plzkthxbai

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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If you haven’t noticed, the mobile photo sharing space has been exploding lately. Facebook, Google+, and Twitter are all including photo-sharing as a major feature in their mobile apps. Smaller startups, such as Instagram, Path, and now Pool Party, are starting to get quite a following as well. Instagram continues to be my favorite photo-sharing app for the iPhone. It’s simple, and the filters can make any photo look sweet. But the new Pool Party application has really piqued my interest and I’ve been using it heavily over the past week.

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.

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Two weeks ago a couple friends and I headed up to Snowshoe Bike Park in WV for a weekend of downhill mountain biking. This was my first trip downhilling, but I generally do 3-4 days of cross-country mountain biking each week. The allure of downhill biking is a combination of lift access, big bikes, speed, and lots of jumps. Snowshoe was running two lifts to shuttle riders (and bikes) back up the mountain to access 1500 vertical feet of rocks, roots, and dirt jumps. Both sides of the mountain were open and the weather was fantastic all weekend.

Dave hitting the big drop at the top of Snowshoe.

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I installed OS X Lion (10.7) this week on both my personal and work Macs. I spent some time over at RoaringApps.com checking application compatibility for my frequently used applications. Everything was reported to be working fine in Lion so I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my OS on the first day it was released. The upgrade process was extremely smooth. I followed this Mac Rumors guide to create a Lion install DVD using the file that I downloaded from the Mac App Store. I used this DVD to install Lion on my second mac so I didn’t need to re-download the 3.74 GB installer. This went very smoothly. Impressive!

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.

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Spotify announced this week that it’s finally coming to the US. The streaming music service has been hugely popular in Europe since it started in late 2008, but presumably the record label deals have kept it from reaching the US… until now! Spotify offers three plans: Free, Unlimited, and Premium. The service is currently invite-only in the US for the Free plan, but if you are willing to pay $5/month for Unlimited (or $10 for Premium), you can sign up now on the Spotify website. On Thursday morning I received an invite for the free version but quickly upgraded to the Premium plan in order to give the service a fair trial. The Premium version offers mobile streaming, offline support, 320 Kbps high quality audio, and manages your local files in iTunes. So far, I have been extremely impressed with the service!

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This weekend I read a linked post on The Brooks Review which really irritated me. The linked post was about the popular 1Password application. Justin Blanton says:

“While on the topic, if you’re not using 1Password (or similar)—and you can afford it—then you’re an idiot. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but there just isn’t any excuse.”

Not a user of 1Password myself, I was unsurprisingly a bit offended by the “idiot” remark.  Especially because I consider my password management skills to be quite sufficient. Sure, I’ve heard of 1Password and KeePassX before. Many of my friends and coworkers use these type of password managers. Prior to this weekend, I had made a concious decision NOT to use this type of software. I had considered it on many occasions before and had always decided it wasn’t for me. Well, the above quote got me thinking and I decided to spend a day or two revisiting the topic.

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