Covering all the Nationals requires travel…lots of travel. While I know better than the start griping about the time spent on airplanes while going to shoot photos, red-eye flights (like the one I had on the way through Newark on the way to Unadilla), occasionally put you in some interesting spots and provide unexpected photo ops. For example, there was this one, where the sun was rising over over Manhattan, and you could get glimpses of the New York City skyline.

 I'm going to start posting more things like this...partly to show you what goes into putting together Vital MX, but also to show you some of the possibilities of what you can do with your own blog here.

For example, I uploaded the photo above to my profile, then clicked the Insert/edit Image button (the one next to the anchor that looks like a tree). Then I pasted in the image url into the window, and clicked insert. Easy! 

Yep, I went and did it. I bought into one of the most heavily hyped product releases ever…the Apple iPhone.

Up until this point I’d avoided Crackberrys and the like. During my TransWorld days I used to watch, half in horror, and half in amusement while Donn and Garth stood next to each other, sending each other text messages. Back then, I didn’t want to be that connected. Now, I think I’m about one browser update away from being able to post news updates to Vital MX directly from my phone.

Now in my own defense, I wasn’t standing in line at an Apple or AT&T store at 6:00 PM on the first day they were available. Never mind that I was traveling to Red Bud at the time and couldn’t have been there if I’d wanted to. I avoided being that much of a geek…barely.

While up at Hangtown, I went to dinner on Saturday night with Vital’s Todd Toth and MSR’s DV8 Dave. While waiting for our waiter to stop by, we had some fun examining the photos of Ryan Villopoto and Jason Lawrence’s afternoon practice encounter, and also showing them off to the pro riders at adjoining tables.

Being the carnivore that I am, I happily placed an order for a big plate of pork chops. But about halfway through my salad, the waiter stopped back by with a rather odd request. He wanted to know how I’d like my chops done. Now I may not be a culinary expert, but that’s the first time I’ve ever had anyone ask how I’d like pork cooked…outside of whether or not I’d like my bacon crispy.

I wonder what he’d have done if I’d asked for them rare?

Growing up, my mom went through nursing school and later became a Registered Nurse in an emergency room. Pretty much the definition of Hell for any kid with dreams of owning a motorcycle or going out riding. I was lectured frequently on the dangers of motorcycles (mostly based on the street bike guys that my mom had seen come into the E.R. all wadded up).

Never mind that I later spent years proving her right...

Earlier this week my mom and dad were driving their Honda to a doctor's appointment when they were rear-ended by another car while sitting at a traffic signal. The other driver bolted and hasn't been seen since. They're mostly okay, though a bit sore. But...

You can imagine how much fun I had sending them an e-mail that read in part, "Haven't I told you those things are dangerous? I'll bet you weren't even wearing helmets..."

holy shiznit dawg i just tried one of those ring tone sites...

DO you know whats on most girl's minds but they won't tell you or will they...

i am in shock right now. my friend sent me this link to get a FREE $500 Target Gift Card...

Man, am I glad that Vital doesn't have the kind of spam that you get on MySpace. 

If you want to update your main profile photo, click the "My Profile" button on the upper right of the site. 

If you're going to carefully craft a blog entry, I'd suggest doing it in another program, like Word, then copying and pasting it into here. 

If you spend too long in here, you can time out, and after you've hit "Save Blog Entry," and get the "No Permissions" message (which happens when you've timed out), there's no way to retrieve what you wrote.

We're looking at a fix for it, but in the meantime, be warned.

Here's a funny one. After spending Sunday night posting photos and results from the MXdN, I headed to the lobby a bit early so I wouldn't have to bug my roommate (thanks Rupert X!) with a wake-up call at 4:30 on Monday morning.

Of course, I immediately crash out, and wake up to find myself covered in cocktail napkins. What the...?

 Anyway, I'd pretty much forgotten about it until today, when I got this private message on one of the MX message boards. The names have been changed to protect the guilty (but revenge will be sweet).

 

Hey Steve,

XXXX XXXXXX here. Just e-mailing you to let you know how lucky you are!!!!  

At about 4:30 am in the lobby of the hotel you looked like you could use a few napkins...............so I gave you some. 

The best part is that I got a few pictures to go along with it (I was of course laughing my hiney off the whole time while you were sawing logs). But my buddy (who's camera I used) accidentally left it the rental car when we turned it in!!! It was only a $100 digital camera that he had just bought for the trip so he didn't feel like writing a letter, etc. to the rental car place.

Anyhow, if we actually HAD the camera, those puppies would been up on Motonews and elsewhere so fast!!!!

Take care,
XXXX

Just got to the hotel, and most of the Team USA contingent is hanging out in the lobby.

 So far the weather is good, just overcast, and I haven't heard any weather reports yet for the weekend.

 Internet access here is pay by the minute...dumb. I'll post more from the track.

Sorry, I still have trouble calling it the MXdN, versus the newer, Americanized Motocross of Nations. Anway, I'm pretty geeked about traveling to Winchester for the event. It's not necessarily the travel. I've done my share over there, but always for BMX (France, Belgium, and England) or mountain bike events, like the Mountain Bike Worlds in Lucca, Italy; or in Aré, Sweden.

Having been to some of those events, I think I have a feel for what this one should be like. Flag-waving, air horns and painted faces for the fans, and national colors for all the teams rather than their usual team gear. There's also the team aspect, rather than individual glory. Watching the teams gel should be pretty cool.

I'm also looking forward to seeing a bunch of the international stars for the first (and in Stefan Everts' case) last time, but I hope he leaves the white tires at home. Colored tired were a bad idea in BMX, a bad idea in mountain bikes, and definitely bad in motocross. But enough on that topic.

Anyway, I'll be posting updates from the track, so be sure to check out the homepage and photo sections. Depending on connection speeds, we may even have some video from there.

 I can't wait.

I just spent a half-hour or so writing up a blog entry in the little window here for something that I was going to post. I've been promising myself that I'd blog more here, sure, partly for content, but partly as an exercise to help stretch my limits a bit further as a writer. 

Well, I think all of us can relate to a time (or several) where we hadn't saved some work on a computer, or had a power outage with unsaved work, and Poof! it was gone. Tonight proved to be one of those for me. I clicked the "Save blog entry" button, and got a message something akin to, "You don't have permission to do that." Basically, my connection had timed out, or I wasn't logged in in the first place.

So my suggestion to you is pretty simple. Either write your stuff offline and copy/paste it into this window, or at a minimum, copy it here before you hit the button and discover something bad happened. 

Hopefully this will prevent someone else from suffering the same fate, and make their time here more fun and productive, because I can't wait to see what you all have to blog about.

GuyB

 

I swear I wasn't looking for a job. But one found me. Until recently, I had a really cool gig wrenching on the web site at TransWorld MX, where I'd spent the last three-and-a-half years. There were a group of guys there that I liked working with, traffic on the site was through the roof, and generally life was pretty good. When I'd first started working on www.transworldmx.com, it was rather neglected, receiving only occasional updates. During the time there we also introduced our Thursday Theater Quicktime videos, which weren't really being done by anyone on a regular basis. For fun (and in my spare time), I was doing a message board called www.motodrive.com. That's when I got a phone call from Brad McDonald. Now Brad and I have a bit of history over the last 20 years or so. Back in…well, let's just say it was a reeeeeallly long time ago, I was the editor at BMX Action magazine, and Brad was an aspiring BMX photographer and business student who would occasionally call me, looking for assignments. Now fast forward a bunch of years. Brad had finished school, started Snap BMX (later renamed TransWorld BMX) and Ride BMX magazines in his bedroom. He grew them into successful titles, and sold them off to Time, Inc., but continued on as their publisher. Later on, he'd started TransWorld MX with Donn Maeda, taken over as group publisher for all the TransWorld titles (including skate, snow, surf, etc.), and when I joined on at TWMX, he'd interviewed me for that position. Weird how stuff had changed over the years.So that's pretty much how things went, until a couple months ago when Brad left his spot at TransWorld Media. Pretty much all we knew at the time was that he was leaving to start a "web company." At the same time, our Associate Publisher, Todd Toth, went with him. That was pretty much the last we'd hear of Brad…or so I thought. Actually, a while later, Brad had e-mailed me a job posting that I had sort of, um, well…ignored. Sure, it was interesting, it was MX-related, and it involved a lot of the same type of stuff that I was already doing, but leave TWMX? That was a tough proposition