Entries from June 2006 ↓

Last Wednesday, I was in a horrible car accident. I must have just been too tired or used to driving a rental car (while on business in LA) and I slammed on the clutch instead of the brake and pushed a pickup truck with the hood of my car for about 10 feet. My car is messed up– but everyone was okay. I’m a little shell-shocked.

And, I paid off my college student loans today. My final two years of college I watched in horror as my student loan debt increased. I worked hard over the summers to put all the money I could towards the balance. But at the end, I ended up taking out over $20K in loans. It was hard then, to imagine paying them off and I remembered being depressed until a Professor told me how much she had in debt with undergrad + grad school loans. “You’ll just pay off a little at a time…it’s not a big deal.” It made me feel a lot better. Still, I feel GREAT to have paid them off completely, and like she said, I paid them off a little at a time.

On Tuesday I will travel to Beverly Hills to meet with the senior staff of FOX Interactive. It could possibly be the biggest meeting of my life. I bought a new suit and got a haircut to ensure I look snappy.

I saw the Al Gore film, “An Inconvenient Truth” last night. I was simply amazed at some of the statistics and photos. And I was touched by Gore’s lifelong passion for the environment and in particular, the issue of global warming. I’ve been confused about the issue for some time– whether the climate change we’re experiencing is simply a regular climactic cycle or if the human effect on the atmosphere is actually raising the temperature of the earth. I left the film convinced that we have set ourselves up for catastrophic climate change. I took a screenshot of one of the most compelling arguments in his slideshow (below), apologies for the resolution. In it, you see CO2 levels (in yellow) for the past 600,000 years as collected from 3km deep Antarctic ice cores. The white line below the CO2 line indicates temperature. You can see that the temperature and CO2 lines closely follow each other over this huge period of time. The higher the CO2 levels in the atmosphere, the higher the avg. temperature. The lower the CO2, the lower the temperature, etc.

The far right of the yellow chart indicates CO2 levels today– off the charts. Much higher CO2 levels than have ever been present in the atmosphere in the past 600,000 years. That’s not good. I’m planning to support Eco-friendly industry and business like my father’s company, Discovery Sea Kayaks that offers Kayaking tours in the San Juan Islands.

I moved into a new apartment on Telegraph Hill and today, for the first time, I finally feel like I live here. It really feels like the right time time to start fresh and set new intentions. I’ve redesigned this website with a new intention: an expression of myself on the web. While I was trying to formulate witty, edgy names and tag lines and speculate on what I would write about and how, it came to me: call the site my name. In reality– why not? A quick Google search confirms there are hundreds of people with my name and, frankly, it’s about time I proudly joined them. A blog seems appropriate– my initials are RSS after all. And while the site carries my name, it’s also, ideally, about something bigger than me and a place to get my thoughts down about what that is. So, here we go…