This was just awesome! Around 200 people for a private Rick Springfield concert. His new song “Venus in Overdrive” was really, really good. Both Cariann and I were rockin’ out!
I’m a bit surprised the explosions were not larger than they were, but we had only Minnesota legal fireworks in there which are pretty crappy. What you don’t see in this video is that about 10 minutes later as it was still burning some more fireworks ignited in the bag. Freaking awesome!
I used to fly a lot and as such I had around 100,000 NWA miles left in my account (I have used a bunch but I still had 100,000 left). When it was time to plan for ISDC 2009 I needed to do this on the cheap, so I went with my banked miles to get tickets on Northwest Airlines.
For those who don’t know me, I really, really dislike Northwest Airlines. The service is awful, the planes are old and crappy, the tickets are expensive and the overall experience is just plain bad. Alas in order to keep costs down this is a necessary evil, so NWA for us it is!
It is the night before our flights and we’re packing our luggage. Since we’ll be recording ISDC we have to bring a bunch of gear like cameras and whatnot. NWA has an *insane* $15.00 first bag fee, $25.00 second bag fee and a $125.00 third bag fee! So If I want to check 3 bags by myself it will cost me $165.00 in each direction just to get my luggage there! In our scenario we’re really only looking at $55 each way (or an additional $110 total) to get our bags there, but still! I thought you guys were merging with Delta so these wretched rules would go away! Nope.
My inexpensive trip, after all the stupid NWA fees and whatnot, will now cost me $315.00 plus 80,000 banked miles for the two of us to fly from MSP to MCO. Not that expensive, but I could have purchased SunCountry tickets for $200.00 round trip for the two of us, and that includes all of our baggage!
Well, I guess this is less of a story of how Northwest sucks and more a story of how I should have listened to my own advice. I knew they were bad going in, I just didn’t think that even with my miles it would end up costing me more. Here’s hoping that SunCountry can stay around in these hard economic times because I’m going to be flying them a lot more from now on. Oh, and they have really great service and airplanes too. Cheaper, better and nicer. What was I thinking buying NWA tickets???
Northwest Airlines: The worst way to start your trip.
I took this video while we trekked from the Crow River Coffee Studios back home (about a 40 minute drive). These are my general thoughts on how Spacevidcast 2.01 went. I can say that I was hoping it would go a lot smoother, but I’m not at all surprised at how rough it was. We will get it all fixed and worked out though.
Cariann gives us a tour of one of the largest indoor theme parks in the world (top 5 at least): Nickelodeon Universe at the Mall of America. It started as Camp Snoopy then became the Park at MOA before finally re-opening recently as Nickelodeon Universe. If you’re from the MSP area it is worth a look, or if you’re visiting the MOA you must stop in to see it.
In anticipation of a few projects I have going on I have moved to my own hosted platform. For anyone who wants to do Wordpress or Drupal hosting I thought it would be nice for me to go over what options I went with and why:
HTTP Host - MediaTemple.org. I like MediaTemple because they have incredible uptime, great prices and packages that will fit almost anyones needs. I used their Grid Service (GS) for a while but my needs are a bit more complex so I went for a Dedicated Virtual server (DV) which gets me a full Plesk control panel.
Registrar - GoDaddy.com. While they used to be the big evil registrar that would steal your domains right from under you they seem to have turned a new leaf. Great pricing, mobile access and a powerful administration tool make this my favorite registrar.
DNS - DNSMadeEasy.com. If you even think for a moment that using the DNS service that comes with your registrar is a good idea then you’re a fool. Registrars really suck at DNS hosting and so I use DNSMadeEasy.com which has a remarkable uptime and a ton of options for both forward and reverse DNS settings. The admin interface is a bit rough but when it comes down to DNS you’ll want a low price, 100% uptime and the most amount of flexibility. In the 8 years that I have used these guys I have seen zero issues. The best part is that if you go for an enterprise account (around $60.00 a year) you get free domain monitoring (which is usually a couple dollars per domain) plus DNS failover so if your main host goes down you can fail to a backup page. Really great stuff.
E-Mail - Google Apps for Business. Use IMAP and just about any client other than Outlook (the worst e-mail client ever built, ever, ever) and you’ll have an amazing e-mail experience. If you have a Macintosh just use Mail.app and call it a day. I have tried to sell this to users for years and they seem to fight me every step of the way. Once I break them down they move to IMAP and never, ever look back (unless of course they stay with Outlook). Google Apps is free, has good enough IMAP support and still allows for a webmin interface.
Platform - Wordpress.org. This is personal preference. I would say it is between Wordpress.org for blogs and Drupal.org for full platforms. Stay away from MovableType as they don’t scale well at all and the platform is simply a pain in the butt to work with. Oh yeah, and it’s based on freaking Perl. WTF?
Graphic design - Bluefox. The Bencredible site actually was not designed by Bluefox, and you can tell. Hard to read, bad fonts, just a really amateur design. All of my future sites will be designed by Bluefox as he has a really great feel for web 2.0 stuff and the latest trends in pretty.
In the end the above items allow for very rapid deployment of your blog or community based platform. Fast, easy and as close to 100% uptime as you’re going to get without load balancers or moving to the EC2 service. For now as we wait for DNS to fully make the switch (24 to 48 hours) you may bounce between the old and new site. If you see this post you’ll know you have come to the right server!
My brother caught this. Holy crap. I don’t think I could lift a fish that large let alone catch one!!!
Recently I started going to the gym to get in to better shape. 30 years of life and I don’t think I have ever actually worked out. My body has taken a beating and it is starting to affect my concentration, specifically around 3:00pm.
I’m not just going to the gym, I’m also changing a few of my bad habits. I have cut out soda, I’m eating better and I’m monitoring my stats using a web site called Gyminee.com.
Gyminee is an interesting creature in that it allows me to share my fitness and nutrition data with other people as well as post this data on a blog. Oh look, I have a blog!
The really nice thing is that there is an iPhone interface for Gyminee.com that allows me to quickly and easily input my workout or calorie information on the fly. Don’t have to remember what I ate when I get back to my computer and since it is designed for the iPhone it is so fast that I can input the data while waiting for the check or while getting on/off the treadmill.
Really cool site, I may even write about it on TE… Undecided yet.
You are currently browsing the archives for the Uncategorized category.
