After spending the last two years at Delaware’s Firefly Festival, we decided to play closer to home this year and try out the quickly growing Governor’s Ball on Randall’s Island in NYC. Once our friends at the Infatuation announced that they were curating this year’s food “playlist”, it was a no brainer. So which food and bands were the best? Streets of Laredo The funky folk fanfare of Streets of Laredo opened up the day.

With our trip to Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro in two weeks, our planning is nearly done. It seemed like a good time to explain the insane process we use to plan our trips. The last few trips we took, including our car delivery in Germany and driving around Lake Como, as well as my wife’s birthday trip to Hong Kong and Singapore, had us scheduling our itineraries down to the hour.

While touring the hip new Long Island City craft brewery scene this weekend, we noticed a sign at the small Big Alice brewery that we couldn’t make sense of. We tried mathematical permutations, counting the breweries in the area, checking the legal blood alcohol level in New York, and finally googling it, but all to no avail. Finally we asked the bar keep who explained it was an initiative to get New York bars to serve 80% New York brews by 2020.

Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start to summer and the official start of outdoor brewery season. When the garage doors of Brooklyn open up and the farmhouse ales deprecate the boys from the men. It’s a magical time, and to celebrate, I toured the new craft beer scene in Brooklyn and Queens (LIC) to see how these boroughs stack up. Surprisingly, I think Queens was the winner for taste and authenticity.

Sometimes the goal for a run isn’t a new record, a new distance, or even the medal. Sometimes just finishing a race is all you can aim for. In the past, marathons have typically had this goal for me, but after injuring my foot, all I wanted to do was cross the finish line alive in the Brooklyn Half. Thanks to my running buddy Rebecca, I had someone to help get me through some of the toughest running outside of miles 22-26 of a marathon.

Belfast is a city with a troubled past, a glamorous scene, beautiful people and supercars like the DeLorean. It’s basically Bruce Wayne. Since the violence of the “Troubles” has eased, Belfast has come into it’s own quietly with an amazing restaurant and bar scene. Even the New York Times has discovered the resurgence of this city with a new 36 Hours in Belfast feature in January featuring some of the local hotspots and landmarks.

My second marathon, one where you can wake up at 8:45 and make the start, and the best places to eat for preparation and recovery in the beautiful and not-too-distantly troubled city of Belfast, Northern Ireland. When I finished the NYC marathon last November, I knew I could do better. Four hours of standing around before the start in freezing wind, too much tapering, and first marathon nerves meant I finished, but wasn’t very happy with the result.

Running injuries are apparently very common with over half of all runners coming down with at least one injury a year. Most are related to ramping up too fast, though some, like whatever I apparently did to my foot, can’t be tracked down to a specific event. After running for a year, I considered myself lucky and assumed that I, unlike others, would not get injured. I had deal with my share of soreness and cramps, but nothing debilitating.

Two weeks ago, I ran the Fred Lebow half marathon in Central Park. I had been freaking out about the cold temperature as I hadn’t done much outdoor running this winter so far. Luckily, the sun came out and for the first time in seemingly weeks, the temperature was above freezing. It was actually rather perfect weather, though I did get a bit sniffly. I’m not sure why I keep running in Central Park.

I’ve been at Audible for about 3.5 years now. People I know love Audible, and see all the awesome stuff we work on as well as my pictures of the cool stuff we do at work. I often get asked what my absolute favorite thing about working for Audible is. It’s hard to nail down a single thing, but one of my favorite things about working at Audible, beside the ping pong and free lunch, is having the opportunity to work on complex technical problems and build features that people in real life, even my friends and family, actually use.