1 surround sound.

Speaking of the music, The Art of FLIGHT featured a fantastic soundtrack. Curt Morgan collaborated with Anthony Gonzalez of the electronic music group M83 to score some of the songs and create original tracks for the film and trailer. The soundtrack also features songs from Deadmau5, Nero, and a track by The Naked and Famous called “Young Blood”, which was one of my favorites. Every scene in the film seems to match the soundtrack perfectly. It’s beautiful.

The film can be purchased on iTunes in HD for $9.99. You can also order the Blu-ray edition on Amazon. If you haven’t figured it out already, I would highly recommend you put this film on the list. Even if you aren’t into snowboarding, the production value along is worth the cash.

Check out some of the gorgeous footage below:

Watch the trailer and read more about the film at: www.artofflightmovie.com.

As the popularity of P90X continues to grow, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the workout from curious friends and family. People always ask me if I follow the nutrition plan (I don’t) or which workout I think is the hardest. Of course I also get a bunch of people asking if they should start the program. Many of my friends have tried it, and a few have completed it at least once. I’ve been meaning to write about it for the past year, so this seems like the perfect way to celebrate!

My Daily Workout

First, I have a confession. I do not follow any of the workout schedules. As many of you know, I am an avid mountain biker and the thought of spending 6 nights a week in front of my TV didn’t sit well. For about 10 months out of the year, I substitute a good mountain bike ride for 2-3 days of P90X. I try my hardest to work out 7 days a week. In the winter, this is a bit harder since the weather is not as nice and it gets dark early. I’d say that I’ve probably worked out at least 350 days this past year. I’m at the point now where I actually feel guilty if I have to skip a workout. This usually only happens if I’m traveling or somewhere where it’s just not possible to get a good workout in.

Since I don’t follow any of the recommended schedules, I keep my own schedule. I do at least 2 strength training P90X workouts each week. I rotate 4 of the P90X workouts: Chest & Back, Back & Biceps, Shoulders & Arms, Chest Shoulders & Triceps. Each of these workouts includes Ab Ripper X at the end, which is a quick 20 minute ab workout. I always do abs after the strength days. In between strength days, I try to get in a good cardio/leg workout. Usually this is a 10 mile mountain bike ride. If it’s raining and the trails are closed, I usually like to throw in the Plyometics workout. Fridays are generally my “open” day. Occasionally I will go for a bike ride if the weather is nice, but usually I like to do the Core Synergistics workout. On the weekends, I usually opt for 2 long bike rides or some other type of exercise. I’ve found that mixing a super fun workout like mountain biking in with my P90X workouts has been critical to staying with the program for so long.

I noticed myself progressing a lot during the first few months. I was getting much stronger and I was definitely noticing some muscle growth. However, I was always sore. Really sore. I spent the first few months using exercise bands for the strength workout. These are really good for when you are just starting out and don’t feel like spending a lot of money on dumbbells. They are also perfect for traveling. Eventually, I decided that the bands were not doing it for me anymore and I got a nice set of dumbbells. I think this brought me to the next level and I’m still seeing progression, albeit slower, with the strength workouts. If you are already pretty fit, I would suggest going straight for the dumbbells.

As a quick side note, I recently tried another workout called Bob Harper: Pure Burn Super Strength. This is a single, hour-long workout that somehow manages to hit everything. Every two weeks I try to fit this workout into my routine and it’s brutal. I’d venture to say that this is probably more difficult than any single P90X workout. So, if you have already done P90X and are looking for something new and challenging, check it out!

Exercise vs. Dieting

I mentioned that one of the questions I get a lot is about the P90X Nutrition plan. The program includes a fairly comprehensive guide for eating right. I’ve never been a big fan of structured diets, so I can’t say that I really know anything about this guide. I guess I have a problem with structured diets because they just don’t seem sustainable to me. I love eating and I do try to make healthy choices. However, I’ve discovered that I would much rather do a tough 1 hour workout each day and not have to worry about what I eat. If you’re always just worrying about what you eat and you never exercise, you’re missing many of the other benefits you get from exercise. Sure, it takes more time, but think of the physical and mental health benefits you get from a good workout. Counting calories can’t do that! Also, considering I spend a very large part of my day sitting in front of a computer, it’s really nice to be able to spend some time exercising.

Why not just go to the Gym?

During high school and college I used to spend a lot of time at the gym. Towards the end of college, I did not spend nearly as much time at the gym as I would have liked. If you have a good workout partner and enough time, the gym can be very good. However, if you don’t have a good workout partner… I find that I don’t push myself as hard when I’m alone at the gym. The P90X workout dude, Tony Horton, is an amazing motivator. The guy is nearly 50 years old and he’s ripped! I’m a lot more comfortable pushing myself to complete exhaustion when I’m at home.

Originally when I started the workout, my plan was to do P90X until I got bored or annoyed with it. At that point I would get a gym membership and continue where I left off. Well, it’s been 2 years so far and I’m still not sick of P90X. I’m a bit shocked, to be honest. I love the convenience of being able to come home from work and start working out immediately. I don’t need to change clothes, drive to the gym, wait for equipment, etc. I just push play on my Playstation and I’m good to go. I’m able to eliminate a lot of the extra time that is padded onto a normal gym workout since I can cut out travel and all of that other stuff.

Is P90X right for me?

This is the ultimate question. The P90X program is marketed towards people who are already “in pretty good shape”. This is a very intense workout and it’s not recommended for people who’ve spend the last few years sitting on the couch. Sure you’re welcome to try it out, but the likelihood of you finishing the program is much smaller. I was in decent shape when I started thanks to mountain biking. The first few weeks of P90X were seriously brutal.

Another major issue is the time commitment. You should plan on allocating 90 minutes every day. For many people, their schedule just can’t support this type of program. I’ve gotten into the habit of coming home every day after work and working out before dinner. This means that we don’t usually eat dinner until 7:30-8pm. Obviously if you have kids or a very demanding job, this probably wouldn’t work for you.

Motivation is another huge factor. Anyone who has completed the program will tell you that it takes a lot of willpower and self-motivation. You need to seriously want it if you are going to succeed. Since it’s a home workout, it can be very tempting to come home from work exhausted and opt for the couch instead of your workout. I’m a very driven person so I generally don’t have a problem with this. Usually once a week I won’t want to workout but I just force myself to push play and do it anyway.

Finally, everyone is different. P90X offers 3 different routines based on your fitness level. There’s a lean version with more cardio, the Classic version, and even a Double workout. Some people will love the program and complete it many times over. Others will hate it and might be looking for something totally different. I can safely say that I LOVE it and I’m hoping to knock out a few more years.

Sorry, no pics. ;)

I first heard about Pool Party after reading a TechCrunch article about it at the end of June. The service sounded pretty interesting, so I decided to request an invite in hopes of getting a chance to check it out. A month passed and I had completely forgotten about the service until I received an email with my invite. I created my account and was immediately impressed with the application. The main feature of Pool Party is the ability to create “pools” and then invite people to be contributors to the pool. Basically, it’s like a shared photo gallery with a bunch of photographers adding photos, comments, and likes. If you’re hanging out with a bunch of people who are all using the app, it turns into an amazing time.

If you follow tech news closely, you might recognize that this sounds awfully similar to the Color app that was released a few months ago (and with $41M in VC funding). Pool Party is definitely similar in the sense that you are collaboratively creating a photo album, but I found Pool Party to be MUCH easier to use. Color doesn’t explicitly have the notion of friends, but instead relies mostly on location. It automatically creates albums based on photos taken near each other. So, if you’re out for dinner somewhere, you might start to see photos from strangers showing up alongside photos from your friends. With Pool Party, you and your friends control who is invited to the pool and only those users have access to the photos. Location does not play a part in the pool, so you can include people who are halfway across the country. I think this approach is much more logical and new users are immediately able to understand how it works.

For an early beta, the application is quite impressive. It did seem to crash occasionally during heavy use, but overall it worked pretty well. After the first day of heavy use, I received an email summary of the previous day’s activities. It included a “Top Photos” section based on the most commented/liked photos of the day. It was pretty cool to see the recap. (Note: normal day-to-day activity does not generate these emails. I guess it was just since we had a day of heavy activity in our pool that we passed some activity threshold.) I also like how you can view your pools on the Pool Party website. The website provides a few more features and settings that are not (yet) included in the mobile app. The website is a bit ugly, though.

The most fascinating thing about the application for me has been the rate of engagement. It’s probably because the application is pretty agressive with Push notifications, but it seems like within 5 minutes of a photo being posted, nearly everyone in the pool has seen it. This would not be totally surprising if it was just a bunch of tech geeks always on their iPhones, but i’m seeing this kind of engagement from friends who take an hour to reply to a text message. That’s impressive! There’s something addicting about a photo being added to the pool and when that Push notification comes in, I feel compelled to check it immediately. The downside of this is, obviously, that things can get out of hand pretty quickly if there is a lot of activity in the pool. Luckily, the application offers controls so you can disable Push notifications for certain pools.

The invite-only Pool Party application is available free on iOS and Android. If you need an invite, let me know or you could request an invite. I encourage you to go check out the app and invite some friends. It really is addicting!

UPDATE: Apparently, Google is killing the Slide projects, including Pool Party. So, it’s probably not worth your time signing up. :(

Dave hitting the big drop at the top of Snowshoe.

Saturday morning was a little bit sketchier than normal since it rained a lot on Friday. This meant slippery roots and rocks and lots of mud. The first few runs were pretty crazy for me and we all had our fair share of crashes on the slippery wood. As the day went on, the trails dried out and things were a bit more sane in the afternoon. We had fantastic weather all weekend as it was in the mid-70s, sunny, and breezy. I couldn’t imagine wearing all of that gear if it was much hotter than that.

The Boat House – Our lunch spot for the weekend.

All of us made it through Saturday without any major injuries and slept well that night. Sunday we got up to the mountain early and kicked off the morning with the important Starbucks Doubleshot. Riding on Sunday was a lot better since we were more comfortable with the (dry) trails and our bikes. Dave had a couple bad crashes and decided to take it easy in the afternoon and filmed some runs. I put together an edit of our trip. Check it out:

I also uploaded an unedited version of my favorite trail “Powerline”. Make sure to watch the videos in HD!

The first thing you see when you begin to use lion is a new login screen. It looks pretty cool and gives you additional details in the top corner such as wifi connection, battery percentage, and the time. After logging in you’ll see a dialog titled “Scrolling in Lion”. As you may have heard, Lion essentially inverts the scrolling so it behaves more like the iPhone and iPad. This is probably the most talked about thing in Lion simply because it’s such a drastic change to something we’ve been using for over two decades. I’ve been using the new scrolling for a couple of days now and my brain is mostly trained. If you have an iPad or an iPhone, I would highly recommend sticking it out and learning the new scrolling method. After a week or so, I think it will feel completely natural.

I don’t want to go over all of the new features in Lion, since there are many good reviews (and some long ones) already out there. However, I did spend some time yesterday going through Apple’s 250 New Features page and I made a list of some of my favorite new additions. I tried to pick out some features that I hadn’t seen covered in the other reviews. Many of these features are minor annoyances in Leopard and Snow Leopard that are finally fixed in Lion. I think it really exemplifies the refinement and polish that has gone into Lion.

Quicktime Screen Recording

Introduced in Snow Leopard, Quicktime screen recordings are extremely useful. However, they always felt like they were missing something by forcing you to record the entire screen. This was especially noticeable on very large displays which lead to unnecessarily large video files. Quicktime now allows you to record only a portion of the screen and the new UI for choosing an area of the screen is excellent.

Preview

Preview has to be one of the best applications to come pre-installed on OS X. Lion brings some new capabilities to open iWork and Microsoft Office documents. Don’t forget, the other flagship feature in Lion is the ability to sign PDF documents by taking a photo of a signed piece of paper using your FaceTime camera.

iChat

iChat is one of my most frequently used applications. Lion finally brings some critical features such as a Unified Buddy list so that you can see your Google Chat and AIM buddies in the same window. Unfortunately, iChat is still missing a lot of features. In Snow Leopard I would use the excellent Chax plugin to add these missing features. Chax is currently broken in Lion, however.

iCal

There is a great new feature called “Quick Add” which allows you to easily add new events using natural language. So you can enter “Board meeting on Thursday at 8pm” and iCal will handle the event creation for you. If this sounds familiar, that’s because the wonderful app Fantastical released the same functionality for iCal a month or two ago. It’s still nice to see this feature baked right into iCal.

Finder

File this one under the “Windows and Linux have had that feature for years” category. Finder is finally able to handle merging folders. Previously if you tried to combine two folders with the same name, Finder would overwrite the contents of the existing folder. Now it’s smart enough to sort everything out and merge them into a single folder. Finally.

FileVault 2

I’m excited to see that Apple has made drastic improvements to the disk encryption feature FileVault. I started using this feature yesterday on both of my machines and so far I have not noticed a performance hit. Everything works just like it did before I enabled it. FileVault now has an Instant Wipe feature which removes the encryption key from your Mac and then performs a completely disk wipe. It’s still not clear how you initiate the wipe… if anyone knows, please add a comment!

Quick Look

This is another feature I use all the time. Hit the spacebar when you have selected a file in Finder and a modal dialog will pop up to give you a preview of the file. In Lion, the Quick Look dialog will stay visible even if you switch out of the Finder application. For example, now you can Quick Look a Mp3 in Finder and switch to Safari while the song continues to play. This used to drive me crazy! Additionally, Quick Look now works in a multitude of new places such as Spotlight results, links in emails, and more.

Time Machine

If you have a portable Mac, Time Machine will now keep some “local snapshots” of your files so that you can have backups of your files even if you are traveling and do not have access to your Time Machine drive. I’m not sure if it backs up every file, or how it manages disk space. But, I can confirm that it’s working on my MacBook Pro and I can see two days worth of backups when I enter Time Machine with my drive disconnected.

Wrap Up

These are just a few of the 250 new features in Lion. I’ve been extremely impressed with Lion so far and highly recommend updating if you have a recent Mac with one of the new trackpads. The old plastic MacBooks have the old trackpad which doesn’t allow 3+ finger gestures. This could be a problem as Lion is highly dependent on multi-touch gestures. I am using the Magic Trackpad on my iMac and it almost seems like a requirement for Lion.

I’m glad Lion is finally here and I can’t wait to see how my workflow improves with all of these new features!