This mission is paramount because the Space Shuttle program is being decommissioned and we’re going to have to rely on Russian Soyuz rockets to get astronauts and cargo to the ISS. America needs to act fast, and SpaceX is stepping up to the plate and has recently hit three home runs.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 Takes Off

SpaceX performed this feat with just a FRACTION of the budget and number of failures that other government entities and larger companies have had. They are showing that privatizing works when done right. Put a bunch of geniuses in a room with a solid vision, a fiscal goal to achieve, and an inspirational leader, and this is what you get.

I am very close to many people at SpaceX, as they were one of my primary customers in my old sales job. I am still friends with many of the employees, as they are a great group of guys. I am honest when I tell you that every time I stepped into that building, I was the dumbest person in the room. I can’t say enough good things about them, the missions they’ve accomplished, and how they do so much with so little.

SpaceX is founded by Elon Musk, who was the co-founder of PayPal and also runs Tesla Motors.

What the SpaceX Launch Means to Me… and America

Note: This is the way I see things. I follow space, but not so closely that this is how it all went down

Over the past decade, we have had two American government administrations that have done nothing but balloon the size of the government with basically zero productive results. There has been nothing but bureaucratic waste, failure, and endless “wars”.

Our Space Shuttle program has been ailing, as was evident by the 2003 Columbia disaster. Our shuttles are no longer certifiably safe, and they need to be put to noble rest. So Congress commissioned NASA to create the Constellation program, a new human space transport program. Sounds cool, we can keep up with Russia and China, right?

Wrong.

As many expected, NASA shit the bed with Constellation. They were so covered in shit that they were unable to even provide a reasonable estimation for how much the program would even cost!! Talk about flying blind! (Original 2004 NASA estimates were that it’d cost $230 Billion to get to the moon)

So much win.

So I have to credit President Obama for doing his homework and canceling the program. Instead, he decided that it was time to take a “bold new approach to human space flight that embraces commercial industry”, as Constellation was “over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation.”

So he created the COTS program, designating $6 Billion to fund commercial technology companies to get it done. SpaceX and Orbital Sciences won the bids, with behemoths Lockheed Martin and Boeing left licking their wounds.

What you see in the video above is somewhere south of $600 million worth of investment. That is less than the amount of “cost threats” NASA calculated as being risky endeavors for the Constellation program. While this bloated program was busy making mistakes (yet keepin’ them cushy jobs!), SpaceX got busy flying rockets – and making profit.

I know that it’s not so clear cut, and SpaceX still needed a LOT of NASA help to communicate out there, but let me continue.

Okay… But why should I care about any of this?

Dragon Capsule Comes Home

Good question. This country is on a downward spiral, so why are we worried about sending expensive rockets into space?

The first part of the answer is that if the shit hits the fan, we may need manned missions that we can operate. Even with SpaceX, the US still has a gap where we cannot fly manned missions ourselves after Atlantis is decommissioned. We will have no safe shuttle!!!! SpaceX doesn’t think it can officially bring an astronaut to space for 3 more years, which probably means 4.

Sure, we have companies like Lockheed, Boeing, and SpaceX that can bring your satellite into space. But if we need to do spacewalks to fix things, do we really want to rely on the Russians and Chinese? It’s not a good situation if relations go downhill, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility. I for one don’t completely trust anyone but Americans with my precious cargo and communications systems.

The second part of the answer is this: While NASA is less than 1% of our budget, it’s a microcosm for everything that is going wrong with this country.

You can spend billions upon billions of good peoples’ money by pushing paper around, or you can let a bunch of smart people attack the problem with the incentive of that forsaken word, PROFIT.

So my question back to you is, if a company of 1200 employees can accomplish at a fraction of a price what a huge government organization of 18,000+ people cannot do… where else can this country save money and put power back into the hands of the people?

It’s not rocket science, people. Well, except it is, and privatization STILL worked. Why not try it in places where it’s a bit easier than building space ships?

So congrats once again to SpaceX and all of my friends and past associates.

Yesterday was a great day for America and our founding principles.

Elon is 39, and today I turned 29. I have exactly ten years to be as fucking cool as that guy.

Related posts:

1. On Strike With the Writer’s Guild of America
2. Land of the Free, Right?
3. You Can’t Live the American Dream in Europe

We sat at a table with other members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. The typical conversation went like this:

Me: Hi, I’m Mike, good to meet you.
Him: Hi, I’m John. (exchange business cards)
Him: Oh, founder of your company. So what do you do?
Me: I run a network of fitness and nutrition websites that helps users find the best information and lowest prices on different nutritional products. How about you?
Him: I’m a consultant.
Me: (…awkward silence…)
Me: Ummm, doing what?
Him: I’m like a janitor. I clean up problems.
Me: (…awkward silence…)
Me: Oh, ok. Well I’m gonna go over there so that I don’t breathe any of your stale carbon dioxide.

Out of the 8 other people at our table, this was basically the jist of 7 of the conversations. By the end, I quickly recognized the futility and simply started talking about my personal travels and how much I liked Hong Kong, as

1. These people didn’t give a shit about Internet Marketing and had no use for me
2. I didn’t own a sweatshop somewhere in China where they could run a Kaizen event, so I had no use for them, and
3. They wouldn’t know a dumbbell or high-protein meal if it smacked them in the face, so they had no use for my web platform.

This reminded me of the time I went to the “South Bay Internet Entrepreneurs” meetup.com meeting. Some guy gave an INCREDIBLE on-site architectural SEO presentation, and out of the 30 people in attendance, 2 others besides myself actually had a clue. The other 27 were wastes of space who were merely looking for easy “Make Monies Online” schemes.

After complaining about the idiocy that meeting, my friend Larry explained it best: “Because REAL entprepreneurs are busy WORKING, not going to lame meetup.com meetings”.

Lessons learned? Just like you need to focus on a niche (and divide that niche by 1000) in your small business pursuits, you need to stay within your niche when socially networking. Going to general business luncheons like this is where you find generally boring people with no specific passion who are generally clueless.

“If you like ‘all’ music, you like NO music”
– Chuck Klosterman

So I need to start networking better within the fitness/health/nutrition industry. I need to meet personal trainers, dieticians, health counselors, etc.

The reason I haven’t been confident enough to do this yet is because PricePlow is what I consider an absolute wasteland of a website*. It’s on my roadmap to fix it all up in a monstrous project, and even though it’s not there yet, now is the time to plant the seeds in my niche so that I have a better social network ready to go when it’s time to rock.

However, I will attend the Affiliate Summit West. These guys might not all be in the health niche, but they do similar things as I do and use similar tools. I don’t care for 99% of ad networks that will be at this convention… but the party will be awesome and I’m going to learn some new tactics.

Besides that, it’s time to stick with my niche and away from these “consultants”, who I still can’t figure out what in the hell they do anyway.

* It’s never easy for a parent to admit the truth in that that their child is stupid, ugly, and fat… but this is the case so let’s not beat around the bush.

Related posts:

1. You Can’t Live the American Dream in Europe
2. Land of the Free, Right?
3. Two Paths From Here

It sounds counter-intuitive, and small businesses in China definitely have to deal with a lot of hassles and paperwork, but they’re also given a great amount of leeway in terms of how they get to run their operations.

Some great examples of this are in Mike Michelini’s recent blog article titled Maybe I’ve Been in China Too Long. Mike is a businessman who has been bouncing between the US, China, and Phillippines. While I don’t agree with the Healthcare bullet point at all, it’s hard to argue with the other points.

One of the many interesting things I saw in China was a Help Wanted sign at a clothing store that dictated the prospective employee had to be under 5’4″ and 90lbs. Imagine doing that in the States! Every obesity support group in the country would have you in court by the week’s end. God forbid you want someone attractive and healthy modeling your petite line of clothing.

In the US, on the other hand, we have exceedingly aggressive laws and tax codes that have been written by lawyers and CPAs – two regulated industries where you need “certification” in order to enter the industry. This creates a barrier to entry, thus artificially inducing the wage floor. At the same time, since these are the people writing the laws, they write them in such a way that you need to hire one of them to figure it all out – and if you don’t, you’re going to get screwed by someone who does. Land of the free, right?

It’s a vicious circle, and if you’re not one of them, it affects you negatively. Not a day goes by where I don’t respect lawyers less. What am I doing about it? You’ll find out soon enough, but it’s phenomenal to see people such as Rand Paul, who I heavily support, getting elected this week. Rand will fight this kind of nonsense and try to reduce these laws and simplify the tax codes.

In the meantime, we have sticks-in-the-ass like this clown who shut down a 7 year old’s Lemonaide stand in Oregon due to lack of paperwork and licensing. Yes, I know the story had a happy ending, but it should have never have happened in the first place – and WOULDN’T have happened in “highly regulated” China. Land of the free, right?

As for me right now, I’m happy to admit that I’m struggling with the growth of my network. I have several successful projects, but I do nearly everything for every single one of them. The profit margin is great, but it’s time to start hiring other people.

The first thing I want to do is hire a writer. While I love writing, the research and composition takes too much time I’d rather be doing other things (designing, coding, marketing, and surfing, mainly).

Clearly, I want a quality writer who speaks English as his or her first language. But guess what – In the Land of the Free known as the United States of America, you can’t ask or require that English be your first language. That’s illegal become some bureaucrats decided that I need to give everyone a “fair chance”. The best I can do is massage the system and ask backassward questions such as “Do you have any language abilities that would be helpful in doing this job?”. A lot of good that will do.

So I either have to waste my time testing and weeding a bunch of people out (and most likely ultimately arrive at a native English speaker), or I can just say screw it and outsource the service to contractors, who likely aren’t Americans (right now I’m actually working with a British team). I don’t have to pay them benefits that I can’t currently afford, I don’t have to worry about ridiculous Obamacare rules and Welfare policies that may or may not get enacted, and I can stop sourcing to them whenever I want for any reason I choose.

So tell me, who are these laws really helping? Because let me tell you something: Life isn’t fair, and if you don’t meet my requirements, you don’t deserve a “fair chance”. In the real Land of the Free, you don’t have the government make fair chances for you – you make them yourself.

Related posts:

1. I Will No Longer Press 1 To Speak English
2. You Can’t Live the American Dream in Europe
3. If You Like “All” Music, You Like NO Music

Throughout these travels, I met an incredible amount of European men and women, and we often compared lifestyle and culture. No matter what part of Europe I was in, one theme remained constant in each one of these conversations: When I told the other person that I ran my own business, they were absolutely floored and couldn’t have been any more interested.

In America, it’s interesting to meet business-owners, but there are a great number of us, so it’s no big deal. From independent limo drivers to contracting plumbers to wedding photographers to Internet marketers, we’re not that rare.

However, in Europe, that didn’t seem to be the case. The Socialist regimes put a government stamp on basically everything, and everyone is complacent to work their 9-5 job so that they can save up enough to go on “Holiday” for the month of vacation that they’re given. And I’m not one to argue – our measly vacation policies are probably the #1 thing I hate about Corporate America. Europeans don’t have that problem.

In the meantime, someone like me who wants to rise above the masses in Europe has to deal with ridiculously high taxes and unlimited amounts of government bureaucracy. With these obstacles, combined with the fact that you can get taken care of considerably well without using much of your brain, why bother going above and beyond to produce something new to the world? The status quo is fine for most.

However, I was amazed by the amount of attraction I created in women that I talked with. Sure, maybe it was the mustache I rocked that one day, but I think it goes deeper than the physical. In their eyes, here is a guy who does whatever he wants, reports to nobody, and is at least wealthy enough to go on a trip overseas with the sole purpose of drinking beer and throwing Euros around like they’re Monopoly money. On the surface, he’s an alpha male – the leader of his tribe who leads the pack (even if it’s a tribe of 1 – but they don’t know that). And to women, that’s naturally attractive, no matter what society or tax system you live in.

The troubling thing is that our current Administration is steering our great country towards the demotivational mindset of Europe. Right now, the question entrepreneurs ask is, “Why should I hire more employees when I don’t have a clue what kind of health care and welfare I’m going to have to provide this person?”. We have absolutely no foresight into what’s around the corner, and it’s scaring a lot of business owners into inaction. But at the big picture level, while this is hurting our country, it’s not stopping us from starting our own businesses.

I just desperately hope that we stick to our revolutionary roots and change direction before that question becomes “Why should I bother producing something new when there’s a 40% tax and everyone gets spoonfed from the Uncle Sam anyway?” It’s a question that I will actively fight from ever existing in America.

But in the meantime, I will continue to lead my tribe of 1, rise above the masses, and continue to mystify German women who want the unfamiliar – because You Can’t Live the American Dream in Europe.

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2. Land of the Free, Right?
3. What the SpaceX Falcon 9 Launch Success Means to America

There are several industries that are dominated by companies, individuals, and even government agencies that spread false and/or unverified information that is unfit for the average consumer. They promote products and services that serve no purpose beyond creating profits without benefit to the end-user. Moreover, these companies often plague the industry with anti-competitive practices, further hurting consumers through high prices and lack of choices.

It is my mission to use my skills in web design, internet marketing, and search engine optimization to provide factual, research-backed information to users in a way that helps foster awareness and increased levels of competition amongst vendors. I will pull no punches and will put all of my energy and resources into attacking these non-competitive, predatory, and deceitful practices, even if my own profit margin suffers because of it.

I will remain focused, and will attempt to focus on one industry at a time. I will employ high-quality, deserving individuals, and will show no favortism whatsoever. While my gameplan may change, my overall mission will not.

I will not, however, sacrifice my own personal health in the attainment of this mission, nor will I sacrifice personal fun.

If you are one of these predatory companies or government agencies employing deceitful, anti-competitive practices, be warned: I’m coming for you.

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The greatest thing was the lack of distractions. On Wednesday, something [good] came up on one of my sites and I needed to put in a serious 3 hours of grunt work*. I turned the phone off, closed my e-mail tabs, stayed off Facebook, turned off my instant messaging program, dug myself into the cave, and got into the ZONE. No blackberry blinking. No e-mails to care about. No phone calls exploding everywhere. Just pure hustlin’. It was awesome.

I’ll admit it. I hate the phone. Not a good thing for a former sales guy to say, but it’s the truth. With phone calls, you get no documentation, it’s tough to multitask, and there are no benefits of seeing body language. I’ve pretty much had the phone on “All Alerts Off” the entire past three days. I check it at MY leisure. It does not check me. If you want to get a hold of me during “cave time”, you pretty much need to knock on my door.

Another thing is the responsibility factor. I seriously think I just grew up a little bit**. No, I don’t want to play flip cup with the vball crew on Wednesday night. I need my BRAIN tomorrow. I didn’t do this every weeknight in the past, but the fact is that I could afford to. Now, I don’t feel like I can. NOTHING is worth getting a bad night’s sleep right now.

I wanted to start off with a bang by getting into a solid routine. I’m a creature of habit, and the sales job didn’t allow me to properly habitize. Here’s basically what I like to do on a weekday:

1. 7am wake up. Spend a minute looking at messages and e-mails on the phone and get up. No loafing.
2. Get some amino acids mixed with a dash of creatine to hold my appetite off. I’m a morning person and don’t need caffeine at this point.
3. Check yesterday’s sales. If end of the month or around day 15, calculate month-to-date revenues and profit margin.
4. Do e-mails. Both personal and business
5. Check all y’alls boring facebook statuses. What’s that, you’re miserable at work? Poor thing, I really feel for you. Oh wait, no I don’t.
6. Check up on any writing I’ve had outsourced. I will most likely use it three steps below.
7. By 8am, creating content. One rule I have for myself is that I must create at least one piece of quality content for one of my sites every weekday. This blog doesn’t count.
8. Publish and social bookmark that new content.
9. Perform and check on various other linkbuilding strategies. I do much myself, and outsource some. This is part of my secret formula so I don’t share publicly.
10. ~9/10am. I’m starting to get a headache from lack of caffeine, so now it’s time to do my pre-workout formula. I need to add a few more carbs here.
11. Workout. Either surfing, swimming, or CrossFit right now. If a rest day, allow myself some R&R at 11am. Still trying to get back in shape from my post Pier-to-Pier swim layoff.
12. Post-workout shake, shower, then finally eat a real meal.
13. While eating, check news, see how stock trade are behaving, etc.
14. Until 3:30pm, work the “main set”, as we swimmers say. Typically this is hardcore writing or hardcore designing. Phone is off. Good chance I already started working towards this in the morning too.
15. 3:30pm. Naptime. I can tell you when I’m within 20 minutes of 3:30 every time. It’s my natural crash time and I don’t fight it. Good chance I’ll eat something light beforehand, especially if I’m gonna do a 6:30pm swim.
16. 4:30/5pm. Wake up, cook, and do a bit more design/writing. Caffeine optional. This is usually when I can figure things out that were frustrating me during my 3pm haze.
17. After that, start slacking off from work, check relevant message boards for my industry, and take some R&R or whatever I feel like doing. I sometimes swim at 6:30 but like the morning workouts better.
18. 8pm, try to find a good stopping point, and go to a friend’s house, chill out with a movie, TV show, or read. Maybe watch sports and have a beer at the local dive but not too many unless campaigns are REALLY rockin
19. 11pm/12am – Bed.

Maybe that’s too rigid, but that’s essentially what I like on an ideal productivity day. BUT, I could ditch the routine and spend the entire day writing code, or drive down to San Diego to surf and say screw everything.

And now it’s beach time. Volleyball and cooking out. And while you’re technically making $0, my sites will be banking revenues. Can’t beat that.

* Technical lesson learned – Don’t hardcode anything in. I know not to do this in programming, but I had a ton of links and product names hardcoded into a bunch of pages instead of using a redirection plugin. That is now fixed, so it will turn this into a 10 minute job instead of a couple of hours.

** Note that 8 hours after I write this, I will have quite the buzz on. So I’m not totally grown up by any means.

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Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
–Robert Frost

Tomorrow is the big day. My first day as a fully self-employed entrepreneur.

Over the past few months, as I’ve seen this time coming, I asked myself who I was going to be in the foreseeable future. And the more I thought and talked about it, the more clear it became.

I could really see it going one of two ways.

The first way is the easy way. As it stands now, I could very easily live off of the profits from my websites without dipping into my savings. I’d have to watch the expenses, but could easily do 15 minutes of work per day and become a total beach bum. I’d play volleyball, become a better surfer, work out all day, drink cheap malt liquor, and do whatever the hell it is that all of these California bums you see wandering around all day do. Occasionally, I’d get inspired and launch a new web campaign and make it profitable.

The second path is the exact opposite. Go for The Empire. Dominate several tiny niches of the web, then aggregate them into a massive network that feeds into an enormous machine. Attack industries that need attacking, and inform users that need informing. Hire employees, learn social media, and even do “In Real Life” marketing. Buy a fancy house, own a boat, and invest in land – all in cash. Stay healthy, keep racing, and learn some new weapon skills, but occasionally go on some ridiculous international drunken bender and let things coast for the week.

I really could see me doing either for a while. But it’s pretty much one or the other.

And as things become more and more clear, I am pretty sure I know which one it’s going to be. You probably do too.

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2. If You Like “All” Music, You Like NO Music
3. Week One in the Books

I never realized how many people I’ve met over the past four years, and how hard saying goodbye would be. There are literally hundreds of people that I’ve helped, supported, and have become professional friends with. Their feedback has been incredible – they all support my endeavor but know that the new guy will be better than I was. Honestly, I’m gonna miss nearly all of them.

All of my customers kept telling the new guy how big of shoes he has to fill. Really? I guess I didn’t think I was that great of a sales guy, so maybe I’ll have to write something on how I operated as a technical sales rep, because I guess it worked. In short, my four pieces of advice would be these:

1. SHUT UP, ask questions, and listen
2. Follow up
3. Don’t be a douchebag
4. Delegate anything and everything to the geniuses at corporate.

Customers knew that I wasn’t the guy with all the answers, but they also knew that I’d crack skulls in an effort to get the answers for them. With an incredibly proactive company like NI, skull-cracking usually isn’t necessary, but sometimes it is. And I will fuck you in the ass if you dare downplay me and my customer. I really wasn’t a sales guy OR an engineer, so much as I was a “Resource Manager”. I liked that. It was the closest I’d ever come to being a pimp. Why spend 45 minutes trying to figure something out when I could get someone in corporate to do it in 5? Delegation is key, and something I’m trying to figure out in my own business (and kinda failing at thus far, admittedly).

Everyone says it’s good to not burn bridges. But let’s face it – I will NEVER return to National Instruments, the Test and Measurement industry, nor corporate America in general (unless ClutchWave IPOs – which isn’t part of “the plan”). I’ve made some of the best friends ever at NI, but don’t really care about the professional bridge. No doubt, the NI connection is great, but my gripe is more with Corporate America in general. I don’t want or need back in. So why did I bust my ass transitioning the next guy in when it wasn’t in my personal best interests? Well, in a few words… because I’m one helluva nice guy. I want to leave something better than the way I found it. And I can truly say that I did that.

Anyway, come September 1st, I’m going to wake up and be on my own. I’m nervously excited. I have a plan and I know what I want to do. And I’m gonna do it.

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Crash Test Lobby Card

Exactly a year ago, I was thrown into a reality TV pilot titled Crash Test, which aired on Spike TV on April 27th, 2010. On Crash Test, we used top-notch stuntmen and stuntwomen to recreate accidents and crime scenes to see who was really guilty or innocent.

I was the “biomedical scientist” of the bunch, and took measurements to determine if the real-life accidents would have really occurred in our simulations had we not been using professional stuntmen and women.

70MPH Remote-Controlled Crash

For reasons I’d rather not get into, the show is not moving forward with a whole season, despite its rave reviews from both sexes and all age groups (further despite the bad rating on IMDB… who’s the clown that gave us a 1/10?!). So at this point, I’d like to add my perspective.

I was thrown into the project at the absolute last minute, and even missed a day of filming. I had one full day to prepare, which included finding sensors, programming my hardware and software, doing the research on the accidents we were about to recreate and how I should take measurements.

Being on set was absolute chaos, and probably the coolest experience of my life up to this point — and I’d like to thank Reveille Studios, Tim Prokop, and Spike TV for giving me this incredible opportunity. So here is what I learned from being the geek on the set of a Reality TV show:

1. Come Prepared (Gear)
   If you’re doing anything technical, you better make sure your stuff works PERFECTLY before getting there, and is completely self-contained. When your gear is needed, there is absolutely no time to make last-minute changes or fix a programming issue.

   Your devices need to be self-contained. You are not guaranteed how far away it will be or if there will be power nearby. You need to be able to flip a switch and have it ready to go.

   There might also be a lot of time between turning it on and when the film is actually rolling (see the “Hurry up and Wait” section), so make sure you have a lot of memory and battery life.

   At this point, I must give a shout-out and thank NI Systems Engineering* for their assistance, specifically David Harding. Also Otmar, Caroline, and Simon in NI DIAdem and LabVIEW Marketing, and my good buddy Paul Mandeltort for being all-around smart as hell. Thanks guys!

   *(side note: If you’re an NI customer working on a very large project and are not leveraging these resources, you’re crazy NOT to contact your local rep and make sure you’re doing things right!)

2. Come Prepared (Research)
   
   

   SCIENTISTS > Engineers!

   You are the expert on whatever the hell you’re doing. Or so the country believes. One of the directors is going to be asking you questions from your perspective. You need to know what’s going on, and how to compare it to real world stuff so that the audience has a clue what you’re talking about?

   There was 40g of force? Guess what, geek – that means nothing to 99.5% of the country. But “it’s the same impact force as getting hit by a college lineman off the line of scrimmage”? Cool, now you’re talkin.

   This one was tough for me, as I had to worry about programming my gear on top of knowing what amount of force typically breaks a vertebrate, information not always easy to find.

   And am I an expert biomedical scientist? Fuck yeah.

3. Be Aggressive
   Get your ass in front of the camera! Tell the camera guys that you have something cool to show them. If there’s a critical scene that you pretty much KNOW will make the final cut, make sure your face is visible and you have some decent input (unless told not to). There were a lot of times when I was behind a computer but should have popped my head in to make some comments.

   Additionally, don’t let any crew members do any setup stuff that could get you on TV more. Do all things that pertain to your role.

   In our show, Casey was operating the high-speed camera. That should have been MY job – because it would be my job to take the video and synchronize it with my data. Another example is the guy who’s hammering in the stake that connected to the chains that held the trailer down. That should have been Casey doing that. Get aggressive.

4. Research YOURSELF
   I learned a lot about myself by watching myself on video. Before you go on set, have a friend videotape you doing similar things that you’ll be doing on the show. For me, I would have taped myself walking around, using the computer, hooking stuff up, standing and arguing, etc.
   
   

   Front row seats to this crash? Priceless

   
   Here’s what I would have improved about myself had I seen myself on camera first (and yes, this will sound horribly lame and egocentric, but it’s the truth):
   • I didn’t realize how much I hated my beard length until I saw it. I was on setting #3 throughout the show, and will always be at #1 or #2 from now on. I can’t believe I’ve worn #3 that much without noticing!
   • My eyebrows need trimming. Not waxing or grooming, but trimming – they’re just too damned long. My barber, Daisy, now takes care of this… but I wish I would have done this earlier… like 15 years earlier. Very “gay” of me to say so, but very true.
   • I hate those jeans. And I wear them ALL THE TIME (note: despite writing this… 1 year later, I still wear those. I really am a lazy POS)
   • Build up my traps. I’m a swimmer, my shoulders should look better under a polo shirt than that!

   A picture is NOT worth a thousand words – a video is.

5. Get some sleep before filming.

   Because I was pulled in at the last minute, I was spending all-nighters coding up my experiments. And boy, did that take its toll. I was a zombie by the end of the filming days, messing things up, and had huge bags under my eyes. This may conflict with rule #1, but we all have a minimal number of hours of sleep in order to function properly and you need to get that much. For me, it’s 4 hours.

6. Hurry up and Wait!
   

   Me, TJ, and Casey take a break from the heat

   Being on the set is nothing short of pure chaos. You will be sitting around, waiting for your part, and then when it’s time, you better be in the vicinity and ready to rock and roll. Not out back flirting with that cutie Kelia or the stunt girls (heh). And then you’ll be called over for your part… just in time to get yelled at and probably wait another 10 minutes for no logical reason whatsoever.

   Hurry up and wait – Be prepared but chill out. It’ll take time as the other ongoing chaos unfolds.

7. Know who is who on the crew.
   
   

   Matt Discusses the Tornado

   
   You will get a “Call Sheet” that has everyone’s jobs and names. Understand what their roles are and try to remember their names. If you have time, research what is a “Line Producer” vs. an “Assistant Director”, what the Grips are, and so on. This will pay MASSIVE dividends. Treat them all incredibly well. Also note that if it’s a pilot, defined roles are not clearly set and everyone wears a zillion hats, so if you need something, just keep asking for it (or keep asking who to ask) until you get the right person.

   Also, the director is KING. Do whatever he says, with little argument unless you know it’s awfully wrong. Otherwise, guess what… you will get cut out of that scene! Don’t try to “write” over what they want you to say, you’ll just get yelled at. Right Casey?

8. Day Before Shooting Chaos!

   The day before filming will be the most chaotic day you’ve ever lived through. Nothing will be ready. You’ll have to go to Home Depot and Radio Shack 35 times. There will be studio employees driving all over the city trying to get stuff for this project to work. I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life. And somehow, you’ll get through it with flying colors. And get some sleep!

9. Acting!

   There is definitely a component of acting. You will be asked to say and do certain things multiple times, even if they already caught your natural reaction. Do your best – you’re a shitty actor and everyone knows it, so there’s not a ton of pressure, but they might be able to get a few seconds of better crap out of you.

10. Product placement
    

    Pimpin DIAdem? You bet!

    As an engineer using tools on the set, you’ll get a ton of companies wanting to give you free stuff for product placement. It’s really cool. However, those placements will be FAST and the company needs to decide if it’s really worth it for them to waste a whole day getting it in the show. I personally think it’s worth it, but don’t expect your product to be slowly called out and for us to pop your website onto the screen. Action is too fast.

    As the rep for National Instruments at the time, I had access and know-how to use NI gear. I put it freaking everywhere. I finally got PXI on TV. I put DIAdem and LabVIEW logos in my software for the screenshots (see image). Get aggressive but don’t go over the top. Note: NDAs and other contracts will need to be signed between the studio and the vendors.

11. Have Fun
    

    Matt havin fun in the Tornado

    It was stressful at times on that set, but things started slowing down by the final couple of days. Remember you’re on there to make good TV! Have fun and be yourself! It’s an experience you might never get again, so enjoy it, make friends, and smile.

As I finish writing this, I am kind of bummed out. Working with Tim Prokop, Casey, TJ, Jack, and the Stunts Unlimited guys was such a cool experience. John Schneider is a total pimp. This show was fucking awesome, and I really wish we could have received a full season.

I have to admit that it PISSES me off to see such garbage that is on TV nowadays, and when we try to put something out with some semblance of intelligence, we get one episode. But money talks, and as you can imagine, it cost a lot of money. It was simply too risky, and I understand that business decision. But it doesn’t mean I can’t be jealous or mad at society for watching nothing but slop when our show doesn’t work out!

As I become fully self-employed next month, I am going to throw my hat in the ring and audition for a few other geeky reality shows. I would be happy to be the geek on or off the set. It’s fun and a great challenge.

This concludes part 1, on the set. Coming next up next: Post-filming.

Related posts:

1. Announcing Crash Test – Tues 4/27 11PM EST on Spike TV
2. Parenthood Review (TV)
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