MMP

Today we hit a major milestone here at Freeskier, well, I hit a major milestone. The official public beta release of Freeskier.TV, our new online streaming video content channel. The beta release only shows this years upcoming trailers, future releases will allow you to select from multiple channels of content like full length movies, exclusive behind the scenes freeskier video, athlete interviews, event coverage and audio interviews. I’d like to go into it more, but I’ve got to keep some things secret for now. We’re planning on blowing everyone out of the water with this.

For now, head over to Freeskier to check out this year’s newest movie trailers and a sneak peek at Freeskier.TV.

Please excuse our lack of internet presence today while MMP and all adjacent Dave Amirault based web properties are moved to a new server and IP address. If you’re not a nerd, this is what that last sentence just meant to you.

MMP will be down for a portion of today to allow for the geeks that control my web server to move it to a newer, faster, more reliable server.

For those of you sending me e-mail, the mail server issue has been officially fixed and I’m now reliably getting email. Please bear with me today while the geeks do their thing to make MMP more reliable.

Easily one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long, long time. I wanna roll with Bob Saget!

Update: Just got an interesting e-mail from Chris alerting me to this gem of a website… Bob Saget Is God.

Thanks to Brendo for the link.

Well, folks I just emerged from a behind the scenes nightmare. MMP, and the other sites that are hosted on my webserver almost vanished into the vast depths of cyberspace today. As many of you are aware, I’m really busy with my new job/life. I travel non stop, work long hours, and are usually busy after work doing miscellaneous things. Today, I noticed that my dave@ozskier.com account hasn’t been getting e-mail for the past 3-4 weeks. Normally, this e-mail merges into my dave@freeskier.com address and it is all merged into one inbox to keep my e-mail more organized and simple. I cracked open my mail app and sorted my e-mail from the past month by address… No e-mail to the dave@ozskier.com box. That is odd, typically I get 10-20 e-mails a day to that address. 5 of which being spam, 10 being comments to approve for MMP and the other 5 being general BS from friends. Come to think of it, nobody has responded to any of the e-mails that I have been sending either. Splendid.

So, I figure there is something wrong with my webserver. I crack open the ol’ address book and give the people a ring… Number disconnected. Hmm, odd. Maybe I have the number wrong. I head over to their website, the client login is taken down and all phone numbers and e-mails have been removed. Now I start to panic. Thankfully, several years ago I asked for the exact geographic location of my server so I would know where it sits. I then headed to google maps and found the location, the businesses in the building and found the company that owns my actual webserver. Time to get tricky on these mo-fo’s.

I knew that the people that I was paying my web hosting were a 3rd party, and apparently they had skipped town and folded the business. Don’t worry, they were still charging my credit card, ugh. And since my e-mail has been down for the past 3 weeks I was not getting ANY of the e-mails associated with the demise of the company. Thankfully the new people I’m hosting with apologized for the problem, recognized it as their fault, corrected the problem and as a thank you increased by monthly hosting to a ludicrous number and pretty much gave me unlimited bandwidth for MMP. The icing on the cake is that it is now $5 bucks cheaper per month. Sweet.

So, if you’ve been sending me e-mail to dave@ozskier.com for the past month, I didn’t get your e-mail. The e-mail address is up and working now in a separate inbox just in case there is another problem. MMP is here to stay and won’t be going anywhere… Just to be sure I did a full site backup this morning to my local computer to be super safe.

So, that’s it. MMP was almost wiped out this morning thanks to some shiesty ass-hats who skipped town and screwed their customers. If you sent an e-mail over the past month, send it again. And I will go through my outbox and re-send the dozens of e-mails that apparently nobody got thanks to this freakin’ mess. You know, they were nothing major just stuff about my trip, e-mails to family and other non Freeskier ski related stuff.

MMP is with a new host and safe for now. Needless to say, it was a very stressful morning.

So, this past weekend in Park City we had a casino night. Fake money natch, c’mon it was in Utah people. We were each given $250 in chips to start the night out and could play poker, blackjack or craps. At the end of the night, for every $100 in chips you had you could exchange them for a raffle ticket. There were some pretty sweet prizes, round trip plane tickets, a sweet pair of Atomic Super Cross skis, DNA jacket, free lodging in town, lift tickets for friends, etc.

During the course of the night, I somehow managed to parlay my initial $250 into $1200+ worth of funny money and ended up with 12 tickets for the raffle. I don’t know crap about gambling, however I do know that in order to win big you have to gamble big. Thanks to some extremely lucky hands of blackjack with $400+ on the table I managed to get the dough. Now, if this was my money I’d be betting like a pussy, $5 and maybe the occasional $10 hand. However, when it isn’t my money and there aren’t any consequences like not being able to pay rent, I go balls to the wall.

So, long story short when it was time to select the raffle winners I ended up winning the $270+ dollar DNA Jacket and the sick ass pair of Atomic Super Cross skis with bindings. People there were pissed that I somehow managed to win all the sweet prizes and they were winning things like keychains and Park City t-shirts. Well, that’s the breaks folks.

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This past weekend I was fortunate to enjoy a trip to Park City, UT compliments of the folks at Ski Utah. It was an amazing weekend of good food, copious amounts of drinks, great company and of course water ramp training at the Salt Lake Olympic Center. I spent Saturday at the center hitting the jumps and hucking my meat.

I landed this trick 10/10 on the ramps. Now I just need to get the balls to throw it this winter. It shouldn’t be a problem, seeing how here in Colorado we have a ton of powder and none of that east coast boiler-plate shit.

Robby B. was on the check in this past weekend and sent me this fantastic image. He was at some bodega-ass store in beantown and happened to snag a pic of Frito Lay’s latest product… Nobby’s. Only in Boston could you get a Nobby for 99c. Fantastic.

They may want to head back to the focus groups for the name of this new product.

Ligers, game two, tonight. We’re 1-0. The Key Bank team got slayed last week, 6-2 and we’re looking to keep the winning streak going. Wait a minute, is one victory a streak?

Last week I got a RBI and a run. Tonight, I’m predicting 3 runs and 47 RBI’s. Ryan is going to be pitching, really looking forward to seeing him strike out the entire set. He’s been talking up a big game. Let’s see how he does under pressure.

Update: We lost 4.-3. Ryan rolled a great game and I got two RBI’s, however the girls on our team just couldn’t pull it together and they made a ton of errors and didn’t run through the baselines. Not too smart to slow down on your way to first base when you could potentially be thrown out. UGH.

Freeskier’s very own editor extraordinaire, Tom Winter, was recently married on the beach in sunny So-Cal… No, this isn’t a picture from his ceremony. However, he did send me this photo for MMP.

Imagine this, you spend months if not years preparing for the biggest day of your life. You’ve planned everything, the catering, the music, the location, the travel schedule, etc. However, the one thing you didn’t plan on were your wedding pictures being ruined by that beached whale in the background strutting around with her top off.

I think I just puked in my mouth.

Wow, way to be an ass.
This is an interesting sign that The Duke and I saw in Fort Collins on our mosey on back to Mike’s humble abode. These people had a regular raised ranch home on a street and random horses walking around in their front yard. Sure, they had a fence but it wasn’t like they had this enormous ranch. It was just a plain old house with a fenced in front yard, except they had horses galloping around. Random.

To top it all off they had this sign on the fence to deter you from touching their pet. Ok assholes, you don’t just stick a random horse in your front yard and expect people to not come up and wonder what the hell is going on. It isn’t like you live on a farm or ranch or anything.