plzkthxbai

2015 was an amazing year for music. As is our annual tradition, here are my favorite 50 albums from this past year. They’re all awesome.

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Initially when I sat down to reflect on the music of 2014, it didn’t seem very memorable. I didn’t spend quite as much time listening to music this past year due to an uptick in my podcast listening. However, after looking back through my various sources, I remembered loads of great stuff. I discovered many new artists and enjoyed some follow-up albums from old favorites. Hope you enjoy the list.

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It’s time for my annual blog post! This year my list started out with 98 potential albums. These are albums that I’ve listened to (and enjoyed) at least 5 times throughout the year. I slowly narrowed the list down during the past week and I’m pretty happy with the finalized list. If you’d like to follow along throughout the year, I suggest watching my last.fm page and music blog. Enjoy the list and Happy New Year!

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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!

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At the end of February I met up with a few friends in Lake Tahoe, California, for a few days of skiing in the Sierra Nevadas. It was my first visit to California and I was extremely excited to check it out. Unfortunately, this winter was one of the worst on record for snowfall and the mountains were in serious need of snow. After much deliberation, we decided to take our chances and hope for a big storm at the end of the week. Our luck paid off, as we received 15″ of snow during our last day of skiing at Squaw Valley. It was only the beginning of a big storm that eventually brought 5 feet of snow to the region over the next 4 days.

Lake Tahoe view from our hotel

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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!

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Earlier this year Apple announced iTunes Match alongside its iCloud offering. iCloud allows you to access your music from all of your devices and download (or stream) the music you want to listen to. iTunes Match is intended for users who have music in iTunes that was not purchased from the iTunes store. This could be music purchased from Amazon, ripped from CDs, or downloaded from Napster back in the day. iTunes Match allows you to store up to 25,000 songs from your collection. (This limit does not include songs purchased from the iTunes Store.) The flagship feature of iTunes Match is the ability to “match” songs from your personal collection with those in the iTunes Store. This is a huge benefit because you don’t need to upload these tracks to iCloud, they will be automatically added to your account. On November 14th, two weeks after the “late October” deadline that Apple initially promised, iTunes Match went live in the US for $24.99/year. I have been using the new service for 10 days and I’m extremely pleased thus far.

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With the launch of the new iPhone 4S last week, Apple introduced an intelligent personal assistant named Siri. Apple acquired the company, Siri, in April of last year and has since been integrating their software into iOS. Siri uses advanced natural language processing to assist with making phone calls, scheduling meetings, sending messages, or simply looking for a place to eat lunch. Siri uses the voice recognition technology from Nuance Communications to capture your speech with incredible accuracy and send it off to Siri’s brain for processing.

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.

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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.

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This coming Monday will be exactly 2 years since starting the P90X workout program. I first heard about the workout DVDs from a friend and later discovered that they were quite popular on late night infomercials. I decided to try it out and quickly realized that this was the real deal. This program is intense and requires serious motivation. Each workout lasts between 50 and 80 minutes and there are 12 different workouts. If you follow any of the 3 workout schedules, you will be working out 6 days a week for 13 weeks.

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!

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