Kyle’s May Challenge Recap

What was I thinking?

I’m not saying it was awful, but I imagine this is what it’s like to use the Internet in a country with heavy amounts of censorship (China? Singapore? Cuba?). Then again, the communist approach to the Internet was not without it’s benefits.

Seasonal Food Finder

Just a quick post about a cool feature on Epicurious.com

Here in Toulon, it’s easy to figure out what is in season.  There’s a farmers market 6 days a week here.  Every time I walk through the market, there’s one item that seems to be at every stand.  Whatever it is will be cheap and beautiful.  By the next week, it might be hard to find anyone selling that vegetable at all. 

In American grocery stores, finding what’s in season can be a little trickier- since the produce section at Safeway sells basically the same items year round. If it’s not in season, they’ll truck it in from somewhere it is or find a green house or warehouse that still has it. America might be defined by the availability of tomatoes in December or Pumpkins in July.  Still, your best value and best quality can be had by knowing what is at it’s peak.

A lot of food websites will suggest general things like “Summer means Strawberries”, but the US is just too big for that kind of broad advice. Summer might mean strawberries in California, but it probably means something else entirely in Maine.

Enter my new favorite seasonal veggie finder. I love it.  Thought I’d share.

Anne’s May Challenge Recap

It’s now Sunday evening and I’m just hours away from ending my media fast. While I have to admit that I did cheat some, I mostly kept to French media for the week.

It’s a digital camera with a built-in compass

Ever since I discovered that Google Photos will display my photos as points on a Google Map, I’ve been fascinated by the possibilities.  I love the idea that I can view my photos from college as a map of the college’s campus. I could browse by dorm instead of by date.  I could browse through photos from an old road trip by looking at the route.  In fact, since the photos are tagged with a date and time and a location, Google should be able to tell me what the route was automatically.  How cool is that? What a great way to look at photos from a vacation or compare different hiking routes for a day trip.

The only problem is that it’s really tricky to go through and manually tag photos with exact gps coordinates.  But I’m convinced that this is a technical challenge someone should be able to solve.  And, finally, a couple of solutions are appearing on the market.

Should I Really Pay for Software?

When Anne and I were in Budapest last month, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the budget hotel we’d chosen not only offered free wifi, but had a computer set up for guests to use.  An even bigger surprise- the computer was set up with Linux.

I’d never used Linux before, but I had some important fantasy baseball transactions to make so I gritted my teeth and dove in.  And it wasn’t so bad.

Kyle’s May Challenge

As many of you know, the Pink of Perfection May Challenge sounds a lot like my France Telecom March Challenge . . . except the latter was involuntary and resulted in a 6 week media and telecommunication blackout. While it did give me a chance to catch up on my reading, the France Telecom challenge is not something I’m eager to repeat.  A little too isolating for me.

So I’ve crafted a new challenge a little more suited to my time wasting habits. I’m calling it:

One Window, One Visit, One Week.

The Internet. En francais. (Anne’s May Challenge)

Aujourd’hui begins my version of the Pink of Perfection media detox. I thought long and hard about what I wanted to give up–blogs, facebook, the little tv I actually watch–before coming to my conclusion. I just bought my return ticket to the United States (I’ll be in Seattle July 10th in case anyone wants to welcome me back with a much missed chai latte), and my remaining time in France is starting to tick away. There’s still so much I want to see here, and still plenty of room for my French to improve. Instead of wasting time mindlessly clicking through blogs, I’ve decided to make the most of my stay and use only French media for the week.

POP May Challenge

I spend too much time online. Between job searching, travel planning, blog reading, and speculating about the weather (please weather.com, get someone to check up on your toulon forecasts–they are always, always wrong), I find myself wasting whatever extra time I have. Time that could be spent on reading, exercise, drawing, or actually hanging out with friends instead of just scanning them through Facebook. I’m finally prepared to do something about it.

Ironically, my decision to take a web break was inspired by a bit of blog reading. Sarah from the Pink of Perfection has challenged her readers to take a 7 day media fast. The fast can be defined in whatever way works for the participant–one reader will be going without internet, phone, movies, books or music while another will forgo her beloved magazines.

Kyle and I are both going to do our own media fasts. Because we’ll be traveling at the end of this week and including those days in the challenge would be cheating, we’re going to start a week from Tuesday. Stay tuned for details. And visit Sarah’s site to consider jumping on board.

Backup Your Computer . . . Right Now!

As some of you may know, here at Forever 22 we are in mourning for the recent death of my laptop. For a while, it was tough to find the strength to go on. Now, I have to waste hours each day wandering around the Internet on somebody else’s computer (thank you, Anne).  Worse yet, that computer is a Mac!

But I refuse to be a mope. I have vowed that every time I find myself brooding about some file from my laptop that is now lost, I will pick myself up and take action.

O: Ocean Adventure

While we’ve yet to create any of our own Forever 22 podcasts, one of my favorite This American Life radio stories details an ocean adventure right in Brooklyn’s backyard.

The episode, In the Shadow of the City, first aired in February of this year. Each of the three acts features a hidden urban adventure–crazy stories happening in major metropolises, somehow just out of sight. Act one is “Brooklyn Archipelago.” It’s the hilarious tale of Alex Zharov, a sweet-sounding guy who gets shipwrecked on a tiny Jamaica Bay island during a day out with friends.

Alex takes the whole adventure very seriously, as well a shipwrecked young man should, I suppose, but imagining him making smoke signals and worrying about dehydration just miles from Time’s Square’s crowds tickles me every time.

So plug some headphones into your computer and eat lunch at your desk while listening to the show. Even if you’re stuck in an overly air conditioned office, you can still get out on Brooklyn’s water with Alex and This American Life.