90 Year-Old Grandfather Tells Story of Turning In Lost Wallet Containing $12,500 from Shawn Chittle on Vimeo.

My Grandfather, Robert K. Chittle, WWII veteran, of Flint, Mich, found a wallet in a parking lot in 1947. It contained $1,300 – which in today’s dollars is $12,500. He managed to find the owner and return the wallet and the money.

The man who lost the wallet was a UAW member, and the union wrote my Grandfather a thank-you letter.

In this video he recalls the events from over 65 years ago.

I got pretty choked up when I read the letter and heard him tell the story first hand, which I think caught him off guard and thus he got a little choked up too.

It’s one of the greatest stories I’ve ever heard.

Well, you can’t, really, but you can fake it real good. Youtube works great, but I really like Vimeo which sadly is Flash-based and does not work on the iPhone. But you can instruct your Wordpress blog post to swap out the Vimeo video for an MP4 version of the video that does work on the iPhone.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Encode your video and output an MP4 iPhone compatible video. Upload it to where you host your files. I use Quicktime Pro and the default settings.

2. Download the EXEC-PHP Wordpress plugin. This will let your posts interpret PHP code without any hassle.

3. Add a new post. Click the HTML tab, and paste this code in, changing the values accordingly.

<?php
if(strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],’iPhone’) || strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],’iPod’)) {
print <<<END
<embed src=”http://pathtovideo.m4v” width=”XXX” height=”XXX” href=”http://pathtovideo.m4v”>
END;
}
else {
print <<<END
*****VIDEO EMBED CODE*****
END;
}
?>

Thanks to Eric W. and Michael Moore for posting my Flint/Haiti article on the front page of MichaelMoore.com today. I’m humbled and honored…

There is a working class, blue-collar bar I visit often in Flint called Jesters. To outsiders it might appear as a rough and tumble place, with an unsual mix of bikers, pool sharks, white folks, single moms, gangsters, old folks, black folks, autoworkers, young folks, latin folks, and everything in between. A true melting pot, defying its label as an economically segregated city. The people watching in here doesn’t get any better.

Located just inside the city limits of Burton – which is even poorer then Flint – people come to forget. With 25% unemployment, the highest crime rates in the nation, and a fleeing population, you have to wonder how smiles can possibly happen. And yet they do. You see people struggling. People are out of work. Some are working. Many are making ends meet. Others live on the edge. A sudden, costly car repair, for example, can rapidly spin out of control into a black hole of financial despair of which there is no way out. I’ve seen it firsthand, countless times.

My heart goes out to the people of Flint who did nothing to bring this economic devastation onto themselves. And they have enough to worry about without the problems of the world creeping in. Even global tragedies pale in consideration to the view outside their own front window. I’m reminded of the kids at Southwestern High School in Fahrenheit 9/11 that when viewing bombed-out Bahgdad, comment “There are parts of Flint that look like that!”

And now I get word that Jesters, this past Sunday, held a fundraiser. Not for its own townspeople, who could use a hand, but to help the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. I’d wager a significant amount that few people in Flint have ever set eyes on a Haitian in their entire life. Now, consider the result:

They raised over four thousand dollars for Haiti.

This in a town where one can purchase 50 homes for $60k (that’s $1,200 per home), where a dinner for four costs $24, and car dealers sell used cars with an internal mechanism that disables the car when you get behind on a payment – where ever you are.

You get the idea of the significance of this event, this amount of money, and how out of proportion it is for Flint.

Four thousand dollars.

Four thousand dollars from what Business Week called “America’s fastest shrinking city.” Four thousand dollars from a town that is not doing better than anyone else. Raising $4,000 is like raising $4 million dollars from a small cocktail party in New York. It’s way more than it should be, and you wonder just where the money can possibly be coming from.

When I heard the figure, I immediately felt like The Grinch, after he boo-hoos the townsfolk for trying to do something worthwhile as he sits on his perch wondering what all the fuss is. Then he sees the joy the event brings, the selflessness, the spirit of giving especially at a time when there is so little to give. And his heart breaks free and grows from two sizes too small, to fifty times its size, bursting all constraints.

To George Zaravelis, the owner of Jesters, and his lovely wife Genie, I cannot fathom how you did it. And the world now has an example of how the people of Flint – beaten down and counted out, still have a few more rounds left.

I have never been more proud of my hometown.

My hometown of Flint, Michigan needs all the help it can get. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is holding a public comment period from now until February 28th, 2010 to talk about cleaning up the Buick City factory lot, which is heavily contaminated. They might have a new business that wants to go in there, but obviously, this new business cannot afford – nor be expected to clean up – a 100 year-old industrial wasteland.

From mlive.com

The site’s cleanup is crucial to creating a truck-to-rail intermodal hub on the site that could create 600 jobs. Officials with the Genesee Regional Chamber of Commerce have said that the developer doesn’t want to take on long-term liability of environmental contamination at the site.

Please visit the special EPA comment website and tell them that Flint needs all the help it can get, and both GM and the U.S. Government certainly owe a debt to the people of Flint who  have sacrificed far more than their fare share. It’ll take you all of 2 minutes, and it will mean a lot to the people of Flint, and to me… thank you!

I was a bit too young to understand or appreciate Jean-Michel Basquiat; he died when I was 16 years old and living in Flint, Michigan, about as far from the neo-expressionist art scene as you can get.

But shortly after I moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it was impossible to not hear stories about Basquiat, his work, and what a great scene the East Village had back in the early 80’s. The Julian Schnabel movie about him had just come out. It got my foot in the door.

After seeing some of his work up close and personal, and watching Downtown 81, I finally ”got it.” I found out he slept – homeless – in Tompkins Square Park about a block from where I live. He walked the same neighborhood streets I did, although in the early 80’s he had much more to worry about than I ever will. I felt I made some kind of connection to him, as cliched as that sounds. I retraced his steps from Downtown 81, and while most of it is unrecognizable, there are a few places that are exactly the same. There is something magical about walking out of your apartment and into the frame of a movie you just watched.

In August of 2008 I placed flowers at his apt doorstep (which is a few blocks from my apt) to mark the 20th anniversary of his death. I was the only one to do so, but it was early morning and I don’t know if anyone else did (I hope so). The more I read about him, the more I miss him. His work is just beyond belief. I can stare at his paintings for what seems like hours and never get bored. That’s art!

And now I’ve just read there is a new (long-overdue) documentary coming out shortly. Can’t wait to see it, and hope you will join me in celebrating one of the greatest artists in our modern era.

Long live Jean-Michel Basquiat!

I work for a large electronics retailer in Manhattan and have been wanting to get the company into more social media. We do thousands of customers a day in the store, and millions of unique visitors on the web.

Photographers naturally gravitate to the web and as mobile professionals, social media is a good fit for them, and us. It’s a tough sell, however as my employer is a very shy company… however I got them to agree to let me try some tricks to increase our numbers, and the results were nothing short of astonishing. For the last year or so we’ve only had about 1,700 “fans,” which is pretty bad. I was able to skyrocket our numbers twenty-fold in no time at all. As of this writing, there are over 20,000.

The time difference between the screenshots below is less than one week!

How to (cheaply) protect your touchscreen device against rain/snow from Shawn Chittle on Vimeo.
Rain/snow will ruin your touchscreen device in no time. How to protect it without spending a fortune on a bulky waterproof case? We share a great tip.