Every once in a while I manage to unplug myself from the IT matrix. Here's what I'm usually up to when I'm off the grid...

Coffee

Jen and I took a break from the IT rat race in 2002 to start a small business. We moved to San Diego from Boulder, Colorado for a change of scenery and opened a coffee house at the corner of India St. and Cedar St. in Little Italy in March 2003. With 20 employees and 112 operating hours per week, we joined the ranks of of the very proud, very tired, first generation of It's A Grind franchise owners, and were the first to open an urban, street-retail shop. The gamble paid off. We became the top performing IAG franchise in the nation within 6 months of opening and consistently ranked in the top 3 until we sold in August 2005. I'm not sure we would tackle retail again, but it worked out for us and the experience was priceless. One side-effect though is that we have become insufferable coffee snobs, generally refusing to drink anything we didn't make in our own kitchen. C'est la vie. Here is a site that documents our first few months of anxiety -- I mean excitement.

Where do I go now for great coffee?

Snaps

Back in the heyday of tech -- you know, when the bubble was still nice and ripe -- I had time to moonlight as a photographer and graphic designer. I carved out a nice little niche shooting photojournalism-style weddings, holding gallery exhibits, and doing design work for corporate identity campaigns. I still trap the odd portrait gig, but have all but abandoned the business angle of photography these days. I try to shoot whenever I can and occasionally manage to upload the public snaps to photos.marcrix.com or the original, ancient gallery at www.zoneVphoto.com. For any fellow shutterbugs out there, here's what's in my bag:

Nikon D-80 digital SLR with vertical grip

Nikon SB-800 Speedlight w/ Stroboframe flash arm & Lumiquest diffuser

Nikon N90S 35mm SLR with vertical grip

Nikkor 28-105mm f/3.5D zoom lens

Nikkor 50 mm f/1.8 fixed focal length lens

Sekonic light meter

Gitzo G1126 & Manfrotto 3221 tripods w/ ball heads 

Tunes

To the chagrin of my professional elders, music has always been my first love -- make that third (I do have a gorgeous wife and daughter). Not one for the starving artist lifestyle, though, I assume the identity of a mild-mannered IT professional by day. But when the whistle blows, I shut the computer down and power the amp up. Here are some original guitar and piano demo tracks I laid down in the home studio a few years ago. I burned them onto a CD called Hello World and gave it to mom and grandma for Christmas. Really, how many more fans do you need?

Vienna - Clean electric guitar homage to my first piano teacher