Guess my galavanting is no secret anymore…

Ok, hopefully you got a chuckle from this but I thought this was really cool. There have been many promotions that have allowed us to place our mugs within videos but I don’t believe any have provided the realism that you get from this new one generated by the folks at MySpace with Fan Video. Just simply visit the site, login with either your MySpace or Facebook credentials and you can choose from 8 videos that all have different effects to get your avatar on either service directly into the video. You can even string up to 6 videos together. I chose 2 to bring you my little story. Once the video has been created they offer an easy way to share on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, as a link to a page (which is better quality than the embed. Here’s mine) or as an email to your friends.

I found out about the service last night from newly announced Director of Content Socialization Sean Percival (Congrats to you my friend) and I would have posted this sooner but demand went through the roof and the service went down until earlier tonight after they deployed more servers or clouds or lumberjacks I’m not too sure how they did it so fast. In any case go check it out. I tried all 8 videos as it’s very addictive. MySpace no doubt has a hugely successful viral video campaign about to launch but get there before your friends. You don’t want to be Fiddy’s 2nd best friend :)

So I took these home and decided to film my kids eating them. In retrospect with the possibility of social services knocking on my door, this may not have been the best idea. But after all was said and done, the laughing, the crying, I decided to finally post the video for all to see.

The kids and I watched this for the first time in years today and we really got a kick out of it. Then the lightbulb went off in my head wondering whether they still made these gems. So we went on the hunt and found a new version of them called Bean Boozled. I guess the Harry Potter license ran out. Nonetheless these are similar but with a new twist. They put in two identical colored bellies, one tastes good, the other blah! There were some newly added flavors including skunk spray, rotten egg, baby wipes, pencil shavings, toothpaste, and moldy cheese. So I turned on the camera 5 years later to capture the kids tasting these again and not surprisingly had very similar results.

Disclaimer: Kids, please dont try this at home :)

Alex & Jaclyn Eat Harry Potter Jelly Bellies for the First Time

Alex & Jaclyn Eat Harry Potter Jelly Bellies Five Years Later

Bonus: I came across this rather amusing tasting review of the beans which I thought I’d share if you’re curiousity is still captured by these.

As I’ve enjoyed the site over the last few months I’ve kept a keen eye out for anything I could find that would make for a worthy submission. I have been lucky enough to not only find one, but two photos that I feel are worthy of gracing their site.

So I was channel surfing one night when I saw this entry in the program guide. Of all the people to get a gender wrong…Samuel L. Jackson? Apparently the programmer hadn’t seen Pulp Fiction.

click to enlarge

I was leaving the parking lot of a fast food establishment when I feasted my eyes on the patio of the apartment in the photo below. I had to do a double take and then proceeded to take multiple photos knowing I had struck gold.

click to enlarge

So I just made my way to the Failblog.com submission page and hope that my photos make the cut. We’ll see.

I recently got my first payment from Google for running Adsense ads. I never started this site with the purpose of making money, which was pretty hard to do in 1996, but thought it would be at least nice to recoup the hosting cost so I added Google ads a while back. In a somewhat cheesy (first dollar bill moment) I decided to take a picture of the check before depositing it. Little did I know that my check drafted from multi-billion dollar valuated Google.com would come bouncing back to me. And it looks like I’m not the only one either.I had gotten an email from the bank a few days ago about an item being held in my deposit. The deposit in question had two checks in it. One of the checks was my first payment from a company I had done some contracting for, and the second was from Google. I immediately thought that the small company had screwed me on my first payment, not even considering that the Google check was an issue. Luckily for me the Google check was very small compared to my other payment and was the item being held. I honestly started to laugh when I realized it and decided to call my bank to confirm. Sure enough the check was going to come back to me. Officially it didn’t bounce (but the headline sounds better eh?) but was actually drafted from an account that has since been closed.

So I decide to contact Google to find out what was going on. First off it was pretty hard to find a way to contact them since there are highly visible “contact us” link anywhere to be seen. I had to click on “help” and then search for the word “contact” to then find a link to a contact form. I then sent an email on 4/12 with details of my issue and got a reply 24 hours later referring to me as “Kevin” (my name is Mark) and stating that the check had cleared on 4/11 which was obviously not the case. I have since replied telling them that they may have confused me with someone else (a possible cut and paste snafu…especially if this is widespread) and asked them to look into it further and get back to me. No word yet but this is a bit entertaining and I thought I’d share.

Update 4/16/07: I was contacted by Google today stating that they had received a handful of reports regarding similar issues and in each case the problem was resolved by the bank within 24 hours and suggested I contact the bank directly and provided me with a direct phone number for a representative to provide to my bank. I then contacted my bank, but they weren’t willing to pursue the matter any further and let me know that the check would be returned to me and that I would have to request another payment directly from the issuer. I’ll keep you posted on the next update.

Update 4/27/07: Today I logged in to my online banking and noticed that there was no longer a message regarding the check being on hold. So assuming it had been mailed back to me I called my bank to confirm. When I got a representative on the phone he had to do a little research but found out that the issue with the check had been resolved and the funds were now in my account. He stated that the problem occurred based on an automated response from Google’s bank account that occurred in error and which in turn they resolved. My bank representative said that this is rare and that he recently had spoken to another client who had the same problem. So kudos to Google customer support who were responsive and offered a method to correct the issue, even though my bank didn’t want to co-operate initially, the problem was resolved on Google’s end. This was an interesting experience which won’t be happening again since I have since switched to direct deposit.

Happy Friday!

I decided to create an image with a message to get their attention. So I quickly opened my program, typed the message and saved it. I then uploaded the image to my server where the site was still referencing it and voila (Link1 & Link2), a nice loud message now appears as the background on the site. I’m thinking about starting a pool to see how long it lasts. I’m guessing about a week.

I think I’m being pretty civilized about this issue but that wasn’t the case a few years back. I had the same scenario and decided to be a bit more evil about it. I found a pretty raunchy sexually explicit goatse picture and replaced the image being linked with it. I anxiously waited to see what happened next. To my amazement I got an email from the owner of the site in a panic asking me to help replace the image with the original one they had hotlinked and he was even nice enough to send me the username and password for his ftp server in the email as well, assuming I would be more than willing to help. Well after 5 minutes of maniacal laughter I determined this person was pretty hopeless and I went ahead and deleted the image. I especially like how I found pictures (presumably from the site owner) that appear to show a reaction that may occur when they see the page. Hehehe…

Does anyone else have a funny hotlinking story to tell?

(Update 3/25 11:58pm PST…I just checked and the site has been changed to no longer reference the image. No mention of what happened…life as usual)