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…

It’s been a wild week to be in the eye of the storm. My new company, ViTrue, is smack in the middle of what’s starting to legitimately feel like a revolution in advertising. Video is a medium I’ve always been interested in because when placed online, it has gigantic advantages over traditional ads for engaging the consumer. I’ve always asserted that TV advertising’s primary pull is its ability to evoke an emotion in the viewer. Banner ads, newspaper ads, and Google text ads can’t do that. But video absolutely can, just as it does on television. Everyone’s found a lump in their throat while watching a television commerical at one time or another. For me it was the Cindi Lauper/Kodak “True Colors” ads during the ‘96 Olympics.

So ViTrue’s starting with online video, and leveraging the web to make it flow both ways between the consumer and the product. This week we finalized a deal with Turner/TBS to power their user-generated-video site, “Am I Funny or Not?” We’re also providing the technology for Friendster’s “Get Political” video contest that allows people to upload their own political ads. Check out one I uploaded on Arnold’s behalf: sharkle.friendster.com

And if that weren’t exciting enough, the grey lady got around to picking up my career move: www.nytimes.com/swansonarticle

It wasn’t long after I started working from home for the first time that I realized there were going to be challenges. Yes, the challenges of making sure you get out of your house occasionally, that you don’t merge your “real” life with your work life, and all that. But friends had warned me of those potential pitfalls. No, what struck me immediately were two altogether unexpected elements. First: the HEAT. Yes. I decided to begin working from home at the only time of the year when San Francisco warms up a bit and reaches the 80 degree range: September-October. And my apartment is south-facing, gets a lot of sun, and gets good and toasty. All day. Oh, and it turns out my 9th grade Science teacher was right. Leaving the refrigerator door open does *not* work as a makeshift air conditioner.
And then there are the parrots. For some odd reason the 50 or so famous Wild Parrots of Telegraph hill have decided to make the tree directly outside of my window into their home for a significant portion of the day. And those mo-fos are loud. Crank your volume and check this video I took of them to get an idea of my new office’s soundtrack.

In other news, Burning Man was a hoot. I don’t know What else to say about it. This was my 7th year and well, I keep going for a reason: it rules. Mad props to my False Profit campmates this year for running the tightest burning man camp I’ve ever seen in action. And by tight I mean dope.

I also attended “The Future of Web Apps” conference which provided me some insights on building passion-centric communities and the various platforms du jour for building your new fancy webapp. Also some good talk about launching companies, getting funding, revenue models, etc. I was struck by how many people in the audience had laptops open and were checking email and surfing the net during the conference (me included). I’ve noticed this phenomenon occuring in business meetings now too. With wireless in every nook and cranny, and laptops ubiqutious, it seems an excellent way to feed the ADD tendencies of your average Silicon Valley hipster. Yes, this conference proved to me that people talking to groups is not nearly as interesting as minesweeper.

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…