Surfergeeks

Here we go! It’s been a while since we’ve seen a Rant From Rob™. I’m a little out of practice so it may not be up to the standards I’ve set with my previous rants.

The Western Fair District has, over the past few months, completely embraced the social media that is Twitter and Facebook. As part of this endeavour they had a contest where five people would be chosen to be “Real Serious Bloggers”. In exchange for daily admission to the fair, their task would be to blog about the experience as well as tweet and hopefully be able to post videos as well. This contest was not simply a random drawing of names. To enter it was necessary to submit a sample writing and the winners would be judged based on the submitted writing. The rules stated that preference would be given to those with a twitter account but it was NOT necessary to win the contest.

Today the winners were announced (Congrats to @JayCMenard, @phronk, @evilflu! I know all three of you and know that you will do an awesome job! Also congrats to @erinflattery and @KimberBogema – I don’t know you but obviously you some writing chops!) and needless to say, there are some pretty sore losers out there. I’m not going to name names as I really don’t want to give them any more attention than is necessary but if you really want to know, a simple search should help you out.

As you can tell above, I was not one of the people that won. Am I disappointed? Sure – who wouldn’t be? It was a creative contest with a desireable reward. Sadly, it seems that two of the people who weren’t chosen have taken to Twitter to complain about their loss. It seems that these people are totally comfortable to point the fingers at other people for their loss. Both of the loudest people complaining seem to be focused in with laser-like precision on it being all about the number of twitter followers that the entrant has. At no point do they acknowledge that they simply may have sub-par writing skills. I tried reading through both feeds but it seems that most of the tweets in the their timelines are for contest entries. There seems to be some discussion with other tweeters but nothing of substance. For what it’s worth, I didn’t really notice any terribly glaring grammar errors but when you’re only retweeting contest entries it’s kind of hard to screw that up. One of the other things being brought up was that supposedly one of the winners had their tweets protected. When I went to check none of the five accounts had protected tweets. It could be that they were asked to unprotect their tweets as a condition of winning. It could be that the person was being malicious. Regardless, tweets are unprotected now. Those complaining simply need to accept the fact that their writing, along with mine, was not as good as some of the other entries that were received.

I want to thank Western Fair District (still not sure if I should be putting a ‘the’ in front of that or not) for running this contest. It was a great concept and also kickstarted my writing again. Even though I didn’t win, I’ll still be writing a blog entry (to be posted here, not on the Real Serious Bloggers blog site) and will almost certainly be tweeting from the fair.

I know, I know. It’s been a while. I’ve decided to change the way I store the pictures online. Part of it has to do with convenience, part of it has to do with lack of storage space on my host’s site. Anyhoo, pictures are now going to up on Picasa. I’ll provide links here whenever I upload new pictures.

To start with – Here are the most recent pictures taken over the past week. We start with Alex’s actual birthday, followed by his little party on Saturday and then wrap up with our trip to the fair yesterday.

Alex’s Birthday

Alex’s Party

Western Fair 2008

Enjoy the pictures. If you want, you can leave comments on individual pictures!

The fair was most awesome! We we got up in the morning it was pouring rain so we were more than a little doubtful we’d be going but by 1:00 or so it had stopped raining and started to clear up so off we went! Alex had a blast! He went on a couple rides with Nikki in Kiddie Land and also went on a couple rides by himself. He also really liked the demolition derby. We’re thinking about going back next Sunday for the finals since we have $5 admission coupons.

Alex’s birthday part was loads of fun too! Nikki’s folks picked up his first GeoTrax set for him. Must. Get. More! Soooo much fun. Alex likes it too! My Mom got him his first Lite Brite and we got him his first Etch-A-Sketch so between the two of those he’s got a couple of the childhood staples covered! He also got a couple Diego things and some Cars stuff which he also loves.