In the last few months I’ve started learning about, and tasting lots of different international teas. I was inspired by Kevin Rose, from Digg.com who has been talking about tea a lot online.

Tea is pretty awesome - it has no calories, doesn’t contain much caffeine, is cheap, tastes good and when you’re ready for something to perk you up it only takes a few minutes to make. I also love the fact that there’s so many different types of tea out there you can really try a lot of different types.

I barely used to drink tea. Generally I just drank very infrequent packaged teas. Once I switched to loose leaf tea I couldn’t believe the difference. I was making my tea the wrong way (generally putting the teabag in for far too long). With good loose leaf teas you don’t even need sugar or milk. Its all about having the water temperature exactly right and steeping the tea for the right amount of time (steeping = the length of time you leave the tea in the hot water).

How to get started:

1. Get a teastick: http://gamilacompany.com/tea/teastick.html
This is what you use to steep the tea in the hot water

2. Get a package of teas to try. I’ve found I like Rishi teas a lot, and their oolong teas are great. This is a great sampler pack to start with: http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/sample-set-osthmanthus-huang-guan-yin-wuyi-oolong-iron-goddess-of-mercy-bao-zhong.html

Once you’re more serious:

1. You should get a variable tea kettle. This is pretty important. Different teas should be made at different temperatures.

http://www.amazon.com/Breville-BKE820XL-Variable-Temperature-Kettle/dp/B001DYERBK/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1241211937&sr=8-4

This kettle is pretty expensive for just a hot water kettle, but it rocks. It lets you set the temperature exactly right for the style of tea you are drinking.

2. Get a timer. Each tea should be steeped for the right amount of time. So you take the hot water from the kettle and put it with the tea for a specific length of time - the timer makes this easy to do. This one should work fine:

http://www.amazon.com/Component-Design-TM15-Extra-Large/dp/B0000W4MYI/ref=sr_1_28?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1241212123&sr=8-28

3. Get a bigger infuser. The teastick is ideal for making tea for yourself while you’re working during the day - but if you have a few people to make tea for, you need a way to prepare tea for everyone at once. This prepares tea for 2 people; I often make 3 small cups with it:

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/Glass-Teapot-with-Infuser-Two-Person.html

This is similar but bigger:

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/large-glass-teapot-with-infuser.html

The great thing about an infuser is you can watch the colors from the tea swirl through the water while its steeping. Sounds silly perhaps, but its pretty cool!

4. Pick up a bunch more of the rishi sampler packs, so you can find out which teas you like the most. Here’s some good ones to get:
http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/green-tea-sample-set-jasmine-pearl-ancient-emerald-lily-orange-blossom-jade-cloud.html

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/white-tea-sample-set-silver-needle-premiun-white-peony-peach-blossom-white-tea-rose-m-lange.html

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/black-tea-sample-set-earl-grey-darjeeling-2nd-flush-keemun-mao-feng-golden-yunnan.html

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/pu-erh-tea-sample-set-ancient-tea-flower-loose-pu-erh-ginger-pu-erh-classic-ancient-pu-erh-tuo-cha.html

Once you’ve tried a bunch of teas you will find out which ones you like. Many do taste quite similar. But some are very different. These are my favourites, in order of most preferred:

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/iron-goddess-of-mercy-medium-roasted.html

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/plum-oolong-organic-oolong-tea.html

http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/citron-oolong.html

I order these in 1 pound bags now, which last forever. You can put those into smaller tea containers like these:
http://www.rishi-tea.com/store/tea-storage-vessels/

I have about 30 different tea varieties and its been a great thing to do.

If you’re interested in other tech guys and how they are into tea, you may want to read this article:

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/04/tech-millionair/

Samovar is a tea house right near Moscone in San Francisco; there’s a lot of conferences in the area such as adtech. Their website is: http://samovarlife.com/ They do charge $8-$10 per cup of tea, but its a pretty awesome place. We saw Tim Ferriss there when we were having tea.

If you get really serious about tea, there’s a tea conference you can go to:

http://www.worldteaexpo.com/

And its worth following Kevin Rose’s tea twitter account:
http://twitter.com/goodtea

This is a pretty concise blog post with a lot of links; it represents 4 months of research (and misteps) about tea and is pretty much everything I know. If you follow these steps you’ll be on the right track. I drink 2-4 cups of tea every day and love it - its even great in hot climates like the Caribbean!

This ad was published in a small local newspaper (Pereira) in Colombia on 25 July 1998. The entire newspaper was in spanish except for this advertisement. I am sure all Canadians are very proud.

Ok, I admit it. I have zero sense of direction.. I’ve no idea how it happened, I even competed in orienteering when I was younger (competitive map based running through the bush in Australia). Anyways, today I’m an expert in getting lost.

Since I recently moved to Santo Domingo, I don’t know my way around. In addition, people drive like its their last day on the planet, so the traffic can be a challenge and its easy to get lost. I love driving in the US - I just install my GPS and I can find my way anywhere.

For years I’ve wanted GPS maps of the Dominican Republic. But no go. I’ve searched all over the net for commercial maps, I’ve checked out open source community maps, nothing. I was even going to pay someone to make them, but that turned out to be more complicated than we expected.

On the Dominican message boards, DR1, they mentioned the other day that someone had made maps for Santo Domingo, released just a week ago for Santo Domingo! Wow! So I dug out my Garmin GPS I use for trips in the US and went over there (in taxi naturally, since I couldn’t find it on my own!).

I was concerned my US maps wouldn’t fit with my dominican maps, but it turned out that wasn’t an issue. Once I got there, I was sent upstairs and there was a guy installing the GPS units. He was very friendly and just connected my unit via the USB cable and copied over the data. It took about 10 minutes. Then I paid him RD$1400 ($40US) and off I went.

So firstly, they’re not complete maps, its nothing like GPS service in the US. You can’t look up a street address like you can in the USA. All you get are maps of the city, working on your GPS. If you want to go to a specific address, you have to find that location on the GPS map, pinpointmark the position on the GPS and then it will take you there. It has a limited selection of restaurants and locations built in which you can preselect, but its nothing like a mapping unit in the USA which has virtually complete business data for the entire city.

On my first trip it took me about 25 minutes to figure out how to get it to work. But once I’d programmed in the place I was going to (which I had to find on the paper map first ironically), getting there was a breeze. And, once I was there, I marked the position as a favourite in the GPS, so I will be able to find out how to get back there again.

One night when I was coming home late, I got lost for almost 2 hours.. There are often limited sign markings in the DR and late at night there may be nobody around to ask directions.. With my GPS that won’t happen again.

One cool thing was that my GPS is running in english, but giving all the street names in Spanish. So it tells me to turn left in english. For a lazy spanish speaker like myself, I like it.

Without the ability to search for streets and towns, its not perfect, its about 60% of a US GPS map system. But its a great start and hopefully will be improved.

The only issue I found out is that my cigarette lighter electricity had been disconnected, presumably when my ipod system was installed.. So the GPS ran out of power.. Ah, DR mechanics.. but we’ll get that fixed.

Here’s the unit: http://www.ola.com.do/gps.html

Thanks Ola, and good job!

To read this week’s interview on how a small company can leverage the legal power of the US Government to compete, go here: http://meetinnovators.com/2008/12/18/renata-hesse-from-wsgr/

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I’ve always moved around a lot. The longest I’ve stayed in one country since 1990 until now has been 3 years. Now I’m moving from a city I’ve lived in for the past 7 years, Santiago, Dominican Republic, to Santo Domingo, the capital (Santiago is the second largest city).

I’m moving for a couple of reasons.. people think i’m crazy but i’ve developed a real phobia about earthquakes. iIf you haven’t lived through a major one you may not understand. We had a big one here in 2003; everyone in the city thought we were done for, and it was only a 6.4.

Santiago is right on a major fault, similar to the san francisco bay area. The difference is that in the Domincian Republic there isn’t earthquake resistant construction. In fact, my current building is designed with a car park UNDER the building, so if a major quake comes, the entire building will collapse on to the car park. (this information comes from some caribbean earthquake geologists from the US). But my earthquake phobia doesn’t come from the initial quake - its the 2 months of aftershocks. As far as I know they’ve not had that recently in the bay area.

In Santiago, the entire city was on edge in 2003 because we never knew when the next quake would come. It was extremely scary - you’d be sitting eating lunch and a 5.5 would just randomly happen.. I’ve read about this kind of trauma on the news in countries like Turkey and China when they’ve had a lot of aftershocks. If you haven’t been through it, its hard to relate to.

Santiago was actually already destroyed in the 1500’s by an earthquake.

A piece of the wall from old Santiago which was destroyed by a massive earthquake in the 1500’s.

The tension has built up dramatically and there is a now major tragedy waiting to happen. I lived in Pereira, Colombia for a while and just after I left, a major quake took out Armenia, a nearby city. It was a real tragedy.

I prefer to be in Santo Domingo which while close to Santiago, is not on a major caribbean fault line. I noticed the earthquake affected almost everyone in the city at the time, we were all tramautized by so many aftershocks and the original quake.

I also just want to live in a bigger city with more services. My next move will likely be back to the US to join or start a startup, probably in 18 months. although I’m game to go anywhere for the right opportunity. I don’t need a job - i want to build a billion dollar company either as a founder or part of a founding team. Meanwhile I will stay in the Dominican Republic, using leverage working with other teams and not working with anyone locally.

As part of this move i have done my biggest ever life cleanup. I’ve gone through every single thing i own and tried to dispose of as much of it as possible, a little “tim ferris” style (although I think I was doing Tim Ferris type stuff before Tim Ferris was!). I’m moving to a furnished apartment so this meant I could really dispose of a lot of stuff. like to delegate as much work as possible, however this was something i couldn’t delegate and had to do myself. I now see why i never did it before ;-).

As I went through my filing cabinet it was shocking to see how many different projects and ideas i’ve worked on over the years. I’ve really tried a LOT of different ideas to try to find what would work. Most things didn’t and failed miserably. But a couple did. Its been a lot of trial and error trying to figure out what works for me and my strengths. Ihave a lot of respect for successful entrepreneurs, they aren’t just overnight successes. there’s a lot of interim steps to get it right.

And, I went through all the wiring i’ve had installed everywhere throughout my apartment. i hadn’t realised just how many different things i’ve attempted to get a good system for playing audio and video. finally i have it here: http://adrianbye.com/2008/11/03/a-breakthrough-my-new-home-audio-system/

As i discarded everything, we put it all in to the living room. then my maid got to work and started selling everything. Keep in mind these were things which have very little value for me; I just want to be rid of as much as possible. Well, i put her on a 20% commission for sales she made. I had no idea that my maid with an 8th grade education would turn into such a dynamo. It turns out that as of Sunday she’s made US$3000 in sales! This from all the stuff in the US that you’d normally just send to Goodwill. Dominicans LOVE buying used stuff. It was funny reading about black friday sales in the US and seeing just the same happening in my living room.

Its amazing getting rid of everything. I’m switched to mac, so all my PC stuff is now gone. i’ve switched to iphone so all my old cellphones are being sold. I had 5 cellphones and 3 laptops just sitting around which i’d never had time to get rid of. It feels good.

So now starts a major new phase in my life.. new place to live, running on mac, living in santo domingo, completely organized life, ready to work on exciting upcoming projects. i’ve delayed a lot of things to make this move happen and am really looking forward to getting going again.