Alright, so it’s official!

I’ve purchased tickets halfway around the globe and I will be traveling the U.S. for about five weeks, between March 14th and about April 21st, 2011. I’m very excited about this trip, because it will be my first venture home in two years, and because I’ll have the opportunity to visit several cities and meetup with old colleagues, blogger friends, clients, DNA students, friends and family.

(Read on to see my rough itinerary if you’d like to meet up in person in March or April.)

So here’s the slightly crazy part (every entrepreneur needs to be a little bit insane, right?):

I’ve already invested in airfare, I’m covering travel expenses myself, and no matter what happens, I will be visiting several conferences & events throughout Texas, Arizona, and California for five weeks. But I would love to find a corporate sponsor to help me make the most of my 2011 Whirlwind Thrilling Heroics U.S. Tour and fund some BIG ideas I have for my time there.

If I am going to spend just 5 weeks in North America out of every 2 years, then I want to do some huge, impossible, ridiculous shit while I’m there. I’m confident this can be a massive win-win-win situation for the right company or startup that shares my vision for making a change in the world.

Here’s what I’m about in a nutshell: I am tired of the world some of us grow up in and I want to shatter any notions that people have to settle for “normal” life. I want to truly convince people that they CAN in fact do anything with their lives. They can be anything they want. They don’t have to fit into anyone else’s cookie-cutter expectations, they don’t have to do the same thing everyone else does. I want to help crush people’s fears, and the self-imposed limitations that hold us back. I want to encourage more people to spend a LOT of time to figure out what they’re sincerely interested in and passionate about, to CREATE more, to start up their own small businesses, their own global microbrands and projects to leave their impression on the world, and to have more control over their own time, happiness, and freedom. I want to encourage more people to travel, to live abroad, and to have a wide range of experiences that will make them more informed, compassionate members of the human race.

I believe these things are the future. We won’t make the world a better place ensuring everyone studies calculus in school, by increasing spending year after year on stupid government “solutions” without ever looking at results, or by taxing everyone so we can go murder women and children on the other side of the world, all for control over resources.

No. The future—if our species is to have one for very much longer—requires more creativity (not destruction), more curiosity (not fear), more connectedness. We need to remove as many of the rules as we can—no more white picket boxes—we need to encourage young people to follow their passions, not money. We need billions of people all doing things they love, creating goods and services of real value for each other because they care.

If I sound like a raving lunatic, then you should probably leave now. If these crazy ideas sound like they align with your beliefs, if your company could benefit from working on some interesting projects along these lines, and connecting with a network of remarkable people who believe similarly—people who are actively working to make the world a better place—then read on.

There is a lot of crap out there. But I know for a fact there are thousands (maybe millions) of passionate entrepreneurs out there, creatives, and small organizations that truly seek to make a transformational change in people’s lives and change the world for the better. If what I have to say here on Thrilling Heroics resonates with you, with your worldview, with your company’s mission, then I truly believe there is an opportunity for collaboration that would both make sense commercially and make a difference—it would increase your visibility, get you connected with changemakers, and create a lot of excitement.

Who the Hell Am I to Sell Out Like This?

I’ve spent the last three months pouring myself into building Digital Nomad Academy with my two cofounders Brooke and Milt. In that time, I’ve not taken on any new paying clients for my development and marketing consulting business, no big new projects, other than DNA, which is a personal passion project to help more people create meaningful online businesses (that will also help them travel and live wherever they want). We had a hugely successful prelaunch, and now we’ve got roughly 60 students all going through our course for the first time and helping us ensure that everything is top-notch, and being patient with us as we sort out all the technical aspects and get things running smoothly.

We’re reinvesting a large portion of our revenue back into the business, into the infrastructure, into software to create the best membership site and deliver content in the best way possible, into marketing plans and tools for our official launch the next time around…  And I’m investing the bulk of my time now with our students, ensuring we get the best teachers involved each week to speak with them, answering questions on weekly live phone calls, combing through our peer forums, listening to a lot of feedback, making improvements to the site, and generally trying to ensure Digital Nomad Academy reaches its full potential and that our students are successful in making the life change they desire.

So naturally I was living on savings as we got DNA ready for consumption, draining most of the TH coffers for now…  And I’m investing several thousand dollars now in airfare, travel and living expenses, to get halfway around the world for five weeks and be at several big events.

Like I said, no matter what happens, I will be visiting several conferences & events throughout Texas, Arizona, and California in March and April, but with your support I hope to make this time absolutely remarkable, to plan several gatherings and at least one big retreat, and to connect with as many people as I can and make the biggest impact with my time as humanly possible.

With that said, I am certain if people are interested, I’ll have interest from some organizations that aren’t the best fit for Thrilling Heroics. I will carefully review anyone who applies, speak at great length with the best applicants to ensure that our vision aligns, brainstorm exactly how we could collaborate together on a case-by-case basis, and guarantee that we can create a win-win-win situation together. This is not an invitation to just any company; I only want to partner with someone if it’s a genuine fit.

The 2011 Whirlwind Thrilling Heroics U.S. Tour Schedule

Alright, so here’s my tentative itinerary for my five or six weeks back in the States so far:

• South by Southwest Interactive, March 14–18. I’ll be hanging out in Austin, Texas, for the tail-end of SxSWi and the beginning of the film & music festival. I’m already confirmed to hang out with Benny Lewis from Fluent In 3 Months (who’s generously hosting several bloggers for the week), Karol Gadja from Ridiculously Extraordinary, catching up with my old cofounders Adam Baker from Man Vs Debt, stellar web developer Andrew Norcross, and author Monica O’Brien, as well as Gary Arndt, Sean Ogle, Markus Urban (Mr. Impossible himself!), Chris & Cherie at Technomadia, Charlie Hoehn, Tyler Tervooren, and several others.
• Phoenix, Arizona, March 18–23. I’ll be visiting my little sister and spending time with family for my birthday on March 20th (btw if you want to help me make my biggest birthday wishes come true, please contribute), but would love to meet with entrepreneurs and blog readers in the area. I’ll also be in Sedona, AZ, on the 21st.
• Sacramento, California, March 24–? This is home for me. I’ll spend a few weeks here catching up with friends and working overtime on Digital Nomad Academy, interviews, and other projects for Thrilling Heroics (gotta make use of the blazing fast internet at home while I can!). But if you’re in the area, feel free to let me know.
• San Francisco, California, April ?? At some point, I will be heading to SF to catch up with my old friend Jun Loayza, gen-y serial entrepreneur, visit several friends, and hopefully several other bloggers and readers. Time for a Tweetup!
• Los Angeles, California, April ?? When I head south, I will definitely pop in to check up on my good friend Ryan Lei (recently relocated to the U.S. by the UN Refugee Agency), Clay Boeschen, possibly the Tropical MBA guys, and others. Tweetup time again!
• Coachella Music and Arts Festival, Indio, CA, April 15–17. This is a tradition with a few close friends of mine. I’ve already got my VIP tickets and would love to catch up with any readers who will be there. This is a great festival to see artists from across the region and meet many creative types who flock to Southern California for great music in the middle of the beautiful Coachella Valley desert, surrounded by palm trees, mountains, and gorgeous sunsets.

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Are you going to be in any of these locations?? I would love to meet you! Let me know in the comments below, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Be a Thrilling Hero and Help Me Make My Impossible Dreams a Reality

I’m doing this either way, to the best of my ability. But with your help, I could network with the A-listers, organize several events in three states, and hopefully run a large retreat that will transform people’s lives. For the right sponsor, this could be a ridiculously cost-effective way to reach thousands of people.

Major Opportunities:

#1: As described on their website: “The South by Southwest® (SXSW®) Conferences & Festivals offer the unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. Fostering creative and professional growth alike, SXSW is the premier destination for discovery.”  I don’t have a badge to attend the official SxSW events, but being in Austin while nearly 30,000 people converge for the event still offers plenty of opportunities to meet & greet. For now I’m just crashing the unofficial events, meeting up with tons of people for coffee & after parties, and hopefully organizing my own meetup or two, but if I partner with a sponsor who can help cover the conference costs, that might change, and I’d have the opportunity to attend several keynotes, events, workshops, and private parties, and multiply my impact while I’m there.

#2: If I get full funding, it’s my impossible dream to host an entrepreneurship, personal development, and lifestyle design summit—a sort of unconference & retreat with inspiring, like-minded people who want to create radical change in their lives and build meaningful businesses. Host a group of 15-20 for a series of talks, workshops, trainings, and networking in a beautiful venue for 3-4 days—a place where a group of motivated, creative people can hang out with other like-minded folks to encourage and support each other, probably either in LA or San Francisco in mid-April. Originally I had wanted to plan this in conjunction with Coachella—spend the week sharing inspiration & knowledge, and collaborating together on business ideas, and then spend a fun weekend together at the festival, but my early proposal didn’t get accepted for funding. You can see it here for more details. If not this year, then definitely we will make it happen in April 2012. Do you want to be a part of this??

Thrilling Heroics has over 5,000 subscribed readers, approximately 11,000 members in our larger social media community (on networks like Twitter & Facebook, etc.) and about 15,000 unique visitors per month. This is a relatively small, but very loyal and engaged audience of passionate, motivated, creative, entrepreneurial people who are curious about the world, travel, and building things that make a difference. According to Twitter, when I share about one of my colleague’s product, or a hotel I recommend, or a trip a take, my messages reach at least 50,000 people in my expanded network!

With other communities I have helped build (Digital Nomad Academy, Untemplater, Business Backpacker, In Search Of Sanuk, see here for many of my clients and companies I’ve built online platforms for), it’s nearly impossible to measure the reach of Thrilling Heroics online, however of all websites online, TH currently ranks #56,426 for traffic in the U.S., and is within the top 65K most-visited sites worldwide.

And imagine how those numbers will go up after I rub shoulders with the big wigs at South by Southwest and across the U.S. this year!

So how much would it cost to help make my 5-week U.S. tour Thrillingly Heroic and expose your company to thousands of motivated world-changers?

I am looking for 1-3 unique, remarkable companies to sponsor me with about $5,000–$6,000 US. This will help me cover all transportation and accommodation, conference fees, and startup costs for my big in-person retreat. If you think you would be a good fit, please send me an by email at cody at thrillingheroics.com and we can discuss further possibilities and how to make this a huge success for all of us.

6 Things You Get If Your Company Sponsors My Trip

1. A major sponsor that aligns with my philosophy and my audience’s interests will get prominent adverts across ThrillingHeroics.com site for all of 2011 (probably the only adverts you’ll see on TH anymore).
2. Major thanks and exposure in multiple blog posts, emails to my growing list, and social media updates throughout the year (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Building communities is what I do. If you have something that I believe in and trust, then let’s talk about how I can help you present your service, product, or message to my community and create a win-win-win.
3. Here are just a few people I hope to interview in the next few months: Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby, Brian Johnson of Philosopher’s Notes, and Vishen Lakhiani, founder of MindValley. Want your name or logo attached with interviews like these? Get recognition on any video interviews or podcasts I make for Thrilling Heroics this year.
4. Recognition and thank-you, as well as your banner or slide prominently displayed  at any events I coordinate this year, like my dream retreat. Help me orchestrate a killer major event and come participate in-person and present your business directly to attendees if you want!
5. Get access to my network of friends and colleagues on five continents. If there is a possible partnership or collaboration that benefits you both, I am happy to connect you to entrepreneurs in Asia, awesome developers in the US, assistants in the Philippines, affluent world travelers, sailing enthusiasts, underwater basket weaving experts, whatever!
6. Again, if it’s a fit, potentially promote your product, service, or message to customers of my other companies & projects elsewhere.

Make a Donation to Help Me Reach My Dangerously Ambitious Goals

As I said above, my birthday is on March 20th, and if you want to help me make my biggest birthday wishes come true this year, please do it by contributing to my 5-week 2011 Whirlwind Thrilling Heroics U.S. Tour! Individuals can make a small contribution through PayPal if you want to support my trip. Here’s the deal:

• If enough money is donated ($5,000+) and no company sponsors me, I’ll go to SXSW and write about it here to share what I learn with you, and I’ll do as many interviews as I can to help expose you guys to the coolest, most remarkable entrepreneurs out there, ad-free! Also we’ll have seed money to set up my personal development retreat for this and/or next April in Southern California.
• If a sponsor fully funds my target amount, I’ll donate all reader contributions to The Girl Effect and In Search Of Sanuk (my friend Dwight’s charity project in Bangkok).

Please click the donation button at the bottom of this page and make a $25 donation (that’s my suggested amount, but please feel free to make any contribution you feel comfortable with), or you can become a recurring micropatron if you love what I share here on Thrilling Heroics.

Help Me Spread the Word About My Impossible Dreams for 2011

Please help me seek sponsors and spread the news about my impossible goals by sharing this story on Twitter, Facebook and anywhere else you can. If you know anyone who works at a company you think would align well with my mission here at TH, or in an ad or PR company, please email them the link and tell them my story. If we make this happen, hopefully you can count on meeting me inside South by Southwest and there will be a HellaCoachella retreat in April!
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6 Damn Good Reasons to Help:

1. You love what I write here at TH and want to give back for the time & energy I’ve invested here for the last 5 years.
2. I’ve helped motivate or inspire you to make a major change in your life.
3. You’d like to meet me in person at South by Southwest Interactive.
4. You like to support a hard-working entrepreneur trying to make a little dent in the world in a very unconventional way.
5. Help me grow the Thrilling Heroics community so I can make a bigger impact to help you live the life you want.
6. You want to help me make my idea for a fun entrepreneurship, personal development, and lifestyle design summit a reality.

If you’d like to help me make the most of my 5-week trip Stateside, I will be truly appreciative for any generous contribution you can make. Just click here to make a donation. And if you will be in Austin, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, or Indio in March and April, let me know so we can try to meet up in person!

Thank you for your support!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: The 5-Week Thrilling Heroics U.S. Tour: Help Me Make the Most of It!

a panorama view from the balcony of our new bungalow

Sometimes what you need to overcome a challenge is a state change. Tony Robbins talks about this when he discusses negative moods.

Change your external state, and you change your internal state.

If you’re feeling down, sad, or a bit upset, one of the simplest applications of this is to take a big deep breath, look up at the sky, and fake a big, goofy grin. Tony says that activating those muscles—and that part of your brain—is likely to manifest the real feelings of happiness and improved mood.

This state change is powerful, and it could be just the boost you need to shake a negative mood, or procrastination for example.

But sometimes you need something bigger and more lasting than a smile. To overcome a big hurdle, change a persistent negative behavior, or make some other kind of big leap in your personal development, maybe you need to change more than yourself… maybe you need to change your surroundings?

Sometimes it’s the people you surround yourself with (some say you become the average of the 5 people you hang out with the most), but very frequently it’s your environment.

If you’re in a slump, stuck in a rut, unproductive, unmotivated, or in a destructive cycle, you need to change your state somehow—that’s for sure.

Ask yourself: is your workspace uninspiring? Is your neighborhood dingy or depressing? Do you crave a change of scenery?

How I Gave Up City Life for Island Paradise

I’d been based in Bangkok for the last year and a half—and it’s an incredible city. The people I met there are what kept me wanting to stay—incredible, entrepreneurial, interesting folks from all corners of the globe. It was the first truly big city that I’d lived in for any good amount of time—the nightlife, the food, and the sights, are stimulating—there is something for everyone, and always new experiences to try.

But after that amount of time, I wasn’t excited by my surroundings anymore. I was distracted by the noises of the city, 24 hours a day. I found my simple studio apartment dull and solitary, and I realized that staring at the freeway out my window for a year and a half wasn’t an inspiring environment to turn out my best work. I wanted to get away from the heavy traffic, the trash in the streets, the pollution in the air…

I felt this way and didn’t realize it for a long time, and in retrospect, it sapped my productivity, decreased the quality of the work I’d been putting out over the last six months, and probably put me in a foul mood all to frequently.

All this, and throw in the bloody protests outside our doorstep, and finally my girlfriend and I decided it was time to change our scenery. Nikki had found an incredible bungalow in Koh Phangan, an island in the south of Thailand, on the hillside overlooking the beach and the ocean. After almost 21 months in Thailand, I’m finally living on the beach like I’d daydreamed of before I moved abroad!

Watch the video below for a walkthrough of our new home in this beautiful beach paradise. I’ve been a bit quiet the last couple weeks while we’ve been settling into our new home.

Beach Living in Koh Phangan, Thailand

It is an incredible find—we live on the island famous for the Full Moon Party (but on the quiet side of the island on a resort beach) and all of this for only about $480 per month! And even that’s split two ways between us!

Since moving here, we’ve been working diligently (and productively!) on her magazine and other work projects together. And I’ve even kicked my worst habit: it’s only a start, but I haven’t touched a cigarette in three weeks! Whereas the dirty, crowded, hustling streets of Bangkok made me want to smoke, here I’ve been able to let go of a lot of city stresses and live more healthily. (More on my goal to quit smoking in future months, but wish me the best for now!)

If you dream of living somewhere incredible like this—it is easily within your grasp. There are hundreds of thousands of little gems like this just waiting to be found all throughout Asia, South America, and even nestled where you least expect them in your home country.

If you do need a good kick in the ass, something to light a fire under your butt to start thinking outside the box, get out of the office, and get out of your hometown, then stay tuned for our videos here at Thrilling Heroics, and check out the new Backpacker Video Diaries videos Nikki and I are producing together. Four gals from my hometown (Sacramento, California) go traveling throughout Southeast Asia (and eventually South America) for over a year—having a hilarious, adventurous time.

Even if you only relocate for a short sabbatical or a mini-retirement, what’s holding you back from experimenting with traveling and living abroad?

In any case, remember the importance of changing your state when you’re struggling, and if you’re not happy with your life, take a critical look at your surroundings and ask yourself whether you need a change of scenery.

Maybe you just need to get out of the city. Or maybe you need to get out on the road less traveled for a while.

You don’t necessarily have to travel—especially not across the globe like I have. But one thing’s true: travel will push you to reexamine your preconceived ideas about the world—the very first step in freeing you to make the changes necessary to achieve the life that you desire.

At the very least be real with yourself. Are you boxing yourself in somewhere that doesn’t make you happy? Are you convincing yourself to stay in one place when you really don’t have to?

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Change your Life with a Change of Scenery

I’m about 5 weeks late in writing this article, postponed by a breakup, lack of motivation, work projects, political protests, getting distracted by tons of new friends, and by going on extended mental vacation! This Christmas I’m writing from my new temporary home in Bangkok, Thailand, and I wanted to finally share some of my goals for traveling abroad in 2009. I’ve let a lot of personal issues get in the way of my writing in the past year, but in the new year I will strive to offer you much more frequent updates about my attempts at living the dream, and tips on how you can too!

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I left the States only about a month ago, and already I feel like I have shed my “old” life and am living in a completely new reality! Before my departure, I’d been asked a number of times why I wanted to go to Thailand. My answer back then was simply that I was ready for change. I had lived in Sacramento for 24 years and I was ready for new scenery. But I don’t think I’ll fully understand my reasons until after my journey ends (if it ever does!—life is a journey with no destination).

I was literally two weeks away from moving down to San Diego a little over a year ago. I had left my job at Sac State and was interviewing with marketing & design firms there (which is how i came across a few awesome individuals, like Rodney Rumford and digitaltelepathy’s founder Chuck Longanecker), when suddenly I split up with my girlfriend at the time, so the bottom fell out on those plans.

After that, my desire to travel abroad started as a bit of an escape—to eliminate all ties to my old “self” and start fresh somewhere new—and my interest in crossing international boundaries was fueled by Timothy Ferriss’ inspiring New York Times Bestseller The 4 Hour Workweek.

Reading Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Workweek changed my outlook on the world, and it literally shaped the future course of my life more than any other book has. I learned that the rules have changed. Earning a living doesn’t require you to put your life on hold—working 40- to 60-hour weeks until retirement age is the “deferred life plan” as he calls it. And most importantly Ferriss introduced me to the concept of geo-arbitrage (something I’ll get more into in a future post, but put simply, geo-arbitrage means earning in stronger currencies like the US dollar, Euros, and British Pounds sterling, and then living/spending where the cost of living is considerably lower). Ferriss, like many other business backpacker/vagabond/digital nomad types, says that Thailand and Argentina are two of the world’s best remaining destinations where Americans can easily stretch their dollar.

I had been interested in Thailand since I was just 17, when my high school French professor—Alec Hodgins, who I still maintain a relationship with and whose teaching had an immeasurable impact on my life—took his wife and son for a three-week excursion to the small Southeast Asian nation and came back with wonderful stories of the friendly people and photos of the gorgeous landscape. Thailand in my mind became one of the last sought-after paradises. It was beautiful, you could live on the beach, and the price of living was inexpensive.

So rather than dream about some future vacation there or wait for retirement, I decided to mold my life into something where I could work and travel at the same time. I’ve spent the last year and a half building a business that I can run remotely from anywhere on the globe (as long as there is a decent internet connection). And then I went for it!

When I got serious about my goal to move to Thailand and start traveling through Southeast Asia for a year, dozens of people in my extended network began to come out of the woodwork. Every single person I talked to had good things to say about Thailand. I still haven’t met a single person who didn’t enjoy their time here, and many have stayed here indefinitely or moved their families here. I met several PhD students who did an exchange program with my university for a semester, and they were so friendly and selfless—I was looking forward to change of pace from Sacramento, where it felt to me like strangers are typically pretty impolite to each other.

I felt much more jaded with my hometown than the people around me, but perhaps I was just tired of being in the same place all of my life. I had been fortunate to do quite a bit of travel across North America and Europe, but I had always lived in the same city. I felt like I needed new inputs, and going somewhere as different as I could find from what I was used to was appealing to me. Fast Company magazine ran a fascinating article a few months back about creativity and how to come up with new ideas, in which Gregory Berns, author of Iconoclast, describes how in familiar contexts, your brain falls back on experience—old neural connections—to fill in the gaps and reduce its workload, thus processing the world, both perception and imagination, more efficiently. He talks about the importance of new environments and new experiences for creative thinking and innovation:

“Novel experiences are so effective at unleashing the imagination because they force the perceptual system out of categorization, the tendency of the brain to take shortcuts.”

Additionally I felt that if I didn’t take my opportunity to go for a “gap year” if you will, while I’m still just 24 and have no commitments—no relationship, no kids, no car payment, no mortgage—then I might get stuck in that game and never be able to go wander the world like I truly desired. Another quote that the jet set and the location-independent entrepreneur types often like to allude to is by Mark Twain:

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

So with that I think I’ve talked enough. Finally, here are some of the things I hope to learn as I travel throughout Southeast Asia in 2009:

Simplicity.

Extended travel is a great opportunity to separate oneself from dependence on material possessions. Before my departure, I sold most of my stuff on Craigslist. You’d be surprised how little you need to travel with (with exception of my laptop in my case!). Since I am essentially homeless, wandering from one city to the next, from one apartment or hotel to the next, I hope to learn to be content with only the possessions that are most necessary.

Pace of life.

In many Asian cultures, unlike American career-centric thinking, care for oneself and for others is much more important than business. With less need for material things and the ability to get by with less income, I thought this would be a good chance to scale back the amount of work I do, slow down, and concentrate more time on reading, personal growth, and improving my writing. I’ve got a long reading list of books on simplicity, psychology, positive attitude, the alleged law of attraction, success, and entrepreneurship to read in the year ahead.

Personal growth.

Life in paradise is not without its many challenges. I’ve already been stuck in travel purgatory because of unforeseen political protests, had to sort out un-sortable visa and immigration issues, and, well most recently I’ve woken up to a cockroach, two poisonous centipedes, and a dead lizard on my apartment floor in the past two days! But part of this adventure is to overcome challenges, and especially to learn to be more self-reliant. In Sacramento, not that I relied on it, but if I ever really needed it I had parents and family to fall back on and tons of friends to spend time with daily. Here, I am forced to make new friends, build a new network, and solve problems entirely on my own. To seek new solutions to new problems, almost daily. It can certainly be frustrating, but I think in the end it will be well worth it.

Openness to new ideas, new values, new people.

I think that, as a traveler, there is an ease in making new friends. Thais are intrigued with Western culture, and with other expats you have an immediate common bond simply by the fact that you are a stranger in a foreign land. You can easily form friends with people you might not normally engage with back home. Additionally, as a traveler, you must learn to be more trusting of those around you simply because you rely on them: your taxi driver, people who give you advice on the street, your fellow travelers, and so on. If you can learn to trust people and assume the best in others, most of the time you won’t get burned, and you will learn a lot about foreign cultures, religions, and ideas at an accelerated rate.

Calm down.

One saying the Thais have is “mai pen rai” or “it doesn’t matter.” It’s similar to when we say “no worries” in the US. My Thai friends are always telling me not to be so serious. In the last few days, I’d been stressing out about getting outside of the country before my visa expires, and how to get my paperwork with the immigration bureau in order. Well my good friend Tiam (who we call “The Protector”) told me that Thai law, unlike law in the US and many other parts of the world, is very flexible, and he took me to the immigration office where we were assured that overstaying one day would be no problem at the border. Customs, social norms, and rules are different all around the world, but in general as I face the challenges of travel and living abroad, I hope to cultivate Jai Yen, or “cool heart” in the face of adversity, and trust in the fact that one way or another things will work out okay.

In the end, I hope to prove to myself that life is only as hard as you make it. Although there are tons of language and cultural barriers/differences (some of which I will discuss in my next post), I believe that people around the globe are really all essentially the same. Some of my friends and family from back home were worried about my safety—the media is good at scaring people when there are robberies, kidnappings, acts of terrorism, etc.—but I really don’t think that life in other countries is any more dangerous or difficult than it is in the States. As seemingly “crazy” as people drive here, I haven’t seen a single vehicle collision since I’ve been here, whereas back home I could easily get in a car crash any day of the week (one of the leading causes of death in the US). I choose to accept that I could get hit by a bolt of lightning and die at any moment, so I should do as much as I can with every day I’m given. Why not live my dream in the meantime!?

You can too! Stay tuned.

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By the way, if you want to keep up with my (mis)adventures around the world, please follow me at codymckibben.com where you can see live updates of my photos and activites around the globe and across the web. Additionally, I’ve just started a second venture with my friend Brooke Ferguson from Sacramento, called BusinessBackpacker.com where we’ll soon start coaching other entrepreneurs to follow in our footsteps and live the nomad/vagabond/location-independent lifestyle!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: What I Hope to Learn in Thailand

So New Girl ripped my heart out. Given, we’ve only been dating for two months, and I knew this moment had to come. Unfortunately we were doomed from the beginning. I don’t know what I expected to happen, because I’m leaving for Southeast Asia for a year and she has an acting career to concentrate on when she graduates college. I knew New Girl wasn’t the one, but she was definitely a kindred spirit—you know, someone that you connect with from the moment you meet them (we could always tell what was going on in each others’ head). I had no expectation that she would wait around for me for the year while I’m abroad, but I thought we were at least on the same page in wanting to enjoy this while it lasted.

NG spent a week in Mexico with her sister and her sister’s fiancee. When she came back she was a completely different person than the one I dropped off at the airport.

I’d had all this anticipation for Sunday night—waiting all week for her to return, making big plans to show her a great time for the next two weeks; I even designed a website for her acting portfolio while she was gone!

I know travel changes you (otherwise I wouldn’t be spending a year abroad) but six days apart shouldn’t make someone go from the “honey, baby, I love you” end of the spectrum to wanting nothing to do with you. I have my ideas about what happened, but frankly I don’t expect her to give me the explanation I deserve. I haven’t even heard her voice since Sunday night. I had to push her to tell me that we were actually broken up—and via text message no less!

I dunno what the hell is wrong with her, I just know how it feels. It feels like being effin’ dead inside. I can’t breathe, I can’t eat or sleep at times. I feel as though, once again, the world has proven to me that I can’t count on anybody but myself. At least NG’s given me my reason to move back.

Before the breakup, I almost settled for that sense of security. I mean, we were really happy. She’s a great girl, and we had a fantastic time together. When you’re with someone who makes you feel great, when you have someone to “come home to” and share life’s challenges with, it makes all the other shit almost bearable. But now I am reminded of why I wanted to get out of here in the first place.

I know I have a great life here in the States, but I’m also tired as shit of it. I have a few fantastic, close friends and some really supportive family, but I’m jaded. I’m a workaholic, which makes me stressed out and out-of-touch. I am often crushed to see how quickly some people can turn around and treat others like human trash, and without thinking twice about it. We are lucky in the U.S. to have so many freedoms, so much comfort and security, but a lot of people seem very unhappy—and I’ve long been one of them.

So this is why I’m leaving home for a while. I feel jaded with life here, and I don’t know why I’m here. I often feel like I wasn’t meant to be here—in this time, or on this planet, or something. I just don’t fit in. I don’t see anything I’d be interested in spending the next 60 years on. I’m just not into it. And I know I can’t expect life to be that different anywhere else, but I have to look around and see what else there is.

I’m not trying to get your sympathy vote or sell you a sad story. I know there are plenty of people out there in the world who have had it much rougher than I have. But after being in one place for all 24 years of my life, I can’t look around without being reminded of past failures, deceit, rejection, and so on, and this is just my way of dealing with the emotional baggage.

This is the point:

I should have started a lot sooner, but the idea is to sell everything I own, hit the road with a backpack, a laptop, and a week’s worth of clothing, and start fresh somewhere new. Piece by piece, I’m either selling or giving away everything that represents my old life. I’m going to go somewhere as different as I can possibly find—for a year, or however long it takes—with no set agenda. We’ll see what opportunities present themselves and where life takes me. I’ll be back, but for now I have to do this while I still can—while I’m not in a relationship, have no kids, no mortgage, no car payment…

Some people call it a quarterlife crisis! But it’s time for me to let go of all the reminders of a past life and move on to see what else life has to offer me.

Here’s how you can help:

I leave in 11 days! I have already sold a ton of my furniture and stuff. And I am listing a whole bunch more on Craigslist, but time is running out and I also just don’t have the energy or emotional capacity to get a fair price for all my things, what with all the travel planning, running my business, and the breakup running through my head at all times! Please checkout some of the stuff I have below. If you’re interested or know someone who might be, please get in touch. I just need to rid myself of as many material possessions as I can for now, and if I can give them a happy new home, or help you guys get your hands on some things that you might find useful, then that’d be great. For local Sacramento-area friends or family, of course I’m willing to give you some of this stuff for cheap or free if you’re interested, so let me know (that excludes the car or the iMac, now!):

• 1998 Pontiac Sunfire GT (5-speed) – $1500 OBO
  
• 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac – 2GB Memory/500GB Hard Drive, Loaded with Software, Latest Mac OSX, just bought in February – Asking $1100 OBO
• Men’s Research Dynamics Mountain bike – $45
• Bench Press + 100lb weights set – $40
• Mexican Classic Acoustic (Paracho) Guitar – $35
• 2 box speakers – $20
• VCR – FREE for local friends
• A buncha DVDs and Books I’m getting rid of – Also free for local friends if you want to look through them

I will write more soon about my trip and what I hope to get out of it, but for now, thanks for your support and your help!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Selling All My Belongings

In several recent years, the Kauffman Foundation has hosted Entrepreneurship Week USA, or E-Week. Well now it’s truly a global event with schools and organizations around the world holding activities to promote entrepreneurship. Global Entrepreneurship Week 2008 starts in just 4 days!

Visit UnleashingIdeas.org to learn more and view the video below for more about Global Entrepreneurship Week.

For local Sacramento readers, Ricardo Robles of Capsity Offices has been working overtime to bring Entrepreneurship Week activities to the Sacramento area for the first time:

“Be a part of an international celebration of entrepreneurship as it rolls through Sacramento Nov. 17 -23. The future of Sacramento’s young, green, mobile, diverse, motivated, musical and artistic business leadership will discuss the strategies, challenges and opportunities they face every day. With Global Entrepreneurship Week we will seek to acquire the knowledge, skills, networks and values needed to grow innovative, sustainable enterprises that have a positive impact on our lives and the lives of those around us.

For the first time Sacramento will join over 77 countries in an initiative to Inspire, Connect, Mentor and Engage millions of young minded individuals for a better future. Global Sponsors and Partners that have joined in the efforts of Global Entrepreneurship Week include: Kauffmann Foundation, Ernst & Young, IBM, NYSE Euro next, and more. Please see the flyer for further information.”

For readers around the world, be sure to visit the international GEW website to see what’s going on in your corner of the globe. For my fellow Sacramentans, here is a brief list of some of the events that Ricardo and the local entrepreneur community have set up here in town:

Monday, Nov 17
Living the Entrepreneur Lifestyle
@ Sac State University Union

Tuesday, Nov 18
Sustainability in Entrepreneurialism
@ Green Sacramento, 1931 H St.

Wednesday, Nov 19
Bikeramento Bixer
@ The Park Ultra Lounge

Thursday, Nov 20
Women Entrepreneurs Focus on Mind, Body and Spirit
@ KVIE, 2595 Capitol Oaks Dr.

Friday, Nov 21
No Fear, No Box, Let’s Go!
@ The Guild Theatre, 2828 35th Street

Saturday, Nov 22
Music and Entrepreneurship
@ Harlow’s, 2708 J St.

Sunday, Nov 23
Making a Living as an Artist
@ Kristel Durand Photography Gallery, 500 N St.

More info at gew.sactivist.com

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Global Entrepreneurship Week: Unleashing Ideas Around the World Nov. 17–23

I think with the economy in the toilet, business owners are eager to expand their online reach, and they’re trying hard to get creative with advertising and promotions. I’ve been getting a lot of questions from colleagues and friends recently about how to best promote their businesses online, and there are a few things I’ve been recommending a lot lately, namely: Local Search. A sidenote: For drumming up business I would also highly suggest testing out targeted geographic ad campaigns with Google Adwords and (if you’re web-savvy) building a presence on Twitter. But today I want to give you a few simple tips on how to easily improve your search engine ranking for free with Local Search.

Want to see your business here?

Depending on the type of business you run, local search results may drive the majority of your web traffic. I’m a one-person, location-independent web freelancer who does the majority of my work via email with out-of-state and international clients, for example, so my local visibility is not as high of a priority as a Sacramento-area magazine or a local small business owner with a brick-and-mortar shop. But I recently read an article by Jacob Cass that explains how local search hits can frequently give you the advantage over your competitors, because local businesses often tend to come up at the very top of search results. In other words, if anyone performs a Google search for something like “yourindustry yourcity” or they search for your kind of business within Google Maps, then having your listing on Local Search means you’ll be one of the first companies that show up! Just look at the positioning Jacob’s business Just Creative Design has on the search results page for Newcastle graphic designers!

So even though my target clients are in the Silicon Valley area or abroad, well outside the greater Sacramento area, I decided to go ahead and list my business in the search engines’ local listings. It can’t hurt, and it gives your clients the ability to rate your business and write testimonials for you! In addition to Google Local Search I’ve also been recommending Yelp to all of my friends with small businesses. While Yelp doesn’t have the same traction here in Sacramento yet as it does in the San Francisco Bay Area or other large metropolitan areas, services like Yelp (sort of a social networking-style local search engine where users rate their favorite hangouts and other businesses) will see increasing exposure in the years ahead and give web-savvy companies the edge as the economy suffers and more businesses decide to make the transition online. Anytime I’m somewhere I’m unfamiliar with, I can easily pull up Google Maps or the Yelp application on my iPhone (available for free at the iTunes App Store) to find out where the nearest Starbucks is, or what hotspots, businesses, and events are going on in my immediate area. And so can your customers! Are you there, ready to be found?

Below I’ve listed the most popular local search engines and most important places to submit your business listing. For most of these services, you’ll need to sign up for a free account, and you should have a brief description of your company, contact information, hours of operation, and company logo or photos to attach to your listing (people always click more often on photos than plain text):

• Google Local Search
  
• Yelp (feeds data to Windows Live and Yahoo)
• Yahoo Local Search
  
• Live Local Search
  
• CitySearch (feeds data to Ask.com and Windows Live)

Additionally, if you do any sort of event marketing, it can be beneficial to get involved on some of the most popular web 2.0 sites such as Upcoming.org, Meetup.com, and Eventful.

Here’s to your entrepreneurial success! If you appreciate this helpful tip, please give me a nod and help rate my freelance web business on Yelp!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: An Easy, Free Way to Get Top Search Ranking for Your Small Business

Somewhat surprisingly, my hometown Sacramento was recently included on a new Yahoo! Finance list of ten Best Cities to Live, Work and Play in the U.S. “Our approach this year to picking the ten best cities in which to live and work was simple: Look for places with strong economies and abundant jobs, then demand reasonable living costs and plenty of fun things to do.” The results of the study:

The Top Ten Cities to Live, Work, & Play

1. Houston, Texas
2. Raleigh, North Carolina
3. Omaha, Nebraska
4. Boise, Idaho
5. Colorado Springs, Colorado
6. Austin, Texas
7. Fayetteville, Arkansas
8. Sacramento, California
9. Des Moines, Iowa
10. Provo, Utah

With a population just over 2 million, Sacramento is the largest city besides Houston, TX. The researchers at the Martin Prosperity Institute say that about 34% of workers are in the creative field, surprisingly. And it’s revelatory to learn that we’re also the only city on the list that has an above-average cost-of-living index, at 121.7% the national average!

It is promising that the researchers believe the California state capital has a relatively healthy job market and shows promise for future success, but I also wanted to take the opportunity to examine reader feedback.

Although Yahoo! doesn’t allow discussion, a reprint of the results at Lifehacker has already prompted over 100 comments:

XanderCrews says:

“Living in one of the suburbs would be fine, if an acceptable starter home was available for less than $350,000.”

aj_robins says:

“There may be fun things to do there, but the cost of living is probably only great compared to Southern California or the San Francisco Bay area. The price of homes in Sacramento is still pretty high compared to other parts of the country.”

Listen2Eurobeat says:

“I’ve lived in Sacramento for 8 years and the only things you can do there are LIVE and WORK. […] You’ll have a hard time finding PLAY in that city.”

cnc says:

“…the real estate bust hit here harder than almost anywhere else in the country. Starter homes in decent suburban neighborhoods can now be had around $200,000, which is what they were about six years ago. Cost of living has improved dramatically (or worsened, depending on whether or not you’re a homeowner).”

Xerloq says, with regards to Sacramento:

“Move to Napa. Nice winters, though. I prefer the wine country and the Delta area more though, especially with BART nearby. Summer not bad, though it’s far from everything (e.g. San Francisco).”

Mile High Soapbox says:

“I don’t know why Sacramento is on the list. It has crazy traffic, pollution, is no where near anywhere to play.”

Looks like lots of commentary regarding the housing bubble. And it is eye-opening how high the cost of living is here, which might help explain why it’s so difficult to prosper in this town, financially.

On the bright side, danahyatt adds a more positive note:

“Overall, Sac has everything that one wants in a living place. Employment is plentiful while cost of living is low (in balance) compared to salary. Transportation (public) relies on county board’s decision making, and comes up short most of the time. Poor public transportation. Mid town is accessible to most everything one needs. Schools are wonderful. CSUS offers classes in everything. However there should be more PHD Degrees offered. It’s hard to complain about anything here in Sacramento.”

And cnc returns to say:

“I see the glass as half full. Outdoor dining is awesome as late as you want to go. […] Sacramento isn’t as cosmopolitan as the Bay Area, and our outlying areas are as boring as anywhere. But the central city is vibrant, interesting and fun and the weather for most of the year can’t be beat.”

It’s always interesting to hear people’s perspectives on our little city in comparison to other parts of the country. I enjoy it here and I know I’ll want to return one day, but I know I’m definitely prepared to experience life in another part of the world! I wonder if prosperity is easier to achieve in other areas with a lower cost-of-living index and a little less “keeping up with the Joneses.”

What’s the most prosperous city in the U.S.? Share your opinion!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Sacramento is the 8th Best Place to Live and Work in the States!?

For any readers in the greater Sacramento area, there is a great business networking opportunity on Tuesday, June 17th at the Mondavi Center at UC Davis: The New California 100. Billed as the Central Valley’s first leadership summit, the event will honor the top 100 companies in Northern California that generate more than $50 billion in revenue and employ more than 250,000 people. The event will feature 100 companies, 100 C-level executives, and 100 entrepreneurs and investors, so it will be a good opportunity for entrepreneurs or leadership-minded graduates to meet some influential individuals.

There will be a keynote address by Steve Sabol, President of NFL Films, discussions on the growing network culture among businesses, and some appealing showcases on the High Technology and Internet/New Media Industries. The summit will also have sessions focused on cleantech, manufacturing, consumer products, healthcare, land development, and more.

• The event is designed to bring together the top 100 companies in the 19-county area that stretches from Redding to Bakersfield through the Central Valley
• The economy in this area is different than in San Francisco, LA, San Diego or other coastal counties
• The goal is to bring together the leaders of these companies, along with several early stage companies from the region, and hope to stimulate ongoing dialog and business activity among them to benefit the area
• The primary producer of the event is Golden Capital Networks, based in Chico, and the producer of several regional venture capital events (Venture Vineyard in Napa, Silver & Gold in Reno and Angel & VC Investment Summit in El Dorado Hills)

The New California 100 summit should offer many opportunities for CEOs, entrepreneurs, VCs, development professionals and professional services providers, but Josh Morgan, principle of Morgan/Dorado Public Relations, also wants to draw a younger crowd out to the leadership event this year. I know that there are special rates for students and free press passes available for a select few business- and entrepreneurship-oriented bloggers. Follow me on Twitter and send me a direct message to get connected to Josh for student/blogger passes. Or you can contact Josh directly via Twitter.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: California 100 Leadership Summit at UC Davis Next Week

My friend Tim Walther has just released his first book, Seeking True North: The Pathway to Freedom, Beauty and Success with co-writer Erick Erickson! Tim is an accomplished climber and mountaineer, a leadership expert and motivational speaker, and longtime friend of my housemate Paul Dickey. Tim and Paul were my travel buddies in Barcelona and Ibiza this winter.

Tim’s business, Grand Dynamics, is based out of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, but he was in Sacramento yesterday, so Paul and I met up with him for a bike ride and a great salmon dinner (thanks Holly!), and I finally got my hands on a signed print copy of the book. I helped Tim and Rick design the new STN blog and user forums, so I’ve had the opportunity to read through much of the material. The book tells the story of two characters who learn many personal development lessons (lessons Rick and Tim learned on the mountainside and in training exercises with thousands of professionals across the world). Seeking True North goes on to explain these personal and business development models and tools in detail and how to apply them in your own life.

Tim and Rick both do corporate retreats across the globe that focus on organizational development, experiential education, and leadership studies. Check out the new blog at SeekingTrueNorth.com. Congratulations on the book launch guys!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Shameless Plug for Tim Walther’s New Book

I spent about a week in SoCal, and I’m still recovering from three nights sleeping in the desert!

Last Wednesday was a long night racing across CA-41 and CA-46 in the pitch black, which was a very eerie experience with literally no other cars on the road for miles and miles. After downing two Rockstar energy drinks and six shots of espresso, and slaloming down US-101, I finally arrived at in Goleta, CA, at 11pm and spent a couple days enjoying Santa Barbara and Isla Vista with my friend Nicole Pefley and her roommate Benita Chow.

Nicole and I traveled east toward Palm Springs to attend this year’s Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio, CA. Last year with Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Björk was great, but this year undoubtedly blew all my past live music experiences out of the water! Coachella is a three-day concert where you set up camp in the Southern California desert and get your pick from about 125 bands. Nearly 60,000 people attend the festival each of the three days. Indio is sort of an oasis out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by golf courses, palm trees, a few rocky ridges, and little else. The festival is held on the massive Empire Polo Fields, which provide a large, flat, grassy blank slate for the venue. The headliners this year were Jack Johnson, Portishead, Prince, and Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd).

We got a late start, and after sitting at a standstill in traffic passing through Riverside, we were about 3 hours late to the concert grounds. We struggled to get our tent up as the sun sank over the horizon, so finally we rushed to get into the event before dark. As Nicole and I arrived, we were just in time to hear The Verve perform their 90′s ballad “Bittersweet Symphony.” A powerful song to start off a great weekend with. (I’ll include a number of Dave Bullock‘s gorgeous photographs from the event. Bullock was live blogging from Coachella this year and wrote several articles for Wired magazine)

Above, a bird’s-eye view of half the Coachella venue, including the Gobi, Mojave, and Sahara tents. As the sun set, and as The Verve wrapped their set, we played in the Sonic Forest, an array of 8-foot-tall metal pillars that chirp birdsong at us as we interact with them. Then we grabbed our first drinks at the beer garden.

Later, the crowd filled in at the Coachella Main Stage for Jack Johnson’s set Friday night. This is just one of five venues that play simultaneously! Jack Johnson is always a fun act to see live, since he brings a carefree, upbeat atmosphere to the concert. It was an exciting surprise when he brought Matt Costa and Mason Jennings on stage to accompany him for a few songs!

Saturday was 103°, so we spent the daytime hours trying to keep out of the heat at the local Starbucks. The first big attraction of the afternoon was Death Cab for Cutie. We found a decent place to lounge for the duration of their show, and we were both pleasantly surprised at how many of their songs we knew and enjoyed. I guess I liked Death Cab more than I knew I did!

Next up was the German quartet Kraftwerk. The experimental group, part of a movement dubbed “Krautrock,” actually got their start back in 1970, and have had nearly two dozen members cycle through the quartet. They were some of the original pioneers of electronic music, and some of the earliest artists to give a voice to post-war Germany. Their show is an extremely powerful mix of aural and visual sensations as they perform their progressive electronica beats in front of a massive LED screen on Saturday night. Opening with “The Man Machine,” and continuing with “Tour de France” and their psychedelic “Vitamins,” the only way I could express it to someone who wasn’t there is that it was like the music reached inside your mind and wouldn’t let you turn away!

Being at these live music venues is an entirely different experience from any other music listening experience I’ve had, and I think it opened my eyes to the fact that with electronic music in particular, while many people don’t seem to “get” it at first, it is something that you fall in love with when you hear it live. Whether it’s because of the extreme volume, the energy of the crowd, or the intense audio-visual experience, needless to say this set the mood for the weekend.

Once we were able to shake ourselves from the mind control that Kraftwerk was exercising over us, we raced over to see M.I.A. perform in the Sahara tent. M.I.A. is an unimposing young woman from Sri Lanka, by way of London, but on the mic she puts out loud, thumping rap anthems with heavy African and Brazilian influence, and a lot of original Sri Lankan flavor. She brought Afrikan Boy out to help rile up the huge crowd with “Hussel” Saturday night, above—and when I say crowd I mean it. I’ve never seen the Sahara tent so packed—the audience was literally climbing three levels up the rafters! It was sort of unreal to step back, take a look around, and see yourself as a part of this huge unruly mass of people all dancing to the primal bass beats (Nicole appropriately called the experience “getting bassfucked”!) and sounds of gunfire as they cranked it up again with “Paper Planes.” The difference is, Nicole says, at the favela parties in Rio de Janeiro, the gunfire would be real.

Finally, we rounded out Saturday night at the Portishead show. The band is a trip-hop trio from Bristol, England, consisting of DJ/percussionist Geoff Barrow, guitarist Adrian Utley, and lead singer Beth Gibbons, who still croons her signature powerful, haunting high notes after nearly twenty years as the group’s front woman. The trio hadn’t put out any new songs together in nearly a decade as they each worked on their respective solo material, and Coachella was their first live performance in nearly as much time, on the U.S. tour to coincide with their brand new album release Third. Standing at the center of what felt like the world’s largest surround-sound system, Portishead’s classics like “Sour Times” and “Mysterons,” as well as their new songs like “Machine Gun” and “Silence” struck a powerful chord in the audience. As the last song hit its crescendo, I lay there in silent wonder—in a musical trance—enjoying what I can only call the afterglow of a night of music more perfect than I can describe, a musical experience akin to great sex.

You’d think Saturday night would be a hard act to follow, but Roger Waters was miles away from any sort of let down on the main stage Sunday night. The Pink Floyd bassist and songwriter played a full set that night that featured many of his solo works and several hits from Pink Floyd favorites like The Wall and Wish You Were Here. I hear they also released a gigantic flying pig covered in political graffiti, that somehow managed to disappear! After about an hour, Waters and his band disappeared for a set change and returned twenty minutes later to play Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. Yes, that’s right, they re-created Pink Floyd’s entire 43-minute classic rock trip under the stars in the middle of the Indio desert. And they did it quite well, utilizing the gigantic Coachella main stage surround sound to its full functionality with all the album’s original voice-overs and sound effects coming from all directions. The entire set was also accompanied by some pretty cool visuals captured by one audience member over at Vicarious Music. All-in-all it was a great initiation into Pink Floyd’s music for me, and for other listeners outside of that generation I’m sure. Waters played for nearly three hours, as the audience just couldn’t get enough on the last night of this festival, doing an encore with “Comfortably Numb.”

Nicole and I stayed for the very last act of the festival, the French DJ duo Justice, who waited respectfully for Waters to finish out his set before they started mixing their signature thumping techno/dance music at about 12:30 AM. These guys really have energy; you can tell they really have fun with it, bobbing their heads to the beat while they mix up blaring electronica with a heavy rock flavor. The two perform on turntables and laptops alongside a giant lighted cross, and their up-tempo beats were the perfect thing to give the audience one last rush of energy before getting on the road back home.

This year’s event was beyond a doubt the richest musical experience I’ve had, and as long as Coachella continues to have great lineups each year, I plan to continue going regularly. It’s a fun road trip down to Southern California, and a beautiful natural setting for a great concert. If you’re interested in making the trip with me from Sacramento in 2009, get in touch.

All photos are copyright Dave Bullock/Wired.com

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Coachella Valley Music & Arts Fest 2008 Was Incredible!!

Patrick Farrace brought this to my attention the other day: the Bee finally ran a short article on typefaces and the new documentary “Helvetica,” asking many local Sacramentans about fonts and personalities, and they included a brief snippet from me. Nothing too fancy, but it was kind of neat to be included. Bee writer Sam McManis asked me a few questions several weeks ago while I was working locally at the Naked Coffee Lounge downtown. From the article:

Back to Sacramento Web developer Cody McKibben, pecking away on his laptop recently at the Naked Lounge cafe in midtown Sacramento – he says he’s conscious of how others will interpret a typeface. So he chooses carefully. It’s akin, he says, to a first impression in the online world.

“When I’m e-mailing someone I don’t know well, I’ll stick with serif types, but I’ll make sure to attach a signature in either Garamond or Georgia, which is much cleaner than Times New Roman,” McKibben says. “When I’m doing a blog, I’ll go with a sans serif like Verdana.

“I know some people choose fonts to make statements.”

[via: Sacramento Bee]

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Quoted in the Sacramento Bee

For the last two months, my good buddy Paul Dickey and I have organized a gathering for Second Saturday in Downtown Sacramento. Every month, on the second Saturday of the month, all the galleries open up, as do several other businesses (firms, record shops, restaurants), and exhibit art and live music for free. There are also a lot of stops that serve complimentary drinks and hors d’oeuvres.

Our group meets up at about 5pm at Jack’s Urban eats, and continues to grow as the night progresses. The art walk usually runs from about 6 – 9 pm, and there is activity all over downtown (check the official site for more info; there are also events in Fair Oaks and Natomas, but Downtown has the most).

This weekend was great. Even trotting around with a broken arm, there was a great turnout and we had a blast! At the end of the evening we mostly ended up at the Torch Club for this great live band Shane Dwight. Come join us next month!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Another Successful Second Saturday in Sacramento