I recently finished a book I probably should have read when I was 13. Who would I be now if I had read the character of Cyrus Smith the Engineer as a teenager instead of an adult? The Mysterious Island was written by Jules Verne and published in 1874. The novel takes place during the United States Civil War, with our main characters being held prisoners in the South. The five prisoners work together to escape, but soon find themselves deserted on a deserted island. (Man I could use an ice cream sundae.)

I don’t pick up island books very often. Are there a lot of them out there? I can’t seem to think of many. There’s that one where the kids are on an island, they get all crazy, then eat each other – I think. What was that one called? Never read it. Anyway, I never would have thought that an island would be a good spot for a book to take place, but it turns out if the island is mysterious, it’s an awesome place! You go Jules!

Back to Cyrus Smith, who shouldn’t be mistaken for Sirius Black from the Harry Potter novels, though he too is valiant, determined, courageous, resourceful, steadfast and has a name that starts with a ‘Sa’ sound and ends with a ‘us’ sound – they are not the same character no matter how much you wish them to be (having a wizard on the island really would have changed the cast-aways’ situation). Cyrus Smith is now my ideal man. I mean, should be considered the ideal man. He seems to know everything. The guy builds houses, casts iron, makes gun powder and other explosive devices. He plants gardens, makes an elevator using a waterfall, and helps create the coolest living space I’ve ever read about. I don’t think I gave anything away other than Cyrus Smith being a bad-ass.

What truly amazed me in reading the Mysterious Island was the way in which Jules Verne was able to describe Cyrus Smith’s discoveries on the island. His descriptions of how he transformed these materials into items that would make the castaways’ lives easier or more productive. By reading the Mysterious Island I have learned a few important things about myself. First, I want to own a smart dog that cares about nothing but me, and what I want it to do. Second, If I had to live off of natural resources on my own or with a few others, we’d have well put together clothes, and could probably grow tomatoes, but I’d really have to work my memory to make strong bricks – and unless we had a match and wanted to keep a fire burning year-round, I better learn to make fire. Oh and I need to learn some hunting skills.

Luckily I live on a peninsula and not an island. I don’t have to make all of these things, I can buy them. I am warm in my house while I read my book, this too is nice. Now I either need to pick up a book that teaches me all of these skills before our world is flipped inside out from global warming and we all have to fend for ourselves (deep breath)… Or, I need to come up with a plan to save the planet so I don’t have to learn all of these things.

Now it’s time for that sundae.

It’s been a while since I had a good road trip. Now in the last week and a half I’ve gone to Seattle and back. I’m not a short guy so you’d assume that sitting in a car for 12 hours with 3 other humans and one dog wouldn’t be my idea of a great time. Well you would think wrong. Seriously, get with it. The ladies are beautiful and dear to my heart, and Skip (who’s even taller then me) makes sure everyone is always having fun.

What do you do for 10 – 12 hours in a car? You catch up. You make sure you know everything that’s going on in everyone’s life. You brainstorm amazing business ideas – and most of all you laugh until your cheeks hurt. You can also snuggle with the dog – she likes that.

There are some great books out there about road tripping and traveling out on the open road. It’s no secret that it’s one of Americas favorite pastimes – and we were basically the family version of “Travels with Charlie” (honestly I don’t remember a damned thing about Travels with Charlie; I assure you I read the book though). For me the appeal is getting out of the city and urban sprawl, and eventually hitting the golden rolling hills of California, the climb into Mount Shasta (somehow I always miss the meat bonanza in Shasta City) then the green valleys and lush trees of Oregon. Eventually entering a city that is nothing like the one I live in. I love when it’s a little warm and you can drive with the windows down, the music up, and you sing at the top of your lungs. That’s a road trip.

It seems to be in my blood. I remember traveling time and time again with my dad from LA to the bay area. My dad was so good at keeping me occupied on the trip up. We sang, I would draw, he once even let me plug my piano keyboard into the car stereo to pound out some tunes. As I get older I definitely take note of becoming sore after staying in the car for to long. I also feel bloated. When we came back from Seattle I instantly wanted to go to the gym (so I did). I’m also very conscientious about my environmental impact. I remember reading once how much prehistoric energy from the growth of forests, the perfect circumstances of decomposition with added pressure and heat in the earth that it takes to create oil. Then the massive amount of work and energy it takes to pull the fossil fuel from our earth (at least this is how I remember it : “The Weather Makers” by Tim Flannery). Then we burn it without a thought. This is hard for me to swallow.

So as I grow older I find myself considering new things about the road trip. How long am I able to stay in a car before I want to jump out. Could I even jump out once my legs have cramped up? How much gas am I using and what effect will it have on our planet? Should I stop at the black bear diner for a milkshake or will that just add to the bloated feeling? These seem to be things that I’ll have to keep considering as time continues to push forward. In the meantime I’ll reminisce on the trip to Seattle and Back. The first one with 1 (and only) wife, 2 friends and a dog. The second with 1 (same one) wife, and one great friend. It really felt good to be on the road again.

I won’t be making it out to SXSW this week – It just didn’t work out this year. But I have a simple request to my friends who will be there. I’d like you to help me be a SXSW meme amongst each other. The idea of a meme simply put by wikipedia is a “unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures”. This can be done a few ways.

Writing: When you’re out this week, and I would have been out with you hashtag #sxsw #ws – The #ws for Whit Scott. The search looks like this.
Speach: When you’re heading out to parties you should remember as a group to invite me. Please invite invisible me verbally. Here is a picture of Thomas, Rachael and invisible me at SXSW last year.
Gestures: You’re all creative, I assume you’ll be able to come up with some Whit style gestures. If I was there it’d probably look like this.

At this point I can’t really get much out of South By South West unless I become a meme. Maybe I’ll even meet people this way… Imagine Thomas Knoll tweeting my hashtag and Ethan noticing it. Ethan asks Thomas what he’s doing, thinks about me, then tags me up for the rest of the conference. This meme can be endless. By the end of the conference, people who don’t know me will think I was there.

In the mean time i’ll be participating in #SXSWSF (south by south west san francisco) – SXSWSF happening now all around us.
I’ve heard you can go to: Temper Trap Expression College 12:30pm, Violent Soho Amoeba records 6pm today (Friday) if you’re actually looking to be around people who are participating in #sxswsf. You can follow the SXSWSF hashtag here.

The people who can help me out that I’ll be missing this year include but are not limited to:
Thomas Knoll
Ethan
Sean
Dan Martell
Ben
Yama
Violet
Alicia
Adam Duffy
Jonathan Nafarrete
Natasha Wescoat
Willo
Sarah Vela
Derek Overbey who did this interview of me last year.
Tracy Apps
Rachael Joy
Sarah C
Phill Campbell
Paul Stamatiou

I hope you all have a great time, and I look forward to following you all vicariously.

The reason I am writing to you today is in hopes that I can find an iPhone 3G to purchase from you, your friend, or your mom (moms usually have extra iPhones – I asked my mom, but she had already given it to my sister, so will you please ask your mom for me? Thank you.), or your neighbor. It seems to me with the iPhone 3GS available now there must be drawers full iPhone 3G’s out there. We both know that they are just declining in value, and you’re just waiting for the next iPhone to come out.

The truth is I’d rather give you, your friend, or your mom money than Apple and AT&T. I went through the rebate brewhaha at Apple yesterday and laughed my way straight out of the store.

I don’t want to pay $299 for the 3G and have to sign another two year contract, when in six months I could get the 3GS upgrade for like $199. If that didn’t make sense to you, don’t worry, all that needs to make sense is that I would like to buy your phone from you.

Thank you in advance, please send this post to your friends (ReTweet). They may have friends that have an iPhone that they have been trying to sell for the last four months.

Thomas and I won a Ford Fiesta for 6 months! We’re not exactly sure what that means at this point – What we do know is that we’ll be heading down to LA on the 19th in order to pick up the car. Now the question that is in your head is likely to be, what color car are you two getting? Well I’m glad I thought you might ask that. The color options for the “Ford Agents”, as they call us, were Black, Silver, Lime Green and Magenta. Because Thomas and I couldn’t have won the car without the help of so many people, we decided to leave that decision in the hands of said people.

Obviously they choose lime green…
So yes, we’ll be driving a lime green Ford Fiesta for 6 months, being agents, doing missions – Again, that is all I know.

The agent web page is up on the Fiesta Movement web site, and if you’d like to see our bio that was written by the beautiful and talented Giselle Kennedy, you should go here.

If you have no idea what i’m talking about because you’ve been hiding under a rock or have a dial-up connection, watch this (unless you have dial-up, you should just turn off your computer and read a book).

As the missions begin we’ll be posting a lot of content, probably here, on my flickr account, on facebook or friendster (j/k), youtube, and of course tweeting the bajesus out of it all on Twitter using the new Seesmic Desktop Client! <- That post to come soon.

See you on the road!

About 2 weeks ago my coworker Thomas Knoll and I were sent a forward from our boss who had received an e-mail from Julia Roy about the Fiesta Movement. (I love when my blog posts start with sentences like, “my fiance’s sisters boyfriends sister works for the Golden State Warriors” – sounds super legit.)

What is the Fiesta Movement you may be asking yourself… or asking me?
Well it looks as though it’s Fords ad campaign for the release of the Ford Fiesta schedualed to release in the US in 2011.
What it really is is a very smart ad campaign by Ford to get people to post videos on YouTube and send it to all their friends, Tweet about it and write blog posts like the one you’re reading.

What we have to do: Send in a video saying why we would be good “Ford Agents”.

What we did: We just posted a video of us driving around San Francisco and talked about how cool we are. Which is not very (cool that is)…

Also worth noting:
Ford posted our video on their site 2 days after we posted it.
We made teasers for our video, 9 in all, they’re short, but decent.

More importantly then winning the Ford Fiesta, Thomas and I think we should try to enter all the video competitions we can find online and make a show out of it. If you have any leads be sure to let one of us know.

EXT:JONES AND ELLIS

So the first problem with my story and my journalism is that this is only my perspective, which I can tell in about a sentence. I hear a pop, we stop abruptly, bus driver yells “fuck”, we drive about 20 more feet, quickly, bus driver yells something like “oh shit”, jumps out of his little bus driver booth onto the floor, a passenger runs to the back of the bus and dives to the ground, everyone on the bus dives to the ground.

That really doesn’t tell you much. Everything else kinda has to be assumed and or made up. For example at one point when we’re all laying on the ground with our heads covered a passenger asks the bus driver if he’s all right:

Guy “Hey bus driver, are you all right”
Bus Driver: “Yeah -is everyone else alright”?
Passengers as a collective “Yeah”
1st guy: “Think you can drive us out of here”?

Remember at this point all of us are still on the ground covering our heads.

Bus Driver “You Fucking drive us out of here, we’re being shot at”.

So at this point Im on the ground because I heard a pop, the bus driver slammed on the breaks, jumped out of his cubical. I never saw anyone with a gun, or a bullet hole anywhere.

I did see a guy laying on the ground when we got off the bus, about 4 police officers around him, and one was cutting his shirt off, which I assume was to stop bleeding from a bullet wound. Now comes the second craziest part (the first being that we were on a bus that was supposedly shot at). By the time we get off the bus at least 4 cop cars are already there, our bus is already being taped off with the magical do not pass this line, protective, yellow caution tape – and a police officer tells everyone to leave the scene. Basically for all we know there is a shooter on the loose, and he wants us to walk through the Tenderloin away from where all the police are. That didn’t sound safe, and it didn’t sound fun, we did it anyway.

I shoot video for a living, but right now I’d like to present to you some of the worst footage I have ever taken in my life, I guess I would be a pretty horrible war time camera man. Below is the footage that I took from laying on the floor.

It was a 3 day tournament, it was rainy, and it was in Vegas – I note this because of how bad those 3 things are combined for a tournament, but how good they are for seeing how good a player is and how good a team is. Imagine trying to throw a disc, now imagine doing that in the rain, for 3 days, after a very long evening in Las Vegas – You see my point.

I brought my camera along and snapped some photos, you can see all of the photos here, or you can watch this montage of photos in the video that I made below.

That was yesterday morning, I look tired. Today I feel much better, thanks for asking.

I’ve been on Etsy for about a year now but it wasn’t until two weeks ago that I first found out who it’s CEO was. Yesterday I was walking through the halls and happen to recognize Robert Kalin. I introduced myself and after a short conversation introduced him to Loic. Robert has been following the launch of Seesmic thus he knew who Loic was. We got a pretty great interview with Robert which I’ll link here.