Cameron Olthuis

This just happened down the street from my house, a San Diego man was attacked by a shark this morning and bled to death. Apparently this is the first fatal attack in 50 years in my area. This is pretty scary considering I was just about to paddle out for a surf.

I have never really worried about attacks around here just because they are so rare. I guess now I will have something to be cautious of. This is sad news and my thoughts go out to this man’s family.

All you business and website owners listen up and listen well. Avante Gardens, an Anaheim Florist, is going to school you on building loyal customers, links, and positive buzz all in one shot….

So how many of you remember my story about FTD Sucks and how they screwed me over on Valentine’s Day? If you don’t the click over and read it really quick so you can be up to speed.

So, there is this super bad-ass floral shop up in Anaheim that took notice of my post and decided they’d use my bad experience to their advantage to win over a new customer, me. Shortly after I checked into my hotel for SMX I got a knock on my door. It was a room service dude that had a bouquet of flowers for me. At first I thought maybe I had a secret admirer that wanted some lovin’ or maybe the SMX crew was just going the extra mile for their speakers. Nope, I was wrong. The following note was included in the flowers…

Dear Cameron, After reading your plight with FTD during Valentine’s Day, I just want to put in a plug for local florists. I’m looking forward to your presentation.

Wow! My heart melted. I was in love. I thought this was one of the coolest things ever and couldn’t believe someone remembered and cared about little ol’ me.

I just snapped that pic of me with the flowers. The ladies tell me that’s a super nice bouquet. Huge thank you to Avante, you effin rock and I love you.

Hope you all learned something. This would have been a great opportunity for FTD to step to the plate and make good with me… they didn’t and now they can kiss my badonkadonk. I will never order from that piece of crap company again and have told as many people as possible not to as well. They obviously don’t care about their customers. Now, on the flip-side - you all know a good florist.

I meant to post this a couple days ago when my buddy Brent broke the news. I was at SMX though and didn’t get around to it. Pretty cool stuff though that Brent was able to scoop this story. Reddit has been long overdue for an update on features and their UI. So check out the new Reddit UI and features… then make sure you tell your friends that Brent the pimp broke the news.

For all you skiers: Simon Dumont set a new world record for the biggest quarter-pipe air EVAR!!

Chalk one up for the skiers….

Aw, the joys of running a content site. I’d almost forgotten how bad it gets with people ripping off your content and reposting it on their own sites word-for-word. This last weekend I’ve spent countless hours chasing down these villains and trying to get them to remove our original work. It gets time consuming and because we have a relatively new site that doesn’t have a ton of authority with Google, I actually do worry about it quite a bit. I’ve already noticed a few that show up above us in the SERPs and that is no-bueno.

This is something I’ve never really worried about too much with this blog. Mostly because it’s my personal blog and I don’t monetize it, nor do I have plans to ever do so. So now I have another hat to wear at my company, content police. Although I have to admit, I do slightly enjoy it when I find their phone numbers and I can actually call these people. It’s pretty funny.