A little background: I own a big blue cargo van. It costs about a million dollars a day to park in a garage in Manhattan, so I usually end up fighting for a spot on some side street where it’s free. The catch is that twice a week the street sweepers come by, and if you don’t move your vehicle, they ticket you $65.

So on Thursday I parked the big blue van on 71st St and Central Park West and waited with the other New Yorkers for the sweeper to come. It came, we moved, we moved back. And then we waited until 9:30 (because that’s what you have to do in case they come back and ticket you). As long as a person is in the vehicle and ready/willing to move if the sweeper comes again, you’re allowed to sit there.

While I was waiting, some guy pulled up in his own van and asked us if we could squeeze in so he could fit. I happily did so. But some guy in a BMW was talking on his bluetooth and refused. The van guy got angry and started yelling at him. Bluetooth guy got angry back and got out of his car, taking off his jacket and ready to fight. After about 10 minutes of yelling insults in each others’ faces, they got back in their cars and parked.

Since I was nice to the van guy and moved for him, he came and thanked me. We made friends. His name was Abraham. All of this is important because it means I have several witnesses that I was there all the way up until 9:30.

9:30 rolled around, and people started getting out of their cars. I waited until 9:35 for good measure, waved goodbye to Abraham, and walked home.

When I went back to the van today (2 days later), I found this parking ticket:

The violation was for not being there during the street sweeper time frame. Notice the time? 9:18 AM.

9:18 AM? The only way this could be possible is if the officer ticketed me the SECOND I left the van, and if his watch was a full 17 MINUTES slow. Which is absolutely absurd.

In other words, the traffic cop lied. He or she is named A. Robertson (according to the ticket), and straight up falsified a government document in order to get me to pay money.

That, my friends, is what you call fraud.

Needless to say, I’m going to dispute this ticket in court. I don’t care if it’s not worth the time for just $65. This is about corruption.

A. Robertson and New York City cannot get away with screwing the law-abiding, tax-paying, hard-working citizens of Manhattan.

Please pass this on if it infuriates you too. And if you know someone in NYC city government, pass it on to them!

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Here is the SpeakerTexted video (click on the text below the video to jump to the important parts – there’s lots of fluff up front):

I’d love to hear what people think of Dino.sr and what ideas you all have for it. Thanks, friends!

Shane

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Now that I’ve made it through grad school, and my band mates are off having kids and working their lives away 9-5, my dreams have crossed over to a different platform. I’m building tech startups and dreaming of making it big, landing VC funding, and having geeky Rails programmers whisper as I pass them in the hall at NerdCon.

Perhaps it’s not as sexy, but it’s glamorous in its own way. And I’ve realized the parallels between starting a rock band and starting a web company are pretty spot on:

I can see the natural progression I made in the music world closely parallels my progress in the tech world. My first band was a crappy punk band, Lynette. We thought we were awesome, but we weren’t very unique. We just played local venues until other bands stopped inviting us when they realized we sucked. Then I started an electro-punk band, Jersey City Fire, which was more innovative, especially in our live show setup. We got to play some shows out of town, but the team didn’t work out in the end. Then I started a dance/pop-core band, K&TK, and we blew people’s socks off (at least comparatively). We toured across the west, recorded some songs, and had a lot of fun. We had the perfect combination of team members, a unique but poppy sound, and lots of drive and hard work. We would play our songs acoustically at random parties to gain fans when we weren’t playing real shows, run online campaigns to drive traffic to our Myspace, and practice relentlessly.

Then people got married and stuff, so we let that dream die peacefully, knowing we might have had a shot if we wanted it.

My first website post-college was a sort of Digg for UFO nuts, AlienUFOBelievers.com (I made it after one of the band guys “saw” a UFO in Montana). It was a cool idea, but there wasn’t a whole lot of market potential. The site was buggy and got hacked, and I sold about $200 in stickers by the time I quit. I started some other sites, which were better constructed and had more potential for ad revenue. They still make me a little money, but I won’t be buying a yacht anytime because of them. Then I started PrintingChoice.com, a Travelocity-style search engine for business card, flyer, postcard, and brochure prices. It has a solid revenue model, and has done quite well. I put that on autopilot and started Scordit.com, a social site that pivots around products people are obsessed about. Users joined, creating thousands of pages of content, and I felt vindicated when sites like GDGT and Hollrr launched with similar ideas and gained a lot of attention. My bands were starting to suck less and less.

Now I’m working on two projects pivoting off of Scordit: mainly Dino.sr, a site for gamers that revolves around games you’ve beat/played/want and lets you created game-specific microblogs of your game progress (and the site is a game itself); and on the side I’m helping with isWearing.com, a real-time stream of people answering the question “What are you wearing,” which aims to help people dress better. Both of these have clear paths to monetization and sort of culminate the experiences I’ve had in my previous ventures. I’m sure these won’t be the last web products I create either. I’ll keep working hard and building better stuff every time, and one day one of my “bands” will get picked up by that major label — I have no doubt about that.

Starting a rock band is a very entrepreneurial experience. I’d be interested to see how many tech companies have been started by people who played in bands. Really, I think being an entrepreneur is all about executing creative ideas — being the guy (or girl) who actually starts a band rather than sitting around with friends and talking about how cool it would be, or being the one who actually sits down and builds a prototype rather than just talking about it for years until someone else builds it.

Sorry Lollapalooza, but NerdCon here I come.

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My personal blog/life details/random personal stuff is now http://shanesnow.tumblr.com

My portfolio/resume/social media hub is now http://www.shanesnow.com (shanesnow.net now forwards there, too)

My wife and I have a family tumblog at http://www.kristenandshane.com

Television Sky is now officially an entertainment extravaganza of delight and woe, updated as often as it can be.

If you don’t own a feed reader to keep all your blogs straight, go to http://www.google.com/reader

Much love,

Shane

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Here’s to being too busy and/or lazy to blog.

And here’s to all my friends who check back anyway! You rock!

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Happy Halloween!

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(Other than that, grad school is going awesome!)

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Sure, I’ve had a good life. These 25 years have been awesome, but there’s something sentimental about being totally grown up. It’s impossible to deny now that I belong in the category of Stone-ager rather than teenager. I mean, I was born in 1984! One day kids are going to say “WOooooooo!” when they hear that.

Speaking of 1984… I have this theory that there are certain years where everything seems to happen. 1969 is an example of this – all sorts of crap went down in 1969, like lunar landings and stuff. In the same way, I think 1984 is pretty much the most awesome year ever, and here are a couple of reasons why:

• The first Apple Macintosh computer came out
• 3.5″ computer disks came out
• CD players came out
• Thriller sold 37 million copies
• Ghostbusters, Karate Kid, and Indiana Jones 2 came out
• Duran Duran was popular
• Movie tickets cost $2.50
• Shane Snow was born!!! (yeah!)

Well, a quarter of a century down and three-quarters more to go for me. It’ll be fun. And who knows, 2010 might be the next 1984. Could be fun, right?

(Duran Duran)

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So naturally one of the things that I have been looking forward to the most upon moving to Manhattan is New York pizza. New York pizza is probably the best pizza ever, which is quite a feat. It’s typically rather thin, greasy, slightly crispy, and comes in pieces so big you have to fold them in half to get them to fit in your mouth.

New York Pizza.
(Looks like someone took a bite out of this one. I wish it were me.)

This week, K got on a plane to Florida to visit her mom, and consequently I have had lots of spare time to eat pizza. With no woman in the vicinity to curb my ability to eat pizza for every consecutive meal, I have decided to take upon myself the noble task of rating every pizza joint in Manhattan, starting at my apartment and circling outward.

K left approximately 18 hours ago, and so far I have had pizza 4 times.

Due to the gratuitously high grease level of New York pizza, I have decided it would be unsafe to consume pizza more often than once every 4.5 hours. So, in order to maximize my safe pizza intake and the amount of pizza joints I can rate, I have been meticulously eating 1 (giant) slice per 4.5 hour period. And so far so good!

At this rate, I will devour 37 slices of pizza by the time K returns from her trip. I estimate that at this point my pizza radius will have reached about 12 blocks.

I am using a very strict set if criteria for my pizza rating system. In pizza taxonomy, there are several Phylums and Orders and Classes and stuff, so to make my experiment consistent I am eating only cheese pizza. Which is the best kind of New York pizza anyway. The common criteria for my study are the following: size of slice, cheese and sauce amounts, crust crispiness, overall taste, and PGR, which stands for Pizza Grease Runoff. The perfect pizza slice will have just the right amount of each of these, and ideally will cause my body to narrowly avoid going into a coma. Although if that does happen, it will be coma of happiness.

So it looks like I have an excellent week ahead of me. 4 down and 33 pizza joints to go. Maybe K will get delayed in Memphis and I can make it an even 34. And if that 34th slice does me in, well… I hope they serve pizza at my funeral. Until then, bon apetite to me!

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