I just got back from a short vacation, see my photos for some Tuscan eye candy.

In unrelated news, I no longer live in Seattle. I moved to New York City several weeks back.

Last year, I spent a lot of time traveling, primarily while living abroad. Although I was mostly in Seattle this year, I still did a respectable amount of traveling. This year, I visited five countries, and slept in 30 different cities:

1. Seattle, Washington
2. Salt Lake City, Utah
3. San Rafael Swell, Utah
4. Scottish Lakes, Washington
5. Conway, Washington
6. Las Vegas, Nevada
7. George, Washington
8. Hanalei, Hawaii
9. Po’ipu, Hawaii
10. Honolulu, Hawaii
11. Indianapolis, Indiana
12. West Lafayette, Indiana
13. Chelan, Washington
14. Carcavelos / Lisbon metro, Portugal
15. Zambujeira, Portugal
16. Lagos, Portugal
17. New York City, New York
18. Boston, Massachusetts
19. Sunnyvale, California
20. Portland, Oregon
21. Lima, Peru
22. La Paz, Bolivia
23. Copacabana, Bolivia
24. Cusco, Peru
25. Inka Trail, Peru
26. Tambopata, Peru
27. Arequipa, Peru
28. Mumbai, India
29. Mahableshwar, India
30. Goa, India

This year was an interesting one for me, and 2008 shall also be a year of transitions and experiments. I’m looking forward to it.

I’m currently in India for a few weeks, and I am going to stop by Dubai and Qatar on my way back before returning to Seattle in mid-January.

I keep on forgetting to post here, but for now you can find pictures on my Flickr page. Photos from November’s trip to Peru & Bolivia are available, and I’ll be posting photos from India whenever I get a good Internet connection.

I know I’ve gotten pretty lazy about writing, but I thought I’d give a quick update.

I’m currently in Portugal, I’m spending the month of August here visiting family, eating well, and working on my tan (I’m very easy to spot on the beach, hopefully I’ll start to blend in soon).

I’ll be back in Seattle in early September.

Last week was the one year anniversary of my departure from Microsoft.

Although it seems so simple looking back, the decision was tough for me at the time. I thought about it for months, and asked people for a lot of advice.

I quickly noticed a pattern in the advice I received: the vast majority (90%) of people told me to do what they did. If they quit, then they recommended that I quit. If they stayed and the company and climbed the corporate ladder, then that was the path for me as well.

(Aside: The other 10% of advice I received was from people who gave me “anti-advice” — i.e. advising against doing what they had done. This is often the most useful type of guidance.)

I had three theories why this happened:

1. Skilled Introspection: These people really understood themselves and what would make them happy, ultimately making the best choice for themselves.
2. Cognitive Dissonance: Even if their is choice was the wrong one, they’ve convinced themselves that it was right. See also: Dan Gilbert’s talk on Synthetic Happiness.
3. Charmed Lives: My friends, co-workers, and I are extremely fortunate and live a life of luxury compared to the rest of the world. Our “tough” life decisions are choices between the 99.99th and 99.96th percentile, the difference between the two is imperceptible so it really didn’t matter what was chosen.

One year later, I find myself giving the same type of advice — but what other choice do I have? I chose my path and have no idea how the others would have turned out. I don’t believe in my first theory — but the latter two seem completely reasonable to me.

Three years ago, two economists at the University of Zurich, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, released a study called “Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox.” They found that, if your trip is an hour each way, you’d have to make forty per cent more in salary to be as “satisfied” with life as a noncommuter is … The commuting paradox reflects the notion that many people, who are supposedly rational (according to classical economic theory, at least), commute even though it makes them miserable. They are not, in the final accounting, adequately compensated.

“People with long journeys to and from work are systematically worse off and report significantly lower subjective well-being,” Stutzer told me. According to the economic concept of equilibrium, people will move or change jobs to make up for imbalances in compensation. Commute time should be offset by higher pay or lower living costs, or a better standard of living. It is this last category that people apparently have trouble measuring. They tend to overvalue the material fruits of their commute—money, house, prestige—and to undervalue what they’re giving up: sleep, exercise, fun.

I was spoiled by growing up in a small town — I found my daily commute from downtown Seattle to Redmond to be dreadful. It’s a little under 15 miles, but a one-way journey can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half at peak hours (the median is about 45 minutes, but travel times are unpredictable). Honestly, this was a big reason I ended up leaving Microsoft.

The article brings up an interesting way to decide where to live:

Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can spend an hour or two travelling each side. “You live in Pasadena, work in North Hollywood, shop in the Valley,” Putnam said. “Where is your community?” The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had. In that kind of life, you have a small refrigerator, because you can get to the store quickly and often. By this logic, the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul.

I would add another important location: where you see your friends.

I sold my car just before leaving for China last year, and I’ve stayed car-free since. Seattle isn’t an English village, but the points of my triangle/rectangle are all within walking distance of where I live — and I love it that way.

Round One, before the wine

I took a wine and cheese pairing class last night, and learned a few things I’ll pass on to my millions of readers:

• All Cheese Rind is Edible: Even the wax and foil (!) ones. Cheese makers spend time crafting the rinds to add to the flavor. Not all of the rinds taste great, but they’re edible.
• Brie, and other soft cheeses, have less fat than hard cheeses: This is obvious in hindsight, but it’s because hard cheeses have less moisture, and therefore a higher percentage of fat.
• The mold in blue cheeses is a penicillium: This was interesting for me because I’m allergic to the antibiotic version of Penicillin — but I have no symptoms when eating blue cheese (or my current favorite, soft Italian gorgonzola).
• Non-pasteurized cheeses are legal in the US as long as they’re more than 60 days old: The libertarian in me tries not to imagine how much federal legislation exists around cheese.
• Lactose intolerance is typically cow-milk intolerance: Most people are just fine with goat or sheep’s milk, as the intolerance stands from some cow-specific enzymes.
• Traditional mozzarella (mozzarella di bufala) is made from water buffalo milk: I thought it was just a name, but it’s not. Apparently, there are some big water buffalo farms in California.
• Goats have the highest proportional milk production of any farm animal

They also handed out the following chart, which shows the composition of various milks, by percent weight (the totals don’t add to 100 because I removed the Minerals column, do the math yourself if you’re curious):

I’ve had Cow, Water Buffalo, Yak, Goat, and Sheep’s milk. I’m definitely curious about Reindeer and Fin Whale (how do they milk it?).

Antelope Island, Utah

Apparently, my phone does not like coming to Utah — it’s been on the fritz all week, and I caught it saying goodbye to old friends (wallet, keys) and giving away its stereo.

I’ve had the phone for almost three years, and I’ve been quite happy with it. It’s small, has good battery life, and a reasonable menu system. It’s also unlocked, so I was able to use it in Europe and China.

A (used) replacement is pretty cheap on eBay — but perhaps I should move into the 21st century and get a more sophisticated phone. Any suggestions?

Three times in the past week, I’ve heard a variant of the saying “You could fill a book with what you don’t know.”

It’s a strange thing to say, because so many people already have — in fact, they’ve filled buildings with books filled with things you don’t know.

This page was looking mighty drab, so I thought I’d add some color. I’ll also add a few random updates:

I’ve now been back from China longer than I was there. This means that I may no longer bring it up in conversation, under penalty of law.

The snow season is almost over — I’m trying to squeeze in some trips before the snow all melts. I went twice this week.

This guy went much, much further with his self-imposed restriction (and for similar reasons) — hopefully he won’t quit after two days like weaker people. I’m still tinkering with the balance, but I’ll do it in private for a while, so I don’t bug anyone (you?).

I’ll be in Salt Lake City next week (and two weeks after that, and two weeks after that). I’ve got some friends from High School in Park City — but what should I do in Salt Lake itself? The guides I’ve looked at all seem to say that going to the mall is one of the top three attractions. I hope the Sbarro’s and Cinnabon there are as good as they are here!

When you’re unemployed, people demand you tell them what you did with your day. In detail. Before, no one ever cared — can you blame them?

Even though I didn’t like running, I wanted to. There was something romantic about the sport. I was drawn to the simplicity, the minimal equipment necessary, and the lack of dependency on others (no need to wait around for a game of pickup). A lot of runners would tell me how great it was to run while traveling — seeing large parts of the city on foot, especially in the morning, provided context and a different view of the area.

Also, running was a sport that people were to do across their lifetimes. Perhaps its the lack of dependence on others, or the ability to go at your own pace, but I never met sixty year-old soccer or basketball players. The active people that age all seemed to be runners.

During my last weeks in China, feeling unhealthy from the pollution and my emaciated state, I decided it was time to suck it up and become a runner. I emailed some of my runner friends and asked for advice, realized I didn’t have running shoes, and made plans to start running as soon as I came back to the US.

I had a lot of downtime while traveling during those last few weeks in China — so I made up some ground rules for my running: Run every day to build and reinforce the habit, run before doing anything else (like checking email) to make sure it doesn’t get procrastinated away, and run for around a half-hour so it doesn’t take too much time (which could put the habit at risk).

My first runs were terrible, of course. The very first run lasted about twenty minutes, and I probably walked at least eight of those minutes. Luckily, most of my early runs were in Florida, which is drier and warmer than Seattle.

I’ve kept at it, although I’ve revised the rules — I quickly moved to six days a week (taking Sunday off), and now I run whenever I feel like it and the conditions are decent (three to four times a week). I rarely run in the mornings, because it’s usually better to wait until the afternoon when it’s 45, not 35, degrees out.

I’ll typically run between four and five miles, which takes a comfortable thirty to forty minutes, depending on terrain. The longest I’ve run was seven miles, with a mile-long walking break in the middle.

Finding good routes has been a bit of a pain, since Seattle has lots of steep hills — on the upside, I feel much faster when I run in Florida (where the highest point is mostly in Alabama and a hundred feet shorter than Capitol Hill).

My biggest piece of advice to those starting off: Track your progress. Take a note of how far you’re running, and how long it takes. It’ll be depressing at first, but it’s great to see how much you’ve improved since you started. If you’re into gadgets, a GPS tracker is nice to have (got mine for Christmas — thanks!). I’ve found the distance measurement to be accurate and consistent. My only complaint is that altitude readings are pretty much useless — when I ran around Green Lake (which is quite flat) it told me I ascended 500 feet on the first lap, and 360 feet on the second.

The forecast said rain, but it’s currently sunny outside. I’m off…

This year, I’ve decided to steal some time from musical hierarchies in order to do some (public) retrospection on my life in list form.

It’s been a busy year, dominated by travel and unemployment:

• January: Visited Thailand and Cambodia
• February: Nothing, apparently.
• March: Trips to Las Vegas, Utah, and Scottish Lakes.
• April: Ten days in New York, and a weekend in San Francisco.
• May: Quit my job
• June: Portugal and the World cup in Germany
• July: The tail end of my European trip, the beginning of China.
• August: I spent the entire month in Beijing, trying to learn enough Chinese to feed myself regularly.
• September: Intra-China travel begins
• October: My final month in China, 3 full weeks on the road.
• November: My sister’s wedding, driving around Florida, and touring Seattle.
• December: More Seattle, Florida for the holidays

In total, I visited eight nine (forgot Canada) countries and six U.S. states. In the vein of kottke’s list, I also spent the night in forty-one cities (bold type indicates cities I was in for more than one week):

1. Bangkok, Thailand
2. Chiang Mai, Thailand
3. Siem Reap, Cambodia
4. Koh Samui, Thailand
5. Koh Phan Nang, Thailand
6. Seattle, Washington
7. Scottish Lakes, Washington
8. Las Vegas, Nevada
9. Zion National Park, Utah
10. New York City, New York
11. San Francisco, California
12. George, Washington
13. Vancouver, Canada
14. Carcavelos, Portugal
15. Zambujeira, Portugal
16. Cologne, Germany
17. Frankfurt, Germany
18. Munich, Germany
19. Leipzig, Germany
20. Hamburg, Germany
21. Berlin, Germany
22. Nuremberg, Germany
23. Trier, Germany
24. Brugge, Belgium
25. Paris, France
26. Beijing, China
27. Tai Shan, China
28. Xi’an, China
29. Yangsuo, China
30. Baoji, China
31. Hui Xian, China
32. Chang Sha, China
33. Zhangjiajie, China
34. Lijiang, China
35. Hangzhou, China
36. St. Augustine, Florida
37. Gainesville, Florida
38. Miami, Florida
39. Key West, Florida
40. Everglades National Park, Florida
41. Tampa, Florida
42. St. George / Apalachicola, Florida