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Scott Pilgrim: 24-year-old guy in a crappy band in Canada, dating Ramona

Ramona Flowers: dating Scott, has 7 evil exes that Scott must fight

K Jex: cute halfAsian girl not in the books but in this comic

Shane: genius

Walrus: Shane’s sidekick/minion (real life stuffed walrus)

[click to enlarge]

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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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It turns out I lost the title for the smurfvan, so I had to send away for a duplicate in order to be able to sell it here. The van is registered in Idaho still, so I mailed the proper form to the Idaho State DMV, and even paid $26 extra for “Rush” processing.

Upon calling said DMV, it turns out that “Rush” processing means they decide to hit 3 keystrokes on their computer and print out your new title in 5-6 business days, and then snail mail it back to you. I can’t fathom how long non rush processing ends up taking.

Sadly, long distance DMV interactions are apparently just as painful as the in-person ones. I’ve been waiting for 18 days.

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I mean this in good fun, guys.

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Which is why I’ve proposed a few ideas to help us get the best of both worlds: crazy startup work ethic + physical fitness. What do you think?

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A 70-year argument among scientists concerning lemurs and other furry inhabitants on Madagascar may be over, according to a study published in Nature in January. Scientists Jason R. Ali and Matthew Huber, from the University of Hong Kong and Purdue University, respectively, claim that the isolated collection of mammals that arrived to the island millions of years ago did so in almost cartoon-like fashion. They rafted in.

This theory was first proposed in 1940, though it had been previously dismissed as impossible. Paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson proposed that the lemurs, tenrecs, carnivorans, and rodents which showed up in Madagascar in distinct batches starting 60 million years ago floated unwittingly across the ocean channel on large logs or vegetation mats washed off eastern Africa. Other scientists disagreed, saying the area’s ocean currents rule out such a possibility and that the mammals must instead have walked across some sort of land bridge. But no one has been able to recreate a scenario where this is possible either.

The ocean bordered by Africa, Asia, and Australia flows in what scientists call a “supergyre,” essentially a big counter-clockwise swirl between the continents. Madagascar is located near the top-left portion of this giant current, which means the water flowing between the island and the African continent flows south and west. A raft launching from Mozambique, where scientists agree the Madagascan mammals originated, would be quickly swept away past the island.

However, the continents themselves are constantly migrating. Africa and Madagascar have drifted some 1,650 kilometers north in the past 60 million years. Using climate system models from the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, Ali and Huber took a look at various recreations of what Earth would have looked like in the days the lemurs and their cousins would have set sail. The scientists discovered that, unlike today, 60 million years ago Madagascar sat toward the bottom of the Indian Ocean gyre, meaning currents would swirl across the coast of Africa and back east toward Madagascar. Floating debris from Mozambique could reach Madagascar in less than a month. And if a tropical storm came around, currents would flow faster, allowing even more rapid transport.

Large floating “tree islands” have been known to wash off the African coast during storms, so it’s entirely possible that animals 60 million years ago washed away with them. Though rafting mammals clinging to logs while crossing hundreds of kilometers of ocean may sound like a scene from a Disney movie, it’s now the most plausible explanation scientists have for the Madagascan mammal phenomenon. The next big puzzle: Why are these lemurs so darn cute?

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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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Guest comic by Jason Grover

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