Opening Thoughts

Just a bit ago when I went to write this post, I found that all of my sites were down, hosted by the same company. I checked their own site and it was also down. Everything was back up a couple of minutes later, but I managed to do some calculations during that time. They guarantee 99.9% up time, which gives them a little under 9 hours per year of down time. That’s a bit shy of an hour per month, which they have gone nowhere near. So well done BlueHost, well done. I still like you.

Wakeboarding

Life is good, as it has been ever since I moved to Florida. Here are some fun things that happened this week. I landed a tantrum to blind with an indy grab for the first time. That’s a fun one. I have ridden with plenty of good friends this week, and during one set I tried a double flip for the first time ever. That scared the snot out of me, which was really fun. Here’s the video: (It’s poor quality, but here is the link to the high quality version.)

Then today, I went riding with my friends Ben Greenwood and Trevor Hansen. After that, we came home and Trevor took a look at the video above there.

Trevor is, to date, the only person to land the move I tried, a double back roll, on a normal wake, as in not using a double up. (I’ll put the video below) He gave me a thumbs up and proceeded to coach me and break down the video to help encourage me to try it again and land the thing. That was pretty awesome in itself! I just tried the move on a whim, and now I feel motivated to land a double invert on a wakeboard. I mean come on, I have been coached by the only person in the world who has done it wake to wake. That’s awesome.

Here’s the aforementioned video:

Sorry, the video can’t be embedded on here. That’s something about online videos that bugs me, not allowing people to put them on their site, but whatever, that’s for another time. Check it out on Trevor’s blog here: Trevor’s Double Back Roll.

Nice huh? Yeah, he’s good. So is Ben. He landed a lot of different 720s today and a couple 900s.

Non-Wakeboarding

I get thoughts from time to time of what to blog about. I usually forget those by the time I sit back down at this desk. I’m okay with that, but perhaps I should try to work on fixing my retention method. So all I really have right now is this link for you:

Go Away: Hilarious email conversations between a talented graphic artist and people who have crossed him. The top post is a great place to start reading.

So it’s a new year and I’m averaging one post every 18 days! Yeah! Since last post, I went to the greatest redneck event I’ve ever been to: Crash-A-Rama. Yes, I too feel it should be Crash-O-Rama, but oh well, what are ya gonna do? It took place on Black Friday, and was a million times better than shopping.

My local friend Brittany invited me, so I took a Greek friend, Nick, and a French friend, Jerome, to see what real redneck-white-trash looks like and to see the benefits of their genius. The event took place in a town called Bithlo, FL. It was at the speedway, which had a paved track that I figure is a half mile oval, and all dirt in the middle. Maybe there was grass, but it was all dirt by the end. We got the seats where the real fans go and even had to sign a waiver to get into those seats. Here’s what went down:

• Oval race with demolition derby type of cars and much contact.
• Pusher cars – One car isn’t running, its partner car pushes it, and a third car tries to separate the two.
• Skid cars – Front wheel drive and skid plates instead of tires on the back.
• Small demolition derby.
• Boat trailer race – Trucks and cars towing boats and trailers. Last running guy towing something wins.
• Camper trailer race – Same as above, but with camper trailers.
• Figure 8 school bus race.
• The Green Mamba.

I’m sure I missed some, but oh man, it was so awesome. There was a big truck called Fordzilla that was just exploding boats and camper trailers. He was doing it right, going fast and hitting everything he could. The school bus race was incredible. The race started with almost 20 school buses, some were full size with lights flashing, stop signs out, and all the bells & whistles. The first few laps are spent waiting to see the buses get spread out enough to possibly collide in the middle. And on the first chance of a collision came the best one of the night. The 2nd place bus and the last place bus hit and it flipped the 2nd place bus entirely over, landing nice and hard on its wheels!

There was so much awesomeness that I just can’t cover it all in here. Here is a link to a video of the bus race. Hopefully you can see that on Facebook.

The Green Mamba was this jet engine that pretty much had only a seat and four wheels attached to it. They brought it out and lit that exhaust ablaze. Behind the Mamba was one of those airport shuttle buses. The bus wasn’t there very long. It turned into a huge black plume of smoke that may still be floating up somewhere over the Atlantic.

It was an awesome, very cold, night of breathing in smoke, oil fumes, dirt, and all kinds of burnt metal and cheering with Florida’s finest camouflage-clad rednecks. Can’t wait to go back!

Here’s the site.

So I went out on the series of tubes and found the actual video! The product is a total scam, but you see what I’m talking about with the ladies. Well played Jeff Paul, well played.

That was a pretty helpless feeling. I had to change my plans and figure out how I could fix the problem. Netflix doesn’t let you add a movie into your queue that has a status of “At Home,” which is probably for the better. So I have to add it back in as soon as they receive it. Of course, I did send The Wall back as soon as I found that out, so I’ll get that movie back sooner or later. I’m actually surprised that this is the first time I’ve had this happen in about a year and a half of using Netflix. I’m sure it will happen again. This was a pretty boring post, oh well.