Author: Jason Dunn

True Love is That Which Sacrifices

“Dick and Rick Hoyt – When Rick Hoyt was about to be born, the umbilical cord got wrapped around his neck, depriving his soon-to-be-born body of oxygen. Initially, doctors told the new parents their son was a vegetable, with no higher brain function. But the parents didn’t believe it; they saw signs of life and intelligence in their son. Sure enough, the doctor’s discovered they were wrong. Rick did have higher brain function. However, the lack of oxygen did deprive Rick of the ability to control his muscles, leaving him essentially a quadrapalegic.

The story of Team Hoyt began when Rick found out about a fundraiser for a friend. The fundraiser involved running, and wheelchair-bound Rick told his Dad he wanted to participate so he could help his friend. So father Dick Hoyt ran with his son, rolling him around the track, raising money for Rick’s friend. After the run, Rick told his Dad that running made him feel free for the first time. Inspired by his son’s statement, Dick took Rick running, swimming, bicycling, climbing–anything he wanted to do, Dick found a way to share it with his son and help him feel free. It’s an amazing story of a father and son’s courage, determination, and love.” – Source

Talk about humbling. I was grumpy today for various reasons, but watching this video and reading about this father/son team (thanks for the reminder Shane!) brought me back to reality – you can’t help but be inspired reading about this father/son duo. Amazing stuff.

Amazon AdSense Ads

How long has Amazon been running sponsored links? I was looking at The Wreckers live album, and saw this in the listing:

Clicking on the ‘What is this?” link gives the following text:

SPONSORED LINKS
Sponsored Links are advertisements that Amazon.ca provides for you. We receive Sponsored Links from Google’s AdWords service. When you click on a Sponsored Link, we get revenue. The selection of Sponsored Links that are displayed is based on keywords. For example, if you search for “Bruce Springsteen” or view pages about Bruce Springsteen, the Sponsored Links may point to sites that sell tickets to his concerts or provide information about him. Sponsored Links are always clearly labelled.

Generating additional revenue from Sponsored Links allows us to offer you lower prices–something we are dedicated to doing in every way we can.

Really Amazon? You’re going to drop your prices because you’re making money from Google? You’re not just going to roll the profits into your quarterly earnings to make your shareholders happy? Yeah. That’s what I thought.

[I really do like Amazon though, I order a lot of stuff from them – pretty much every new book, DVD, and CD I buy comes from Amazon.ca…and I’d buy a lot more from them if Amazon Canada offered MP3s, electronics, etc.]

Sloppy PR People Tick Me Off

The bulk of my “day job” consists of me filtering information from public relations/marketing people: they flog their products at me, I decide if it’s worth writing about, and if it is I share it with my community on one (or more) of my Web sites. What’s extremely frustrating is when I decide I’m going to write about something, and the PR person/company in question makes that hard for me. They typically do one of these bone-headed things:

  • They send me a press release, but they haven’t gotten around to publishing the press release online anywhere, so there’s nothing for me to link to. Links – you know, the foundation of the whole Internet? Yeah, they matter. I’m not going to spend 30 minutes re-writing your whole damn press release – I’m not a journalist, and I don’t have time for it. I hear excuse after excuse from PR people: “Oh, yeah, we haven’t gotten around to putting the press release online.”
  • The don’t send me an image of the product. The Web is a visual medium, and people like pictures. I can either email the PR person back and wait several hours (or days) for them to get back to me with the photo, or I can hunt around the company Web site looking for an image – and more often than not, I can’t find anything more than a little 100 x 100 pixel image. Even companies that are smart enough to have dedicated online press rooms will often not have them updated with the latest products. Why the hell have an online press room unless it has absolutely everything that an online writer is looking for?
  • They send me their press release as a 2 MB Word file with large embedded graphics. Don’t waste my time. They often think that embedding graphics in a Word document is the same thing as providing a blogger/journalist with the images they need. It’s not.

So the shot list for all you PR People out there: email me the press release in the email message, have the press release online for me to link to, include me a reasonable size Web-ready image (1000 x 1000 pixels maximum, JPEG format), and if I ask you a question, please try to get back to me as quick as you can…though hopefully if you give me the things I need, I won’t have any questions for you – other than “So when can I review this?”.

Oh, and lest anyone think I’m bashing PR people, I’m not – my bachelor’s degree is in PR. I know the game and how it’s supposed to be played, so it ticks me off when my “peers” don’t do what they’re supposed to.

I Saw Iron Man Tonight…

The. Best. Superhero. Movie. Ever.

(more later, gotta’ pack for Seattle, heading to Mobius 2008)

Win a $5000 Laptop: Here’s How…

If for some odd reason you only read this blog, and don’t follow my “real” sites, you might not have heard about this: on Saturday night I launched my $5000 HP laptop giveaway contest ($5500 once you factor in the bundled software). Go check out this post on Digital Home Thoughts for all the details.

Spammer Using This Domain…Again!

It’s an ugly way to start my week: opening up my personal email account and seeing 300+ messages…290 of which are spam bounce-backs from some jackass spammer using my personal domain as a reply-to address. And it just happened a couple of weeks ago! Hopefully it will be as short-lived this time as it was then. And I really hope all the alpha-geeks in the world would get together and solve the problem of email domain-hijacking once and for all (and spam for that matter).

Sites Back Up…Again

Ok, we’re back up and ready to rock – although things are a bit slow at the moment because we’re copying over large chunks of data. I’ll be posting the Dragon contest later today as planned – but it won’t be until the late afternoon/early evening. Watch Digital Home Thoughtsmebeli for it!

Sites Down…Again

Yeah, ye old Thoughts Media sites are down – we were in the midst of moving to a new server, and something went a bit wrong. Doesn’t it always? I hate going to bed knowing that my sites aren’t up and there’s nothing I can do about it. It sucks. Hopefully by the time I wake up tomorrow, they’ll be back up. I swear, it’s a miracle that Google hasn’t punished us for all our down-time…guess their crawlers are more patient than I am.

The Movie Trailers You Wished Were Real

I’m not bad when it comes to editing video, but I truly admire people that have the sense of timing and intuition to make truly superb movie trailers – you know that ones where you end up finding out that the movie trailer was better than the movie itself? These are three movie trailers that take the movies in a completely different direction…much to the delight of anyone watching them. This is funny stuff! [Language Warning]

(That last one would have been even funnier if the announcer’s voice was more appropriate for a movie trailer…)

Live-Action GI Joe Movie: Should I Be Elated or Scared?

Like most men that were kids in the ’80s (yeah, I’m over 30 now), I have fond memories Transformers, GI Joe, and other franchises that are now flooding the modern movie market. For the most part, that’s a good thing – I really enjoyed the Transformers movie, even if I think Michael Bay should have been punched in the head for a few of the decisions he made. At any rate, as you might have guessed from the photo above, GI Joe is coming to the big screen…and I’m not sure I should be scared or excited. Will they slaughter my childhood memories with a campy, cheesy movie that will suck? Or will they retain some of the coolness and make it an enjoyable romp? Well see – but one things for sure, GI Joe: The Movie in cartoon form still kicks ass! I just watched it a couple of months ago… 😀

Oh yeah, and in case you didn’t figure it out, that’s Ray Park playing Snake Eyes – the same guy who played Darth Maul. I think Ray Park is great, but someone needs to teach him a new stance – that’s a total Darth Maul rip-off. 😉