A friend of mine hooked me up with a fun and well-paying modeling gig with the Versus TV network. They're the channel that shows sports like hunting, fishing, extreme fighting, and of course, professional bike racing. I was completely thrilled to be their face of the Tour de France this year. It was a great experience to see how these things are made from the inside. Plus, I got to see my mug about 1,000 times during the month of July. Too bad it was day after day of heartbreaking drug scandals.
I grabbed a few URLs for about 7 bucks each just for the heck of it. I have a lot of PayPal money to burn from a flurry of ebay auctions. I may try a different blog software for each one, just to test out the new features. The URLs are:
www.bikeisthenewblog.com -- A place to stash my bike commuting, bike racing, bike lifestyle, and bike tech thoughts. The URL is a play on Pink is the New Blog of course.
www.bikeisthenewgreen.com -- Because I couldn't decide if I should focus on the environmental benefits of bikes, rather than any old topic. I think I could get some good traffic if I focused a bit. I believe bikes are one of the easiest ways to improve a community, alieviate traffic, save gas, and get some extra excersize in the process.
www.bittmania.com -- A silly reference to Mark Bittman from the New York Times. Bittman is the Minimalist food columnist who so many New Yorkers follow religiously. I'll use it as a place to poke fun of the foodie scene in the City, and comment on the writings of Frank Bruni, Burros, Fabricant, Asimov and Bittman himself. If you know these names, put down the Times and back away slowly. I'll stash some of my own ideas on cooking, booze, other lifestyle bits, and stuff about Top Chef.
Who are the last five people you called on your cell phone?
A friend about dinner plans
Mom
Dealership about my car repairs
A dude I sold a big chair to on ebay
Wife
I finally got around to joining Twitter. I'm not sure how to describe it really. I'll have to see how I feel about it once I add some friends. It's for the texting generation. I'm alas, not much on texting because it's not really needed when you're a Blackberry user, and all your friends are Blackberry users. I just added this piece of HTML to take you over to my Twitter profile if you like to see my minute-by-minute activities:
I'm still at the Sree & Anil Dash show at Columbia. He just mentioned having a blog is a great way to pull all of your personal information in to one place. Unfortunately, Vox does things their own way.
So if you want to check out my LinkedIn profile, go here.
I'm at Sree Sreenivasan's class tonight for journalists. I've been lax about keeping up with the blogging world lately. Though it's almost 8 PM and I haven't seen much new besides a zipcode-based blog search site called Outside.in
The guy in the pink is Sree's guest speaker, the ubiquitous Anil Dash from the Six Apart company. It was at a Six Apart mini conference that I became aware of Vox, as well as their Pro network, a consortium of hardcore Moveable Type bloggers who share their expertise.
These auctions benefit something called Saving Animals Across Borders, and is brokered by a company called Mission Fish. This is a great idea, and the auctions seem to be getting a bit of press.
I'd be inclined to buy stuff Skilling owned. He was way more interesting and evil in Smartest Guys in the Room. Perhaps the winner of his desk will find a switch for a trap door to the dungeon or something.
A friend of mine at an interactive agency sent this viral video to me today. Is it a clever and subtle ad for Nokia, or just a cool raw recording of the band Naturally7 doing an acapella version of their hit on the Paris Metro to get attention? Regardless, now I know three new things: Naturally7 is big in Europe, Daily Motion is kinda cool, and it is indeed possible to make a Phil Collins cover sound good.
One of my former co-workers liked to quote me in conversations about web2.0: "In the end, the 'net is about hooking up". Yes I said that.
While you're surfing on your lunch hour finding new ways to hook up, check out Hitchsters--a social network designed to help travelers share cab fare to the airport.
It's a similar idea to Peter Shankman's AirTroductions. Peter--a relentless networker--created a social network in attempt to maximize those dead hours spent flying by finding people to talk to ahead of time. I usually use the time to GTD the sh*% in my bag and catch up on leisure reading. I'm looking forward to using these networks together the next time I fly.
The previous post took 11 minutes to show up on a Google alert via the word "Chupick". If that doesn't illustrate the value of blogging to put the right results on Google, I don't know what does.
