Featured – Page 3

San Francisco

Yesterday I got back to Colorado from my spring break to San Francisco. I spent the week visiting with Alan, whom I had only seen once since high school graduation. His apartment is downtown just blocks from the Embarcadero, so we had easy access to all kinds of stuff. I got to hang out with a lot of Alan’s salesforce.com and Carnegie Mellon alum friends- lots of rock band, cupcakes, and hot tubs were had throughout the week.

I posted a stream of the more interesting places I visited on my Foursquare account. I particularly liked walking around in the Mission (in the sun 😀 ) and checking out some of San Francisco’s, ahem… more eccentric cafés (that link is mildly NSFW).

Towards the end of the week, I got to do some more catching up. I spent a day in Silicon Valley with family: Denis and Shana and my cousins Anora and Quinn. The kids have probably grown a foot and a half since I last saw them, so it was really fun to get to play with them. Shana works in HR at Google and took Denis and I around the Googleplex, which lived up to its reputation as a geek’s utopia. I also had a chance to meet up with Jessica, another friend from high school; we all went to Tommy’s Yucatan Restaurant, which is famous for their top-shelf tequila and is where my stepdad proposed to my mom.

So I had really great time overall. San Francisco is my favorite city in the United States and I’d love to find a software job out there. It isn’t making the prospects of living in Boulder, Denver or Fort Collins any less attractive, though; I had a great time there and I’m sure I’ll be having a great time there again regardless of where life takes me.

Below are the photos I took while I was there. (Denis took a couple of them while Quinn’s wrestling skills had me incapacitated.) I should also mention that Alan is way more of a shutterbug than I, and also spends a lot more time taking pictures of actual people instead of my transfixion on architecture and the like. He has a couple of great galleries from my time there: [One] [Two]

Proprietary Vendors Want Open Source Sanctions

The Guardian reports that International Intellectual Property Alliance requested that the U.S. Trade Representative to put countries using open source in government on a “Special 301 watchlist” – a list of intellectual property-violating nations, or “state sponsors of piracy.” The recommendation states:

The Indonesian government’s policy… simply weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness by creating an artificial preference for companies offering open source software and related services, even as it denies many legitimate companies access to the government market.

Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, it encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations.

As such, it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions.

In general, this is just another example of an established, successful industry trying to maintain power by coercing governments to make emerging business models illegal, rather than bothering to innovate and create sustainability in the free market. I rant about this all the time, so I won’t continue to do so here.

But since this was filed by the “International Intellectual Property Alliance” – an interest group which conveniently separates this action’s publicity from the companies it represents – I thought I’d just call out just a few of the member companies which are behind this anticompetitive action: (this list goes through member organizations of the IIPA, including the BSA, ESA and AAP)

Adobe
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Apple
Bloomberg Press
The Cato Institute (Free market libertarian economics think tanks for government regulations?!)
Cisco Systems
Dell
Electronic Arts
Harcourt, Inc.
Houghton Mifflin Co.
HP
IBM
Intel
McGraw-Hill
Microsoft
Motion Picture Association of America
Nintendo
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
SAP
Sony
Symantec
Xerox
Countless University presses (MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford, Universities of California, Chicago, New York, North Carolina and more)

While there isn’t evidence that these companies directly instigated the effort to stifle competition from open source, they are the financial backers of this anticompetitive organization, and thus have a responsibility to be accountable for its actions.

Why Google Buzz is a huge deal

Today, Google announced the release of their new product, Google Buzz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi50KlsCBio

Looking at just the features offered in this video, it appears to be nothing more than a Facebook News Feed clone with Gmail integration. But don’t be fooled: Google Buzz has the potential to totally disrupt social networking as we know it today, and to do it for the better, for the sole reason of its open nature.

Online social networking has been a repetition of the same pattern since the mid-1990s: companies offering “walled-garden” networks offering cool new ways to connect with others – as long as they buy into the same network. It’s great for business, as users are better attractors of customers than any cool new feature could ever be. The operator then owns that social interaction medium between the people who come to rely upon it. We saw it happen with AOL. We saw it in the early 2000’s with the advent of blogging, as the most successful personal blogs were the ones hosted on social communities such as Livejournal, Xanga and Blogger. We moved on to MySpace (come on, admit it… we all can share in the shame!) and then Facebook, and Twitter has long passed the point of being a toy for early adopters, as it has become a tool of the masses.

But these sites – these closed networks – lock users into using their system for communication. This is in stark contrast with our real life social network – the completely fluid and decentralized manner in which we interact. This social network belongs to us, and cannot be monopolized by another. There is no tangible constraint that keeps me from interacting with someone else in one way or another, only issues like distance and language, things which are decreasingly important as technology advances.

So why should our social interactions online be different from our interactions in the rest of the world? I should be able to connect with others regardless of which applications I choose to use. Google Buzz is a major step in this direction. Buzz has a huge amount of interoperability using existing technologies like Atom/RSS and OAuth, and is getting much more soon. (It’s all for developers’ taking at Buzz’s Google Code page.)

What makes this relevant to everyone is the ability to publish and read from just about any application you want. This isn’t a centralized application like Facebook Platform, where developers extend more functionality to users and keep them inside the “Walled Garden,” but enables social communication between all kinds of applications, instead of demanding that friends use the same applications if they wish to communicate. In theory, I can post a status, photo, video, or just about anything on Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, or even my personal site at ZekeWeeks.com, and everybody gets that information regardless of which applications they choose to use themselves.

This announcement means a win for the users, and a serious threat to operators of closed social networks. I don’t know how much it will succeed, but I’m all for products which improve users’ lives and increase technologies’ openness to everyone’s benefit.

A Day In Technology: 2010

Two and a half years ago, I was feeling super geeky and wrote a post covering the software I use in a normal day. It was interesting to read now, as somethings have changed a ton, and some things have remained exactly the same. I have since switched my main machine from a Dell Inspiron laptop to a MacBook Pro running OS X Snow Leopard, so that obviously changes some things, but what’s more interesting is the trends in how work and play gets done online in a pretty short time. So here’s an up-to-date synopsis of the tech that this CIS Major / Web Developer / general technophile interacts with in a normal day:

In the morning:

I try to avoid the computer sitting in my bedroom. I agree with the psychologists who claim that bedrooms should only be used for sleep and sex; I prefer to have a separate workspace. My current house is great, but lacks the room for me to really do this. I’m connected to the web all the time, so I can afford to stay disconnected in the morning as I gather my senses and try to remember who I am and why I’m not waking up in Spain.
This all goes out the window if I’ve forgotten to sign out of Instant Messenger – in that case, my friend Jesse usually jars me awake just for kicks.

From the Fortress of Productivity (also known as my home workstation):

It’s insane how many productivity tools are moving online. Because of this, most of what I do runs out of a Chromium (Google Chrome) nightly build. Chrome’s recently-added bookmark sync and extensions features are to die for, and make web apps feel more like traditional desktop ones.
I had a six-month affair with Apple Mail for my e-mail, but I have since returned to my web Gmail client. Nothing beats the ability to never delete a single email, and then go back to search all of those messages. I can pull up client interactions from 2004 and have them readily accessible at a moment’s notice. I’d honestly prefer to use a desktop client, but so far they’re pretty limited by the old IMAP and POP protocols.
I keep an eye on both my social networks and the news using TweetDeck.
Less frequently, I check a ton of RSS feeds using my Netvibes homepage. I recently borrowed my friend Kevin’s great idea and now have a whole tab devoted to feeds of Craigslist job listings, which allows me to spend a lot less time on upkeep while still staying on top of the latest job openings.
I recently started teaching myself guitar. I use Apple’s Logic Studio to play and record. It has a ton of amazing amp models and effects. I was using FL Studio on my PC system, which I still know my way around better than Logic. I’m honestly tempted to put a native Windows install back on this machine in order to have FL back. I’m trying to convince myself that I just need to work my way up the learning curve with Logic. We’ll see how that goes. On the flipside, I have GarageBand installed too, and that’s about the coolest and easiest-to-use Digital Audio Workstation I’ve ever used.
Adium is one of the real joys of being on Mac OS. I haven’t been happier with a multi-protocol IM app.
I’d be dead in the water without VMware Fusion 3. I use this as my connection to the Windows world, as well as the tool which enables me to try out the latest Linux distributions, though this has become a lot less interesting since my switch to OS X satisfied almost all the needs I was looking to Linux to fill.
For years I relied on the Adobe Creative Suite, especially Dreamweaver, to do web design and LAMP development work. Now I’m using Panic’s Coda, which is an amazing single-window IDE for web development. The interface is way more usable and gets out of the way to let you code. It has great integrated workflow for previewing layouts, uploading & managing files, and doing remote terminal work. I use the MAMP software package as a super easy way to test my apps on local web servers and databases.
For the more uninteresting kind of work, I’ve got both the Office 2008 for Mac and Office 2010 Beta for Windows installed on my system. I have to say that I’m not a huge fan of Mac Office in comparison to Office 2007 and 2010 for Windows, of which I’m a huge fan. But what has surprised me most is how much I enjoy using Apple’s Pages and Keynote as alternatives, which seriously required no time for me to learn and are a lot easier to start doing pretty great visual layout tasks without needing in-depth knowledge of the program. All of my current résumé stuff is done in Pages. It’s really the first time I’ve actually felt like I’m enjoying a word processing program. Unfortunately it doesn’t have perfect compatibility with MS Office, so anything that has to be interoperable with others still gets done in Office.
Dropbox has accomplished what web companies have been trying to get right for over a decade: seamless personal file sync. My Dropbox folder has completely replaced the various “Documents” folders on various systems I use. Instead, this little piece of software gives me one unified folder that stays in sync across all my machines: my laptop, my netbook, even my iPhone. And if I’m in a computer lab or elsewhere, it’s all accessible through the Dropbox website as well.
Picasa 3 is still my photo library software. They don’t make it easy to export from Windows to Mac versions, so I had to do some XML hackery to keep all of my albums and tags intact. Picasa has all of the features I need, but the Mac version is built on the Qt framework, which does a great job, but is very sluggish. I’d love to give a more native app like iPhoto or Aperture a try, but the effort involved in moving my stuff over means that I won’t make the jump unless I really have to.
I still love using WordPress as a content production platform for myself and clients. While traditional blogging is falling in popularity, WordPress is evolving to offer syndicators new and interesting ways to get their content out there. Right now I’m trying to decide on the best way to turn ZekeWeeks.com into my personal content hub which then syndicates select stuff to Facebook and Twitter.

On campus:

Each day I debate which computer I should bring to campus: my MacBook Pro or my netbook. The netbook runs Windows 7 Professional phenomenally, and has an amazing battery life. Having Google Chrome on there means my bookmarks stay in sync with my main machine. On a side note, I am a huge fan of Windows 7; I think it’s the best Windows release in a decade, and could be a very happy person using it as my main OS.
I take notes with Evernote, which is nothing short of amazing. All my notes stay in sync across all my devices, a rich web client, and my iPhone, and are fully searchable and require little effort to keep organized. I have one class where laptops aren’t allowed, so I’ll scan in notes from that class once I get home. Evernote has OCR technology that recognizes my handwriting and makes those notes searchable.
This semester, I’m taking a pretty interesting class in advanced networking & security. We’re doing everything on top of the VMware ESXi virtualization platform. I’m pretty familiar with VMware’s desktop offerings, but ESXi is a whole new bag of fun for me.

On my iPhone:

I’ve had my iPhone since 2007, and phones are finally starting to come out that can match its usefulness. I’m patiently awaiting the next round of devices from HTC and Apple, and will probably go with the best offering on Verizon later this year.
I have constant social network overload thanks to Facebook for iPhone, Tweetie 2, iReddit and BeejiveIM.
Spare moments around town find me using the Kindle app, or DoodleJump, an addictive game tied into my friends’ highscores. My 9 year old cousin kicked my butt last week.
My phone is carrier unlocked to T-Mobile and jailbroken to allow me to run GV Mobile, a native Google Voice client for my phone. All my voicemail forwards to Google Voice, where I get message transcriptions that are easier for me to deal with than traditional voicemail.

So there it is – I had a lot more to say on that than I had expected! It’s interesting how much stuff has moved over to the web. Socially, everyone is getting more and more interconnected, and it’s changing the face of our personal and professional lives. I think it’s important to stay conscious of these changes, both for the opportunities they present and the important decisions they demand we make regarding our availability to others, our privacy, the way we do business, and even our values in how we relate to one another.

McCain breaks his word on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

Three years ago, John McCain had this to say regarding the United States’ discriminatory policy on homosexuals serving in the military:

“The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it because those leaders in the military are the ones we give the responsibility to.”

Today, the leadership of the military – Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen – testified to the Senate Armed Service Committee that it is time to change the policy. McCain’s response to the military’s highest leadership?

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has been an imperfect but effective policy. And at this moment, when we are asking more of our military than at any time in recent memory, we should not repeal this law.”

Admiral Mullen testified, “It is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.… I cannot escape being troubled in the fact that we have in place a policy that forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.” But apparently that’s not good enough for Senator McCain any more.

John McCain has been an interesting character to me, and my coverage of him on this blog reflects that. I’ve given him high praise for his sometimes unpopular stand on torture, and endorsed him in the Republican primaries. But despite the noble values the Senator sometimes espouses, this is not the first time he has made a complete political about-face – check out his argument for troop withdrawal from Haiti in the early ’90s compared to his unflinching support of our current extended occupations in the Middle East.

It’s one thing to be a “maverick” and express your views even when they conflict with political convenience. It’s another thing to actually follow through on those views as an honest man. I honor your opinions, Senator McCain, but I question your integrity when you won’t stand by your own commitments.

Follow-up: This isn’t the DROID I’m looking for.

Last week I posted an article about my thoughts on Verizon’s Motorola DROID after using it for a week. Here’s where I stand after over two weeks now:

I’m not going to keep it. I love its superior functionality. I can overlook the young OS’s shortcomings. The hardware just isn’t resilient enough. There’s no way that it will hold up under my usage patterns for two years. I have already exchanged one Droid for another unit due to shorts in the loosely-seated headphone jack. The battery cover loves to fall off without user modification. And the keyboard seems to be made of one contiguous sheet of plastic, so I can’t imagine that holding up well over time. For comparison, my original iPhone is still in excellent condition, and no parts have worn out at all.

The OS itself is pretty good overall, but it has some bugs that kill me. Were it on better hardware, I wouldn’t switch devices solely because of them. Most annoying is how I can’t ever stream a long podcast without it dying halfway through – and this happens with any app, it must be an OS problem. Today, the whole screen refused to turn on and I had to remove the battery to force reboot it.

Today, when I came to the point of telling myself, “I couldn’t keep using this for two years, I have to send it back,” it really pained me. Despite the crappy build quality and occasional software problem, I am loving the crap out of Verizon’s network and 3G speed. I love having constant background applications so I have persistent and bug-free connections to Gmail, IM and Twitter. Integration with Google Talk is great, and I’d love to work on actually developing software for this phone. So naturally, I didn’t like the idea of having to return to AT&T and my nice, but albeit feature-limited iPhone.

I may not have to go back to AT&T after all. I’ve been trying to figure out all of the rumors going around about the HTC Bravo / Passion / Dragon. It may prove to be the Google Nexus One, which so far only is known to exist in a GSM variety. But it looks like the Passion is also slated for a Verizon release in January. I think HTC does a much better job at making great hardware, so I would jump at the opportunity to use a 1GHz, keyboard-free Android phone on Verizon.

So I have until January 13 before my “worry-free guarantee” on my contract expires. If the Passion comes out on Verizon, I’ll exchange my Droid for that. If it doesn’t, I’ll be back to AT&T or T-Mobile and my reliable old iPhone until something better comes along on Verizon.

An iPhone user’s week with the DROID

Last week I switched from my trusty original (non-3G) iPhone to Verizon for the much-heralded Motorola DROID. I’ve been seeing Google’s Android OS maturing over the last year and a half, and now I’m convinced that within the next couple of years, Android devices are going to be a huge deal. Right now we’re seeing pretty much all of the American wireless carriers release many next-generation Android devices with different form factors and fitting different price ranges – instead of the iPhone’s “one size fits all” approach, Android is taking the same route as Windows Mobile, getting packed onto many devices from different manufacturers with a bunch of different specs in hopes that each device will better appeal to a diverse customer base.

The HTC Hero hit Europe last July and it seemed like the perfect device for me – save for its sluggish speed. Then comes the Droid on Verizon, which had a big feature list that stood out to me. When I found out that my state employee discounts make the Droid cheaper than my old iPhone plan, I decided to give it a try. Verizon has an extended return period during the holidays, so I have until the middle of January to figure out if Android OS and the Droid are for me, or if my iPhone and I are in for a longer-term relationship than I had planned.

(This isn’t a full-on review of the Droid – Engadget has an excellent one – but this is more about my personal experiences with the Droid from the perspective of a 2+ year iPhone user.)

The short of it is that the Droid has an amazing list of awesome features, but it lacks the iPhone’s incredibly polished user experience and attention to every detail. That tradeoff will mean different things to different kinds of users; I’m a nerd who has to deal with complicated systems on a regular basis, but I have a feeling that people just looking for a phone that complements their lifestyle with minimal fuss will still fare better with an iPhone or BlackBerry experience.

A few things I absolutely love about the Droid:

Its 858×480 3.7″ screen is AMAZING. I love the iPhone screen, but I was surprised by the difference that the Droid’s insanely high PPI (pixels per inch) count makes. It’s most obvious when viewing websites, where much more content is clearly visible without the need to zoom in. In the dark, I did notice that the iPhone has a better viewing angle, and the ambient light sensor on the Droid is a lot quicker to change the screen brightness, so if shadows pass over your phone, it might decide to freak out on you.
Multitasking apps is a huge deal. Any app can continually run in the background – so all day, I get notifications from Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and Instant Messaging. Also, switching between apps currently running goes much quicker than the iPhone, which can be susceptible to lots of time waiting for things to load if you’re trying to, say, copy and paste segments between the browser and a notetaking program. I’m also glad that Android automatically manages your running processes; the multitasking Windows Mobile leaves everything running unless you open the task manager and quit processes, which most people don’t think to do, so their phones just get slow and lose tons of battery life.
Having a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, LED “flash” and a physical shutter button is a godsend. Photo quality is still pretty miserable, but the experience is better than my older iPhone. (The 3GS has 3.2MP and autofocus as well.)
The LED message indicator flashes for notifications- something most phones have, but the iPhone doesn’t.
The mix of metal and rubberized plastic casing on the phone: this thing is durable, a weight that feels good in the hand, but still manages to keep an unpretentious look that wouldn’t look weird in a boardroom.
If you use Google services a lot – Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Voice- you can’t find a more seamless experience than Android.
Android 2.0 has amazing contact sync between Google, Exchange, and Facebook contacts. I didn’t have to enter a single phone number because my contacts just synced right away, and my contacts automatically get their latest Facebook profile picture and phone number.
The notification panel can be pulled down within any application – so I can see new e-mail subjects, tweets, and messages without having to stop using my current app.
It seems more stable than iPhone OS under heavy use- my iPhone pretty commonly crashes programs when it runs out of memory, especially when loading large webpages.
Not only is Google less of a control freak about application distribution, but the OS itself is much more customizable and extensible by third party apps. I didn’t like the lock screen or the music player app, but I was able to find great replacements in the Android Marketplace – something I couldn’t do with the iPhone.
Being on Verizon means not having to worry about reception just about anywhere in the United States. I’m no CDMA fan, but AT&T’s reception is truly frustrating.

I’m having a hard time deciding about text entry. I’m a very fast typist on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, and have learned how to trust its autocorrection dictionary and even type in Spanish. The Droid has both a physical keyboard and landscape/portrait virtual keyboards. The physical keyboard isn’t great by any measure, but I do enjoy using it while doing lots of messaging because I have the full screen showing the conversation. I don’t like Android’s landscape virtual keyboard, because it often maximizes the selected text entry field, taking away all of my UI view whenever I want to view text. The portrait mode keyboard is quite good, however. I am still adjusting to the (barely) different layout and sensitivity from that of the iPhone, so I’m not as fast yet, and the autocorrection is an adjustment too. Right now, I’d say that Android 2.0’s virtual keyboards are about 90% as good as the iPhone’s, so I’d be happy with a non-QWERTY Android phone too.

Despite all of these good things, the last week using the Droid has made me realize just how much attention of detail went into iPhone OS, and how I took some seemingly small features for granted. Here are just some of the annoying things I’ve run into:

The first-party music app is dismal, and doesn’t have podcast support. That said, there are third party apps that work better.
Notification ringtones for SMS and e-mail abruptly interrupt any playing music – the iPhone fades music before and after playing a ringtone.
The notification area is buggy and regularly shows notifications that I’ve already cleared out once a new one comes in.
When I receive an SMS message, the screen does not turn on to show me the message like the iPhone does. Instead, I have to turn the phone on, unlock the screen, and pull down the notifications area before I can see any message text.
The proximity sensor isn’t good enough- I frequently am on the phone only to find my cheek mashing the virtual keypad on an active screen.
The text messaging app gives unknown callers the image of the last known caller – so I get text messages from Verizon Wireless that have my mom’s image. It’s very awkward to think that my mom is telling me I can pay my bill online!
Android’s App Marketplace is quickly growing to become a huge one like Apple’s – but it’s not there yet. It has 12,000 apps to Apple’s 100,000, and there are admittedly a lot of lower-quality applications because there is little to no approval process. I am confident that this will be a very different story in a couple of years, but I still find myself sneaking back to my deactivated iPhone to use its better Twitter, Facebook, and Evernote apps.
Many Droid users, including me, are reporting that the battery door falls off very easily. I keep it in my front pocket and the friction from pulling it out is often enough to slide it off. I cut a business card to size and put that inside, and that cleared up the issue.
Despite the dedicated GPU and snappy CPU, some UI actions are still quite sluggish, and it looks like its graphics capabilities are nowhere near that of the iPhone. My guess is that Android’s Java base is to blame, since this powerful hardware is hampered by running a virtual machine and executing code at runtime. This platform is naturally going to give it performance penalties compared to OSes that allow precompiled binaries.

So overall, I’m on the fence about Android OS and the Droid. I have a very optimistic outlook for Android OS, and the Droid finally presents a very, very good Android device. Most of my gripes are related to software, which I suspect will be addressed sooner rather than later. I don’t see any Android device as an “iPhone killer” because I think both platforms have a very strong future ahead of them.

The question I have to ask myself, as do others, is about what they need out of their smartphone. Carrier differences aside, Android offers way more customization and features for power users and Google users. The iPhone experience is much more streamlined and polished; it’s straightforward and complements your lifestyle rather than trying to be the center of it. Right now, the iPhone has a much larger app store and much, much better games.

Am I going to switch back to my iPhone or not? I don’t know yet. It’s going to take a few more weeks to decide. The Droid tempts me with many things I couldn’t do with my iPhone, but I’m not sure if it’s worth leaving the amazing iPod app and ease of use behind.

Review: “Battle Studies” by John Mayer

Battle Studies

It’s been a while since I posted a music review, but here’s one worth mentioning. Battle Studies is a good new offering from John Mayer – stylistically different from his previous albums, not a pretentious attempt to answer his double-platinum, Grammy-winning release, Continuum.

Musically, Battle Studies strikes me with its layered tones that create a cool, moody backdrop. The tunes have a low to moderate energy level – no hard-hitting songs like “Bold as Love” here. With this album, Mayer mixes his earlier albums’ contemporary pop sound with Continuum‘s predominantly blues theme.

Lyrically, this album is about one thing, and one thing only: a major breakup. The album’s song lineup very closely presents a chronological overview of the his phases in dealing with the end of a relationship. “Heartbreak Warfare” begins the album and sets the stage for what is to come:

“I don’t care if we don’t sleep at all tonight
Let’s just fix this whole thing now
I swear to God we’re gonna get it right
If you lay your weapon down
Red wine and Ambien
You’re talking shit again, it’s heartbreak warfare”

Mayer ponders the depth of his commitment in “Half Of My Heart,” and begins to enjoy the upsides of single life in “Who Says” and “Perfectly Lonely.” Over the next several songs, he begins to feel the true depth of his relationship’s intimacy and the weight of the subsequent falling out, and expresses the full range of his conflicting emotions: “I want you so bad, I’ll go back on the things I believe / There, I just said it, I’m scared you’ll forget about me.” Finally, “Friends, Lovers Or Nothing” is a literal resolution of the whole ordeal, a ballad full of major chords and clear direction forward in the relationship.

This is definitely not my favorite John Mayer album. Each track bleeds of heartbreak, without respite. Also, his cover of “Crossroads” is thoroughly disappointing compared to live performances, and sticks out as a sore thumb from the otherwise cohesive album. To sum it up, Battle Studies is a great piece with some powerful songwriting, but its singular theme is enough to keep me from putting it in frequent rotation in my music library – though I’m sure it’ll be the first album I pull out the next time I’m in a similar situation.

10 Years in Retrospect

The last few months of this decade are closing out here, and at the same time I’ve found myself in a time of transition that’s given me pause and made me look back over how much has changed in the last ten years, both in the whole world and in my own life.

I’m no contemporary historian, and my perspectives have been too limited to really have much original insight on what’s happened to the world at large. America has gone through some serious growing pains, especially involving foreign and economic policy. China has secured its “rising superpower” status, representing both potential for huge improvements in quality of life for many, and serious human rights concerns as well. I’ve had countless friends spend long amounts of time in China in the last few years: most of them teaching English and learning Mandarin. I feel like I should probably be doing the same for my own benefit.

As for myself, I can’t believe how much change I’ve been through. Here’s a short list of things I can remember about myself in 1999:

I was in my last year of being an only child living alone with two single parents.
I had recently become a Christian, and was thus adjusting to a very different view of myself and the world.
My dad had recently been through a big breakup where I chose to keep a relationship with his ex going, despite pressure from others to break it off.
I was a total introvert.

Here’s where I am now in comparison:

Both of my natural parents remarried, and I now have a stepsister and half brother. I learned a lot from having siblings and from being a part of a larger family.
I’ve been through a lot of evangelical churches and social circles, where I met some incredibly loving people and some total nutcases. I matured a lot and gained a lot of perspective. I also had some church influences that gave me what I consider now to be pretty unhealthy attitudes. I am thankful to say that I’m happy with where I’ve ended up: I have a strong, beneficial spiritual life, and am fiercely anti-religious. Am I still a Christian? Yes, and because of it I have strong qualms with most of today’s concept of “Christianity.”
My dad has recently been through a big divorce where I chose to keep a relationship with his ex going, despite pressure from others to break it off. This time has been much more complicated, and it’s given me a lot of doubts about both my existing and future relationships. Nothing terrible, but I definitely have a lot of stuff to work out.
When I became a teenager I got crazy social. Now I’ve calmed down – only a little, mind you, especially after the craziness that is studying abroad in Spain – and have reached a healthy medium. I go crazy with too much time alone or too much time out painting the town red.

As for the decade ahead… I have a lot of big unknowns. I’m in my last year of college, and graduating with a degree has been a big goal for me. After that, I don’t know what I want to do, but I have lots of ideas. I went off on my own in the Sahara this April and spent a long time praying and meditating there, and I came away with my desires for what I wanted out of my life realigned. My future career is but one factor in the large scheme of my entire life (embodied by the Spanish attitude of trabajar para vivir, no vivir para trabajar – Work to live, don’t live to work). I’m considering doing two years volunteering for the peace corps. I’m considering moving abroad, or looking for a nontraditional job that could give me the freedom to travel.

So it’s been a very packed ten years, ten years which have ultimately left me better prepared and very excited to see what life has in store next!

My Adventure in Morocco, Part 1: Fez

I have posted photos of my Morocco trip on my Picasa Web Album – check ’em out!

What an adventure! I’ve crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and set foot upon Moroccan soil. I’ve been plunged into a land of Arabs and Berbers – a country under the power of a monarchy, to boot. I’ve passed through huge marketplaces which have barely changed since mideval ages, and a sprawling modern supermarket like Wal-Mart From Another World. I have ridden Land Rovers and camels across the Sahara, camped in traditional tents, relaxed, drummed and danced with chill desert dwellers.

I’ve walked the dunes and meditated in solitude. (Or was it in communion with all creation?) I’ve explored the desert guided by the light of the full moon. And I’ve had the most amazing group of fun, loving, fun-loving people to share and enjoy the experience with.

I went to Morocco with about 50 students from International Studies Abroad, many coming from other programs in Madrid, Salamanca, Málaga and Santender. Our bus left Granada at 3:30 Sunday morning, a day before Spain’s holy week festivities were to begin. We crossed the Strait of Gibraltar at sunrise and crossed the border at Ceuta, an autonomous Spanish city on the African coast. The border was reminiscent of the Mexico-U.S. border, complete with incessant honking choruses and vans packed full of seemingly useless junk (even though you know a use has been found for all of it).

Upon crossing the border – and scoring one more stamp on my passport- dozens of cameras whipped out and were aimed out the bus windows. North Morocco was nothing like what I had expected – extremely green, like Colorado during April showers. We had lunch at a rest stop, where I had my first experience as a traveler with zero knowledge of the popular languages Arabic, French, and Berber, in that order. While essential travel communication is definitely possible, all of my travel up until this point has been in countries where English or Spanish are widely spoken. Being thrown into a completely different, somewhat non-Western culture is enough of a change of gears as it is, but add total lack of language skills to the mix and you have a pretty intimidating situation on your hands!

We finally arrived to our five-star hotel in the outskirts of Fez, where the king’s palace is located and a huge, ancient Medina contains mideval marketplaces and old stuff abound. Our hotel itself was a different story- European amenities, kind of a retreat from all the new things we explored in the city by day. The next morning, we went to the medina and toured several larger shops, where shopkeepers gave presentations of their goods to the whole group, and many of us would later bargain – “regatear” in Spanish – with multilingual salesmen. The medina really was a blast from the past; narrow walkways with people and load-carrying donkeys, with no motor vehicles to be found. Open-air shops selling fresh veggies and meat from the countryside. Several of us walked past a butcher right as he removed a dead goat’s head and extracted its brain!

Here are a few videos I recorded in Fez:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJpOeIRFlqs&w=480&h=385]

Street Performers in Fez

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNaxhvZaeiw&w=480&h=385]

Fez Sculptor

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIRSsT5Hi4&w=480&h=385]

Fez Percussionists

…and don’t forget to check out the photos!