Vertically Rising

So I posted my last blog entry “Kickstarter: Great idea, bad experience” today at around 1pm.

I also send out a tweet to my followers highlighting this blog entry.

By now, we all know the power of social media, and just some of the stories that were picked up by the media in which customer’s posted to media outlets in order to receive coverage and attention to what was going on. There was the AirBNB scandal where a customer trashed and robbed a home-owner in San Francisco. There’s also the Ocean Marketing blunder where the PR representative/”CEO” went off on not only the customer, but also Mike, the co-creator of Penny-Arcade and received tons of backlash from the gaming community.

No, my story was not covered like that, but it did gain a response from CustomSLR today. Around 3 hours ago, CustomSLR posted this to the comments section …

UPDATE: CustomSLR will now ship out $125 backer’s C-Loop and Glide Strap products!

So here I am in November 2011. I’ve been traveling and shooting photography quite a bit for my new job as a Community Manager at ASTRO Gaming. Taking shots of Pro Gamers, company booths, and just the interactions between the gaming audience at major events like Penny-Arcade Expo, E3, and MLG tournaments. I hear about a new product launching from a new start-up company that I became familiar with through a local “SJ Made” / “SJ Eats” food festival.

CustomSLR was started by two brothers, Ben Wong and Ivan Wong, who desired to make a product that would allow DSLR cameras to be used in an easy gripping motion, but not held by the typical strap locations. They produced their C-Loop, which is similar to various other products on the market, where it moves the strap process …

Someone recently posted on the ASTRO Gaming Forums informing us that he was licking his controller cable before inserting it into his MixAmp for a better connection… It so reminded me of the weird “viral” happenstance of my youth.

It’s the classic example of how my fellow youth of the 80s ruined their Nintendo Entertainment Systems.

Backstory: The NES had some inherit fault with it, where after about 2-3 years of usage, it wouldn’t always read games. Once it powered on, it would produce a black screen and a blinking red light.

Some where, some kid came up with the idea that if he breathed hot air on the metal connection port of his 8Bit NES cartridge game, that it would help the console read it better (I guess water + electricity?). This spread like wildfire (even without the internet) and basically every kid who had a NES that was …

So I got my Gmail account back in 2004 (6/23/2004) when it was still in the Invite only Beta stages. It’s been close to 7 years with a total of over 100,000 emails in my “All” folder. Google’s been constantly giving more and more room to Gmail users (Starting at 1Gb, jumping to 2Gb, and has still blossomed to the 7.569Gb I have today), yet I’m already using 61% of that space!

I looked back to some older entries where I discussed the amount of space and got these stats:

So it really looks like I only have 2 1/2 years until my Gmail box will be full. Sadness. …

History of the Onza:

So it’s been nearly a year from the first announcement of Razer‘s entrance into the console gaming market with two new peripherals for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console. At CES 2010, they announced (and had a working demo unit) of the Onza controller, and a 5.1 surround sound headset named the Chimera.

Both their products kept getting pushed back, and it wasn’t until January 2011 that they allowed pre-orders for the Onza (while the Chimera is still on hold). Razer did expand both lines a bit further to include two versions of each product. For the Onza, there’s a Tournament Edition with a few more features (adjustable tension sticks, braided cable, rubberized surface) than the Standard Edition. The Chimera was also expanded to have a 5.1 system over a 5.8Ghz band and a standard stereo system over 2.4Ghz.

There’s been much talk on the ASTRO …