So after just about a year of full-time living in Augusta (and there was a good six months before that when we were here half the time), we are moving back to Atlanta. Chicago was a real possibility at one point, but got ultimately got eliminated for a number of reasons.

We’ll be heading back to Atlanta within the next four weeks and are looking for a place to stay. We’re giving serious consideration to buying a home even as we realize that house prices are still on their downward trajectory.

Our goal is to live within walking distance of hang-outs, the grocery store, restaurants, etc. There are a few places we have in mind to accomplish this, but they’re all a bit on the pricey side, which has made us wonder if we could find a place to renovate.

We’ll see what we can find. And regardless, we are looking forward to heading back to Atlanta!

I love eggs. They can stand in as a meal in a pinch, whether it be for breakfast, lunch or dinner. You can boil them, fry ‘em, scramble them, make an omelette or a frittata. If you take certain precautions, you can even microwave them. For my go-to breakfast, I personally switch between overeasy and sunny-side up, mixing it up between butter, coconut oil and fresh bacon grease.

I like eggs so much that I often keep a few recently boiled eggs in the fridge for a tasty, healthy, filling snack. I think eggs make such a great snack that the idea of inventing an Egg Vending Machine has crossed my mind — imagine being able to drop 50 cents into a machine and get a piping hot boiled egg in return? Hmm …

What brings me to discuss eggs is a recent post by Richard Nikoley at Free the Animal. Richard is also a big fan of eggs — yolk and all, just like me. This is an important point you shouldn’t miss! Don’t throw out the yolks! Why? Because that is where all the good stuff is (I.e. protein, vitamins, fat)! What about the cholesterol? If you have to ask … read the quoted material at Richard’s site.

Richard also links to a post that talks about the difference between factory produced eggs (the one’s you get at a grocery store) and the ones produced by chickens that cluck around on a farm (eating whatever they happen to find and not all grain). A picture is worth a thousand words, so be sure to note the difference in the egg at the top of the frying pan and the other four here.

The big dilemma I have is: how do I get my hands on fresh, real eggs like that? Farmer’s market maybe? Get my own chickens? Any bright ideas?

Having returned from India and a month-long hiatus from eating healthy and working out, I started brewing on a strategy to “get back at it” and continue working to my ultimate goal, which is achieving never-before-seen (on me) lean-ness and vasculature.

My approach for most of the summer had been working out about five days a week (doing CrossFit) with daily fasting (i.e. 16 hour fasts daily). I tracked a lot of my daily workouts via my workout blog.

Unfortunately, I ran into any number setbacks as I had a couple long periods where I couldn’t manage to eat right or workout (A two week stint out west and a three week stint in India).

That brings me back to today. I’m going “back to basics,” which for me, was eating breakfast/lunch and the fasting until dinner the following day, with a weight-lifting oriented workout an hour or two before breaking my fast. This method worked for me the first time, stripping away a great deal of fat and focusing my diet/weight-training efforts. This time around, the only tweak I’m implementing is that I will do two fasts per week, lifting on days I break the fast, working out on days I eat, and resting on any day I begin a fast. Per usual, my diet will be carb-light, which means no breads, rices, cereals or starchy vegetables while still allowing for most fruits (apples and berries being preferred), some cheats (ice cream), and alcohol.

Goal is to try this for three weeks, track my progress daily and see how I come out on the other end. Stay tuned.

You might recall I recently bought a new, replacement pair of Chacos from Zappos.com. Zappos had a great price on them, and having selected the “fast shipping” option for an extra seven bucks, I received my new Chacos the day after I ordered them. I was impressed.

Well, I returned from India to a much chillier Georgia and a need to break out my old slippers. Finding them woefully inadequate (cheap-o Target slippers from last season), I went to Zappos to look for some replacements.

Without going into details as to what slippers I’ve now ended up with, I ordered a new pair Monday and selected the free shipping option. I received the slippers Tuesday afternoon! I didn’t like them. Late last night I ordered a different pair only to wake up this morning to receive shipping confirmation telling me that the slippers (the new order) had shipped from Kentucky in the wee hours of the morning last night and are “out for delivery” here in Georgia right now.

As to my original purchase that I needed to return, I went ahead and printed up the free shipping return label (very easy process at Zappos.com) and have that box sitting outside waiting to be picked up by UPS when they drop off the replacements.

All of this purchasing was done tax free with free shipping. I’m skeptical Zappos is making money off of me on this sale, but maybe it doesn’t matter: I am officially a Zappos fan-boy. This is as close to online retail perfection as you can get. Painless purchases, ridiculously fast shipping/processing and no-hassle, free returns on items that don’t work out.

Zappos FTW!

I’m having a hard time coping with it getting dark so early. Fall being my favorite time a year, I wish it’d stay lighter later in the day so I could enjoy Fall ambiance in the evening. As it is, seems like the only way to take advantage of the daylight hours on weekdays is by doing so in the morning — say from 7:00 am to 8:00 am? Maybe during lunch?

At least as it’s the weekend, I’ll get a couple good days of brisk Fall daylight.

In case you didn’t follow along, when my Blackberry was connected in India, I was frequently sending live pictures to my Mobog.

Connectivity plus photo-sharing (Admitting that cameraphone shots are poor quality) equals a great way to keep in touch with the folks you left back home. Examples:

• random monkeys
• elephants
• indigenous peoples
• friends you make along the way
• potential gifts (i.e. “do you like these? Email me back if so and we can pick them up!")

Basically, camera-photo blogging while traveling makes for a lot of fun, and is much more efficient (a picture is worth a thousand words) than recanting your experiences over mass emails to friends/family.

I see a lot of potential for camera-phones being used in a blogging capacity. Snapping a quick photo and sending off an email on a Blackberry is just too easy and too quick.

Expect to see more adopt Mobog-like technology in the coming months and years.

Below is a comment I left for David D. Friedman (Law’s Order, Machinery of Freedom, Future Imperfect) in response to his post G1: The Saga Continues. “DDF” had taken a trip to London with his brand-spanking new G1 Android and was hoping to get it working while on the trip – he was unsuccessful. In India, I was faced with trying to get my unlocked T-mobile Blackberry 8320 up and running (and also a working USB modem for my laptop – I preferred the redundancy of EDGE/GPRS connections over tethering for ease of use and diversification of providers). Below is my response to DDF’s post, which relays my experience in depth and hits on a few observations I’ve made having made it through the experience.

Warning: unless global cell phone provider issues are a concern, this post is likely to be very boring to you. If anything, just read the bullets! I am including it below simply for the record.

Read more »

Don’t have time for a “real” post about my trip, but here is a picture of me going for an elephant ride on Minakshi at the Orange County Resort in Kibini, India (Karnataka near the Nagarhole National Park).

Ok one more shot of a baby/adolescent monkey (we see lots of these here) who was hanging out in this Bamboo park:

I first traveled to India in December of 2004. It was a two-week trip where I got to see New Delhi, Agra (Taj Mahal), Baroda and Bombay. Had a great time and participated in a lot of wedding shopping.

Fast forward to last Sunday when we (Father-in-law or “FIL", sister-in-law/"SIL", wife and me) flew out of Atlanta. Our flight left around 5pm Sunday and arrived in Amsterdamn around 7am Monday (6 hour time change). We then had a flight out of Amsterdam at 10am (Note: security at Amsterdam was a pain) and arrived in Bombay at around 11pm (3.5 hour time change). Both of those flights were roughly nine hour dinkers. In Bombay, we had a huge layover with our flight to Baroda (Vadodara) which departed around 6am and brought us to our final destination at 7am Tuesday. Yeah, quite a travelling experience! I managed it all by reading the first couple
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, watching airplane movies (quite a selection these days!), fasting, entertaining other travelers and Bombay airport employees by wearing my Vibram Five Fingers (With new Injinji socks!), and attempting to sleep.

Okay, here is a map of India to help you follow along:

View Larger Map

Note: You can switch to the “map” view and you’ll see more cities, but the Terrain view is somewhat helpful for discussion and lack of map clutter. Baroda is a bit south of Ahmadabad (a two hour drive) and though the politically accepted name for Bombay is now Mumbai, I’ve found that most people here still refer to it as Bombay.

Here in Baroda we’ve spent the week shopping as well as taking care of some familial obligations. My FIL and I have shopped less than my wife and SIL. One of the first things I set out to do upon arrive was attempt to get wireless for my Asus eee 900 as well as set up my Blackberry 8320 with a local sim card for data/EDGE. This required my FIL and our friend Malay as a resident to go to a local mobile provider, Airtel. Unfortunately, what we failed to realize at the time (And the Airtel employees didn’t know) was that the prepaid cards won’t get data working on your blackberry. D’oh! And getting set up on a plan requird committing to a year long contract.

We figured all of that out about 24 hours later upon our second trip to Airtel. This set in motion trips to Reliance (they can’t provide) and finally Vodafone. Vodafone was a near bust until we convinced them that we didn’t care about losing the 500 rupee (Rs) deposit if we cancelled after three months (or was it six?). 500 rupees is only about $10, which I’ve decided is way too low a deposit to affect any Americans behavior. But that is not an insignificant sum to locals, it seems.

Anyway, even after getting a Vodafone card, the instructions we were provided on how to activate the blackberry data on it were out of date. Calling customer service was fruitless. Another day passes.

Finally, on Thursday afternoon (day 3 of trying to get my blackberry up and running), we went back to Vodafone, explained that the instructions were wrong, and then were provided the new instructions that worked within five minutes. Yay! Emails started piling in (Boo!) and I could get onto google maps (triangulation works here!), Jivetalk/beejive, opera, gmail, everything – same as BIS in the states.

Fortunately, throughout all of this I had been hooked up with a TATA wireless modem that an uncle-in-law had set up on a previous trip and left here. That thing, in combination with my eee, has been a godsend, bridging the gap on not having my blackberry working for a few days, enabling me to still keep up with work (Implode business). My only gripe on it is that it is huge in relation to the eee (which is tiny). See here for what I mean. Otherwise, even at max speeds of like 10kbs, it is getting the job done like a champ. And god bless the linux community for ease of setup of a random wireless usb modem on a random wireless provider in India on ubuntu. Works like a charm.

So having completed a good deal of shopping, which meant getting some pimp Indian dress shoes plus some dhoti ("Indian hammer pants") and a couple new kurta tops, dodging cow patties on Baroda sidewalks (SIL was hilariously unsuccessful in this regard), being stared at, observing the amazing anarchy that is driving/biking/rickshawings/carting/ox’ing/cow-dodging/walking on the streets of India (no traffic lights and lanes are entirely ignored) and eating Papa Johns and Subway (and ate some great Indian food, of course), we are moving on to the South for a week.

We fly out of Ahmadabad down to Bangalore and then drive to Mysore. This is a mountainous region that is apparently beautiful. And our stay will involve being in some sort of rain forest for a couple of days. Should be awesome.

There are a lot of thoughts I have on this trip. They range from observations about people, business, food, overpopulation, anarchy to the bizarre mix of modern times (mobile phones and computers) and age-old tech (you should see how they build stuff here – women carrying bricks on their heads, latticing at construction sites made out of rope-tied sticks) to abundant religious iconography to the omnipresence of cows. India is an amazing place on this planet.

In the meantime, I have to get ready to leave Baroda. If you want, please follow along on my mobog. This is where I’ve been posting pictures from my blackberry live of sites I’m seeing here. Hopefully, I’ll be able to keep that up, but a quick review of my mobog will give you a good sense of some of the things I’ve alluded to above.

Anyway, hope to write more when I get a chance. After out trip down south, we’ll be coming back to Baroda in time for Diwali!

So a guy I ping emails with mentioned to me that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson made a great “Dr. Evil” considering his bailout bill had a pricetag of $700 BILLION. What really made the situation humorous, though, was that the bald Paulson appointed shaved-head Neel Kashkari to oversee the bailout. Thus, rather than obsess over the crashing market (1,000 point amplitude today on the DJIA!), I determined to mock up a movie poster:

This might not be funny to a lot of you, but I enjoyed making it. And after this week of atrocious market performance, even for a bear like me, I needed the comic relief!