jrmehle.com

I love Twitter. The simpleness and openness of Twitter makes it useful for so many things. With it you can mass message a bunch of friends, do lazy research (pose a question), rant, promote yourself, or you can just be social. Then it should come as no surprise that the marketing folks had to spoil the party.

Twice in the last few weeks, I’ve received @ tweets from corporate entities in response to complaints I’ve made about a particular service or product.

The first time, I was whining about how Parallels stalls every time I open it up. Just a few minutes later, there was a reply from someone at VMWare urging me to check out Fusion, a competing product. Now, I’ve actually tried Fusion and had the same issue, so I just the problem up to virtualization in general. What was interesting is, I went back and forth with the person for awhile. They were trying to troubleshoot my problem. I’m not so much against that kind of personal attention though clearly VMWare was attempting to woo me.

The second incident was last weekend after an overnight Comcast internet outage at my house. A few minutes after posting a rant about not being able to get online, I received an @ reply from comcastcares. He says they’ll have to try and change my opinion. Having dealt with your incompetent CSRs and technicians, Bittorrent throttling, and monopolistic practices, it’s going to take a lot more than a little tweet to change my mind. In TWiT 143, Leo mentions that he’s also seen Frank from Comcast making the same kind of hollow comments to others. Comcast, let’s see some action instead of unfulfilled promises.

I first have to apologize for the extreme amount of time between posts especially since I stopped right in the middle of a series. I’ve admitted to several people that most of the trip has run together. But I’ll give it a shot here…

It was the final day of our ski trip and to be honest, I was getting a little burned out. As great as the skiing was, my body was getting weary. Louie was extra juiced about all the fresh powder Apex had seen overnight and couldn’t wait to get out to the mountain.

As with the other resorts, you have to take mountain roads to get there. They’re narrow, winding, and usually made of dirt. With the snow overnight, the mountain road was making me nervous. The final nail in the coffin was when we came to a stuck vehicle being towed. We pulled over and chained up the tires right away. Luckily, we only had a few miles left to go and things went smooth the whole way.

It didn’t take Louie long to get suited up and ready to go. I was having some toe/foot/sock/boot issues, so I just told him I’d meet up with him later. I knew I wasn’t going to ski hard that last day anyway. It was as if my equipment had known all along because it was almost an hour before I did make it out on the mountain.

I did meet up with Louie temporarily, but I think we only managed a single run before getting split up again. I came up with a project for the afternoon. Yes, a project on vacation. I decided I’d take some POV videos of me skiing down.

At first I tried to come up with a way to mount the camera to my person. That basically meant positioning the camera so the lens stuck out of one of my pockets. As it turned out, all of the pockets on my jacket were too roomy to get that to work. I had a brief thought about putting it on my boots or skis, but quickly realized that would most likely result in a broken camera. Instead, I opted to hand hold the camera. As you can see, they didn’t turn out too bad. I could’ve probably spent some time editing and cleaned it up more than I did.

There is a funny story about my attempt to be an indie film producer though. Getting used to skiing and shooting isn’t as easy as it sounds. First of all, I didn’t have anywhere to put my poles. Louie was off skiing elsewhere and I didn’t want them to get stolen or taken by mistake. That meant holding them behind my back or off to the side so they weren’t in the shot.

You also have to concentrate on the where you’re pointing the camera. The first time all you could see was the snow and it kept moving around. The next it was a better shot, but there was still too much motion. After a couple more runs, however, I was familiar with the run and how to handle the camera. It was time to make my masterpiece.

I flew down the first half of the hill, made some wide sweeping turns with the camera low to the ground, and then all of a sudden I caught an edge. Clothing flew. The camera included. I snatched it out of the snow bank as soon as I could and wiped it off. The lens covers would not close for a very long time, but after some breathing on it, I was able to clear the lens off (hopefully without any srcatches). The best part was, the camera was running the whole time. Here’s a clip.