I just said goodbye to my wife Claire as she steped out for her work day. Behind her she leaves our apartment in San Francisco which is filled with a collection of books, photo albums, trinkets we’ve collected on our travels, and Buster, our dog that we’ve had for almost a year. Right now she’s going off to support this life that we’ve built together over the last 10 years.

December 1st is our “dating” anniversary – And while we have a new anniversary that we celebrate for the day we wed, 10 years is worth taking pause. After all, at 30 years old, we’ve now been together for a third of our lives.

It turns out a lot can be done in ten years – from seeing each other through college, moving to San Francisco, traveling the world together, and getting married. Hell, if you search Claire in my flickr stream more then 1,800 photos come up since 2005. Instead of writing out all the amazing adventures we’ve been on together, which would take up way to much of your time, I’ve chosen to post a single photo of us for each year we’ve been together. The theme of the photos will be “smothering each other with love”.

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006 on our 5 year anniversary in Melbourne Australia

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

Here is to a decade with my love.

This weekend I rented a 100mm macro lens to practice my photography. For those of you who don’t know what macro lenses are, they allow you to take photographs of objects really close up. This is how photographers take photos of bugs or grains of sand. I’ve wanted to try shooting macro for a long time as I often see potential for close up photos. I’m quite happy that I jumped on the long weekend to do it. A trip to the ferry building farmers market on a day that had both sun and rain proved to be quite rewarding. All of the photos I took can be found here, but for now this is a sampling of my favorite shots.

I love the building across the street from our apartment. While sitting on our couch I often see it in the reflection of a wine glass but this day allowed the light for me to shoot it in my own eye.

After a very long nap she wakes with a tear in her eye.

My first experience shooting rain. Moving water offers a great opportunity to learn about light, speed, and timing.

4505 Meats, voted the best burger in San Francisco.

Primavera makes some amazing chilaquiles. Uploading this photo inspired me to take my first stab at making chilaquiles. They were decent.

The sun is being covered by some low hanging clouds, this helps to diffuse the light.

Still the whites come out a little bright. I love bright pictures but I need to work on my whites.

With the 100mm macro lens your depth of field can start and end so far from the center which is left in focus. Pretty cool.

Chocolate from Recchiuti, yum.

For the times you don’t have Tapatio.

Buster’s chest hair.

I love all the different textures in the three inches from the top of his nose to the bottom of his mouth.

Look, I know I don’t need to lose weight. Let’s get that out of the way now. I’m not trying to lose weight. I’m trying to lose body fat. “But you’re so skinny already”. I’m not trying to get skinnier either. I’m trying to lose body fat. Why? Because I want to feel good and I want to look good. I also want to know how to make my body fat fluctuate.

I know how to add more fat around my waist and on my chest: eat more fried food and drink more beer. Easy. But when I stop eating fried food and I stop drinking more beer, I just go back to this normality. I don’t want my normal to have a slight fat ring. I want to have muscles showing.

I Eat: My Diet
People talk about diets that they’ve done and I’m sure some of them have worked, but I needed to be presented with something by someone who was going to try to explain the diet to me. So I picked up The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferris. Honestly I got it because I had met Tim Ferris a couple of times and liked the ideas he presented in the interviews I filmed. Based on what I already know of Tim I figured at the very least the book would be entertaining.

First off, this isn’t a diet book. It’s a book about the body. In fact there are multiple diets in the book and I plan on trying a few of them. I decided to start with the Slow Carb diet. I’m going to explain it to you, then I’m going to ask you not to say anything like “but you need carbs.” Look I’m doing this diet, and it’s probably not going to kill me, so just let me do it. If it kills me feel free to say I told you so, but know you’re a jerk for saying I told you so to a dead guy. Jerk.

It’s simple. Eat beans. Black, red, pinto, etc. Eat greens. Spinach, Colored greens, kale and the like. Eat lean meat. Chicken, lean beef, pork. And eat them for every meal. Don’t eat anything white or anything that could be white. That includes rice, tortillas, and breads. That does not include cauliflower. It does include cauliflower with swiss cheese on it. Drink lots of water. Don’t drink milk or anything that has sugar in it and that include juice. Don’t eat fruit: it has sugar in it.

I don’t know exactly why it works but I know there is not much fat, there is nearly zero sugar and it’s been working for me. I don’t remember the last time that I had so little fat around my belly or chest. Meals are definitely repetitive but it makes preparing them easy.

Weight fluctuation seems to be based off of how much fat you actually have to lose. If you have 8% body fat already, it’s unlikely that you’ll lose much (or need too). Tim explains that some people lose 20 pounds in under a month. I lost 7 pounds, which I’ll explain a little more later. I have a few friends that have been doing the diet with me and one of them claims to have lost 8 pounds in 2 weeks, even while cheating on the diet here and there (He likes beer, too.) Some people at the 4-hour body site have reported to have lost 15 pounds in the first week and up to 30 pounds in the first month. Again, I’m not trying to lose weight, I thought you might be interested.

Fitness: My Workout

Over a year ago, I joined a gym. I didn’t really know what I was going to do when I got there so I spent a year experimenting with many different workouts. Really I spent a year familiarizing myself with the equipment, the culture and my body. I started noticing how easily I could put on muscle but how hard it was for me to take off fat. For a while, I was running but I found that I wasn’t losing fat the same way that I’ve seen by changing my diet. With that said I will report that I went into the gym on the first day with 14% body fat and when I checked just before starting the diet and workout a few weeks ago my body fat was at 10%. That’s significant. Getting to 8% would be great.

I started doing specific workouts explained by The 4-Hour Body. The workout I’m doing is super simple. Don’t confuse that with easy – it’s simple. On Mondays and Fridays I do the same workout: kettle bell swings and 15 bosu ball situps. You don’t have to do many to feel the pain, trust me. On Wednesdays I do three different lifts, all of which are explained in the book.

I’m proud of my progress with this workout. It seems to be complementing the diet quite well by making me more lean from waist to neck, and stronger in my feet, legs, arms and hands. The book suggested that I do 75 kettle bell swings with 53 pounds. My gym has 50 pound kettle bells so that’s what I use.

Workout #1 (Monday): I did 25 swings at 50 pounds then rested 2 min. Did 25 more. Rest. Finally another 25 to equal 75 total swings. 5 sit-ups, rest. 5 sit-ups rest. 2 sit-ups. Dead.

Workout #2 (Friday): 50 swings, rest. 25 more, done. 8 sit-ups, rest. 4 sit-ups. Dead.

Workout #3 (Monday): 60 swings, rest. 20 more, done. 80 total. 12 sit-ups in a row. Dead.

Workout #4 (Friday): 75 swings in a row! 12 sit-ups holding 5 pounds. Real Dead.

Workout #5 (Monday): 75 swings! 12 sit-ups w/ 5pounds 3 without weight. Dead.

Workout #6 (Friday): Same as above but 15 sit-ups with 5pounds. Dead.

Workout #7 (Monday): 90 swings. 15 sit-ups with 5 pounds. Still dead.

Now for that explanation of my weight fluctuation. I lost that 8 pounds but put 4 back on from muscle pretty quick. So not only am I leaner now but a bit stronger, too.

The Best Part

The diet has an amazing catch. Once a week I get to binge eat. I’m talking about eating whatever I want. I’ve started taking mental notes of things that I crave throughout the day then try to eat almost all of those things on my off day. In the past I would eat something like half a cupcake and feel like I was breaking my own health law. Now I know that there is a day that I get to eat whatever I want and not feel bad about it.

I’m not going to act like I fully understand why I’m allowed to do this in the diet. Ferris explains it, but I was more worried about getting to binge than I was worried about the reason my body actually needs that day to break down sugars and do other health stuff I don’t get. I’ll tell you this. On Saturday I had two breakfasts; a huge lunch; seconds at dinner and dessert; and as many beers as I wanted.

This week my binge day will be Sunday. Super Bowl Sunday! I’m thinking I’ll put Popeyes Chicken on top of some sloppy nachos. I’m going to eat cream cheese dip possibly with some chips. I’ll put on weight, but by Tuesday I’ll be back to normal. That seems to be the cycle. Gain a little on the off day, lose it all and be back where I was the day before the binge only two days later.

The Best Best Part
Simply put, I like seeing results. My body is changing and I like that I know how to create this change on my own. I’ll likely keep it up for a few more weeks.

The next diet will likely be a muscle gaining diet, but I’ll tell you more about that when I’m finished with this diet. If you would like to talk to me about this diet, please feel free to contact me. Also feel free to follow my blog or call me if you have my phone number. If you really want to know more about the diet you should get The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferris. No, I’m not getting kickback from this recommendation though I’ve probably single-handedly sold seven of them.

I’ll also remind you that you can sign up for my very infrequent e-mail updates. You’ll get reports such as “I’m making a movie and I’d like you to watch the trailer” or “You’re awesome.” You know, basic banter.

My birthday was on the 1st of January. I celebrated with some friends. That took all day. On January 2nd my wife and I got dog. On the 3rd I washed all the floors in our apartment and washed the dog. Today I am attempting to start what will be my “New Self”, or “Continued Self”, or “Whit 2.0”. Call it what you will – this is what I’ll be focusing on before I turn 30.

Work, Body, Self

My Work
The long short; I’ll be attempting to create a film.
This is a process that I began over five years ago, but was put on the back burner as I started a full time job. I won’t be telling you all about the film in this blog post, that will come in the not so distant future. Part of this process will also include:

- Filming interviews of people who help me throughout the process
- Blogging about the process

Lets be clear that there is a lot of work to do on this project, including a lot of writing to be done, but I’m starting to get my ducks in a row. You will be able to find everything about my film on my blog.

My Body
Setting specific goals for my body. I’m a pretty skinny guy with not so big muscles. This may not be a big deal to you, but adding 20 pounds of muscle to my body would be huge. Last year I joined a gym and have noticed what a difference it has made in how I feel from day to day. Not only do I have more energy, but I have more drive. If you work out, you probably know what I mean. For those of you who don’t know, I play ultimate Frisbee. So it’s not that I don’t run around all the time. In fact, I’m a very active person. It’s just time to set actual goals for my body to track any physical change.

There are three entrepreneurs who I look up to that are very conscious about their physical being; Loic Le Meur, Tim Ferriss and Dan Martell. All three of them openly talk about how important exercise is for them. I’ll be writing about this more soon, but to give you an idea of what I’ll be doing you can check out Tim Ferriss’ new book “The 4-Hour Body”. Getting in to the specifics – I’ll start with a slight diet change and a slight workout change. More to come on that. Tim, I’ll be trying to track you down for advice sometime soon.

P.S. I met Tim Ferriss once when he came into our offices for an interview. Seems like a very nice guy.

Self
I’ve done a lot of thinking over the past few years, wondering exactly what it is I want for myself. I’d like to explore this some more, and now I feel as though I’ll have the ‘space’ in which to do this. You’ll probably see my reflections on this in random blog posts moving forward.

There are several people who I have contacted to help me through this process. This isn’t a journey I plan on doing alone.

I could use help from anyone who is interested. Please contact me via my contact form if you are. If you would just like to follow along please to follow me using RSS, or e-mail where, yes, I will e-mail you when I update my blog. *old school*

October 12, 1998 – November 22, 2010

I just drove my 12 year old Jetta for the last time. I drove it 2 blocks to where it would be towed then donated to KQED. I never thought I would have been so emotionally attached to a car, but looking back over the years it’s no wonder this process has been tough. I got the Jetta handed down to me by my mom around January 2000. I don’t remember the day specifically but I do remember being so excited to drive it. That excitement stayed with me all 10 years I owned it. I was always proud to be the captain of that car even when two of its windows stopped rolling down, the CD player stopped working, the tape deck stopped turning, then the new stereo was stolen. None of that was the Jettas fault (and we put Sharky our pet shark who watches over the car in too late). The Jetta just wanted to get us from one place to another.

176,500 miles is a lot of distance to have memories of. They aren’t all mine but I’ll share the memories I have that coincide with photos I’ve recently come across. If you have any memories of the Jetta that you would like to share, I’d love to see them in the comments.

Traffic somewhere between LA and New Mexico. We get out of the car and make friends with a truck driver. The CD player worked at this point, thus Steve is choosing good “standing on the freeway” music. Note my ridiculously long hair. That night I slept with the back seat down, feet stretched into the trunk which we had cleared out.

The time I fell asleep behind the wheel with a big rig heading straight toward us. The guys thought it would be a good idea to grab a quick photo before waking me up. I’m glad they did. Date?

Surfs Up! Pink giant surfboard coming out of the sun roof, blue giant surfboard had to be held. Trunk open for good measure. Date?

The Jetta parked in front of our first apartment in San Francisco. Circa 2005.

The Jetta freezing it’s hubcaps off in the greater Tahoe area. This photo comes with a video.
The video that comes with the last photo.

I drove to and from the Bay Area a lot with the Jetta. This time was with Thom Smith on our way to “Beware O the Sombrero”, an ultimate tournament in the South Bay. I believe we were listening to AC/DC?

In college Steve and Drew would have been two of the more frequent riders of the Jetta. Both putting in their time in the back seat. Steve driving a bit and Drew doing his best to stay awake while I drove through the dark of the night.

It’s fitting that this next video be put in this post. It’s probably the video with the most Jetta exposure even though it’s a video I made to win a Ford Fiesta for 7 months. The car that ended up replacing the Jetta.

It’s no surprise that Claire would be sad to see the Jetta go. Claire easily put the second most amount of time spent in this car. Together we drove up and down the West Coast. The Jetta kept us warm, safe, and took us everywhere we asked it to. We’ll remember all the ultimate tournaments we went to in it, the times we went camping, or took it a bit more off road then it would have wanted. It drove us up and down the hills of San Francisco, through the Grapevine connecting Northern California to Southern, and through both Shasta and Tahoe. This car was ours through and through and we love it.

Thanks for being you Jetta, you’re the best!

More photos of the Jetta can be found here.

If you have stories or photos you’d like to share we’d love to see them in the comments.

After months of consideration, weeks of work, and nearly three years of blogging, I have decided it is time to change the image of my blog. I saved some cash and paid a professional to give my site a new look and feel – I would love everyone’s feedback.

What you see is my name in Helvetica, Bold, slightly over a blue gradient square. I personally think it’s genius, but please don’t let my opinion get in the way of your opinion.

UPDATE

A WhitScott.com reader has just informed me that Gap has the exact same logo. We must have used the same designer. Blast!

Seesmic du jour (Seesmic of the day if you will) is now organized into a playlist on Youtube. You can find all of the episodes in one place at loic.tv, hizzah! For those of you who don’t know, Seesmic du jour was a show that world famous French entrepreneur and CEO of Seesmic.com Loic Le Meur and I created. The idea of the show was to present an inside look of a start-up being built from the ground up. We shot the show for 170 consecutive work days showing Seesmic from the inside out, giving incites on the tech world and Silicon Valley, and introducing the audience to interesting people from the industry.

Watching the show now would certainly make one think that Seesmic is a much different company then it is today. We have gone through many changes in the last 2 and half years, starting as a video communications platform and eventually transitioning into a communications platform currently harnessing Twitter and Facebook technologies. But the core value of the show still exists. It’s obvious from Seesmic du Jour (the fact that there even was a show) that the company has taken many risks in the past few years, I just think that the risk of the show was one that payed off.

If you ever watched the Seesmic du Jour I’d love to hear what some of your favorite episodes were. If you’ve seen every episode I apologize for the bad ones, and thank you for your engagement.

photo taken by @sizemore

So the internet is mysterious, you’re never really sure what you’re going to find or where your content will end up. Here is the story of a video that was put on YouTube a week ago, how it was modified, and where it’s traveled since.

SCENE 1: The Market
INT – THE MARKET – MORNING

If you haven’t seen the video “Drunkest Guy Ever Goes for More Beer“, the quick description is: A guy walks into a market. He appears to be drunk, and has the intention to buy beer, but he can’t stay on his feet. This is all filmed on the security cameras, which is then posted on YouTube, and goes viral. The rest is history.

SCENE 2: Silent Film
INT – SF APARTMENT – NIGHT

The original video has no audio because it was filmed on the security cameras. While the video is pretty funny to watch in its original state, it’s a little long and definitely silent. I grew up being intrigued by silent films and vaudeville – I think I would have thrived in the early 1900s. In the past two years I’ve written a few scripts for silent shorts, one to the amazing song Amarcord by Nino Rota. It’s not surprising then that when I saw this silent video, my first thought was that it needed to become a silent classic. The edit was easy; speed it up, make it black and white, throw down some music, make the film look old, post it on YouTube.

SCENE 3: Share your content
INT – LIVING ROOM – DAY

I create a lot of content that is put on the internet, mostly for Seesmic – the company I work for – but also some of my own personal work. Most of this I silently put online, and you either stumble upon it, or you are one of the 25 people subscribed to my blog, flickr account, or YouTube page ( I have 2). Twitter, and my friends, are my next to allies (Me on Twitter). On Twitter I’ll give my videos a little push, simply asking people to check them out. I prefer not to ask people to RT (Re-Tweet) because I know that if the content is any good, they’ll RT it on their own. I’ll post a link on Facebook and leave a message to give it a personal touch because I know my friends are going to see it. The last step is friends. Basically, I send the link to the people that I know will most enjoy the content and ask them specifically to help me spread the video. It helps when you have friends who have large online followings – whether it be through blog, Facebook or Twitter. These are the people who help you reach out to the world, they are your super-connectors.

SCENE 4: Magic
INT – INTERNET SUPER HIGHWAY – MORNING

At this point the video starts getting passed around. I’m not certain how specific blogs come across videos or articles, but I’d assume its because of the nature of their business – therefore they receive a lot of material without having to look very hard. What I do is go to a place like Technorati where they search blogs around the internet, and in this case searched “Drunkest guy ever, silent film” and see all the blogs that come up. Most notable in this particular case is boingboing.com

Yesterday it was pointed out to me that the Huffington Post had the video up, and from there you can see that (as of right now) 1,431 people shared it on Facebook and 117 people re-tweeted it. (To be honest I have no idea what Buzz Up is, but I’ve been told it’s by Yahoo!)

Using Twitter search I can see that 255 people have tweeted the words “drunkest guy ever” and “silent film”.

Finally, I can check with Bit.ly (a URL shortner that keeps statistics on links) to see how many people have clicked through a particular link. Basically I get the original URL of my video, put it through bit.ly and tweet that out. Bit.ly then keeps track of how many people go through my link to see the video, which is about 377 right now. But it also tells me how many other people using bit.ly have made a link using the original URL – In total I can see that 2,529 people have gotten to my YouTube via a bit.ly link. Cooler than that, I can see who took that link and posted it somewhere else. Oh, the glory of the internet…

Here is an interesting thought on the psyche of it all. The reason this video works is because it makes a video that is actually pretty sad, pretty funny. When I first watched the video of the alleged “drunkest guy ever”, I didn’t really laugh as much as I pitied him. The thing is, the guy looks hilarious when he tries to stand up, and you want to laugh. Really all everyone needed was an out. I changed the story from “Drunkest guy ever goes to get more beer” to “Larry goes to the market, and gets hoodwinked.” It’s okay to laugh now.

I know you didn’t do it for me, I didn’t plan any of this, it just kind of happened, but thanks to everyone who posted the video.
The Bored Ninja, Filmed Drunk, Bits and Pieces, Miss Cellania, NeatOrama, and Geeks are Sexy.

p.s. The title of this blog post is pretty obscure. “What! No Beer?” is the title of a film starring Buster Keaton, made in 1933. Buster plays Elmer J. Butts who is trying to get rich quick by brewing beer during Prohibition, thinking that Prohibition is just about to end. Hilarity ensues.

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!

The Media Room in Davos at the World Economic Forum is crazy. I just overheard someone say “this is the worst place I’ve ever had to work”. Now I’m not sure if that’s true for me, I’m working just fine, but you really do have to know how to tune out the sounds around you. Here’s a short video of the life of the room, this is not the most full I’ve seen it.

By the way – the guy next to me is a writer, I’m not sure for what – but I was surprised to see that he types with two fingers.