Why hello everyone!  As I prepare to move and I tidy up my office, I was reminded of something rather nasty that occurred a couple of months ago…  while happily munching away on a box of Social Tea cookies from Dare Foods Ltd (huge brand in Canada) I found this…

Yes, that is indeed a wasp's head…. embedded in a cookie.  MY cookie, that I was about to eat.  Needless to say, I will never eat one of these cookies ever again, nor will I ever buy anything with the Dare logo on the box.  Check out the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aTSqwmpPVE&fmt=22

I should probably warn you NOT to watch that unless you don't mind inspecting every cookie you eat for the rest of you life lol!

Dan

Posted my final write up on Spooktacular 2009, which was a complete BLAST!  If you want to give it a read, click here to check it out!

Laters,
Dan

Hi all!  I think it's time I started paying attention to my blog again, what do you guys think?  I actually have a lot of people contact me through this site when they are trying to find me, so I think it's time for some TLC on my blog and get back in the habit.  I've been very busy in all my personal projects, but this past week and a half was the AMAZING Sideshow Spooktacular event, an online extravaganza that is very close to my heart.

For those of you that have no idea what Sideshow is or my little hobby (aka vice), let me explain Spooktacular for you a little bit… What is Spooktacular? It's Sideshow's annual Halloween and Horror online extravaganza of rotating discounts, spot giveaways, new product announcements, contests, and community interaction, plus much more!  Basically it's a week and a half of Sideshow Collectibles partying with their customers and fans in a MASSIVE online event that runs 24 hours a day for 10 entire days.  During those 10 days, they give away tens of thousands of dollars worth of prizes, announce awesome new products and we all have a blast.  The highlight of the event for me is the 10 day chat room they open up, where hundreds of fellow collectors and Sideshow enthusiasts can interact each other and compete for chat prizes via trivia contests and scavenger hunts.  It's a time for no sleep, minimal food and very little social interaction outside of the computer.  You eat, sleep and breath Sideshow, and hope that when it's over you're still alive and your wife hasn't filed divorce papers.

Some of you are probably wondering who the hell Sideshow is at this point.  For anyone that doesn't know, I collect science fiction movie collectibles, like statues and props and stuff like that from various favorite movies… I specialize in Predator related collectibles, but I also dig Terminator, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings etc.  Sideshow is probably the biggest company in the world that creates museum quality statue replicas and full size prop replicas and they are HUGELY popular for collectors like me.  So when a huge event like this comes around, you can rest assured that we go all out and try to take in as much as we can of the event.  Spooktacular is always held right before Halloween and ends on Halloween day… so the first week of November is always a brutal week for me lol!

I also do extended Spooktacular coverage on my other site, Predatorstuff.com and it's VERY busy for me while I try to post the latest Spookfest news AND keep an eye on chat and new contests etc.  It's stressing, but a lot of fun!  If you want to get a taste of what my work looks like, you can check out the Spookfest article category by clicking HERE!  You can also check out the main portal page on Sideshow's site for Spooktacular 2009 by clicking HERE.

And with Spooktacular all finished, I always put together a little written review of the event to talk about my thoughts on the event, but mostly just to thank Sideshow for spoiling us rotten and as a thank you to all my friends who hung out with me in chat over MANY long hours.  I'll be posting my review later this week, but I did toss up a quick thank you and shoutout video tonight if you're interested.

The video is available on YouTube in HD, check it out by clicking HERE!  Most of it you probably won't really understand what the heck I'm talking about, but it gives you an idea of the fun I had.

So yeah, that's where I've been for the last couple of weeks, hope everyone had a GREAT Halloween and hauled some serious candy!  I'll see you next post…

Take care,
Dan

Hey guys… for those of you keeping track (lol!) Rosebud graduated from Obedience School today, completing obedience levels 1, 2 and 3 at 7 months old. We’re very proud of our little pup, she’s turned out to be a gorgeous and extremely intelligent animal and we love her to bits! Here we are on our last day:

That’s about all I have right now… Halloween has been very busy for me in the prop and costume stuff so I’m finally starting to catch up a bit on other stuff. Going to draw the winner of the iPod Shuffle tonight for our Halloween costume contest… looks like most of P2L fail at Halloween though… only a few people posted their pumpkin carvings and/or costumes. Boooooooo!

Until next time!
Dan

It’s been a long summer, filled with fairly crappy weather, Spongebob Squarepants and several hundred yards of Bounty paper towels. And if there’s anything I learned this summer, it’s that toilet training a puppy when it’s constantly raining is a HUGE pain in the ass! But it seems with back to school coming up next week, summer finally decided to start about a week ago. It’s honestly been the worst summer I have ever seen in this city weather-wise, I can not believe how much rain we’ve had. But now that August and September are here, so is ragweed, so now my sinus ass-kicking has begun.

My stay-at-home summer duties are almost up and Rosebud doesn’t need to pee every 35 minutes, so it finally means I can start catching up and stepping up the efforts on Pixel2life v5 and the community’s overall development. Not sure if anyone has noticed, but P2L was recently awarded a PR7 from Google on the last update. No idea how long that will last, but… GO US! Nick is back in school but still working hard on the site. At this point I would say we are 75% – 80% done, so it’s getting there.

In between work, I am also working with our NAID puppy on training and she has been doing VERY well. Here she is at 5 months old, taken today:

We started obedience training about 3 weeks ago and she has picked up basic commands EXTREMELY well, I am totally impressed. She seems to be able to grasp and accept commands immediately… As an example, she went from never hearing the lie down command to doing it on command anytime while walking (You can literally go Up, Down, Up, Down.. and she will keep standing and laying down) in 3 days. And she does this with minimal praise, I don’t even bother with food anymore. So I am extremely proud of her and I can’t wait for this winter to start Skijoring with her. We’ve been training with the harness too and she LOVES to pull! We haven’t had much training time though, I’ve been busy with P2L plus the crappy weather makes it hard to go out and pull in the muck.

So that’s about it from my end… all is well, just trying to hang in there until we get v5 out the door. I’m also happy to report we are back to the 5 – 7 day tutorial queue time on P2L, rather than the 2 weeks+ we had going all summer long.

That’s it for me guys and gals, take care and good luck to you students in your new school year!

Dan