HD4PC

The transition back to LA was not easy, and I was really missing camp when I returned.  I felt more out of place than ever living in the big city, especially since I was returning to my new apartment right on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood.  I recognized very clearly that while I liked my job, I did not like living in Hollywood, or Southern California in general.  But that was the only place on the planet where the cutting edge type of work I was doing was taking place.  So I soon came to the conclusion that I would eventually need to have a different source of income, that didn't tie me geographically to living in Southern California.

To that end, I began creating my own website, which I could theoretically operate from anywhere I wanted.  Leveraging what I knew and was good at, I created a website about emerging video technology, and called it HD4PC.com.  I posted information about all of the new technology that I was using at work, at least anything that wasn't covered by our numerous non-disclosure agreements.  We had access to a lot of products and software that were still in development, and I knew more about them than most people.  So I was well positioned to accurately predict how they would be used together in the future, in wildly new ways from the current methods of video and film production at the time.

Over the next year or so I developed a small but influential list of followers on my site, who looked to me for insight on what was coming next, and how to best leverage it in actual use.  I didn't have a large number of readers, but most of them were key members of the video technology community, with their own blogs and research as well.  Most of them had much wider audiences than I did, but that was because their content was not nearly as technically complex and thorough as mine was.  But that was deliberate.  Eventually once I realize that I wasn't going to be able to make much money from the website, through advertising and such ($250 in 6 years), I had focused on being "the" expert on the topics I covered.  This resulted in people coming to me for solutions to complex workflow issues, which involved technology that most people had never even seen yet.  This allowed me to make far more money as a consultant for them, than I was ever going to make from the actual web site traffic.  But the site was the mechanism to attract those lucrative clients.  And the free information I provided on there is what allowed the value of my expertise to be recognized.

In that same period of time, shortly after returning from camp, I typed up a number of stories from that summer.  The director had been offering $5 for each story that staff members could provide, to be used as testimonials for marketing and fundraising purposes.  I never did attempt to turn them in for that, but I am assuming that my 30-page, single-spaced log of my most intense week of camp, was not what he originally had in mind when he made that offer anyway.  I recognize now that writing the stories down was just a way to process what had happened.  They remained relatively untouched in storage until last year, when I used them as the basis for a series of blog posts on here.