This is something I was writing for PM Lifestyle but I want to share this with you guys here. I shot this sequence and for anyone who has done SEMA or tried to shoot in a large crowd you should know how great it was to get this shot off. Thanks to Jason and Phil for shoving people out of my way to make this great video happen. The ACP rally shooting was my favorite sequence we shot at the 2008 SEMA show. Somehow we managed in the middle of the SEMA show to shoot one long continuous take around the K&N booth with the ACP rally team. The video starts with the Evo 9 image flipping over from the 2008 X-Games event and we walk to the Evo 10 that is hanging from the ceiling. What an amazing layout and Andrew and Jen just busted out a great interview on the first take. Our tripod dolly really came into play for the 2008 SEMA show for this interview. I had a blast filming this ACP interview for NOS TV.
So after all the Chris Rado drama that was started by this post http://wreckedmagazine.com/blog/2008/10/24/chris-rado-ready-to-leave-the-sinking-ship-spotted-drift-testing/ and left me and Chris as frienemies or something? I’ve been watching to many teen dramas and TMI weekly lately (sorry). We talked it out and I told him he could come on the site and say whatever he would like. Above is his 5+ minute interview where he told us he is building a Toyota RWD factory drift car that isn’t a “Scion.” This sounds pretty interesting, for those of you still bent out of shape about the Chris Rado incident, check out the interview, hear the guy out at least. I cared so much that I conducted the interview instead of Kelly. Truthfully, somewhere between the last booth and Chris Rado’s interview she quit for like 5 minutes so I suffered it out with no voice, sick, dead, and no sleep. So bare with me on that part. I cannot wait to see him in Tony Angelo’s S13 this weekend at Redbull for his first public runs at Pro Am. Don’t miss it this weekend.
So I have so much I need to talk about. SEMA 2008, the death spiral of General Motors, LA Auto Show, new content, and new features across Wrecked Magazine. We even have tons of new and excited stuff going on at Wrecked’s parent PM Lifestyle right now as well. So I haven’t forgotten about you blogites, great stories are coming soon. Right now I have to tackle some P/L charts, clean up the palace, and pay our 31-60 day late utility bill that was buried on my desk under some Fuze bottles and misc. credit card offers. And yes, that is me laying dead on Thursday at SEMA and Evan from Exedy sitting on top of me. I have no idea what is going on, who took this picture and why it’s on my blog. Ok this post is done.
Now that Issue 7 has come out I feel it is one of my favorites we have produced to date. While it is already special to everyone that has worked on Wrecked Magazine since it marks our one year anniversary issue. After some long late night talks and debates with friends and Industry people the Top 10 Wrecks in Formula D history was a very nice touch to Issue 7. Justin Pawlak’s piece was amazing and I learned a good bit about him in his interview including why his National Wave sponsorship is a passionate sponsor to him and his family. When you have a few minutes make sure you open up this issue and check it out.
In the new issue of Wrecked Magazine we launched right before SEMA we added an awesome looking advertisement from AEM. They used my photograph from Formula D Road Atlanta for the background of this ad. Our design team and the guys at AEM came together to make an awesome interactive ad. The parts on the bottom right all will take you to different sections of the AEM website which is very cool. If you haven’t read the new issue make sure you go ahead and check it out.
If your into FREE music then listen up. I am an avid Girl Talk fan and recently on last.fm (add me!) they recommended me to the mash up artist E-603. Yes, the 603 stands for the New Hampshire area code….I know it’s inconceivable that anyone other than Ryan Tuerck would come out of New Hampshaaa with talent but this kick rocks it. I am not one to promote music but he offers his album for FREE, no questions asked. How can you not love that? He has some amazing mixes with some of the best rock/rap mash music I have ever heard of, plus this album brought me flashbacks of that show ElimiDATE.
Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch made this amazing post about how Voicemail is dead. Stop using it and welcome to 2008. Here is his post as he posed on Techcrunch.com.
Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it.
When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various enterprise voicemail systems - which had the best forwarding and group messaging, which allowed for archiving, and how many messages could be stored and for how long. Even though email was around, people were still unsure how to use it. Letters went on letterhead and were formal. Voicemail was informal and common. Email etiquette was still being developed. It was good for mass-forwarding jokes and moving Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files around, but it took a while for email to take over as older generations moved out of the workplace or got with the program.
But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.
Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally - let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back.
How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?”
Senders often feel guilty for leaving voicemails, too. And to make sure you get the message, quite often people will follow up with a text message - “Just left you a VM, it’s important” - just so you know it’s there.
There are startups that are trying to make voicemail more useful. Pinger, GrandCentral and YouMail are among them. The iPhone’s visual voicemail feature helps clean up the clutter, too. But at the end of the day you still need to take time to listen to those voicemails, and that usually comes after other equally urgent but less disruptive tasks.
The services that really make voicemail more usable are those that convert voicemail into text and then send it to you via email or SMS (Spinvox, PhoneTag Yap and Jott, for example).
More mobile carriers are offering text conversion for a monthly or per-message fee. It’s my guess this will become more and more common. Voice is here to stay as a data input method, but listening to messages will certainly become an increasing luxury, to be reserved for loved ones or those messages that aren’t transcribed properly (or you need to hear it for tone or emotion).
For now most people don’t have voicemail transcription services. So think before you voicemail, more and more people just find it annoying.
My personal site has gone out of date BIG TIME so I finally found a cool and creative way to keep it up to date with little to no maintenance. The image background is a Billionaire Boys Club production I found a long time ago which I enjoy and is my desktop background. I used a Retaggr.com virtual business card which will sync you into many of the sties I am active on such as Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, Twitter, and many more. You can read a bio on myself and find out information about PM Lifestyle.
I will make this short and sweet and after SEMA I will try to get more on my automotive trak for this blog but lately I have been escaping when I can due to the SEMApocalypse coming next week. So I have been getting a good bit of “heat” from friends and other people for publicly bad mouthing the Atlanta Trashers errr Thrashers. Listen, I am still a fan at heart but it’s so much easier to boo rather than cheer. It was a sure sign to everyone when we lost all of our talent and acquired none that things were coming to a quick end. So I decided to give the game a fair chance and spend my hard earned dollars at the arena tonight. Well we lost 7 to 0. Amazing, the Thrashers suck, possibly worse than the Hawks now……I know, it’s amazing. Maybe we can trade Ilya for six first round draft pics in 2009. If we were really lucky the Atlanta Spirit would just SELL the team already.
With the advent of Internet television comes some casualties of war I guess. Revision 3 is a tech centric online television company run by Jay and Kevin from Digg. They canceled my second favorite show on their online TV network called Popsiren. While the one girl on the show was super strange we will miss the epic hostess that is Sarah Lane. The show will be missed and it sends me a clear message we need better advocates (like myself) to encourage you people to throw away your televisions and cancel your horrid cable/DirecTV/bunny ears. Watch television on the Internet, it could make you rich and probably better looking and if your really lucky more interesting of a person. Sarah Lane did a project tracking her locations she has live in her life which inspired my life project that some of you have seen in Google Maps. Hopefully in the post SEMA world I can get it complete and unveil it on the blog. It’s coming soon, I promise. At least TRS and Diggnation are still on the air. Alright, back to pre SEMA warcamp.
