And I thought that “temptation” and I decided to become friends loooooong ago…

Photo by losermike.

“Run…to the hills!” shrieked Iron Maiden in their classic track of the same name [lyrics].

Well, last night I found myself running away from the hills.

In case you haven’t seen the news, Griffith Park — the largest municipal park in the country I believe — caught fire yesterday around 1pm. Since many of you have asked, here’s a quick update on the fire from my perspective.

The park itself is pretty darn close to my home. Here’s a map showing the distance between Griffith Observatory, to which the flames came dangerously close, and Spaceland, a small music venue which is very near my home.

I was at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale yesterday during the day. As I was boarding the plane at 6:45 pm to return home, Molly told me that there was a fire in the park and that I might want to explore alternate routes home.

I landed in Burbank at ~8pm and after seeing the thick smoke billowing from the hills, I decided to take an alt route home. Instead of my normal journey down I-5 to Silverlake, I detoured up to the 210 and over to the 2 South. This route took me to through the La Canada hills which are north of Griffith Park. It gave me an elevated view of the profile of the fire, which was stunningly beautiful (and extremely terrifying). On my whole drive home along the 2 South, the entire sky to the southeast of me was bright orange (sadly, I did not have my camera but from now on will keep an old digital camera in my glovebox).

Photo by seraphimC

I made it home around 8:45. Molly was supposed to be watching the Gilmore Girls finale with her friend Laura (Molly & Laura, sorry to rat you out!). But Molly was by herself on the couch watching the local news. Laura had gone home to make sure that she had power and that her dog was ok. By this time, power was out in parts of neighboring Los Feliz and areas of town that are very close to us were being evacuated.

We had no food in the house and I needed dinner, so we left to go find something. We detoured through the Silverlake hills, first on Apex Street east of the Silverlake resevoir and then near Micheltorena to the west of the resevoir. It was dark by then, and we could literally see bursts of flames shooting up into the air (Mack Reed has video footage).

Photo by ericcastro.

We ended up going to Gelsons Market in Los Feliz — taking us closer to the park. The air there was pretty thick with smoke, and after we made it back to the car I noticed that sizeable pieces of ash had settled on the roof of my car.

With that, we went home to watch a bit more news, sent an update to Twitter, and finally turned in.

This morning on my way to work, I saw one of the tanker helicopters swoop down into Silverlake resevoir, suck up a few thousands of gallons of water through a big tube, and fly off to dump the water on the fire. It looked like a big mosquito. Mack got footage of this too.

I detoured to work back up through the 210.

Good luck to the fire crews and to anyone who had to evacuate last night. We were certainly thinking of you. It was a scary night but it seems that everyone will end up ok, except for Dante’s Peak…one of our favorite hiking spots.

Also, in case you hadn’t noticed from my references above, Blogging.la had wonderful coverage of the whole event. There are also a bunch of photos on Flickr, where I found all of the photos above too.

Hitwise’s US News and Media Report: Impact of Video, Google, and Blogs

Fascinating look at how social media has changed news consumption trends in over the course of just the last year.

We had a full house of guests this weekend, which happened to be the weekend leading into my 30th birthday (which is tomorrow, May 7). My sister, Jamie, flew in from Denver and surprised me on Friday evening. And my friend Mike also came to town from New York for a wedding and claimed our red sofa as his bed. We had a nice day at Hermosa Beach on Saturday playing beach volleyball (poorly) and enjoying surprisingly nice Cinco de Mayo margaritas at Cantina Real. But the highlight of the trip for our LA touristas had to be today. We woke up and decided to have a BBQ at Elysian Park, which is best known to most Angelinos as the green leafy area that leads in to Dodgers Stadium. Little did we know that there would be a full on lowrider-fest at the park! Jamie, Mike, thanks for coming to visit this weekend; I had a really great birthday weekend and I’m now ready to face my thirties! Oh, and in case you didn’t realize it, this is how we roll.

It’s just all part of the “California lifestyle”…

A few of my friends and former colleagues launched their startup today, at FlipFrames.com!

It is a slideshow and photosharing site with some cool user interaction design. You can add different backgrounds in the frame, and anyone can comment on any photo if logged in, even in the distributed slideshow on MySpace or a blog. Their FAQ mentions something about a label, but I don’t see where that is.

Here’s a quick slideshow I made with photos of my recent trip to Paris.

They have an “Add to MySpace” functionality too so you don’t have to even look at the embed codes if that isn’t your thing. DISCLAIMER: Before you go there and make fun of me, you should know that my MySpace page is horribly horribly awful.

Their differentiating factor appears to be that they are building a reputational element to the slideshows (Frames), such that some frame styles are locked until you have a certain amount of interaction on your current slideshows. One of their FAQs states:

What are check$?
Each check is like a penny, so 100 check$ are like a dollar. When people view or “flip” your FlipFrame, you earn check$. Check$ can be used to purchase exclusive locked frames or in the check store to buy prizes.

It also looks like they will soon be launching a handful of other verticalized services.

The site has been live for just a few hours, so I’m sure they’ll be firefighting bugs and such all weekend. But check it out and play around with it. If you have feedback, it looks like they’ll take it here. Congrats again guys! Pretty sweet! I know it was a lot of hard work.

Map of Online Communities

Pretty clever (and reminds me of the New Yorker cover of Newyorkistan from 2001). It seems to be greatly missing the MySpace ecosystem sites like Photobucket, Slide, RockYou, etc. Maybe it needs to be a border dispute somewhere near the MySpace area.

ASME’s Top 40 Magazine Covers of the Last 40 Years

Wonderful survey of the greatest magazine covers from the last 40 years. I remember receiving a few of these in the mail (New Yorker and Wired) and being blown away.

I’m sitting in a Hilton hotel room in Eugene, Oregon, having flown in this evening to spend tomorrow with the some of the super folks at Right Media’s Direct Media Exchange, who will eventually become the newest members of the Yahoo! publisher-focused family. I met the team here last week in preparation for today’s announcement, and now I’m back to lend in-person support post-announcement of the planned acquisition.

For my full thoughts on what this could mean for Yahoo! and Right Media, check out my post on the Yahoo! Publisher Network blog, which should appear on Monday morning. (UPDATE: The YPN Blog post is now up and live here).

For now, I just want to say the following: Massive congratulations to everyone at Right Media, and especially to the Direct Media Exchange team, who share the Yahoo! Publisher Network team’s dedication and drive to help publishers of all sizes realize the full value of publishing. Pat, Cam, Pete, Travis, Brad, Jerri, Michael, Shane, Leland, Becca, Juliana, Vincent, Joseph, Luke, Edward, Chuck, Ellie, Eric, Trent, Alexander, Brian, Brandon and Jon (and if I missed anyone, I’m really sorry!), all of us at Yahoo! Publisher Network look forward to working with you and combining efforts in order to really make a difference in the online self-publishing landscape. Your enthusiam for the difference you are making in the online publishing world blew me away last week (check it out, they even recently had a Hack Day!). I look forward to working with each of you!

Happy Earth Day to everyone. This is a quick note to any of you who are still subscribed to my greatly neglected blog (you certainly have noticed that I’ve yet to even update my theme from the default K2 design since migrating to Wordpress nearly two months ago…and I promise that there will be more activity on this blog in the near future, but thanks for still staying tuned in the meantime).

But on to more important topics with a quick but fun post. As mentioned, today is Earth Day, and about 35 minutes ago I closed an auction on eBay for a beautiful Anaheim-based 1985 Mercedes-Benz 300D, the Turbo Diesel variety. Consider this my birthday present to our planet…and here’s why:

I bought this slick ride with the plan to convert it to run on vegetable oil.

Lovecraft Biofuels, which is right down the street from my house, can do the conversion for less than $1000 all-in. For those of you not hip to the vegetable oil movement, any diesel car can be converted with minimal cost to enable it to run on any combination of diesel, biodiesel, clean/straight vegetable oil (svo) or waste vegetable oil (wvo). Clean veggie oil can be obtained in bulk at places like Costco or Sam’s Club and supposedly works out to about $3 a gallon (as long as you have the arm strength to lug about 100 lbs of oil to the parking lot once a week or so). Or, even better, there are people who will deliver waste vegetable oil (which can be collected for free from restaurants anywhere) to your house in bulk for about $2 a gallon! The great thing about the vegetable oil conversion is that the exhaust is nearly 100% biodegradable. And (supposedly!) the car won’t really lose any power or torque after the transition.

I’ll keep you posted with updates about the conversion process and my experiences obtaining oil. In the meantime, here’s my cherry new ride!

Exterior (Pearl Black)

Interior (Cherry Red!)

10 Steps to get Traffic from Yahoo Answers

This article outlines some productive ways to get involved with the Yahoo! Answers community as a means of driving traffic to your blog.