There are a lot of new media players out there, but none of them were interesting enough for me to start using. It seemed that iTunes worked, although it was more of a love/hate relationship at times. But it is looking like I found a player that gives me a lot more control over the media that I consume. For Video it always has been VideoLan Client and it will probably stay that way for a while, but for music it has become AudioCodex.

I am sure it is not for everyone, especially since it requires OSX, but the ability to just run AudioUnits and have DJ-like controls such as pitch, BPM display and adjustment readily available is making for a great little media player. If you are into these sorts of things, check it out.

As I originally left DivX, I quit to spend some time with the girls and look into starting up something new, however, I ended up talking to Janus and Dirk-Willem about their new european based online television project that seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity to move to Europe and experience the talent across the pond. An experience it certainly was. I have high hopes for how the project will progress. Having experience working with a 9 hour time difference when I started. It is clear that this is something I am unable to take on again. Regardless, the relocation would take a good 3 months to do properly and therefore it made a lot of sense to just move on. We have had discussions on doing some consulting from San Diego, but it is clear now that does not make sense either. Both Leiden and New York are simply too many timezones removed from California.

So, in December I gave notice to the company and have been moving ever since. Our container with household goods has made it to California, so once it clears U.S. Customs and we have unpacked it will be life like normal again. If you are a Southern California local, I am open to meeting up, however, I do not expect everything to be in full swing again until May. Meanwhile, I am happy to say that having all this time with the family has been a great experience that I would not have wanted to miss for the world.

Joost, I would like to thank you for a ride I will never forget, but now it is time to look towards a new adventure.

• Q: Why doesn't my uploaded remix show up on the site immediately?
• A: Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of frustrating record company legal politics, and must ensure that your mix does not include any unauthorized material - as defined in the next answer on this page - before it is approved for the site. Approving every mix is a tedious process, and we rely on the greatly-appreciated help of the site moderators to review submitted mixes. Because of this, it may take some time before your mix shows up on the site. You will receive an email when it becomes available - in the meantime, please be patient, and understand this isn't the way we'd run the site if we had a choice.
• Q: What kind of materials are not okay to include in my remix?
• A: Thanks to the record company copyright politics mentioned in the answer above, we must require that your mix does not contain ANY elements of copyrighted material, unless you yourself own the copyright (i.e. it's your own music). Your mix can include any element of any NIN song, or of other songs offered in multitrack format on this site. You can manipulate or destroy those pieces as much as you'd like, and you can combine them with your own original sounds and music. You CANNOT include samples of songs by other artists, or samples from movies, TV shows, or video games. Any remixes containing these elements will be rejected during the approval process. Please understand that it is not our wish to impose these restrictions on your creativity or the functionality of this site, but we have no choice in the matter.

It is unfortunate that you have to do this, especially since it is hard for individuals to know what is copyrighted material and what is in the public domain. It certainly seems to highlight that the DMCA is not the right answer here.

This is a very interesting double-edged sword in regards to the DMCA. As during the early MP3.com days we had people sitting in a room listening to every track that was uploaded for copyright material, cover songs, etc. These days most companies rely on DMCA safe harbor to be re-active rather then pro-active at taking down content. It is really a shame that mashups and sampling are seen as such a liability. Rather than seeing it as a sign of appreciation and respect, we turn around and would sue the creator for a small piece of the action. I can see it to a certain degree, but clearing rights needs to be much much easier then it is now if we truly expect people to clear rights for things like a sample or mashup.

It even was supporting aid workers prior to FEMA arrived with bandwidth and even did so when all the other groups providing connectivity had shut down by 7 or 8PM. They have had just about anyone you could imagine use it from Evacuees, FEMA officials, red cross workers and the National Guard. People used the connectivity for just about everything from checking fire maps, evacuations, looking up phone numbers, checking e-mail and kids playing games.

It takes a lot of effort from volunteers to provide services like these to the public, especially with so many road closures and following the needs across the county. It is amazing to me what some good will can provide to people in need.

If you are interested in helping to provide connectivity where it is needed most, please visit SoCal FreeNet's volunteer section and see how you can help.

Although, we are not in California at the moment, the current San Diego fires hit close to home. I still distinctly remember the 2003 Cedar fire. This time around it is significantly bigger and by the looks of it already has destroyed the Rancho Bernardo home I lived in while attending SDSU. Miraculously my parents moved out of San Diego last year. Updates are still coming in, but according to this detailed Rancho Bernardo Fire map the house is still standing. Currently, no family members reside in San Diego, but certainly many many friends do. I have been on a few internet chat rooms keeping up to date with friends and old co-workers. It sure is amazingly scary and hope that everyone is doing well.

Here are some of the links I have found to be useful to keep track of the fire, in case you are looking for more details.

• Official San Diego County Emergency site
• James Welch - San Diego Fire Resources
• Twitter: Nate Ritter Fire Updates
• San Diego Fires Wiki
• SDSU Department of Geography's map.sdsu.edu
• KPBS: San Diego Wildfires
• Flickr: San Diego Fire
• SignOn San Diego: Firemap
• SignOn San Diego Fire Blog
• Live Video: KGTV 10 News: San Diego Brush Fire Coverage
• Live Video: NBC San Diego

We still have our house in Mira Mesa, but it looks like that is safe for now. Naturally, I am much more concerned about others and friends in the area. I can only imagine that the air quality must be terrible right now. Be safe everyone and please ping me to let me know that you are doing okay.

While we have been deploying more sites and scaling up our software, the content team has been doing a great job getting all of us some great new content.

We also have this concept of Joost Links that allows you to easily share shows with others. As we have added some pretty neat stuff, I figured I would point you to some of my favorite shows on Joost. Do keep in mind that not all shows are available in all regions. Unfortunately, we are still in a world where content is ruled by contracts per region, so even if Joost secures the rights for a piece of content it may still be restricted. The content owners may have sold the rights to someone else for a particular region and therefore are not able to offer the content in that region.

Anyways, download Joost and check out some of the content listed below:

• Max Headroom: Blipverts - http://joost.com/175001i
• Transformers - http://joost.com/0560016
• Ren and Stimpy - http://joost.com/0790001
• CSI - http://joost.com/094009j
• Audi Channel - http://joost.com/1050001
• F1 Documentary: Chasing a dream - http://joost.com/00200ub
• Fifth Gear Shortcuts - http://www.joost.com/01900b6
• Fifth Gear - http://www.joost.com/01900dz
• Nettwerk - http://joost.com/01800ba
• The Prodigy - Voodoo People (Pendulum Remix) - http://joost.com/092000t
• WMC 2007 - http://joost.com/065002i

If you are looking for some new backgrounds to grace your monitor or laptop then, do not forget to check out the goodies available on the Joost site. It has been a crazy amount of work getting all of this in place. I truly hope you enjoy Joost and please provide us (or me directly) with your feedback. We would love to hear what you think.

Lately both Caustik and Bunnie have been working hard on bringing us one of the most interesting gadgets, the Chumby. While setting out to create this little ball, Bunnie explored the land of China to produce it. Along the way, he learned a lot about the countries culture and the incredible dexterity and commitment to a project of its workers. He posted this in lots of detail on his blog under Made in China. I normally would like to provide feedback on Bunnies observations, but Bunnie really says it all. Bunnie, we really appreciate you sharing this with all of us.

Be it starting a new company, getting a degree, creating new media or starting a family. The hardest part is not to fall into the traps of getting bogged down because someone else is already doing it. Not pursuing it because you are afraid that others would not approve or do the same thing. It is almost like we are afraid of standing out and landing in long tail oblivion. By everything you do there are points where you have to look back and determine if it is worth continuing on the path you are on or take a different direction.

This is a challenge that has come over and over again. Is it a mountain or a small hill that currently is in the way. What does it look like on the other side. Is it a bright sun shining on a beautiful beach along the ocean? Is it a quaint town that you have never visited? or is the climb what makes it all worth it? It is always easy in hind sight.

I have found that most situations depend on where you are in live and what you truly see as your next challenge. I originally set out to be the best I could be and to ensure that I would always be able to bring food on the table. Even after I had long accomplished this goal, I kept pursing it as if the quantity and quality of the food was never good enough. I have realized since, that setting a new goal was appropriate. Figuring out what that new goal should be is still pretty unclear to me. The key is to realize when you have met your goal and know when it is time to quit pursing it and moving on to something different. Regardless of what the next goal may be. Figure out what drives you as an individual and determine what sort of goal may complement this drive.

As stressful and challenge it may be to currently live in Oegstgeest, it is accomplishing a new goal. Every day, when I look at juggling a 60 hours a week job, with an international relocation and being a father and husband, I realize that this is a significant load I am carrying. I feel it is the same for my wife and daughter. It is exhausting. However, when you look at what we are experiencing by not taking the easy way out and taking this opportunity on with both hands, it is amazing how much we are growing as a family.

I am learning a lot about who I am and how that relates to my first 13 years in Europe. Just as I know that San Diego has changed significantly, so has the Netherlands. It is frightening to see how many people take their surroundings for granted and never challenge them. On the same token it is frightening to see how similar these surroundings are in totally opposite parts of the world. It is interesting to see that both have grown independently and are facing similar challenges. How each location is handling those challenges differently and what that means to the individuals living there. Obviously, there is a lot I do not understand, but people are certainly influenced by their surroundings. It seems very easy to get frustrated, because no one understands your point of view (or your language for that matter), but give it some time and you realize that things are not as bad as you think.

Each challenge brings out new areas where you can improve and each area makes you forget how much you had already grown. There are always times to move on and finding out when that is can be very difficult. But at times it can be just as hard to determine to stay and battle it out. The choice is really up to you.

One of the things that took a long time was finding a place to live. After almost two months arriving in the Netherlands we finally have the keys to our new home. Although, we are renting the place. It is completely bare and we are installing flooring with the help of our friendly co-workers and friends. The place is just on the outskirts of Leiden in a town named Oegstgeest. It is a big milestone for us and we hope to move into the place, although we will continue to essentially live out of suitcase this week. Our container is waiting for us to jump through enough hoops so we can start the customs clearing process which will hopefully complete sometime next month.

It has been a crazy experience trying to move with our daughter in tow, but it is looking like we are slowly settling in. We would like to thank Dirk, Ardy, Pier and Satoko for their help in making our place more livable and we would like to thank Harrie for putting up with us for these last few weeks. I do not know what sort of place we would be moving into if it wasn't for his gracious offer to have us stay with him until we were able to find a place we liked.

As I have mentioned before, I have been getting some of my new tracks in digital form from Beatport lately, as I am not really setup right now to listen to them in vinyl, nor do I have the time to convert the vinyl to FLAC and MP3s.

As it turns out, Beatport just recently decided to give existing customers 3 free credits in honor of their three year anniversary. I have some ideas as to what I would get, but I have a better idea. What would you get if you had 3 credits at Beatport? Please leave your suggestion as a comment and I will make a later posting as to what I actually ended up getting.

After the last few weeks working on the grant brand reveal, we now have launched under the new brand Joost™. The brand is pronounced as "juiced" unlike the dutch first name Joost which is pronounced as "yoast". I can probably save a few minutes every day now that I only have to type five characters rather then sixteen.

I will adjust the category on this site to reflect the new name.

Thanks to a lot of hard work throughout this holiday season, we are now sending a big chunk of our Long Tail Storage cluster traffic from the new and primary datacenter in Luxembourg. We also recently released 0.7.2 which has fixes and adds support for the new datacenter. Colm MacCarthaigh made an excellent post on our corporate blog describing the launch, so I won't go into it here. It is not as redundant and setup as we like, but it is far enough along to where serving from Luxembourg made sense. I personally would like to thank the Operations team and everyone who lended a helping hand for making this happen.

With the launch of LUX, expect invitation tokens to be handed out to current beta testers while we expand the private beta to more individuals. Do keep in mind that this is just one datacenter of many that we will launch around the world during the upcoming year. Things are scaling and more stable every day, but we are still a startup that has lot of growing to do. I am very excited to have reached this milestone, though and I look forward to increasing capacity and redundancy during this new year.

Bunnie has a monthly contest called "Name that ware" which asks visitors to name a piece of hardware based on pictures of its innards. I totally suck at it, but it is very interesting to see the experts at work.