New York City Espresso

What a spectacular place. I made the mile-plus cross town walk from the hotel to Everyman Espresso. The windchill made it feel like all of 15 and I considered buying earmuffs at each sidewalk vendor until I realized I'd have to stop walking and risk instant hypothermia to do so.

The espresso made every frigid step worth it. Oh glory, what a shot. I had two and wanted 10. This is a shot that grabs you by the balls and twists -- hard. A good amount of Ethiopian lends the signature dirty flavor that is perfectly balanced with nice residual sweetness. When it was over I positively floated back to the hotel -- I don't even remember it being cold.

I'm beginning to suspect there is a unidirectional correlation between Tattoos and Good Espresso. That is: Every good barrista seems to have visible tattoos, but not every barrista with tattoos is good. The guy at Everyman is good (and tattooed).

Everyman Espresso
136 East 13th Street (Union Square)

iTunes Managment

Here are a couple of very hard earned tips when managing large iTunes libraries:

• NEVER, EVER, Under any circumstances, start iTunes without the music library mounted. This can cause many hours of work to re-connect iTunes to the missing files.
  
  
• The only way to merge libraries is at the file system level, dragging whole libraries into iTunes causes more trouble than it's worth.
  
  
• External NAS-based iTunes servers suck. I have a 2TB ReadyNAS NV+ from NetGear and it's a piece of shit. Performance is poor, the UI sucks, and it takes 20 minutes to start-up.
  
  
• Anything over 25k songs really hurts iTunes performance.
  
  
• Lots of people talk about managing large libraries. Lots of people think that 10 Gigs is a large library. Things that work with 10 Gigs, struggle at 100 and fail at 250GB. Make sure you research any new technique.
  
  
• Over USB2, 250GB (50k+ files) take 6-8 hours to copy. Try not to do it twice.
  
  
• I could not have gotten everything under control without a number of scripts from Doug