When I was out in San Francisco, I met with Plaxo. In a total coincidence, I had just started using Plaxo Pulse a few weeks before and was realizing how useful it is. It bascially takes your whole life and syncs it in one spot. All of your contacts who use Plaxo are automatically updated by them, and it all syncs with Outlook, Entourage and everything else. You can share calendars and all different levels of information however you want to. I’m not really into joining more services like this, but it’s solved a lot of headaches between synching home / work contacts and calendars as well as working on both PC’s and Mac’s. It’ll even pull in your Flickr, YouTube, or any other accounts. Join it and send me a connection request, assuming if you’re even reading this you know me.

 

 

Nothing like taking a red-eye back from San Francisco for an 8am meeting. The only thing worse is getting on that plane with 76 eighth-graders. Good thing for headphones, apparently I missed out on what was even more of a nightmare flight for others…

 

 

Nick LaVecchia is more man than I will ever be when it comes to cold water, and killing it with his photos. Check his new winter gallery on Surfline, and also in an article with him in the current issue of ESM.

Nick LaVecchia

 

 

We had a quick weekend down at the beach in a borrowed house for Tara’s grandmother’s 85th. After hitting Atlantic City, we came home with a lot less money than we left with, so we stuck around Sea Isle for the rest of the time…

 

 


We flew into Seattle where Faz and Jenna came to pick us up on the way to Whistler. Instead of getting burned in rush hour traffic we decided to hang out in the city and kill some time to kick off the trip. Seattle’s got some kickass shopping like Paperhaus, one of my favorite stores. After some roaming we went to Smith for some cocktails and waited for Evert to show up, and then we endured the marathon single lane construction-laden drive to Whistler.

It was a great week with plenty of smack talking, fun spring snow, and lots of après beers and vodka in blueberry juice. We missed the last day because of some shitty rain, so we shot down to Vancouver for some more shopping. It wouldn’t have been a trip to the Northwest without some rain.

 

 

I have been looking for one of these since college, I think around when the finger-loss lawsuits made them start disappearing. Now that I have the Dremel mini saw, I need to go find something to cut. Another great find at the car show…

 

 

With all the chaos in the music industry, there’s some bands that get where it’s headed and are doing things right. Last night Nine Inch Nails put a new album on their site (really 4 albums together) unannounced with the offer to download the 1st of the 4 albums for free, or all 4 for $5. There were also CD options and a $300 limited edition CD / book set. The word of mouth spread pretty quick and basically shut down the site. After they re-worked it and got the site working, I went for the $5 option and got 2 hours of DRM-free music, a pdf of some kickass photography tied into the albums, a batch of desktops, and some other graphics. Not bad for $5. Amazingly (really, not so amazingly) the 2500 limited edition $300 sets sold out in less than a day. I’m not even that into them, but it’s awesome to see a band looking to the future and working to engage their listeners and creating some inspiring marketing. Their site is on it too – give you the tools to remix songs, enable you to post them, and download others.

Free is the value of music, and it needs to be leveraged into other ways of generating cash. Fuck yeah.

 

 

We went to Atlantic City for the classic car show yesterday. Lots of good stuff, and it’s almost warm enough here to break out the Chevy…

Only at the car show can you buy a set of Indians with a fake fire.

 

 

I had my 9th birthday ever today. For the big day, Tara took me to go see the Daily Show in NYC yesterday. We made the rounds in SoHo and worked our way up through Times Square and over to the show. It was titty-freezing cold and they make you stand outside for 2 hours before you go in, but once we were inside it was all worth it.

They always change up the six or so cities on the globe ticker they have, and they put Stowe up on there this time around…

I’m not sure what this thing is capable of intercepting.