j e s r u s h . c o m

The traditional mojito recipe is good, but lately I’m beginning to prefer an Americanized alternative.  Not only does it taste better (IMO), but it’s faster to make — because you don’t have to warm up any simple syrup.  Courtesy of my friend Scott:

• 2oz Bacardi Lemon Rum
• half-cup sprite
• one whole lime, quartered, juice squeezed into glass
• 2-3 sprigs of mint (rough them up a bit so the mint comes alive)
• Ice

Mix this all together violently and then strain it (preferably) to catch the loose mint.  Pour the liquid into glass, add the ice, lime carcasses, and (large) mint sprigs. Delish!

As traffic and sprawl continue to sicken suburbia, more and more suburbanites are throwing in the towel and moving into neighborhoods which are highly walkable.  A highly walkable neighborhood is one where groceries, parks, schools, restaurants, and shopping are within a mile or two.  According to WalkScore, the benefits are tremendous:

Better health: A study in Washington State found that the average resident of a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood weighs 7 pounds less than someone who lives in a sprawling neighborhood.¹ Residents of walkable neighborhoods drive less and suffer fewer car accidents, a leading cause of death between the ages of 15–45.

Reduction in greenhouse gas: Cars are a leading cause of global warming. Your feet are zero-pollution transportation machines.

More transportation options: Compact neighborhoods tend to have higher population density, which leads to more public transportation options and bicycle infrastructure. Not only is taking the bus cheaper than driving, but riding a bus is ten times safer than driving a car!²

Increased social capital: Walking increases social capital by promoting face-to-face interaction with your neighbors. Studies have shown that for every 10 minutes a person spends in a daily car commute, time spent in community activities falls by 10%.³

Stronger local businesses: Dense, walkable neighborhoods provide local businesses with the foot traffic they need to thrive. It’s easier for pedestrians to shop at many stores on one trip, since they don’t need to drive between destinations.

As the National Association of Realtors pointed out, “Buyers want it all within walking distance. The next hot market could be homes in walkable neighborhoods.”

Enter walkscore.com, this brilliant website allows you to enter an address, and the system will evaluate its walkability by measuring its proximity to grocers, libraries, etc.  It’s not perfect of course.  It can’t tell for example, that although that grocery is .3 miles away, you would have to cross a six lane highway with no sidewalks to get there.  It doesn’t measure church proximity either.  But nonetheless it is a fantastic tool for gauging the general walkability of an area. And NAR is spot on, this will be the next hot market.

I hate voicemail, but until I saw the iPhone commercials I could never fully explain why. The commercials nailed it: regular voicemail is irritating because you have no control (”Press 1 to hear the next message”) and no visibility (Where in the seven message queue is the message from john?!?). In addition, many voicemail systems make you press too many buttons to get to that first message (’Scranton Man Faints from Voicemail Fatigue’).

Apple’s solution is to buy an iPhone with its “visual voicemail” fanciness. It’s an elegant one, but I’m not paying $500 for better voicemail. Enter <a href=”http://www.phonetag.com/”>PhoneTag</a>. PhoneTag is a subscription based service where you redirect your voicemail over to their voicemail system. Most cell phones and many office phones can handle this “redirection” by dialing a short code (which PhoneTag provides). Once redirected, any callers who reach your voicemail go into the PhoneTag system where they leave a message and–here’s the kicker–it gets transcribed into an email or txt msg and sent to the recipient(s) of your choice.

I’ve been trying it for a week and I’m completely hooked, and at only $0.35cents/message its not too expensive either. They push a little window mobile application that goes along with it, but as long as you have a phone with email or text messages you don’t even need the application. Recommended!

NPR recently aired an incredible story of a NY man who was mugged on his way home from work.  Listening to the audio is the best way to hear it, but a teaser to get you started:

Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

“He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, ‘Here you go,’” Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”

Continue reading at NPR…  Wow.

(Continued from part 1)

You need to become familar with these tools, and use them (or have your prospective jeweler use them) as much as possible. At the very least, consider only diamonds that score well on the Holloway Cut Advisor, use it to “screen” prospective stones.

• The Brillancescope for measuring light return.

• The Firescope for measuring light leakage.

• The Isee2 for measuring contrast.

• The idealscope for measuring light leakage. If you’re going to buy from a jeweler who doesn’t have a firescope or idealscope, then you’ll probably want to buy one of these suckers for yourself.

• The Holloway Cut Advisor for approximating light leakage and determining spread.

• The Atlas Cut Grade system for an overall evaluation.

• The OctoNus Diamond Calculator for 3-D modeling. Folks on the pricescope forum have this software–post a request to have someone run it on a diamond you’re considering.

• Computer Method’s Diamond Cut Study for approximating scintillation.

To shop…
After learning about these tools (and even using some of them yourself), you won’t be comfortable buying a diamond without a great deal of testing and data. You’ll obviously want crown and pavillion angles (from a lab certificate, sarin machine, or megascope machine) so you can run a Holloway Cut Analaysis, and preferably firescope, idealscope, or brillancescope data so you can get a handle on light leakage and scintillation. There are a handful of retail brick & mortar jewelers who offer some of this information. Charleston Alexander, and sometimes–Kay Jewelers–come to mind. One trick to finding retailers is to use the brillance scope website and search their retailer database. Another is to seek out stones that have AGS lab certificates which will produce crown and pavillion angles.

If you can’t find much locally, consider buying online. Buying a diamond engagment ring online has two major advantages:

• Price. Three factors make internet diamonds less expensive than their brick & mortar counterparts. Firstly, buying from an out-of-state jeweler over the Internet means you avoid paying sales tax! Consider that 5.5% sales tax on a $3000 ring is $165.
• Secondly, the internet market is much more efficient in terms of information distribution. Popular websites such as Pricescope allow you to search for stones meeting a specific criteria (i.e. .90-.99ct-G-VS2) from multiple vendors. This encourages jeweler’s to out discount each other.
• Thirdly, many Internet jewelers either operate small storefronts, or have no storefront at all. These vendors have less overhead expense than their B&M competitors who operate ritzy storefronts.

Quality. Many online diamond retailers provide crown and pavillion angle data and some of them have various scope data. Here is a brief list of some favorites:

SuperbCert
Good Old Gold
Nice Ice
Whiteflash (I have some reservations about these folks…)
Dirt Cheap Diamonds

Diamond Ideals


A few tips…

• Beware of variance, angles on a diamond are never completely constant. If a crown angle is listed at say 34.1 degrees, understand that is merely an average, in reality the crown angle varies from maybe 33.6 to 34.9 as you rotate around the diamond. Ideally, you want the range to be tight and and entirely within ideal cut limits.

• The AGS ideal cut specifications can be manipulated a little. If a stone’s pavillion angles fall just below AGS ideal range, don’t automatically dismiss it. If it’s crown angles go just above AGS ideal range they may cancel each other out–this could be a great stone.

• Laser inscription is a gimmick. You can see the inscription with a 10x loupe until the stone has been washed a few times. Thereafter the black carbon dissapears and you need a 40x microscope to see the inscription. A better security option is to have the stone gemprinted.

• Invite the experts and appraisers on the Pricescope forum to weigh in on a stone you’re considering. Post as much data as possible. They can offer insights you might be unaware of.

• When choosing the setting, don’t bother with white gold. The rhodium coating will wear off and the ring will yellow. Ignore the claims of self-proclaimed experts about special white gold alloys that stay white. Even if such alloys exist, there’s no way to find them and no way to verify that they were actually used to make your setting.

• Don’t be afraid of slightly included (SI) stones, most of them are eye clean (who cares about imperfections which you can’t see?), and they’re easy to identify (with a loupe) after repairs\cleaning at the jewelers! Interestingly, even some I1’s are eye clean!

Cleaning a Diamond (and keeping it safe)…

Diamonds are grease magnets, hand soap, makeup, cooking oils–they attract it all. They need to be cleaned almost every day. Here is a simple writeup I put together on how to clean a diamond.

The End Result…

Here is the data on the diamond which I finally choose, yours should be approximately as excellent.

(Note: This post was actually on my old website but so many people were finding it via google that I decided to move it over here)

There are two kinds of guys who buy diamond engagement rings:

Guy #1 reads about the four C’s on the internet, walks into a jewelry store, and demands to see VS (or higher) clarity diamonds in the 1 carat range. He looks them over for a half hour (they all look striking), listens to the sales pitch, decides GIA diamonds are best, chooses one, picks a ring, and is done with it. He’s happy, she’s probably reasonably happy, end of story.

Guy #2 reads about the four C’s on the internet, browses a jewelry store, and thinks, “All these diamonds are beautiful and aside from size, I can hardly tell the difference. How do I choose?” Guy #2 goes back to the internet and spends some more time searching around. Maybe he stumbles on the book Engagement & Wedding Rings: The Definitive Buying Guide for People in Love or Fred Cuellar’s How to Buy a Diamond. Or maybe he finds the Pricescope diamond knowledge site, or ends up at the infamous Good Old Gold tutorial. Maybe he is cost-conscious and realizes there is no sales tax (hundreds of dollars!) on a diamond purchased over the internet. However it happens, he finds a source that lets him in on the big diamond buying secret:

The retail jewelry stores could make frozen spit look good with their high-powered halogen counter-top lights. Once you remove a diamond from that special environment, the CUT of the stone determines whether it still sings with brightnesss, fire, and scintillation or whether it darkens into a dud.

By cut, I mean not the shape (round, heart, etc.) but rather the particulars of the cut itself (crown angle, pavillion angle, minor facet size, etc.). If these terms are unfamiliar to you, then you’ve got a lot to learn.

But I should warn you, if you go down this road, your search for the perfect diamond is going to become exponentially more frustrating, complicated, and time consuming. The more you learn–the more discriminating you’ll be, and the pool of acceptable diamonds will quickly evaporate to a small handful. In my opinion it’s worth it, I took great pride in finally delivering one of the top 1% of diamonds to my girlfriend (now wife), but some guys just don’t have the time or interest.

If you want to see how far the rabbit hole goes, here is a brief guide to the things you need to see and experience…

To read…

• The book Engagement & Wedding Rings: The Definitive Buying Guide for People in Love. I suggest reading this all the way through, it’s a super introduction.

• The Good Old Gold tutorial. Go through all of the chapters, the information is excellent.

• The Nice Ice Expanded 4Cs. Ignore the irritating tone, the information is good.

• The Pricescope diamond tutorial and forum. Read some of the forum posts.

Once you’ve read all that and have your new understanding of the importance of cut, continue to part 2 where we look at tools.

Ever since college (and rowing), I’ve always been a runner. I used to run to get fast, later I ran to keep off weight. When you look at the charts, running burns an insane amount of calories compared to other exercises. But I’ve finally realized what the problem is with running: You can’t run at 50%. I can’t run lightly. There is something about the motion of running that just makes you go all out.

Running is great for weekends when you’re rested, but what about after work on a Thursday night when you’re dog tired? When it’s just not possible for me to run “lightly,” the sheer effort of it all (running at 100%) becomes a disincentive to actually doing it.

So I recently broke down and bought something I never thought I would buy: An exercise bike. The Schwinn 112. How is it? I love this thing! Yes, it doesn’t burn as many calories as if I were running (about 265 calories per half hour vs. 500 running), but the simple fact that I can bike when tired w/o giving myself a heart attack makes all the difference. There is no mental or effort barrier to working out.

The Schwin 112 costs a mere $300, has an electro-magnetic resistance wheel (the same kind of wheel you find in high end gyms bikes), is reasonably sturdy, and assembles in an hour. This thing is a great value…

Deep down in the poorest recesses of Washington DC is a remarkable little organization called, ‘A Simple House.’ It’s a volunteer-based ministry where the full time staff live in group houses, work without salary, and engage in what they call, a “ministry of friendship.”

Friendship ministry–in their view–consists primarily of serving the poor through acts of faith, love, and charity. If you’ve ever seen the movie Patch Adams, and remember the way Robin Williams lights up all those lives at the hospital, then you’ve got the right idea.

These folks are literally walking the streets of southeast dc. They’re doing good work and they’ve got some amazing staff. If you have a few extra prayers or dollars, you might send them their way. As part of their commitment to simplicity, they work with no more than three months operating expenses. Highly recommended!

Finding good new music has gotten really hard lately. Sometimes I feel like I’ve heard everything, like there is nothing new left to discover (or at least nothing I would actually like). Enter CD Baby. This site is different from iTunes and all the rest: it’s all brand new independent artists which you’ve never heard.

But it gets better. Anybody who has taken a dive into independent music knows what a mess it can be… you’ve got 10,000 bands and no idea what they sound like. There might be some stuff you would like, but how do you actually find it?!? CD Baby has finally solved this problem. On their main page, click the sounds like button, and you get a huge lists of known bands which in turn lead you to bands which sound like them. iTunes, Amazon, and everybody else have been doing “You might like” recommendations for years, but this is the first time I’ve seen it done with independents.

For example, I went down the ’sounds like U2′ road, and stumbled on this band Signal Goodbye with this track which you can listen to. And you get instant MP3 downloads. Brilliant.