MWGblog

I commented on this to my wife earlier this week. Funny, a CBS reporter writes about the yellow jackets.

As I mentioned earlier, it has been a disastrous week here in Southern California. We are fortunate that the fires have not directly affected us here in Newport Beach, but you can not escape their effect for even a moment. Ash is everywhere, kids are kept inside at school during recess, activities are cancelled across the county and the smell of smoke is everywhere. You get used to the orange hue of the daytime sun though it is just now starting to abate.

The firefighters have done an amazing job! While there are fires up and down the southern part of our state, it is hard to believe that someone is sick enough to have deliberately started the fire that our county is dealing with. I have a long time friend, Brian Schraff, who has spent the whole week in touch-and-go status regarding his house. He is one of the people whose home is up in the Santiango Canyon area where “next door neighbor” means a half mile away. Brian has been keeping us updated all week regarding his status. It has gone back and forth between safe and almost certain doom, literally, with the direction of the wind. Fortunately, it looks like the threat to his home is over, though it got as bad as a mandatory evacuation order delivered from firefighters who stationed a truck in his driveway to ward off flames. A lot has been said about the efforts of our firefighters, here is an excerpt from an email Brian sent out yesterday:

Seeing the way the fire departments from all over California fight fires, I honestly think it would take a mind blowing firestorm for them to lose a house. These guys love the challenge of winning. When they came up to my house it was “Game On”. I watched them save a house yesterday surrounded 340 degrees by fire and they were bummed out that they lost a wooden shed. Anyone saying they are standing around watching, or not committed to saving houses… are definitely not watching the same fireman I am blessed to have been talking to and watching.

Glad to hear all is well with Brian and a big thank you to the courageous men and woman of the both the local fire departments and Cal Fire.

As you all probably know, it seems that all of Southern California is on fire. Here is my iPhone shot of this morning’s smoke from our backyard. Ash is everywhere and this is definitely not the day to take up jogging or any other outdoor activity. We are on stand-by for Search and Rescue in case parts of Irvine need to be evacuated. Curious to see how the day turns out. Hoping for the best.

As part of my Search and Rescue training they encourage you to get a HAM amateur radio license. Last weekend at SAR (Search and Rescue) City – explained here, I took the Technician class test and am now officially licensed by the FCC as KI6MDR. The idea is, that other than regular communications, if there is a large scale disaster (I live in SoCal so read that as “earthquake”) we can all still all communicate. I picked up a nice little handheld unit, the Yaesu VX-7R to start. See where it goes from there.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am a member of the Orange County Sheriff’s Search & Rescue Team. This weekend I am heading off to “SAR City” which is three days of training classes and learning opportunities for those who work on Search and Rescue teams here in the Western United States. I’ve found it to be a great way to give back to the community while learning about and doing the activities I have always been interested in. For me – I enjoy the technical rescue, i.e. ropes work. Looking forward to it!

This made me laugh when I saw it today. The early days of podcasting made friendships like this possible.

My good friend Chris Hoskins has kicked-off his 3rd annual Muscle Car 1000. You can check out the pictures as the week unfolds here. As is par for Chris, he starts things off by getting some of the participant’s cars craned up on to the deck of the USS Midway where they enjoyed a catered lunch, then off to the St. Regis, Monarch Beach. Chris does everything with a first class touch. Enjoy the photos. Also, check out the Superbird. Always a crowd favorite. (There is a great story behind how it was purchased at auction.) Enjoy.

As some of you who attended the “Making Money with Sponsorships and Advertising” panel at last week’s Podcast and New Media Expo know, a question was asked during the Q&A about the presentation I made on Friday covering our experiences with the average time to get paid by 3rd party ad networks at GigaVox Media. In response to the questioner, Jonathan Cobb of Kiptronic said, “…there were some factual inaccuracies in some of the things that Michael said specifically about my company, in that session, and I won’t go into any more detail because I have the highest degree of respect for Michael.” As you might imagine, this caught me off guard. I work diligently to be accurate in all my presentations and knew I had been especially careful and was accurate regarding Kiptronic.

Because some audience members were left with the impression I might have been playing fast and loose with my data, I contacted Jonathan to find out what was going on. Sure enough, we had a great conversation and discovered that Jonathan made the comment based on some incorrect information forwarded to him by a 3rd party. (We all know how the game telephone works.) To correct the record, Jonathan asked that we remove his comment from the final audio we’re producing for the PNME. We agreed to this.

Everyone makes mistakes, and I think it speaks volumes about Jonathan Cobb and his company, Kiptronic, that this was quickly discussed and rectified.

I posted about a statement I made in a presentation I gave at this year’s Podcast and New Media Expo that “Podcasting is Dead.” Leesa Barnes says in a post that she considers this Link Baiting. I certainly understand her point, but I consider this issue much like Mackerel. Mackerel can be used as bait, but I (along with many others) always order “Saba” (Mackeral) anytime I have sushi – not for bait, but because I like it. Can it be both bait and “good” (and true) at the same time?

I have posted before about how I enjoy the BBC program, Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Now that there is (predictably) a US version, I was pleased to discover that you can view the new shows online at Fox. No cost and no pain in the ass hurdles to jump through. Free programs, sure they show ads, but it is usually one ad per “slot” which means the whole show goes much quicker and is consumable anytime the week it shows on your computer. Is this the future? Is Paul Colligan and his Year of living Digitally listening? This week’s show was the one that resulted in a lawsuit. Great stuff!