I’ve been talking for years about the ethical and environmental reasons for buying local products and foods but since we’ve had kids, we’ve also been concerned about the health reasons. We had been buying organic foods when possible (products which are getting easier to find and cheaper as a result of greater demand) and also recently went about trying to find locally grown or made products. As Wyatt is about to turn a year old – and thus will be switching off baby formula and on to cow’s milk – we decided to try and find some local milk. This is what led us to Hatcher Family Dairy only a few miles away from us, in College Grove, TN.

We had intended to just head down to the Hatcher farm store to have some sandwiches for lunch and get a couple of gallons of milk. We ended up also purchasing some ground lamb and gelato, as well as signing up the entire family for the farm tour later that afternoon. This would be Wyatt’s first gallon of milk and wouldn’t it be fun to see exactly where it came from and how it was made?

If you watch the film "Food, Inc." – or even read almost anything from Eric Schlosser – you’ll learn about some proposed laws which would make it illegal to report on or photograph food processing plants in the U.S. I’m not going to comment on these laws, their current status, or even if this is an accurate description of what they purport to do; but just want to mention that at least some people in this country are concerned about this aspect of the state of food production in this country. So what would we expect from food producers who had nothing to hide? How would we expect a company who is actually proud of how they produce our food? Well, you can find at least one answer at Hatcher: they offer bi-monthly tours of their farm facilities, by members of the Hatcher family and their long-time staff. They – in no uncertain terms – make it clear that if you as a customer have any issues with their milk, come and see them. They are the epitome of the cliche “the buck stops here.” Their product is expensive and they freely admit they don’t have plans to feed everyone; but you can’t help but respect their willingness to be completely open and honest with anyone who walks off the street and onto their farm.

It is also worth noting that it is clear that the family and staff at Hatcher surely do love what they do. I already knew enough of dairy farming to know that no one chooses it because it is an easy life. When you take into account that immediately across the road from the farm is a huge golf course and subdivision of half-million dollar plus homes under construction; you have to realize that farming is a lifestyle they want to continue. It would be so tempting for any farming family sitting on a few hundred acres in one of the country’s wealthiest counties to sell out and retire (and likely free a couple of generations to come from ever having to consider if they want to continue the family business). It has happened time and time again all across Williamson County. But here are the Hatchers, of whom the youngest sibling just graduated with a degree in agriculture business and now runs the business in addition to personally milking most every cow, daily.

At the end of our hour-and-a-half tour, our two young kids probably didn’t have any better of an idea of where their milk comes that they did before. After all, Ainsley already knew that milk came from cows. However, as an adult, it is amazing to see that someone still makes and sells their milk just as they did since before the Civil War, when they started the farm.

That being said, we all could appreciate the sample of chocolate milk we got.

Later that evening, we made beef & lamb burgers with some of the ground lamb from Hatcher and then had some of their vanilla and strawberry gelato for desert. Dinner with the family out in our back yard was the best; knowing much of it came from another family down the road.

Speed

First of all, it is very nimble when launching and page loads are fast. To give an example, I use a three year old iMac Core 2 Duo w 4GB of RAM. I always keep my browsers to load the last set of tabs that were open on closing. For a Chrome to launch and load ten web pages only takes under 13 seconds. Additionally – for you mac nerds – the dock icon only bounces twice. FireFox, eat your heart out.

Now, all of this isn’t to say that the browser is always fast (more on this in a bit).

Extendability

Extensions are available to replace most all of those that I actually used in FireFox; as well as some basic FireFox functionality which I was surprised wasn’t included. I currently am using:

• Chromeleon – a user-agent spoofer
• Delicious Bookmarks – a social bookmarking tool
• Tab Buddy – a tab manager
• BugMeNot Lite – a tool for bypassing web registration
• Google Voice
• RSS Subscription – A tool to add easy feed subscriptions (how was this not integrated to begin with?)

Another nice feature of Chrome is the ability to add web-site specific searches into the address bar, as opposed to FireFox’s separate search field, with a drop-down menu to select a search engine. Both are about as easy to add a new site to, but Chrome’s integration feels more seamless.

The lack of a history in the navigation buttons annoyed me. I actually use that when I’m doing some web searching to go back to a point I branched off on my current rabbit hole. It made for a lot more clicking on my part. It seems like the sort of thing that could be easily added in, but neither Google or any third party extension writers have done so yet.

Flash & Video

Personal preferences aside, the real downside is when it comes to video. Flash is really awful in this browser. If found that YouTube regularly locks up. Pages with lots of Flash-based ads can completely choke the browser. Further, Microsoft Silverlight isn’t even available for Chrome, which means¹ no Netflix² That may not be a deal-breaker for many, especially as many users (myself included) would like to move away from Flash and Silverlight. However, they are a reality of the web right now and something I end up using everyday.

I’m also notices some website tools don’t function so well in Chrome. For example (though albeit not a great one), the "Quick vote" poll tools on CNN.com’s site don’t seem to work for me in Chrome. I click Vote and nothing happens. It’s Javascript, so I’m not sure what is going on there because as I understand it this is the place where Chrome really excels. It’s not the sort of thing that has bothered me so much I’ve felt the need to even investigate it, but something worth mentioning.

Conclusion

I have to admit, I figured that I would find myself needing to open up FireFox everyday when using Chrome. Honestly, other than the occasional hard-to-remember login or accidental click, I haven’t missed it at all in over a week of using Chrome. I could easily find myself using Chrome full time on my mac and may even give it a whirl on my beleaguered Windows laptop (which needs all the corners cut possible in terms of speed).

And, for the Apple fanboys, my next experiment is to switch to Safari for at least a week to see how well that browser works for me. I haven’t seriously re-visited it since I got my mac three years ago.

1. Silverlight works fine in Chrome, not sure why Netflix won’t play nice.
2. A Safari-based extension, similar to the IE Tab extension for both FireFox and Chrome, would solve this issue. However, those are bulky and far from ideal solutions. What’s more, it’s only hypothetical at this point, as no such extension exists for Chrome ont he mac.

1. Actually 49% called it good vs. 40% called it bad, according to a Gallup Poll reported in the Christian Science Monitor.

At least, until last month. Apparently, with no warning, the state informed Fentress County – a rural county which has historically had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country – that they would need to begin paying for over $2 million of the school’s $5.5 million budget. Today, it seems, the picture has gotten even more grim for the children of Jamestown, Allardt, and surrounding areas in Fentress. The State Dept. of Education is handing out termination notices to all faculty and staff which are likely to go effective at the end of the term (May 2010). So, there are so many questions I have but no would appear to make the situation much better:

• Who will own the school property and grounds? Will Fentress Co. be allowed to continue using this regardless of funding capabilities?
• Is the termination of employees part of the $2 million cuts or is this in addition to those? That is, are the salaries what Fentress County Schools will need to find money for?
• Why has this been done with no warning or plan? Can’t this be graduated over some period of time?

I’m sure there are many more questions, but right now it appears that either no one knows or they aren’t making it public. I urge anyone who gets credible information to inform the local and state news as soon as possible.

Here’s a quick calculation just to put some perspective, based on Wikipedia’s demographic data for the county:

• The population of Fentress Co. is under 18,000, with 6,693 households (of which 4,818 are families) residing there.
• If each household has to take the additional cost, that is $344 annually.
• The average income level is $23,238 ($28,856 for families), which puts the school funds needed at 1.5% of the average income.
• It’s also important to note that nearly one quarter of Fentress County lives below the poverty level (23.1%) and the unemployment rate is historically much higher than the national average.
  
• It actually gets worse when you compare the median household income to the rest of the state. Fentress has a median family income of just $27,874² where the state median family income is over one-and-half times as much ($43,614).

1. Other state run high schools are for special needs children such as the blind or deaf.
2. In the county seat of Jamestown, where the high school is located, the median family income is a sickeningly low $15,149.

Unfortunately, my small HD video camera gave out only 22 minutes into a 32 minute presentation. The above is from the still of the actual presentation at PodCamp. However, I have re-recorded the audio (and hopefully adding back in a bunch of the tips I forgot to tell the audience or ran our of time to include). You can watch the whole thing in the link above or head on over to SlideShare to watch.

Unfortunately, Whiskerino only happens every couple of years so I had to wait until this season to participate. Sign-up was on the 1st of November and the response was so overwhelming I almost didn’t get in (my grandfather was visiting that day and I had waited until family left to try). Fortunately, an e-mail plea to the organizer got me signed up and I posted a photo of Angela kissing my beard good-bye.

I really did my best to be creative. I was pretty much constrained to what I could pull off by myself (I work at home, alone) during the time I was taking to eat some lunch or take a short break from writing. I had a few good photos and the photo constraints of the contest forced me to think about how to use my camera and limited resources (no post-processing allowed; i.e. – no Photoshop).

My Whiskerino 2009 Photos

However, between parenting and visiting family around the holidays, and all of being more sick this past winter than our entire lives, it put a strain on my time. Internet beard-growing & photo contests are unfortunately the sort of thing that has to get put aside first in these situations. I stand in awe of the guys who did this every last day with kids, jobs, and way more stuff going on than me. But it is important to note that many of these guys have been doing this for years and have become very close friends. This is the modern internet equivalent to a guy’s road trip.

And, in fact, there was even one of those! (though many women came along for the fun, too). Last weekend many participants came together here in Nashville for the Throwdown weekend. I was able to join for a taco lunch and got the chance to meet some people whose work I’ve been admiring for the past 3+ months. They were all the nicest, most interesting people from every background you can imagine.

Despite all the grumblings from Angela (who has never approved of my beard-growing activities and was not happy at all about Whiskerino), despite all the crazy one-upmans-ship that I had not way of competing in, despite all the discomfort that I get when my beard goes for a few weeks untrimmed, let alone four months!; I’d do again were it to happen in a couple of years.

Why? Because I started to see what all the people who’ve done it for the past few years see in it. It is way more than beards. Or photography. Or posting every day. It is about making friends with people whom you’d never would have had the chance to meet otherwise. It’s about taking the most individual, least competitive things in the whole world and turning it into some sort of team sport. One where the team consists of over four hundred other guys whom despite not knowing you and maybe having nothing else in common with you, encourage you and are your friend.

It was one of the oddest things I’ve ever done and it was so much more fun than I can begin to convey in a blog post. But don’t take my word for it. Go over there and look at the photos from today. Read how much this means to the guys involved. Then go and read some of the amazing stories they shared (babies, engagements, cancer, broken backs, swine flu, newspaper interviews, tattoos, even bigger tattoos, and so much more).

All that being said, I was more than ready to shave off the pile of wire and horse hair that was growing out of my face. I was starting to feel very uncomfortable (both physically and socially) and was never so glad to shave as I was today. I did try and have a little fun with that, too:

You can see all of my 2009 Whiskerino photos, as well.

To see what was truly the best of the best in these photos, please check out the King Beard section (each day’s favorite photos, as voted upon by the participants). Note, I only made into the top ten one time, and I’m proud to say it was by one of the most amazing photos I’ve ever scene.

But really, this should really come as no surprise. GPS was once so bulky and expensive of a technology that it’s inclusion warranted an entire device be built around it. Now, I get GPS along with WiFi and gigyabytes of storage in something the size of a quarter in my EyeFi camera card¹. As the cost of a technology like GPS, accelerometers, cameras, or WiFi approaches free, the uses for it will increase exponentially. Where it once was odd to include WiFi in a stationary device (an iMac or the Wii, for instance) which could be hardwired, cheap WiFi hardware does away with the need to run wires. Bluetooth does essentially the same thing, only with far less range and bandwidth. But, I think that the single best thing about this sort of device consolidation is the new uses that having essentially free hardware allows. Uses that we really can’t quite grasp until the tech is cheap enough to unleash them.

Even now, it may seem odd to think of GPS being included in to what is essentially a stationary device — like a desktop PC — but it once the cost of GPS is nearly zero, then it’s inclusion is inevitable. Including GPS allows a device to suddenly know where it is and that can be handy information; even if that doesn’t change very often. Why should it be easier to pull out your phone quickly get a map of what lunch places are around the office when you’re sitting at a desktop computer? Or insert the need for location for any other website of program you use on any given day² Data storage is cheap. GPS is cheap. The reasons for having a dedicated GPS device are rapidly approaching zero, which is what both my wife and I have tried to explain to anyone who mentioned we should get a car GPS.

So, I posit the following: When the cost of the technology behind a device drops below a certain threshold, that device will become obsolete in favor or other common devices which can co-op that technology to greater effect. Let’s call it Coleman’s law until someone else shows me someone else previously said it or something similar³.

You might argue: what about a device like the Kindle that uses cellular networks to communicate? E-readers surely won’t replace cell phones, will they? No, but I can’t help but shake the feeling that cell phones are destined to replace e-readers. And this coming from a guy who would love to have an e-ink display reader, himself.

Another argument against device consolidation is that general purpose devices (like a cell phone⁴) just can’t do any one of those things as well as a special purpose device; and surely that’s true. However, I never hear anyone complain that their low-budget GPS device doesn’t work as well as a high-end mapping system by Trimble used for construction. Nor do I really think most people care that the quality of video on YouTube doesn’t rival that shot on a RED camera. As a matter of fact, I doubt most people even know who Trimble or RED are. So does it really matter if your cell phone doesn’t shoot the same kind of photos or video as a fancy DSLR? My answer is no. The enthusiasts who really want that kind of quality will continue to use those device but the majority of people are taking photos for high-quality but rather because any photo is better than losing the moment.

1. Truly, the EyeFi card is simply amazing. It is the first bit of tech I’ve had in a long time that really seems closer to magic than to science.
2. Of course, cell tower triangulation or IP addresses can be used as reasonable substitutes for GPS technology, but the falling cost of GPS with respect to its accuracy makes it the logical option in almost any device, now.
3. Though possibly an extension of Moore’s law, they are not really the same thing.
4. I’m not using the phrase "smart phone" here as I simply now consider non-smart phones to simply be last-generation phones.

It doesn’t really pan out that way, though. In particular, the states with the highest percentage of men having been married three or more times are some of the reddest of the red states: Arkansas (10%), Oklahoma (9%), Tennessee (9%), Alabama (8%), and Mississippi (8%). The state with the lowest percentage in this category? Blue, gay-lovin’ Massachusetts at 2% (stats aren’t much different for women, incidentally). So much for the gays ruining marriage; we heterosexuals seem to be devaluing that hallowed institution just fine on our own.