So I think youtube has been getting a bad rap lately. A lot of press is surfacing that this free for all of content is a breading ground for adolescent cyber-crimes. They’re have been some high profile teen fight vids lately that truly are a shame. But that’s the glass half empty side of things, here are a few of kids taking things up a notch.
This first one is an 11 year old BMX kid on a 16 inch pulling everything in the book! We’ll be seeing more of him I am sure.
Next up is the 10 year old sand wheelie. This kid has got some serious throttle control.
Holy crap. This is going to be one the best indy sites we’ll see in 2008. Built by Justin Nouellette it has a simple interface for making your own sharabale mix-tapes for the web. You get your own sub-domain and everything, and it streams nicely through an AJAX interface which means it will work on an iPhone (but it only sort of works). Click on the links below to rock my own personal mix; it’s got it all!
I am pretty bummed to report that yesterday I made a poor decision while riding out at Eaton and paid the price. I launched crooked off a jump into space, and came down no where near the landing. I fell from about 15 or 20 feet to hard ground and fractured my 2nd-5 th metacarpals of my left foot. The impact was pretty intense and I actually heard the bones breaking as I hit the ground. I got up limping and asking for a ride to the Hospital.
I am confined to crutches for the moment, but I am hoping this won’t require surgery and I can be active again in a couple months. Who knows, maybe I will have time to post here a bit more.
So my whole family is a bunch of nerds. I think we have five or six blogs between 3 of us, and the really nerdy ones in the family have workshops that are bigger than my condo.
Today, my mom sent me a recent post from her blog in tribute to her Uncle Charlie. I wanted to post my own tribute here, to Charlie and to my Mom for always picking up new technologies and using them to contribute positively. I honestly think 10 and 20 years from now I will be trolling through these posts with quite a fond recollection of these wild west days of user driven content.
I decided to upgrade my system last week, and outfitted my home office with a nice mac pro, complete with dual 20″ displays. I spend much of my waking life at the computer so I figured it was worth it to splurge and I made the conscious decision to pay that extra cash to get more than enough hardware, and the option of being on Leopard instead of Vista. I am fully impressed and satisfied with the systems performance and interface BUT when I set things up I realized the build was mis-configured!
The system was not installed with the optical DVD drive I had purchased! I am shocked. I could have bought a car for the money I paid! I figured the three business days it took them to ship the system was a QA cycle. What happened?
Today I got on the phone with a customer service rep to address the situation. No biggie, I figured, I’ll just get them to send me the part and I can either install it myself or bring it over to the Apple Store. I have heard from Apple service folks before that the online store and the physical store location are two different entities, but certainly they can communicate on a service issue like this. NOT THE CASE! “We can’t really do that, they are totally separate.” was all the rep could offer me.
“OK Fine”, I said. “Send me the part.”
“Well, I am going to have to process this as a return because we don’t sell that part online.” the rep stammered.
“What? I don’t get that. There is obviously a part missing, get your hands on it and ship it to me.” I was getting a bit heated at this point.
“Well,” he explained, “the part comes from our shipping center, and I don’t have the ability to get the one you need.”
“So really this is a communication problem with your warehousing and fulfillment infrastructure? ” I proposed for him.
Silence.
This didn’t seem to be going anywhere for either of us at this point so the rep changed his strategy and asked if I wanted some free speakers. I conceded and settled for a copy of Office 2008 instead and am going to have to part with my brand new precious system for a few days to get it reconfigured. As a customer I was very dissatisfied my customer service experience, and as a share holder I am worried about the communication and quality assurance problems I uncovered. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect more and certainly hope someone at Apple is reading this post; my contact info is on the About this Site page if you care to take this off-line.
Good times were had this Saturday with a few friends in some really creamy snow. It wasn’t the deepest day I have skied but the snow was hero, and some of the bonier lines are now filled in. Here are a few shots from Rush and the Diving Board. Thanks to Eric for the photos.
So it’s time to make some room in the stable. I am currently selling 3 bikes and working on getting a 4th ready to sell. Check out the for sale links on the left if your looking for some new wheels.
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