Things I Will Miss About Texas, Part 1: Salsa

I approach each ending with an absolute finality, and with that in mind, I'm probably not going to be coming back to Texas anytime soon. After dealing with several stereotypical Texans in college, I was seriously pissed off when I found out that I was moving to the Lone Star state. Once I got here, though, I realized... that it seriously blew. But once I moved to San Antonio, it was actually pretty cool. Over the past two years I've managed to visit most of Texas' larger cities, and I realize that each of them have something distinct to offer. Also, each of the big five (Dallas, Austin, Houston, El Paso, and San Antonio) are amongst the biggest cities in the nation, thus guaranteeing that there will be someone here who is selling what you're looking to buy. Anyway, here we go:

Salsa. Despite the literal translation being "sauce," it's certainly more than that to anyone who eats Mexican food. To me, it's a goddamn food group. How many meal have consisted largely of me just eating chips and salsa? TOO MANY. One time I even drank a container of salsa without even bothering with the chips. What's the big deal? It's only vegetables. Think of it as a salad that was mixed a little too far.

Growing up in the Midwest, I grew up on Pace and other generic salsas, which - unbeknownst to me at the time - were pretty crappy. Not something you looked forward to eating. The HEBs and Central Markets have AISLES devoted to salsas (okay, at least a significant portion of an aisle), and a majority of the selection is grown in the great state of Texas. I've spent the last three months choosing jar of salsa, exploring what each has to offer. Recently I've had my ass kicked by the Smoke and Flames Stagecoach Salsa, and my absolute favorite (though now discontinued) came from a hotel in Marathon, but the one closest to my heart is Julio's, a tortilla factory that is prominent in San Angelo, and yes, Del Rio.

 I don't really care for the chips, but the salsa is savory enough to keep me coming back (though nostalgia might play into it, too).

The point being, in many other states, salsa isn't something that has its own aisle in the grocery store, and that's a shame, because there are myriad ways to prepare the simple dish, and the preference for an individual can be of great contention. No matter what the selection, salsa variety is something I will miss once I leave Texas.

Big Country

I like a pretty wide variety of music, which might be why my favorite band is Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. Fleck, one of the world's best banjoists, takes his bluegrass roots and combines them with the funk background of Victor Wooten, the jazz background of Jeff Coffin, and the experimental background of Futureman to create a style of music the fans have called "Blu-bop." 

In 2000, I was a kid ripping CDs that I borrowed from the library. I rented Left of Cool because it featured Dave Matthews on a couple of tracks, but it was the track "Big Country" that caught my attention and made me a Flecktone fan. Since then I have listened to a lot of music, but that song remains a favorite. 

Here are three different versions of it, showing the versatility of the group and the type of genre-bending at which they excel.

Big Country

Beer, Taken to It's Inevitable Extremes

I like beer. Not the water-down domestics that permeate our society through Frat parties, lower-income housing, and ironic hipsters, no - I'm talking about the rich, dark, full-flavored brews that are as complex as wines, and are slowly being realized as legitimate competitors to the fermented grapes that have been sniffed, savored, and collected for hundreds of years. There's an ever-growing contingent of beer aficionados in our society, and the good ol' U.S.of A. is at the forefront of the craft brewing movement. Just take a look at the multitude of inventive full-flavored beers available,* and I've only been keeping track the last six months or so. AND, that's only a sampling of what I could get my hands on - regional selection varies depending on the distribution of the brewery.

*Last year, I met someone who collected beer bottles. I thought this was a novel idea (and something that, once again, people sometimes do with wine), so I thought about joining in on the fun. The problem is, cleaning and transporting shitloads of beer bottles would be expensive and fragile, so I chose to photograph them as a compromise)

Something that is talked about amongst hop heads are the strong beers - the ones that can top out at nearly 20% alcohol by volume. Dogfish Head's 120 Minute IPA, at 18% ABV, was one of the more popular super IPAs that pushed the limits of the alcohol, but recently there's been a battle of alcohol content going on in Europe - surprising, given that many of the countries over there hold the brew in such high regard that they pass laws governing what can be used to make the stuff.

The battle has been between BrewDog, a Scottish brewery, and Schorschbräu, from Germany. The former came out with a 32% ABV beer, which the latter combated with a 40% product. BrewDog then upped the ante 1% to create Sink the Bismarck, for which they currently hold the record for the world's strongest beer. Given BrewDog's willingness to disregard interstate (intercountry) shipping laws regarding the shipping of alcohol, I bought a bottle. It wasn't cheap - 40 GBP to purchase, and another 40 to ship, which equated to $130 once the exchange rate had its way with my wallet. All the same, how can you put a price on tasting history?

Several weeks later, the beer arrived heavily wrapped in a BrewDog-branded box, which I thought was a bit silly, given their attempt to skirt the product past the Feds:

Inside was a bottle of the Holy Grail of beers, along with a stopper - in case you don't want to finish it in one sitting - and a free bottle of their Tokyo* as an apology for the long wait (not that this beer isn't without its own share of controversy).

Given that the beer has as much alcohol as your typical bottle of liquor, I was expecting some very harsh notes from the beer. I was actually pleasantly surprised - there's a ridiculous amount of hops, giving a very piney taste, followed by the harsh end of the alcohol. There was no masking this much alcohol, but it was certainly more drinkable than other beers with high ABVs. Needless to say, this one was a sipper, but it met its end eventually.

It's certainly not a beer you're going to be drinking on a regular basis, and admittedly half the novelty is in the unseemly amount of alcohol, but it's a legitimate beer in its own right, too. I don't know about you, but a regular part of my hobbies involve either seeking the best or most of something. This firmly falls into the "most" category, and while I'm sure someone will someday release a 42% ABV beer, for the time being, I can relish in the fact that my lips have tasted the strongest beer in the world.

Nexus One

The History
I got my first phone Veteran's Day weekend of 2004 - the Audiovox PPC4100. I wanted it because Windows Mobile allowed me to sync my Outlook calendar and email, and I could even surf the internet as much as I wanted, permitted it was within my 5MB/month limit through Cingular. It was cool to have a stylus and sync my Outlook data (only when it was connected to the computer), and it even had a camera... once I purchased a camera that connected to the phone via SD card and stuck out of the top of the thing. I even was able to improve functionality with a hard keyboard. With all of these features, they worked at best sometimes, and at worst not at all.

I upgraded to an unlocked Samsung Blackjack on October 15th, 2007. This one dropped the stylus, added a hard keyboard and camera that worked all the time, and 3G speeds. This sufficed until 2008, when - after riding out the Cingular sim card for as long as the AT&T servers would allow, I was forced to upgrade my service and the Blackjack II along with it. All three phones provided incremental updates to the same basic Windows Mobile features, but over the course of six years and three phones my needs have become far more than simply more of the same with slightly better specs. Where once my email, photos, documents, chats, and videos were all accomplished through separate programs, they are now all stored in the cloud and under the comfortable umbrella of Google. Even with my Blackjack II, I could get my email and calendar synced over the air, and I could surf a limited version of the Web, provided the site created a version that worked on my phone's browser, but it was only a patchwork solution. The time was right for a new phone that didn't just take the old features and make them better - the paradigm of what we think of as "phones" was changing, and Windows Mobile 6 was not going to follow me into the new decade.

The iPhone was revolutionary in the same way of the iPod - they took a device that was stuck in the old way of doing things, and it completely turned the industry on its head... and then rode that one significant innovation over years and years and years. They got lucky with the iPod, as it was so significant that no other company could come close to matching, but the mobile phone market is not so easily resting on its laurels, and rightfully so - Apple's products are great for advancing the industry, but they are best used as springboards with which other companies can build upon. Imagine owning a 7th generation iPod (Classic, now) and navigating through 160GB of music and movies using nothing but the scroll wheel. It's incredibly frustrating, and it's why I wasn't about to break down and buy an iPhone - well, that, and the lack of a replaceable battery, the lack of multitasking, and the rigidity with which they run their app store. Since the iPhone's dominance of the marketplace, some old players have struggled to catch up, and some are on the way to bankruptcy, but it seems that Google's Android has become the only serious contender since the significant upgrade to version 2.0. The improved UI, the wider hardware adoption of the platform (no small thanks to Google themselves), and the rapidly-growing app store have made it a serious contender to Apple, and since my life is already completely trusted to the big G, the Nexus One seemed like a no-brainer.

In addition to choosing this piece of tech as a new phone, I was also looking for replacements for my severely aging GPS and iPod. The dream would be to replace all of these things with one super device, and it looked like Nexus One might be the closest solution. As I had a lot of demands for this "phone," and because of the features it provides, I'll be reviewing it in a partitioned manner relative to how it fulfills my needs for each of these devices. Keep in mind my last phone - this is coming from the perspective of someone who has grown up on Windows Mobile, with only an iPod Touch to provide prospective into current-generation UI.

The Nexus One as a Phone
I heard an argument a little while ago that we need to come up with a different name for these devices. In the past week that I've owned the thing, I've made two calls, but have sent more than a dozen texts, a handful of chat messages, and read my fair share of email. There's so many ways of digital communication, and voice is becoming less and less of a priority. The Nexus One excels at combining all of these different methods of communication into a seamless interface. By selecting someone in my address book, I am provided the choice of reaching them via call, text, chat (with a Google Talk status icon telling me if they're available), their address, birthday, and Facebook profile with their last status update. When I receive a notification that they've contacted me via a certain medium, I'm provided the opportunity to reply via the same medium. There's hardly any differentiation between the method - it all appears the same, which is the ultimate goal. Users of Google Voice that are frustrated at Apple's refusal to approve an app for the iPhone will be happy to find that Voice integration into the phone is seamless - you can choose to have all or none of your calls automatically routed through the service, or your choice on a per-call basis.

Call quality was pretty solid, though I find that I have to have the volume cranked nearly all the way to reach an acceptable level of loudness. The volume of the entire device seems to be fairly puny - you will probably hear it, but in areas of moderate ambient noise (like in the car), you might run into some trouble unless it's vibrating. The speaker phone works, but because the speaker is put into overdrive, it's a little hard to hear the caller. They hear you well, however, thanks to the noise-cancelling dual-microphone feature of the phone.

The Nexus One as a GPS
The thing that made me first take a look at Android as a serious phone OS was the release of 2.0 and the Google Navigator, a full-featured GPS application that is included standard on every phone. Where once Garmin and TomTom were charging $350 for standalone units and $99 for iPhone GPS apps, Google was giving away for free. And not only that, but it had the feature that's been glaringly missing from every GPS before it: it was connected to the grid. No longer did I have to worry about buying annual update discs, paying for subscriptions for traffic updates that only kinda worked, or entering destinations only to find that the GPS didn't have it in its database. It was already standard practice to back up my Garmin with a printout of Google Maps' directions, so this was the ultimate combination of functionality.

I took a trip to Dallas last weekend and used it for the entirety. From my experience, the routes are much more consistently accurate than Garmin's. I did run into some problems using it during Dallas' rush hour traffic - some sort of really bad accident was stopping the interstate traffic in all directions, and while I managed to escape being stuck in it, I couldn't get the navigator to take me through an alternate route that didn't involve getting back on the freeway. Garmin has an "avoidances" feature which allows you to tell the software to avoid highways, toll roads, U-turns, etc., and I had to refer to it to reach my destination. Even Google Maps online has the option to avoid highways and tolls, but I guess that's why they preface the navigator with the familiar "beta" tag. If they wanted to score even more points, they would allow the user to manually drag and drop the route like in Maps, but that's asking a little too much for the time being. As it is, there are certainly more benefits to drawbacks to using the Navigator over a standard GPS, but I think it will best the standalone unit in 90% of use cases.

Since the first unveiling of the Nexus One, they've offered hints that a GPS dock would be offered, but that wasn't available at the time of my purchase. Today, however, it finally went on sale, coming with a car charger and the ability to launch the Car Home when docked. I've ordered one, and will update when it arrives.

The Nexus One as an MP3 Player
From my one cigarette lighter port in my car, I have a three-way splitter to which power adapters for my GPS, (old) phone, and MP3 player were all getting juiced. The GPS is already gone, and I have to keep room for a phone charger (more on that later), but what about the MP3 player?

I kept my old iPod 5G for so long because it did everything I wanted to do - play music in the car and during my workouts - but as it slowly started to go, I was stuck in a dilemma between an iPod Touch and seeing what the Nexus One brings to the party. In early reviews I read mediocre things about Android's standard music player, but it turns out that it fit most of my needs well - mainly, it organized tracks in a manner not dissimilar to the Touch, and that was good enough for the car. The main drawback to using the Nexus One as  my primary MP3 player was that it was inconvenient to transfer music to the device. Not inconvenient in terms of other devices - hook the Nexus One up to the computer via USB and you can upload tracks to your heart's content - but I have literally no other reason to connect this device to the computer - everything is done over the air. In addition, I don't really want to run with my precious $600 phone strapped to my arm, clinging for dear life.

I ultimately went with purchasing the Touch, not only because I already use iTunes as my primary music manager, but because of the Nike Plus application and the ability to keep up on the latest iPhone apps that haven't yet made the jump to Android (though finding a hotspot from which to use them is an adventure in itself). I think it's possible to see myself using nothing but my Nexus One in my car at some point, but I haven't reached that point yet.

The Nexus One as a Camera
Did I mention my camera was in need of replacement, too? Well, it was. I'm not super big into photography, but I know enough to know that megapixels can only get you so far before you have to start worrying about things like shutter speed and ISO. I ultimately bought a separate new camera for the high quality stuff, but the Nexus One's 5 MP camera is no slouch, with surprisingly good macro and low-level performance, and a blinding flash. In addition, when the GPS is on, pics are geotagged, and they're easily uploaded to Picasa Web Albums (though I would like the ability for all of my pics taken on my phone to automatically get uploaded). It's not going to be my go-to camera, but it's certainly nice enough in a pinch, and the small size makes it a lot easier to take pictures of people without them knowing (just make sure the flash is off).


The Nexus One as an Alarm Clock
This one isn't really that big of a deal - I've used my phone as my primary alarm for a while, with a separate clock radio as a backup on the occasions when Windows Mobile decided to mysteriously error itself out of usefulness in the middle of the night - but the dock connector that you can buy separately is neat. When the phone is connected, the clock app is automatically loaded, giving you quick access to the time, weather, and alarm functions. I've previously mentioned the limitations of the speaker, and here it's no different, with the max volume outputting adequate-but-not-awesome loudness. It gets the job done for me, but I can see how some heavy sleepers might not awake from it. The dock does include a 3.5mm output jack, though, allowing connection to a stereo to really give it some oomph if needed. I'm thinking it's time to put away the clock radio.

The Nexus One as an ebook Reader
You're not going to find any app that's as nice as iBook or Kindle on Android, but I'm not a fan of paying full prices for digital content that's riddled with DRM anyway. I have a modest collection of books in PDF, and while the native PDF reader isn't great, the Beamreader app is pretty nice for scaling and reading the books in a comfortable text size. It doesn't support the addition of bookmarks, which makes saving your place a little tough. I'm sure there will be an app that will fit the bill. It's not great, but it fits my needs - all of my books are uploaded to my Google Docs account, and I download the one I want to read.


Everything Else
I'm still adjusting to the soft keyboard, which works almost as well as the iPhone's, though I find more native apps in Android are willing to rotate to landscape, making the experience better. One thing that gets me is the caps lock, which is activated by pressing the upper-left corner of the shift key. If you aren't careful, it's easy to toggle the thing accidentally. Actually, so far it seems that the only time I can successfully turn it on is when I don't intend to. From a human factors standpoint, I hate the idea of having to have my complete attention focused on the keyboard when typing - it was easy to text and drive on my Blackjack II, because I could glance at my keyboard to get a quick reference and then eyes back to the road, but it's nearly impossible and quite a bit more dangerous to type with the Nexus One. It's a tradeoff for the thin profile, I suppose. The phone integrates voice commands into just about any keyboard input, and from my tests, it works pretty well, picking up most of my words and punctuation marks, though in a few cases it took a couple of tries to get what I was looking for (in any case it was leaps and bounds over the crappy-yet-hilarious transcriptions done by Voice). It remains to be seen if this is a viable alternative to texting during those inconvenient times, but it looks good.

For as much as people have complained about AT&T's 3G service, I've never had a problem with it. Besides, if you took the iPhone's install base and put it on any other carrier's network, they would instant crumble under the weight of all that traffic. I was happy to stick with AT&T, and they're beefing up their network anyway, so it's a moot point.

The absolute worst part of this phone is the battery life. Depending on what's running, I can get as little as a few hours before the phone has to be recharged. As an example, this morning, I undocked the phone at 6:30 with a full charge. By 11:30 it was at 34%. I'm thinking that poor signal coverage my contribute to this - at work, when the phone can be flaky with 3G, the charge is terrible, but here in my apartment, even with GPS enabled, at idle its power consumption is hardly anything. Of course, when you do start using the GPS or data services the charge still decreases quite rapidly (I went from 85% to 80% just from uploading my 30 phone pictures to Picasa Web Albums), so constant monitoring of which services are enabled is necessary. Hopefully the car dock will help alleviate some of the pain once it gets here, though it didn't stop me from buying an extra battery to be on the safe side.

Power consumption is a major problem, but when you have a phone that possesses so many capabilities, its a tradeoff that is unavoidable, and can only be rectified when the battery technology catches up. In the meantime, the phone (communicator? cell?) is a wonderful piece of technology that is practically limitless in possibilities and is the single unifying point for my everyday life. I was reading an article in Wired that talked about chess matches between humans and computers, and how that, for all their processing power and ability to compute hundreds of possibilities for each move, the best chess players were not the computers playing alone, but the humans that worked with computers and knew how to best utilize the technology. I'm not a particularly smart person, but for most things I don't know, I do know that where I can find them online. If we all had the ability to integrate our physical lives with the digital, the knowledge and capabilities that we can tap into make us incredibly more capable as a species. This phone is the first step towards achieving that goal.