Nathan Johns

Soundwave Prophecy

admin — Fri, 20 May 2011 22:41:20 +0000

Now that the dust has settled a bit and Charlotte is on a pretty good sleep schedule, I’ve had a little more time (and energy) to work on some other stuff besides my day job. My good friend Chris and I have been collaborating on a music project off and on for the last couple years and have started giving it more focus lately.

We call our project Soundwave Prophecy. I added a music widget on the right side. You can also visit us on Reverb Nation. We’ll hopefully have a dedicated website up soon as well. Give us a listen. We hope to be making a lot more music in the near future, provided we all survive The Rapture this weekend.

Cheers.

My favorite beers of 2010

admin — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:19:56 +0000

As 2010 comes to a close, it’s become obvious that craft beer for me is more than just the occasional tasty beverage. Over the past year, I have:

Started my own beer chronicle in Picasa.
Taken beer tasting classes. (and met Peter from BetterBeerBlog, a great guy and BJCP beer judge).
Created a Twitter list of as many U.S.-based craft breweries as I can find.
Brewed my first two batches of home brew.
Learned a ton about beer in general.

Needless to say, I felt compelled to share a few of my favorite beers from the past year. Note: these aren’t necessarily new beers in general, just new beers to me. I think it makes most sense to break them down into category; it’s only fair to the beer, after all.

I.P.A.

If I had to pick a favorite style of beer, this would be it. My top three favorites from 2010:

Ninkasi Total Domination
Ballast Point Sculpin
Stone Emperial 14

It was tough to pick just three. I think I’ll need to write up a complete ranking of my favorite IPAs at some point.

Belgian

I hadn’t really tried many Belgian beers until this past year. I really have been missing out. Luckily, I’ve discovered this huge, tasty world of beer and I ain’t turnin’ back. It’s also fair to say that there are many different kinds of Belgian beer and it would only be right to have a top three inside of each kind, but that will also have to be a different post for a different day.

St. Feuillien Saison
Rochefort 10
Chimay Red

Belgian (U.S. brewed)

North Coast Brewing Le Merle
Goose Island Matilda
The Lost Abbey Judgement Day

Winter/Seasonal

Shipyard Smashed Pumpkin
St. Martin Cuvee De Noel
Anchor Brewing Christmas Ale

I’m looking forward to what 2011 brings to the world of craft beer.

One step closer to mobile music nirvana

admin — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 18:34:53 +0000

I’m pretty happy with my current car audio set-up, so I thought I’d share it. The goal here is simple: Add bluetooth for both music streaming and hands-free phone calls.

My car is a 2001 Lexus IS 300. The stock audio system came with a 6 disc CD changer, tape deck (!) and your standard am/fm receiver. As any good gadget junkie will admit, a plain old CD player will just not cut it. I’d been thinking about upgrading my set-up for a while but I just wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. I finally figured it out a few months ago and pulled the trigger.

The first step was to replace the stock changer/receiver. I’ve always been a bit hesitant to do this because it would change the look and may affect future potential sale of my car (in a negative way). I’ve always felt this way when it comes to most after-market stuff for cars. I decided to pull the trigger anyway.

I went to a local car audio shop and had them install the most inexpensive receiver that was capable of streaming bluetooth, which was the Sony Xplod BlueTooth CD Receiver. I opted for the mic upgrade so my bluetooth calls would have a higher quality. The mic is hardly visible and sits just underneath the rear view mirror. After one hour for installation and a few hundred dollars later, I was all set up.

I needed a secure place for my phone, so I picked up the car dock for my HTC EVO. It’s not the cheapest option on the market, but it’s the best one available IMO, and keeps my phone safe and secure, in a visible and easily accessible location.

Now that I’d got all the hardware situated, it was time to figure out what software would be best for playing my music. I’d been testing out several android music apps and ultimately chose to use mSpot, which is one of the music-in-the-cloud options currently available. It’s a pretty straight-forward service: upload your music collection to the cloud, pay a monthly fee if you need additional space (I opted for the $4/month option), and access your music from any browser or phone.

So now I jump in my car, slap my phone into the dock, and I’m streaming my entire music collection from the cloud wherever I go. Lately, I’ve been hooked on using the “shuffle” option and seeing how quickly I can figure out which artist and song is playing.

Charlotte Mae Johns

admin — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 17:32:48 +0000

On Thursday October 21st 2010 at 5:07 p.m., Melissa and I were blessed with the birth of our first – Charlotte Mae Johns. 7 lbs. 6 oz., 20 inches long.

I’ll soon be adding a bunch of pictures to her album on Picasa.

Giants Baseball – Torture

admin — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 20:32:29 +0000

The theme of this year’s San Francisco Giants baseball team, which has been adopted by everyone from the fans to the players and coaches themselves, is “Giants baseball – torture!”. As long as they continue winning as they make their way to the team’s first NLCS since 2002, I’m completely fine with it. If you haven’t had a chance to watch the Giants 2010 Anthem, you should:

SMX West

admin — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:26:01 +0000

SMX West is coming to Santa Clara next week, Feb. 10-12. This was a great conference last year and it sounds like people are pretty excited about it again this time around. Danny Sullivan, John Battelle, and Vint Cerf are giving keynotes. I’ll be sitting on the Expert Technical Review panel at the end of the day. Webmasters will get a chance to get there site reviewed by panelists who will give feedback on potential improvements to be made if any.

I’ll be attending as many sessions as I can, and I enjoy meeting others in the industry. If you’re going, please find me and say hi!

I’ve moved! (Well, my blog moved)

admin — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:56:22 +0000

I finally got around to moving off blogspot and onto my own domain. I suppose if anyone cared, or if I had enough subscribers to matter, I should have posted about this before I actually moved it. Oh well. http://www.nathanjohns.net is where it’s at now!

The Auto Industry Bailout

admin — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:57:00 +0000

I’ll start by saying I don’t support a government-sponsored bailout of the Big Three automakers in the U.S. Some quick rambling points:

I understand there are a lot of jobs at stake. However unfortunate, this is not a valid reason for the auto bailout.
The Big Three have been struggling for years. The financial crisis is giving them an out.
If they don’t get a bailout, they will file for bankruptcy, sell parts of the company, re-organize, and most likely become profitable automakers once again.
The government as auto industry manager? Seriously? That’s got to be a joke, because if it’s not, my brain might start to leak out of my nose.(I don’t hate the government, I just don’t think they should be making cars).

Here are a couple observations I have on the auto industry. It’s important to note I know very little about the inner workings of making a car from start to finish, etc. etc. Having said that:

WTF is up with the process of going from concept to production? Why do the concept cars always look really sexy and awesome, then get totally destroyed by the time it gets to production? I’ve heard one simple explanation that goes something like this: the concept engineers come up with a car, then they send it to the production engineers who say “we can’t do this, this, this and this, it’s impossible” so they change everything to make it work. So they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on making a concept car that gets totally borked and re-designed? That seems like a broken system. I understand a car is a very complicated piece of machinery, but damn. Have you seen the before and after pictures of the Chevy Volt? (Before and after pics – the first one I took at Google campus):

I still like the newer look, but it’s still a big downgrade. This happens to be one of the most anticipated cars ever and I thought would be a good example.

WTF is up with automobile advertising? Is it really worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a commercial for a truck with Dennis Leary as the voice-over, and then play it like 43 times during a football game? I understand there’s a certain value behind brand awareness, but c’mon. Auto advertising is broken and needs to be fixed. I think they could spend half the money and be twice as effective.

That is all.

Mark Wahlberg talks to animals

admin — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 06:17:00 +0000

They need more skits like this.

Interview with Tech Talk Radio

admin — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:43:00 +0000

Last week, I sat down with Tech Talk Radio to talk about blogs, feeds, and web spam. I was joined with my colleague Anindo – You can listen to the full two hour show or get the shorter podcast.

Tech Talk Radio is based out of Australia. They have Lidjia Davis based in the Silicon Valley for reporting and interviews. It was a pleasure meeting her, and getting the chance to sit and chat about some of the topics in the Google Search Quality world.