Rather than doing a year-in-review in words, I’ll just provide this very cool time-lapse video by Eirik Solheim that shows a year passing on a fixed landscape in 40 seconds. Incredibly cool. (Tip of the hat to Gizmodo for this one). A two minute version and HD versions of both are available too, as are the original source images.

Today it is bitterly cold in Boulder, currently registering -4 degrees Fahrenheit. I returned to Hoth this afternoon from the relative warmth of San Francisco, after attending last night’s excellent Topspin holiday party. As I was catching up on my Slashdot feed, it came to my attention that scientists have discovered a sixth region of the magnetosphere called the warm plasma cloak. I could really use one of those tonight when I take my dog out for his nightly walk.

I cannot deny it – I love beer. My “gateway beer” that taught me there was a whole universe outside of mass-produced beer was Pete’s Wicked Ale, introduced to me when I arrived in the Bay Area to attend Stanford in 1989. Then, during my junior year, I spent six months in 1992 living in Germany, three months at Stanford’s campus in Berlin and three month in Munich working for BMW on the assembly line building their 3-series cars.

Aside from memorizing Berlin’s U-Bahn system and learning German words (such as Warmelosierung and Gewindebolzen) for car parts whose names I didn’t know in English, I developed a love for excellent beer (i.e. not American macro-brewed Budweiser, Miller and Coors) and eventually started brewing my own beer. After moving to the lower Haight in San Francisco in 1996, I found myself within blocks of über beer-nerd bar Toronado, and continued my beer education in those hallowed halls.

My first post-Excite-IPO angel investment was in a brewery based in San Francisco called Speakeasy Ales & Lagers. Today Speakeasy is thriving and brews and bottles some truly excellent (and award-winning) beers, my favorite being Big Daddy IPA. Their bottled beers enjoy good distribution on the West Coast, particularly in San Francisco, are served on tap in bars throughout the Bay Area, and I’ve even seen them on the shelves of Dean & Deluca in New York, Napa and Georgetown.

My love for Speakeasy’s Big Daddy IPA turned me on to India Pale Ales in general, and I’ve been thoroughly exploring the genre over the years. IPAs are strongly-hopped beers with higher-than-average alcohol content that were originally brewed for the long sea voyage from the UK to India back in colonial days. Because the voyage was long, the beer had to be brewed to keep during the journey. Hops act as a preservative and impart both a distinctive aroma and a strong flavor to beer that some would call bitter, but I would call complex.

Aside from Big Daddy, some of my favorites include Lagunitas IPA, Stone IPA, Boulder’s Avery IPA and the 60-, 90– and 120-minute Dogfish Head IPAs. I discovered Dogfish Head thanks to the excellent and extensive beer list at The Kitchen Upstairs here in Boulder. The Dogfish Head IPAs are by far my favorites, and I was pleased to discover an excellent in-depth article in the New Yorker on Delaware’s Dogfish Head Brewery, which is well worth a read if you are interested in beer. My brother-in-law is also a beer fanatic (the picture above is of his beer fridge), and he and I are plotting a pilgrimage to Rehoboth Beach to visit the source at some point.

I’ve been known to take beer-focused trips in the past, so a trip to Delaware would not be the first. This past May, my partner Jason and our friend Martin and I took a three day “man trip” to Belgium to visit Antwerp, Brugge and Brussels and sample as many Belgian beers as we could. Between the three of us, I think we had about 90 beers, a respectable sample of what’s on offer in a country that boasts domestic production of at least 500 varieties of standard, regularly brewed beers and perhaps thousands when you count specialty one-of-a-kind brews that are put out regularly by Belgium’s breweries and monasteries.

Now that I’ve gone through this recap of my beer education and obsession, I’m hoping my readers will suggest other ways I might expand my beer universe…

When I was in Pennsylvania two weeks ago for Thanksgiving with Katherine’s extended family, we took a trip in to Philadelphia to see the new Comcast corporate headquarters building, recently opened, and a new downtown landmark (chock full of green design and LEED goodness).

The coolest part of the new Comcast building is the giant, $22m 10 megapixel mega-HD video wall in the lobby, which runs custom-developed more-than-HD content 24×7. My brother-in-law is a VP at Comcast and took us to see the holiday show on the wall, which drew hundreds of people. Happily, we were able to secure front-row seats (on the lobby’s floor) to see the show. Click here to see a slideshow of shots I took of the wall with my iPhone. I have to say, the video wall is quite stunning. Most impressive, Comcast! For more tech specs on the wall, check out this post from Engadget.

I’m very pleased with the people Obama is bringing on board his administration. In David Brooks’ op-ed piece in the NY Times today, he refers to this new administration as the valedictocracy – rule by those who graduated first in their high school classes. Having been valedictorian of my high school graduating class in 1989, I’m glad to see my long-suffering people are finally getting their shot. (That’s a joke, folks.)

I’m hopeful that an Obama administration will (among other things) help buck the long-standing trend towards anti-intellectualism in our country. The world is a complicated place, and I want my leaders to be as intelligent as possible, be comfortable with nuance and speak in complete sentences. The last eight years have proven what a disaster voting for the guy you’d like to have a beer with can turn out to be. Fortunately, voters used a different filter this time around.

Call me elitist if you must, but I’d much rather have a beer with a guy or gal with advanced degrees from Harvard, Stanford or Yale than with Joe the Plumber. Time to hand over the controls to the eggheads — even if you are suspicious of this “elitist” approach, let’s face it, there’s very little chance they could do a worse job at the helm than the previous administration did.