AE BestShot Contest

So my friend Connor has been spamming Facebook with links that direct you to the American Eagle website. I usually ignore this sort of thing assuming it is probably spam, but one word in the headline totally caught my attention: “contest”. I am obsessed with doing this sort of thing, even if nothing ever comes out of it. Right now American Eagle is holding a contest asking fans to send in their favorite pictures of themselves wearing AE stuff. The fun part is that there are 8 different categories (9 if you work at AE) that you can submit your photos to, such as “Most Likely Rockstar” and “Best AE Spirit”. I have submitted a photo to the Best AE Spirit category and here I am, shamelessly asking for your votes! You can go here to vote for my photo, or even give it a shot for yourself! :) I’ll probably put some more into different categories so you’ll be seeing more posts. Thank you for your potential votes! I encourage you to spoil yourself and give it a shot. ;)

A Career Shift

I generally don’t talk about what I do for a living.  Not because I don’t enjoy my work, but because until recently my work as a coordinator for a support center didn’t offer much opportunity for blog posts.  Perhaps if I didn’t support very custom software or if I had the inclination to write about the best practices of customer support in my off time I’d have written more, but usually when I get home I’m more excited to blog about geek culture, technology, or video games.

However, now I’m doing something totally different and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to do it.  Recently my work offered me a job in marketing.  I don’t have any formal experience, but they could see how committed I was to blogging, multimedia, and web communications in general.  They thought not only that I would enjoy it, but also that I could fill a need the company had by improving our web presence.  Frankly, they were right.  Unlike many bloggers who speak of the joys of working from home blogging, I’m in the fun position of being paid by my employer now to do the same thing, just from an office.
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Ba-Con: Day 3 Go!

So we’re here on the 3rd day of Ba-Con and while we’ll be sad to see it go, we’re having a blast!  Here are some of the highlights from yesterday:

Nicole tried on a corset, courtesy of Renaissance Fashions, much to my delight and we had the chance to interview Captain Anthony LaGrange about the wares he had available. To say his knowledge of corsets was staggering would be an understatement.  I, myself bought a highly fashionable leather hip pack to go with my ammo bag.  I don’t have a full steampunk outfit yet, but I feel like each con I go to pushes the pieces a little bit more together.

After that, Nicole picked up a Gryffindor tie from Star Base Columbus to complete her costume for the forthcoming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (which, we’ve heard is sold out for midnight launches all over Columbus).

Somewhere between re-organizing our booth and checking out everyone’s setup, I had the chance to sit down and interview Thom Robertson for a forthcoming video where he talks a little bit more about Artemis. We’re definitely going to be having fun with this!

I’d post more but I’m getting ready to go interview the folks from Geeky Clean, so that’s all for now but we’ll post more updates soon!

Ba-Con: Day 2 Go!

We’re sitting here at the booth and day 2 of Ba-Con 2011 is just kicking off.  The free Bawls and bacon are certainly welcome, but what I’ve loved the most so far is all of the awesome people we’ve been able to meet and hang out with.  This is just a quick recap of some of the

Geektress’s  Brenda Kirk is in the booth to the right of us and has some incredible artwork at her booth.  She’s also been kind enough to school Nicole and I on a range of information related to conventions as this is the first one at which we’ve been an exhibitor.

To our left, Thom Robertson, the creator of Artemis, a Spaceship Bridge Simulator (See: Kobayashi Maru) is taking another crew in to gear up for another mission on a projector and a bunch of networked laptops. I had the pleasure of trying this out yesterday and can say definitively that it’s an experience like no other.  Splitting the responsibilities of carrying out starship missions in space among a crew of friends is thrilling!

We also got to hang out with Mike Eshelman of 8-Bit Esh who has crafted some of the finest Perler Bead Art ever seen, including a jaw-dropping 4600-bead Vincent Van Gogh portrait!  Mike was also cool enough to do an interview with us that we’ll be weaving into an upcoming video.

Well, that’s all for now but we’ll be sure to give some updates as Ba-Con continues!

Another Rushed Post

I’m getting ready to run out the door to meet Nicole and some of our friends for dinner, but I just didn’t feel right not posting something before I left on account of all the craziness going on right now with Ba-Con preparations.  The most recent of which is the above, very poorly created art that I was toying with for our booth in a couple of weeks.  If you click on it you should get a snazzy wallpaper (kind of) though.  Anyways, while my skills in drawing vector are horrible, the tool I’m using makes it pretty darn easy.  That tool being Artboard which is currently available on the Mac App Store if you’re curious.

Anyways, Nicole and I are working hard at figuring out everything we’re going to do so stay tuned for more updates!

From Here to There, From There to Here

Its been awhile. Okay, okay. It has been a LONG while since we last sat down and talked, and oh boy have things changed. For starters, let me start by apologizing to not only you, the reader, but to Joshua and Nicole as well. I have been absent for a long time, and no explanation was ever given. Until now. But back to what I was saying. Things have changed. The biggest one (for me) is that I have a new job, which I love, working at a mattress factory. I get to sit around all day sewing up mattresses and listening to awesome techno and anime music on my Ipod. Oh yeah, that’s another thing. I’m an otaku now. For those of you that don’t know, an otaku is someone who is obsessed with anime. That’s right, I’m an anime freak. A HUGE anime freak. In fact, most of my articles on here will now be about anime. Which brings me to my next point: I no longer play Magic.

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We’re Headed to Ba-Con!

Are YOU ready for Ba-Con?  Well, if so, you can expect to see Nicole and I there!  You can get all of the what/when/where information at the link back there, but long story short Ba-Con is the premier convention for geeks of every persuasion that appreciate geek culture, technology, and of course, bacon.  This year it’ll be at the Ramada Plaza Hotel and Conference Center from July 8-10.  There’s still time to pre-register so jump on it!

Ironicially the day after our friend, Kyle (who you remember from episode 3 of the 30 Day Video Game Challenge) told us about the convention the Ba-Con people hit us up on Twitter and invited us to be guests this year.  We were most humbled and grateful for the invitation and it immediately got us thinking of fun things to do there.  We’re still working with the most excellent staff at the convention to sort out our exhibit, but we’re trying to cook up some fun stuff to entertain anyone kind enough to stop by and visit.  What, you ask?  Well, you’ll just have to find out but I assure you it will be very, very cool.

So stop by and check us out and be sure to tell your friends about ba-con!

Quick Update – Nicole’s Graduating!

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I’m blogging this from my iPhone because my Dad’s on my machine playing WoW at the moment. Much as I’d love to talk about WoW in this post I just wanted to say quickly that more posts are coming, but with family in for Nicole’s graduation ceremony tomorrow (I’m exCEEDINGLY proud of her, btw) it’s been a bit hectic. So, stay tuned and we should be back on course soon!

Back to the Mac: A Hard Drive Failure Tale

Updates have been a little slim starting out this June, but I have a legitimate excuse- last week my iMac’s hard drive failed and I had to take it to the Apple Store for a replacement.  It was especially unfortunate as work had a couple of video projects I needed to finish and lost them.  Irritating?  Sure.  Catastrophic?  Not by a long shot.

Thankfully, I keep a very limited amount of data on my local drive at any given point with most of my larger files on external drives, my Time Capsule, and also in the cloud.  Ironically I was just gearing up to do a post about the importance of keeping sound backups of your data.

It was the first time I’d had to visit the Genius Bar for real assistance and it was a pretty good experience.  The employees were all very knowledgeable and empathetic to my problem.  They’ve also got a very streamlined process for assisting customers with their new Apple Store App for the iPhone so setting up an appointment was a breeze.  As a bonus they no longer had 320GB drives in stock (paltry I know) and upgraded me to a 500GB (still pretty lax but an improvement nonetheless.

Anyways, regular updates should resume now and if any of you have had any good experience with the Apple store let us know in the comments!

Go Eat at Dave and Buster’s RIGHT Now

For two reasons:

1) Their food is utterly delicious (especially the Buffalo Bar Chicks)

and

2)If you should find yourself in the unfortunate position of having your fiance’s precious iPhone 4 eaten alive by a Stephen King-esque industrial paper shredder on their grounds like this (click to enlarge):

You can rest assured that the fine staff at Dave and Buster’s will make it right.  As I’m sure you’ve sorted out, through an unfortunate series of events Nicole’s phone wound up being dumped with a bunch of tickets into a ticket shredder.  Thankfully though, both the onsite manager, Maria and also their general manager, Gregg were kind enough to offer to pay for the destroyed phone.

Now, I’d like to speak about Gregg for a moment.  While we’ve only spoken once, this man’s manliness was more than apparent.  I have heard tale that his Herculean balls were forged by the gods themselves  in the fires of Hades.  In one deft move he assured me that our suffering would be short-lived as he stretched forth his righteous and benevolent hand to rid us of our plight a literal flock of doves flew overhead at that instant accompanying his angelic words of comfort.  I wept in pure reverence that he would be so willing, so just, so prompt in assuring us we’d be reimbursed for Nicole’s demolished iPhone 4.  While I’m not sure if that payment will be in U.S. dollars or the combined joy of a thousand childrens’ laughter, I trust he will keep to his word.  While this is just an artist’s rendering as I doubt a mere mortal could capture Gregg’s majesty with our inept color spectrum, I think it will give you all an idea of who we’re dealing with:

All kidding aside, there is only one worry that I now have about the situation.  They asked for a receipt showing I did indeed buy an iPhone 4 (totally reasonable), but that receipt shows a purchase price of $199.99.  Unfortunately, the price of a replacement iPhone 4 is actually $599.99 when you’re not eligible for renewal.  I’m not sure if Dave and Buster’s will be willing to reimburse me the full price for a replacement, but that’s where all of you, dear readers, come in.

You see, while I don’t doubt that Gregg could simply roundhouse-kick his way into a favorable outcome for Nicole and I, it might help his case to get us reimbursed from corporate if I could show them that at least a few people are going to comment here and go get some Dave and Buster’s food at some point.

I’m not sure what the ultimate outcome will be, but I’ll be sure to post it on here as soon as I do.

So thanks for any support as we try to get Nicole back her sweet, sweet phone and Gregg, if you’re reading, thanks for being so awesome and rest assured that tales of your mercy shall be told through the ages.

-Josh