igorkharitonenkov.com

conversing for hours
generation Atari
won’t forgive or say sorry
not mean, just not worried
slow living, no hurry

one focus – living for today
in time, patience is repaid
giving it your best, always
cop a trophy when it comes your way

-IK

Big ups to CatEyez for editing this video.

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No Impact Man came out in 2009.  It’s a fascinating, multifaceted story.  Simply put, a man goes on a mission to see what it’s like to live a whole year without any negative impact on the environment.  In the middle of New York City, Colin Beavan experiments with a zero carbon footprint lifestyle, stringing along his wife and young daughter.  They give up driving, eating out, toilet paper, Pampers, coffee, plastic anything, etc.  As a family, they struggle and they fight, but they are ultimately brought closer together.  I finally got to watch No Impact Man last night (it streams on Netflix, fyi).

The root of No Impact Man is the journey of a family that tries to live a zero-impact lifestyle in our consumer world.  They give up air travel and driving, they compost and practice zero waste, they only eat local food grown within 250 miles, and they live without electricity for six months (minus one solar panel that power’s Beavan’s laptop).  But the conflicts behind No Impact Man run much deeper then a green lifestyle, and they provide for some serious eco-entertainment.  First off, Beavan questions the nature of his own experiment, and whether his extreme measures are something the public can actually learn from.  Is he going too far to be considered a legitimate resource?  The family deals with celebrity, and consequently, hate.  The project makes national news quickly, and before you know it, even environmentalists attack Beavan for being irrational and giving them a bad name, and the family is only left to wonder, “Why all the hate?”  And underneath it all, we see a conflict unfold in the Beavan family.  Can Beavan’s wife, Michelle, a self-proclaimed lover of take-out food, new styles, and all things consumption, survive a year without clothes shopping or her favorite latte from Starbucks?  Ultimately, the storyline of No Impact Man builds on itself, and the lessons the Beavan family learn from this experiment develop and unfold throughout their remarkable year.  No Impact Man is a documentary that will undoubtedly make an environmental impact on you and leave you appreciating the Beavan family for their struggles and successes.

For more on No Impact Man, visit Beavan’s blog here.

It’s Spring again and I’ve finally had a chance to take my Columbia Ravenous trail runners outside.  I’ve worn these shoes on road and light trail runs and on a treadmill in the winter.  I definitely recommend these running shoes and give them an overall rating of 4.5/5 – see my review below:

Look:  The design is okay.  It’s sleek and simple, but some of the graphics are off.  There are four color combos to choose from, which you can check out here.  3/5

Weight:  I was pleasantly surprised when I put these on my feet for the first time.  Cross trainers and trail running shoes can be a bit heavy and bulky, but the Ravenous, at 12 oz, have the weight of a typical running shoe.  5/5

Feel:  The padding on the heel is very soft, which I prefer.  It’s cushy and molds quickly to your feet, and provides excellent support when you’re running.  Plenty of room for the toes.  True to size.  Feels great on your first wear!  5/5

Breathability:  The shoe is mostly composed of mesh fabric, which provides excellent ventilation for your feet.  4/5

Overall:  I’m very impressed with Columbia’s Ravenous Trail Running Shoes.  I’ve worn them on roads, light trails and treadmills alike.  They are comfortable and light; they provide excellent heel support; and they keep your feet ventilated and dry.  I highly recommend these Trail Runners.  4.5/5

Two weeks ago I tuned into a webinar sponsored by The Integrated Media Association (iMA) and National Center for Media Engagement (NCME) called Tips, Tricks, and Tactics to Make the Most of Your Online Video.  The presenters were Kevin Dando, Director of Digital Marketing and Communications at PBS and Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder of SEO-PR, an Internet marketing consulting firm.  These guys are legit, so let’s get to the nuts and bolts of what I learned about bringing more traffic to your YouTube video.

Background on YouTube

More video content is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than all 3 major U.S. networks have created in 60 years.  Only 10% of these videos get more than 1500 views in the first month and only 3% get more than 25,000.  How can YOU get more hits?  The first step is to know how to take advantage of titles, descriptions, and tags to optimize your video for search engines.

Optimizing Titles, Descriptions, and Tags

Titles:  Titles have a 100 character limit.  Use the title as a headline and try to use as much of the character limit as possible.  Include a brand name or a website if you have one – it should go last.

Descriptions:  Descriptions have a 5000 character limit.  Of these 5000 characters, you should use up as many as you can.  Stay relevant but try to be as detailed as possible.  Textual elements found in the description of your video are the terms that search algorithms pick up. What that means is that the details in your text help your video get discovered when somebody searches for related content.  If you have a website, include this link as the first item in the text.  Also include links to your twitter or facebook fan page, myspace, email, etc.

[Tip:  How do you know what your audience is interested in?  Try typing in related phrases in a search bar and see what the auto-fill comes up and which videos pop up.]

Tags:  Be detailed.  List brands.  List related topics.  List geographic locations.

Annotations and Captions

Annotations:  The annotations feature can have a variety of promotional uses.  You can use annotations to plug your website or ask people to subscribe to your YouTube channel. You can also use annotations to draw a viewer closer by expanding on related resources, such as promoting a similar video, posting a relevant update, or simply throwing in a catchy comment.

Captions:  Not everyone on YouTube speaks English.  Think of how much you can expand your audience if you include some captions in, say, Spanish?

Other Tactics to Help Promote Your Videos

Branding: Always bug your video at the beginning.  Use a slide or graphic to let people know where your video is from and who made it.

Cross Promotion: It’s a two way street.  Use your videos to promote your website and social media but don’t forget to promote your videos through your social media outlets.  Ask people to comment, to re-tweet, and to ‘like’ your stuff.

Statistics: Check your YouTube insights to figure out how your viewers are responding to your videos.

The webinar ended with Greg Jarboe giving a dramatic example of the power of YouTube optimization.  Voyage.tv, a travel company, got 1,510 video views in its first 8 months on YouTube.  After optimizing their videos, hits skyrocketed to over 1,000,000 views in the next 14 months!  This could be you someday.  Good luck!

McKibben's book, "Eaarth"

Last week I got to see McKibben live in action in Boston, speaking about climate change (aka humanity’s biggest FAIL ).  It was a fantastic talk (nerd-alert side note: I got to meet him and he signed my copy of “Eaarth!”)  Anyway, to those who have already embraced the biggest problem affecting humanity today, the talk was a refreshing bit of truth.  To those who aren’t as familiar with the current climate situation, well, you probably left the event feeling just a bit queasy and unsettled.

I’d like to summarize his words by going back in time.  Since the last ice age, for the past 10,000 years, life on earth has existed within a constant and predictable climate.  Our plants, with many years of evolution and adaptation behind them, have become accustomed to growing at the same temperate throughout that time.  That’s 10,000 years, same temperature.  Over the past 100 years, temperatures across the world have gone up by 1 degree.  Now, off-hand that number may not seem a like a lot, but if you do the math and understand that evolution is a slow process, then 1 degree in a hundred years is quite a spike.  And it’s only a fraction of what’s to come, when scientists today predict that temperatures will rise 4 to 5 degrees by the end of the century.

[Rewind: How Climate Change is Fueling the Need to End Our Fossil Fuel Addiction]

As McKibben pointed out, we are already seeing the byproducts of a warming climate.  Last summer, for example, wildfires raged for two weeks across the gargantuan landscape of Russia.  Moscow, which had never seen a 100 degree day, got eight consecutive 100 degree days.  It was the hottest recorded summer in Russian history.  The disaster cost numerous lives and over $15 billion in damages.  But how does a warming climate and fires in far away Russia affect me, you may ask?  The answer lies in the grocery store.  It just so happens that Russia is the 3rd largest wheat producer in the world.  After the fires broke out, President Medvedev ordered wheat exports to be stopped.  Shipments were canceled and trains were ordered to turn back around.  Within a week, wheat prices across the world went up by 70% and have held steady since.   There are countless examples of this.  All over the world, rising temperatures and unpredictable weather patterns are disrupting crop yields.  Food prices are nearing all time highs and within a few decades we’ll be feeding an extra couple of billion mouths.

To quote McKibben, the world we are living in today is not the world we were living in 40 years ago.  Take the story of McKibben’s visit to Bangladesh, for example.  In 2000, Bangladesh had its’ first outbreak of Dengue Fever, a viral disease carried by mosquitoes that prefer hotter climates.  In the past decade, incidents of Dengue Fever in Bangladesh have increased by a dramatic 200%.  McKibben caught it while he was there and was taken to a local hospital.  His illness he got over quickly, but what he couldn’t forget was the scene of desperation at the hospital.  It was so crowded inside the building  that you could barely move.  Beds were stacked like dominoes, one right next to another, spewing out into the hallway.  Many patients were dying.  And as he looked outside his window and saw the rickshaws and bicycles that crowded the streets in a country where most people don’t have access to the electric grid, he realized the terrible unfairness of climate change.  Because it’s not the Bangladeshis that are causing it.  It is us, and our dependence of fossil fuels and reckless spewing of carbon over the past 100+ years that is sending viral mosquitoes to explore new, uncharted regions.  And the Bangladeshis are paying for it.

And that’s the world we live in today.  Forget the notion that what we do today will only affect our grandchildren.  We are those grandchildren.  It is already affecting us and it may be too late.  By raising the temperature by a whole degree, we’ve opened the flood gates to a massive snowball effect of natural carbon release that is beyond our control.  Just one alarming example of this: scientists have recently discovered that permafrost in Alaska and Siberia is starting to melt for the first time since the last Ice Age.  Melting permafrost releases methane, a heat trapping gas like Carbon Dioxide, only much more potent.  According to McKibben, melting permafrost will release enough methane this century to equal 270 years of CO2 emissions at current levels.  And so, climate change is possibly beyond our control at this point.

McKibben ended his talk on a more positive note.  The only way we can hope to turn things around is by fighting the fossil fuel industry.  It’s tough, when oil companies like Exxon are earning more money than anyone has ever made in history.  But it can be done.  He encouraged us to go out and become active citizens.  As part of a 350.org campaign, he urged us to contact our local businesses and demand they quit the Chamber of Commerce.  A shocking 94% of the Chamber’s campaign contributions in the 2010 elections were doled out to climate deniers.  If we are serious about turning things around, we will have to unite against a rigid status quo and demand change.  Most importantly, we have to take our blinders off and start confronting the reality: we have plundered and pillaged to a point where we will never again live on the same planet that our ancestors called home for so many years.

Stay tuned for my review of “Eaarth.”

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“Desireless” – By Igor Kharitonenkov

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It was only last week that I perhaps had one of my biggest mental breakthroughs throughout this process.  I was having a conversation with a friend and he shared a simple tip with me.  It turned out to be some of the best advice I had yet received; it tied everything that I had learned over the course of the past few months together.  It also inspired me to write this song, “Desireless.”  He told me that in any situation in life, you need to avoid living with expectations.

[Rewind: "It's Gonna Be Okay" - The Beginning of the Journey of Making Positive Personal Changes]

His small but significant piece of advice triggered flashbacks of broad Buddhist principles I had learned a few years back.  It reminded me about the concepts of desire and attachment, and that the key to happiness and self-fulfillment is letting go of our ‘wants.’  In life we are never guaranteed that we will get what we desire, whatever that may be, and we are only setting ourselves up for disappointment if we live for that desire.  Thus, we shouldn’t get caught up worrying about who or what we can’t control.  We shouldn’t have expectations.  We should try only to find satisfaction in what we can control, which is ourselves.  Everything else will follow in accordance and if we don’t expect anything, we won’t be hurt.  “Desireless” is a song dealing with these concepts.  It also sounds great on an Ipod.  Just sayin’.

"Olympic Dreams" Loot. See Below for Description.

After officially submitting the video, we sent it out to friends and family, spread the word through Facebook, and posted it here on IGORoamandreport.   It got a lot of views and a lot of love – thanks everyone!  The video was also sent along to Columbia Sportswear through one of Greg’s connections.  The folks at Columbia headquarters got a peek and loved it!  They told us they were interested in sponsoring us and would get back to us soon.  For realz???  Although we had no idea what that meant, we were damn excited about this!

A month passed and before we heard back from Columbia, Backpacker disclosed the results of the contest.  It was a bittersweet moment.  We were so close.  The video came in runner up!  Sure, we may not have won, but it’s still quite an honor to have our work recognized by the editors of the most popular hiking magazine in the country.  As runner up, I would also receive a free pair of Keen hiking boots as well.

Eventually Columbia did respond back to us; this happened only a few weeks back, right before I left for a week-long vacation.  I was contacted by their marketing people and I couldn’t believe what I was told.  They stayed true to their word.  As part of the sponsorship, they were offering to send Greg and I tons of free gear to try out and review.  Unreal.  Total score!

[Rewind: Backpacking on a Budget - The Best Cheap Backpacking Gear]

A week later, when I got back to Boston, I was pleasantly surprised to find several boxes of loot already waiting for me.  I tore into my gifts like a kid on Christmas morning.  Inside I found a rain coat (in an awesome shade of blue), two athletic shirts, a pair of cross training shoes and a pair of low cut hiking boots.  I got my Keen hiking boots from Backpacker as well.  In total, our “Olympic Dreams” contest video ended up yielding Greg and I over $1000 retail value worth of gear, not to mention some valuable connections and potential work opportunities down the road.

Speaking of connections and work opportunities, we did end up pitching a separate trip idea to the editors of Backpacker Magazine afterward.  We figured we might as well while we’re still on their radar.  Haven’t heard back anything conclusive as of yet.  But more on that later.  It’s time to enjoy (and review, of course) this gear!

Here’s what I got:

Columbia Tull Creek Jacket (light blue), Columbia Enormity Crew Shirt (silver), Columbia Altimeter Shirt (dark blue), Columbia Ravenous Running Shoe (black and yellow), Columbia Master of Faster Low-Cut Trail Multi-Sport Shoe (black and red), Keen Low-Cut Red Rock Hiking Boot (Black Olive and Rust)

The video that made it all possible: