No Cigar Therapy. H2H goes smokeless.

For many months, I've made it a point to go to carve out a bit of time each week and go to the local cigar shop and light a stogie with friends. As I experimented with Twitter and Facebook, I'd mention that we were going to do it and then more people would show. If they liked it, they would bring their friends and so forth until this grew into a bit of an event. With as few as eight and as many as twenty-two, we've had memorable presentations by our regulars on "The Art of Being a Gentleman", "Alligator Hunting", and "Running with the Bulls." We've talked about our lives and our businesses. We generally have helped each other in a sometimes gentlemanly and always neighborly fashion. What made this work was we had an inviting and available space in which we could comfortably share a cigar and a conversation. And it was good.

The weekly gatherings of story telling and problem solving have meant so much to me that it is now with teary eye that I report that our frequent haunt can no longer welcome us. I dropped by Halfway to Habana on Wednesday to find out it has gone nearly, but not quite completely, now brace yourself for this -- smokeless.

I've heard stories of conflicts with neighbors, landlords, and city government. I really can't say that it makes sense to me. What I know for sure is that the large dining space in which I've happily shared bourbon, meals, and cigars is no longer available for that purpose. Smoking is now restricted to a very small lounge area which has available seating for six to eight, all of whom are to be members of H2H's private club. It's a cigar and martini bar with no place to smoke.


Since seating for six won't even come close to accommodating our group which now ranges from twelve to twenty, it was suggested that we meet on the deck. In fair weather the deck is a wonderful place to sit. Today it's projected to be 56 degrees with light and variable winds and Greenville is currently under a winter weather watch. Maybe this would work. We've even been offered a couple of outside portable heaters to fend off a chill. The problem is that wasn't what I had in mind. Sitting on the unsheltered deck in the glow of a portable heater conjures images of hoboes sitting around burning trash barrels to me. It is so far removed from my ideal scenario of sitting in a warm leather chair with an Alec Bradley Tempus in one hand and a single malt Scotch in the other, that I think I'm going to take a pass. Cigar Therapy was fun, and now it's done.

Thanks for all the memories. I hope we get to make some more real soon.

Who you'll meet at Cigar Therapy, the video

Wondering who shows up at Cigar Therapy? Check out the video and meet a few of the people there.



Cigar Therapy is an informal group of cigar enthusiasts who meet at 4 PM each Thursday to talk about cigars, our businesses, lives, and maybe even share a drink.

We meet at Halfway to Habana.

Perun talks to the camera about Santa

Here's a copy of a post I placed on the kids photo blog. This is why we have technology.

Google Search will get a dose of Caffeine AFTER the Holidays

Matt Cuts says in his blog that Google Caffeine will not be going live in multiple data centers until after the holiday shopping season.  It appears that some online marketers are a bit anxious about the new results.  Google announced in August that it would be overhauling it's indexing and search reporting system.  

It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. 

As a user, I'd like to see less of the cruft appear in my search results.  Let's hope that Project Caffeine, after helping Google perform search faster, more accurately, and more comprehensively, lets them produce results that are more useful to us as well.

Get Google's 16 Terabyte Cloud Drive For $4096 A Year. Smaller Sizes Available.

Google just dramatically dropped the price of storage on their network. They are now offering the ability to store  up to 20 GB of photos and email  for $5 a year.  The current free limits for photos on Picasa Web is 1 GB, and GMail users store up to 7.27 GB of email for free.

Using the new price list, you can see that they will be happy to rent you 16 TB of storage in the clouds for only $4096 a year.  Just don't try to upload that over your cable modem.

Google's storage offer is for GMail and Photos only, so it doesn't quite constitute a backup solution.  It would however seem to be a precursor to the long fabled GDrive.  The rumor has been that Google would offer you a web mounted drive onto which you could throw anything.  In fact, people have previously abused GMail storage to pack rat away things other than email and I'd expect we'll see more of that in the coming weeks as well.

Since Google is essentially in the online advertising business, I suspect that they haven't yet delivered a GDrive because it hasn't been clear exactly how they'd sell advertising along side the data without the appearance of invading your privacy.  It would be kind of creepy to have advertising for alternative drug therapies show up against a spreadsheet of your medical expenses.

The new and now way cheaper pricing does mean one thing.  I will not be wasting any more time cleaning up my GMail archives.  For five bucks, I'll have all the storage I need in 2010, and in 2011, I expect ten bucks will buy me four times that.

Symptom - All of your Apple TV movies, TV shows, and songs appear to be missing

I got the following message from Apple about my Apple TV.

Dear Customer,


If you've installed the Apple TV 3.0 software update, you should immediately update to version 3.0.1. This prevents content from temporarily disappearing until it is resynced.
To update your Apple TV software: 

1. Reboot your Apple TV (unplug the power cord and plug it back in)
2. Select Settings > General from the main menu
3. Select Update Software
4. Select Download and Install


Note: Your Apple TV will conduct a restart, which is followed by the Apple logo and a status bar.


For more information, please refer to this article:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3116

Sadly, it arrived too late. The 3.0 software wiped out all of the content on my Apple TV forcing a resync of my entire library. Since I've recently upgraded the WiFi at the house, this took only several hours instead of a few days as it did when I first loaded it.

The new interface on the 3.0 version of the Apple TV is really quite nice and let's you get to things a lot more quickly.

Motorola Droid - First Look. Is it an iPhone Killer or an Outlook Killer?

I've been playing with the Motorola Droid for a few days this week and have been impressed with the device. The Droid changes the game because it's a device that's fully integrated with the Googleverse. It's open source and thus open to the largest group of developers. It's on a large, well developed network that's unlikely to leave it's users in the lurch. I think this may be enough to change the game. It certainly leaves me wondering why I'd even bother to load Outlook on a computer anymore. Enough about that, let's talk about the phone. I carried the Droid into the studio and chatted with Eric Rodgers about it.

Google Voice now lets you use your existing phone number... sort of

As a long time Google Voice user, this won't help me much. I've already converted all of my peeps over to my Google Voice number. As a dedicated nerd it was worth it to me to go through the hassle to move everyone over to the new number, and I did it as soon as Google bought GrandCentral, the predecessor service. The problem is that although a lot of people like what Google Voice has to offer, they don't want to jump the hurdle of moving all of their contacts to a new phone number. With it's latest announcement, Google Voice essentially removed the number one objection to adoption.

Google Voice is ready for you now

If your mobile phone is on one of the supported carriers (Alltel, AT&T, Cricket Wireless, MetroPCS, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, and Verizon) you can activate Google Voice for that number, forward your unanswered calls to Google Voice and receive many, but not all, of the features of Google Voice. Here's how they breakdown what does and doesn't work:

If you sign up for Google Voice with your existing number, you'll get:

• Online, searchable voicemail
• Free automated voicemail transcription
• Custom voicemail greetings for different callers
• Email and SMS notifications
• Low-priced international calling

If you decide to also get a new Google number, you'll get all of the above PLUS:

• One number that reaches you on all your phones
• SMS via email
• Call screening
• Listen In
• Call recording
• Conference calling
• Call blocking

While being able to port an existing number would be best, this new feature will be good enough for most. Most new users will say the voice mail transcription feature alone is worth the effort to switch.