I have about 50 copies left of the Manx Memorial DVD I'm putting together that I did not take to Seattle. Once these are gone, they're gone, and I will NOT be making any more under any circumstances. The project was very expensive and time-consuming and done for mostly selfish purposes of working through my own grief, but I believe in living life and moving on, so once these are gone, I'm erasing everything except the remastered mixes.
I also have about 20 extra copies of just the DVD in case anyone got a bad or cracked one (if so, please contact me so I can send a replacement ASAP.)
Portlanders, being my home-slices, get first dibs of course. Anyone in Portland who I see regularly or would like to see is welcome to reserve one or two copies which I can deliver at some point. Email me at winkjr@sound-o-mat.com or call me and I'll set copies aside.
Seattlites should contact Erik (Muschi) or Lara (Lara) to see if they have any of the 25-ish copies I left with her, I think. Erik has offered to send copies but I hope will give them to Seattlites and I think Lara has offered to do the same, but please ask first (and nicely.)
Anyone I can't meet with who would like a copy can email me to ask for some. I'll need $3 for the first copy and $1 for each add'tl up to four copies max. to cover mailers, postage, and all that. I've already spent enough $$$ on these that unfortunately I have to ask for postage.
Thanks to Bullseye Disc (http://bullseyedisc.com) in Portland for burning 75 DVDs at the last second to save my butt and to everyone who showed up at the Memorial, and thanks MOST OF ALL to Lara for all her work putting together the Memorial and to Tracy for picking up the food. It was very positive, healing, and what a real Memorial is supposed to be about. And very much my pleasure meeting a bunch of new people for the first time because of Manx. I feel honored to have found myself in such wonderful, interesting, amazing company.
So having wasted a bunch of time writing "test" code for a job interview recently, and not having heard back from them since, I've been working a freelance job creating an "e-commerce" (in quotes since I really hate that term) Web site for a former client. Having done PayPal integration in the past: directly, and within several "shopping cart" systems like Joomla, I figured that would be the easy part, and since this would be my first experience with Google Checkout, no doubt that'd be a headache.
Part of my thinking was that I've been using PayPal since about six months after it started, some eight-ish years now, whereas Google only won me over with Gmail about two years ago, and I've had no luck with their online shopping site "Froogle", which has been "Beta" for, well, forever it seems, and I'm really not a fan of the company, whose employees and devotees are as vocally arrogant and annoying as Microsoft fanatics were during the 90's (note to those folks: so, has the fact that their stock hasn't moved in almost a decade clued you in yet?)
Well, once again, I have to say that Google has proved me wrong and made me a convert. I've spent about two full days trying to get PayPal gift certificates to work, without luck, but I was able to set up and add Google "Buy Now", gift certificates, and other purchases in just a few hours. Their site is blindingly fast, using lots of AJAX to avoid reloading or jumping to new pages, and their interface is typical Google: simple, fast, easy to understand, linear, and very much Web 1.0 - no flash, minimal graphics, etc.
I recently had a friend send me her updated resume and portfolio, and it required Flash to even see the main page. Her argument that since she does "customer-facing" front-end UI work, her potential employers expect to see Flash might hold some credence - but not if she's serious about the Google job she was going to apply for.
But the usual asides aside, while I still think Google's stock is highly over-valued (I mean, look at even the forward-earning P/E ratio!) - they do know how to build a decent Web site. I expect Google is going to eat PayPal and Ebay's lunch very soon, if only because clients like mine are thinking that they might just stick with Google Checkout and stip the PayPal stuff because they frankly don't want to pay me a lot of $$$ just to get PayPal's crappy system to work right.
While I expect to make a lot of $$$ having shorted Google the day they miss their earnings by a couple of cents, I'm also sorry that I'm stuck with Ebay stock, left-over from what I didn't sell off when they bought PayPal. I don't know whether to dump it and take a tax loss or hope it makes it back up to the break even point before they tank and get bought out or go bankrupt. But after this experience with working with Google Checkout, at least on the technical side, I'm on a convert. Both my clients and I have better things to do with our time than try to figure out PayPal problems for the umpteenth time.