Uncategorized

I’ve been invited to present at several conferences this month. First was the Montgomery Technology Conference in Santa Monica, (Monty was the group that coordinated the sale of MySpace to Fox, btw), they also hired Kenny Loggins to do a private conference immediately following the speaking, I took a photo of Kenny rocking out on my phone here. Then I sat on a panel called, “A user-generated star is born” at the Digital Media Summit in Hollywood, and next week you can find me at OMMA-Hollywood speaking on a panel called, “So You’re Ready for Video, Now What?” Strange that with all the talk of the remergence of Silicon Valley, that all three of these speaking engagements have required that I travel to the bay area’s all-but-forgotten big step-brother, Los Angeles.

You bay area natives will note that I did not preface the word Los Angeles with the required, “I don’t really like LA, but I had to go there…” Yes, it’s true, we folks from San Francisco try to make ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN, that people know we don’t identify with pink corvettes and fake boobs like Angelenos do. This is a phenomenon that sort of reminds me of folks from Boston feeling a rivalry with New Yorkers…only the New Yorkers don’t know there’s a rivalry. I’ve noticed that LA natives absolutely LOVE San Francisco…they visit, they heap praise on our culture, our beautiful city, our food and wine and shoot countless films here. While us of the arty, pale and oh-so-much more cultured population of San (don’t call it Frisco) Francisco have to preface each reference of LA with a “I don’t really care for LA too much…BUT, I had to go down there to visit my sister and…” I think it’s high time we in SF, give LA the praise it deserves: as the capitol of all that looks good and takes an hour and a half to drive to, no matter how far away it is…

I left my trusty Mach3 razor that I had been using since college in a hotel while I was on business a few weeks ago, and went to the store to buy a new one. Turns out they sell replacement razors for them, but no more Mach3’s. I cursed myself for losing my beloved as I perused the other options available. The Mach3 was the first multiblade razor of its kind and it was great. Now-a-days, it seems all the kiddies have been gullible enough to believe 4 and 5 blade razors are where it’s at, and I was reminded of a saturday night live commercial parody for the “Mach14, 14 blade razor”. My choices limited between, bottom of the line disposable 2 blade razors and the highest option razor, the Gilette “Fusion” 5+1 razor, I figured I’d give it a shot. Turns out, this razor’s unbelievable. Someday, perhaps, if he’s lucky, my grandson will shave with the Mach14, but for now 6 blades is doing me right. At left is a screenshot from Gillette’s website where the “Doctor” asks if you’d like to “Slip into something more comfortable.” I want to point out that my razor did not come with a lab coat for me to slip out of when the mood strikes me. For this reason, I give the razor a B+.

I’m in Las Vegas for WebmasterWorld a conference for web publishers. Most of the attendees, however, are service providers (like me) for publishers. Much of the content has been geared around search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Interesting stuff, to be sure, but a little narrow content-wise to contain any earth shattering revealations for me. Google hosted a cocktail mixer on Wednesday night where they talked about new video ad units which will be click-to-play and I saw an introduction of a new service they’re offering called ‘Google Gadgets’ which allows anyone to produce a gadget that can then be made available for any website or individual to use on their site or on their Google homepage. Kind of like a widget but more open source. The SEO folks were all excited because if someone puts up a gadget on your site, you get a link back, which helps your search engine rank. Last night Yahoo! threw a big party for all the publishers in the YPN (Yahoo! Publisher Network) Today, I’m off to an open bar/networking event at the New York-New York casino before I fly back to San Francisco. Some attendees are planning on staying through the weekend, but in my estimation, 3 days in Vegas is just about 1 too many.

No kidding,I just saw a UFO fly over the San Francisco city skyline. It was difficult to make out, but it moved really strangely and it was totally creepy. I got goosebumps watching it fly. About 20 minutes later a black, blackhawk helicopter started flying back and forth above the skyline. It’s made about 10 passes back and forth along the same flight line that the UFO had. Above is a picture from my camera phone of the helicopter. I took several pictures, each with a flash, at which point the helicopter changed course and flew directly over my apartment as if it was coming to check out the flashes. Apparently, the truth really is out there! Just by posting this information to my blog, I may be inviting the men in black for a visit. If I dissappear inexplicably, or have a sudden lapse in memory, you’ll know what happened…

August 23rd will mark my 5th Anniversary with Tribal Fusion– and I’ve decided to make August 25th my last day. When I joined the company 5 years ago we were 5 people trying to eek out an existence in a horrible online ad economy. September 11th was soon to follow and if there were any advertising budgets left, few of them were online.

Still, we kept costs low and took advantage of the down market to slowly claw our way to profitability. It provided me an amazing opportunity to work closely with our CEO and founder, Dilip DaSilva and play a key role in the generation of a company. It was a fantastic experience to make huge contributions and experience successes and failures that were all my own. Before long I found myself as a Vice President at one of the web’s top media companies. I was invited to speak on panels, and I built a fantastic 10 person team to whom I’ll be sad to say goodbye. I’ve been on top of the world in many regards and yet I was itching to begin something new.

On September 5th, I’ll begin work as VP of Network & Partner Development for ViTrue a small start-up based out of Atlanta focused around user-generated video advertising. I’ll work from home and I’ll be starting from scratch. I’m certainly out of my comfort zone on this– but I’m hoping to grow through a new set of unfamiliar challenges. So, here goes…

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…