Ethan Parker

Here’s another crappy article from LinkedIn. I get sucked into these at work sometimes because they have interesting headlines. This one’s making over-generalizations about an entire generation of people. It’s like reading a horoscope – so broad that it feels like it applies to you yet utterly bereft of an practical use. Yay!

Here’s my favorite part; it’s on entrepreneurship:

That’s right:

“Entrepreneurs are mostly lonely, anxious people, living on the edge of what’s normal.”

Phew! Good news for me! I was worrying about my entrepreneur status since taking a “job” at a company with more than 10 people in it.

Have a look at Parker Planner right now – HERE

If owning a steel mill is a solid, and owning a consulting firm is a liquid, then owning an app is a gas. It’s the most fickle market I’m aware of. One moment you’re a celebrity, everyone loves you, and you step on $10,000 bills every time you go outside. The next moment your app has been rejected by Apple and you’re suckin’ on a dry bottle of malt liquor cursing all those who passed you in app rankings.

Today is a great day, tomorrow holds a future no man or beast can predict.

Parker Planner is currently (7:01 AM Mountain Time, April 30, 2013 AD) ranked higher than it ever has been and I now raise from my bedroom office chair to do a merry jig. Observe:

No filter, no focus, just pure app joy.

I’ll enjoy this moment while it lasts.

Ethan

I put my truck up for sale recently and I have a VERY InterEstED Buyerzz:

I shouldn’t be so mean, though, this is obviously his/her first time buying stuffs online.

So that was my conversation with a scammer today. Pretty fun stuff.

My former business partner in Parker Planners loved this kind of thing. He would go along with it and find the person whose money was being taken and offer a little help. Those that provide the money in these deals are real people thinking they’re buying something else. One time Benjie was getting money for a car that was originally intended for a pure-bread puppy. The people were always shocked to find out it was a scam and happy to not lose thousands of money.

Love,

Ethan

I just watched the movie “Chasing Mavericks” and it was awesome. Jay Moriarty starts off as a kid who likes to time the waves. He notices when waves take longer to crash against the rocks and learns about when it’s high and low tide time. I just learned on Wikipedia that some shores experience 2 high a low tides per day while others experience only 1. The paths I have chosen in life make me think I’m more like the first shore. Lots of ups and downs. I like to keep it interesting.

I’ll give you a quick summary of how things have gone since I abruptly decided to pick up my life and again move to another state. Tuesday when I decided to see if I could fit all my belongings into my truck just for fun, I got a call 3 hours out of San Francisco on my way to Utah. It was Domo wanting to bring me in for an interview. I had applied for positions in SF and AF (American Fork, their headquarters in Utah) and asked them where the interview would be. “Oh it’s in our headquarters, see you then!”

That was a relief. Haha. I was like “ok, see you then!” – little did she know I was on the road to Utah and would barely move myself across the western United States in time for the meeting.

I’m really glad Domo interviewed me and then offered me a job. I accepted and I’m going to be working as an Account Development Hunter, or ADH. I kind of like the title “hunter” in my job description. Each day I’ll grab my spear and chase down game. Rock.

I’d rather work for Domo over any company in Utah. The founder sold his last company, Omniture, to Adobe for almost $2billion. He’s a great leader and knows how to get it done. He also knows how to acquire and keep talent. The company benefits are insane. Foodses every day, computer, phone, tablet paid for, etc. Awesome. I’m really excited to be a part of something and join a team.

I found an apartment in Provo today. I was expecting a good deal and got a great one! I ended up getting the master bedroom of the condo for the same price as a regular room! It has enough space for a full drum kit and an assigned, covered parking spot! Plus the great thing is rent is about 1/4 what I was paying in California

Tonight I did open mic night at Velour, it was fun! I love performing for people. I did ok and got some hearty applesauce (applause and applesauce are so similar) from the people. I sang “Dig” by Incubus and “My Hero” by Foo Fighters.

This is what it looks like when there’s no people and open mic night is about to start. This is the place where Imagine Dragons and Neon Trees got their start.

And yes this is the song that inspired this blog post’s title:

Ha. That Bob Dylan song makes me think of my friend Dustin Glass who taught me how to play guitar when I was 13. This is one of the first songs I learned.

I just watched Dave Grohl’s new film, Sound City. It’s about a recording studio that was around from the late 70′s through the 90′s. Many, many, many famous albums were recorded there from Neal Young to Tom Petty to Metallica, Nirvana and my personal TOP THREE: Chili, Foo, and even Rage. Amazing. The movie really made me want to make music.

Today I’m taking a trip to Utah. I’ll be there for a while, who knows how long, but I’m excited! I’ve been living the Bay Area since last July and it’s full of freakin magic. I challenge any doubters to drive south on the Golden Gate Bridge on a clear day. You’ll believe.

I spent the morning packing all my stuff into my truck and I was about to head out but I thought I owed those who care about me a little goodbye – this blog post. Thanks to everyone I met in the San Francisco Singles Ward. You’re beautiful people and I’ll miss you. Stanford 2nd ward – thanks for welcoming me and being there for me! My roomates rule, Ryan and Barrett I’ll miss y’all too. And Ladies, my roomates Ryan and Barrett are freaking CATCHES. You’re missing out BIG by not coming over to our house EVERY DAY and begging them to marry you. Fo’ realz. We even have a hot tub! Sheeesh!!!

My plan is to go back to school and become a programmer! There are lots of jobs for non-programmers in the Bay Area and I’m grateful to have done some of them during my time here but my heart is in building and creating stuff. I must rebuild. (reference to Tenacious D)

Bye everyone, bye Bay, bye Ocean, bye Metcalf Motorcycle park. Love you!

Ethan

Hey y’all. I haven’t been writing as often these days. I do write right now though.

Today I went to a baptism of a new member in our ward. It was good stuff. Baptisms are always special because someone is making a big change in their life.

Then I watched Dave Grohl’s keynote address at SXSW, or South by Southwest for those who have never heard of it. It’s a big get-together for cool people in Austin Texas. There’s meaningless business jargon, hopeful startups going nowhere, and some really great music. There’s also a few other things of substance, I can’t dis on the whole gig. Dave’s speech was way cool and pretty academic-sounding for a high school dropout.

I was super inspired by Dave’s talk. It was mostly about his life and path to become a rock star. I already knew bits of his story but to hear it from him in both speech and musically was so fun. When he was 12 he would record some guitar music on one tape and play that while he recorded drums onto another tape. He made a simple version of a recording studio as a kid. Nice! Reminds me of how Tony Hseih had a profitable mail-order business pasting images on buttons as a kid. He started Zappos, a mail order shoe company he sold to Amazon for $1B.

So this inspired me to take a drive to the beach and play some guitar. Fun times.

I work for Mokriya and today is a big day. We released Mokriya Craigslist, a whole new world of buying cars and looking for your next apartment, or human trafficking deal! It’s a well-known fact that Craigslist’s design is poo. Or “not visually appealing” and really hasn’t had a redesign in like 10 years. Well we changed all that!

We got some pretty sweet media coverage:

Wall Street Journal
Mashable
Gigaom
Yahoo News
BetaKit
Pando Daily
Rajesh’s Blog

Look at this moving picture of a lady using the app:

Wasn’t that like wow! It was wow. Verrrrrrrrry. Now look at these pictures:

Aren’t those pictures very unlike anything you’ve seen associated with the List belonging to Craig? Yes. Yeshhhh.

Now, my good person, download, download like there’s no tomorrow and use this app until you’ve bought everything and dated everyone in your city!!!

AppStore link – HERE

Google Play link – HERE

Love,

Ethan

Here it is! The thing you’ve been waiting for! The thing you’ve always wanted! This thing! –

LINK TO APP IN APP STORE

Now that you have this thing you can have all the other things!

Congratulations!

Now for some sense-making verbiage. I made an iPhone app called Fortunely and it’s coming out next Wednesday, January 23. You tap on the screen and it gives you a fortune. The phone vibrates and also plays a sound when you tap or shake the phone to get your fortune. Fun! It’s $.99 for a limited time (because the world will end eventually, right?).

Love,

Ethan

The new Ford Fusion is a joke! They copied Aston Martin, that is all.

Lame, Ford, lame. You dumb. But still send me tester cars and I write about them. One day I will have that job.

This post is an adapted article I wrote for my church group’s monthly newsletter.

- – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

The nation’s coolest cities are chock-full of startups. They’re also (relatively) chock-full of Mormons. Naturally there’s going to be some crossover. SF, DC, NY, etc have many aspiring entrepreneurs and while they may possess an added degree of attractiveness to the opposite sex, there are also a few important things to keep in mind before going in 50/50 on a new venture if ya get ma drift.

This is not a comprehensive treatment, but rather a few pointers along with some common misconceptions.

#1 Personal Misconception: They’d rather make a million bucks than have a family. Nah. Not so much. They’d sell or abandon their crazy business stuff and join the masses in 9-5dom to feed the childrens any day of the week. They’d still marry your face.

#1 Benefit: These people are hell-bound and determined to achieve financial+schedule freedom to spend more time with loved ones.

#1 Drawback: Entrepreneurs are weird. They’re crazy passionate about pretty much anything they do and are therefore a little (LOT) eccentric. If you’re all about Mr./Ms. stable and predictable, you better look elsewhere. Risk tolerance, risk adverse, blah blah.

#1 Career Misconception: If the biz fails you’re hosed in the mainstream job market. Nope. Not at all! Many employers value those who have given it a good old-fashioned try but failed to make it happen with their own gig. Plus these days 90% of startups are tech related and so are the jobs! Additionally, if Romeo or Juliet is a programmer you will eat milk and drink honey all your days.

#1 Thing You Got Right: Entrepreneurship is sexy. It can seriously be so so fun. What do you love doing? What if you could potentially make a living at it? Now what if you could be very very wealthy from that? Exactly. Also startups attract some of the most multi-talented and interesting people you’ll meet.

#1 Thing You Were Thinking After That Last One: Entrepreneurship is freaking hard. Higher highs do indeed mean lower lows. If you’re gonna date this person expect to offer a little more support than normal even if everything seems fine. Yes, and be supportive *especially if things aren’t going well.

That’s six number one’s in a row. For an explanation on this see number one number three.

Finally, best of luck with your new ‘preneuring buddy. Hope y’all have a successful relationship even if it doesn’t lead to jointly filing a 1040 in 2014.

# # #

Haha. I googled “Mormon Entrepreneur” to find a pic or something interesting for this post and my face was one of the first results; I wasn’t even logged into gmail. lulz. Yeah right; so many others are 10,000,000x more successful than me. Here’s a very short list:

Mitt Romney, Bain
David Neelman, Jet Blue
J. Willard Marriott, Marriott International
Larry Miller, Larry Miller Group
Jon Huntsman, Huntsman Corporation
Josh James & John Pestana, Omniture
Scott Smith, Qualtrics
Mick+Brad Hagen, Sid Krommenhoek, Zinch
Garrett Gee, Kirk Ouimet, Ben Turley, Scan

And oh so many more.

ps The blank space in the image was a certain calendar-maker from a while back, sheesh. Oh internet, you’re never asleep on the job.

Hey all! You know I love making the occasional goofy video. This time I borrowed a camera and tripod to help out a friend, Boxenjim. He made a really cool app for iPad that allows you to listen to music through what looks like an old Eight Track player!

Check it out!! Here’s a link – https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/eight-track-stereo/id513506345?ls=1&mt=8

Eight Track Stereo for iPad. Woot.

Read this and see if it applies to you:

Curious. You love nuance and idiosyncrasy. You note the small pieces that make up things, rather than searching for the “essence” of the whole – mannerisms, motives, motifs are your specialty.

A well-honed insight into people. You are highly self-reflective and, consequently, self-critical. You usually dig about six levels deeper than normal as you evaluate why you really feel or think a certain way. You have meta-analytical thoughts about your thoughts, and begin to consider the immovable nature of your thought processes as a whole. The alarming level of self-honesty attunes you not only to yourself, but also (deeply) to others.

Difficult to enjoy things. You constantly evaluate the irony of the situation you are in. It’s hard to purely enjoy something, you feel like a sell-out if you do. You want to enjoy things more, but can’t help feeling this sense of self-betrayal if you give in completely.

Profound conversational agility. You feel as though you almost have an unfair advantage over others. You marvel at the difficulty that others have stringing together a few simple thoughts in conversation. You even feel sorry for some people as they make small talk with you, helping them along as they struggle to make a point or a lukewarm joke. You rarely meet a person with whom you can’t seamlessly engage, though you often wonder if you’re being manipulative, and you’re often bored. You consider that you should put this skill to better use, though you haven’t figured that one out yet.

Alienation/Isolation. Your mind is naturally wired for pattern-recognition. The recursive nature of social interactions, the mechanization of life choices, the strangeness of formality – all of it is very frustrating and confusing. Because people are averse to confrontation, you are often left with no choice but to point out the absurdity of these social tropes through humor. You just hope people don’t realize that you’ve told them to go to hell until after they’ve gone home.

Not so good at relationships. Partners often feel betrayed that the whole world gets to enjoy the gregarious and charismatic “you,” and they are stuck with the self-doubting neurotic version. To compound the problem, you are extremely sensitive – over-sensitive at times – and you often try to play two to three steps ahead of your partner, which leads to a lot of emotional misfiring.

Profound divergent thinking capabilities. You are hypercritical of everything, and constantly evaluating the reality around you from multiple angles. Consider a blanket and a brick. How many ways could you use these two items to create something funny? A really funny person could probably think of about 20 different ways in a minute.

Hurt. You control crowds with ease, people are in awe of how fast you string together different ideas and relate conversations back to their roots five stages later. You have a group of people in stitches for an hour. And then, just like that, you take a play off and they couldn’t care less. You didn’t earn anything. You were only useful as long as you could do that “thing,” and then it was over.

Gifted. You have this ability, this talent, this gift. You don’t know why your brain works the way it does, but at the end of the day, you get to make people happy by simply uttering words and gesturing. You bring joy to people’s lives, perhaps even at the cost of yourself. A lot of times, the cost is well worth it. Life is hard, sometimes it’s nice to just laugh.

Does this accurately describe you? Congratulations! You are, according to this Quora answer with 346 upvotes, incredibly funny. I edited the content so as to not give it away. I wouldn’t consider myself incredibly funny but I identified with a lot that was said here.

I landed at job at Silicon Valley’s hottest mobile app development company! I’m really excited about it and I start on Monday!

Here’s a text conversation I had with my dad recently while I was interviewing at different jobs and stuff:

My dad and I are really similar, it’s fun to talk to him. Especially now that he started texting!

I feel very fortunate to be able to have interest from a few different companies and especially fortunate to be working with some very talented and fun people. The company is called Mokriya. Super pumped!

Along with the new job is a new house. I’ll be moving to Redwood city so I can be closer to my office in Cupertino.

July 28 I drove from Phoenix to SF. I got here late at night, picked up a key from Mick, and headed over to my new home which also happens to be Undrip’s office space. I told Mick that I would work for free for a short time because I really wanted to move out to a big city, they needed some help, and I had just sold the Parker Planner and RM Planner product lines from my business.

It’s been a great experience. The guys at Undrip are really cool and the city is a riot. So much culture, so many interesting people crammed into one place. Here are some fun things I’ve done since I’ve been here:

Go to Super Duper burger place in Castro district:

Go camping in the Santa Cruz mountains on some LDS Church-owned property with my new ward down by Stanford:

Living in this AWESOME house:

Going to a Giants game! Fog rolling into the stadium was super cool.

I visited Google and saw this turbine-engined bike! Jay Leno has one. It’s got an engine out of a helicopter.

Some other fun things are- testing driving BMWs at the dealer next door to the Hacker House, eating food from ‘The Window’ across the street – they rotate awesome restaurants at lunch time – and hanging out with the Undrip guys late at night and laughing our guts out at memes. My Next post will be about phase two of this move to CA.

Hey there! It’s been too long I tells ya. So I’ve been getting a TON of comment spam on this blog so I took strong measures and installed a nifty thing to keep spammers out while still making it possible to add a comment. And you don’t even have to squint at one of those stupid captcha things!

It looks like this:

It’s easy enough. Enter your name, email, and comment, then press the green ‘start’ button. You’ll have to perform some very simple task with your mouse then you press the really wide and narrow button called “Submit Comment **CLICK HERE AFTER YOU PLAY THE SILLY GAME**”

One thing though – the game will tell you to “click below” when really the submit button is above. I dunno how to fix it.

Happy commenting!

Ethan

I was looking through old blog posts and found the one where I posted a video of Will.i.iam and the muppets doing a music video. I watched it again and then saw this one from Bruno Mars.

Haha. Couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time. Programming is flerpin hard!

If I don’t get any farther with programming than this, I still may die a happy man. Every heard of Zork? No. No, you haven’t. Don’t even pretend you have. That is, unless you are a man. And sometimes, when you are a man, you wear strechy pants, it’s for fun.

Zork; freaking Zork is a weird game from 1980 that relies solely on typed commands from you. There’s an element of mystery because you don’t even know what the game can do. You just have to go off of what little information it gives you and be creative. It’s pretty funny, really. I guess the people who first wrote it were MIT folks, hence the nerd humor. I mean, native genius required to construct a game like this.

So I’ve just begun the game, but look where I am!!

Play it! It’s actually pretty fun, haha.

But yes a wise man once told me the command-line stuff is where a boy becomes a man. brb, gonna go kill a lion with a sharp stick . . .

Oh yeah, how does this relate to programming? There is an online tutorial for a language called Python that gives you the tools to write a simple program like this game. The tutorial tells you to look up Zork and play it to learn how things like this work.

This is a pretty crazy evidence of a phenomenon. If hip hop isn’t main stream now I don’t know what is.

I like how his eyes get all big when he says “mind” and there’s a killer flute solo at 2:11.

HERE it is, folks!! The Parker Planner for iPhone!

It’s been many many months in the making and the day has arrived! I hope you like it and find the app useful. It’s my goal to save you a few minutes of valuable time each day as you switch between making appointments, updating your todo list, and writing down world-changing ideas.

Enjoy, everyone!

Ethan