Here is a small and disappointing exchange between my hosting provider Bluehost which I have been a customer of for the past 5 years:

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[EMAIL:]
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Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 4:51 PM
to: support-other@bluehost.com.

Hello, I’ve experienced the SECOND blackout for my server within 3 days of the last event. I’m just about ready to take my business elsewhere simply because I CAN NOT afford to have my website go down. Its simple economics, and I am beginning to feel very upset that despite the fact that I’ve actually recommended your service to several of my clients and have been a customer for years now and I am still be charged for this inadequate service. You can’t tell me that this is to be expected, or that it can’t be avoided. The server should NEVER go down without prior notice. If you don’t have contingencies for what seems like a repeat problem, then I can’t continue to do business with you.

Now, what I need from you are several compelling reasons why I should stay with you, which I would be happy to report to my contacts at several publications because I am simply outraged. I never thought I would be in a situation where your company let me down.

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This was their warm and personal response.

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[EMAIL:]
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Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 5:01 PM

Makana,

I apologize for the inconveniences you’re experiencing as a result of this and I am sorry if you did not receive prior notification or warning. I’d also like to say personally that I wish I could do more than apologize to you.

I encourage you to send your thoughts and concerns to feedback@bluehost.com — this goes directly to our managers and I know for certain that they read and reply to every email send to that address.

Our administrators are hard at work to get everything resolved and get the servers back online as quickly as possible.

Let us know if there’s anything else can do for you.

Thank you,
Sean
Level I Tech Support Engineer
BlueHost.com
888.401.4678

Most questions can be answered by articles in our forum, knowledgebase, and video tutorials:

Forum: http://www.bluehostforum.com
Knowledgebase: https://www.bluehost.com/cgi/help
Tutorials: http://www.bluehost.com/tutorials/
Server Status: http://serverstatus.bluehost.com/

When you have a new question or issue, please open a new support ticket.

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They simply passed the buck and didn’t even have the common sense to forward the message to their managers. I did not contact feedback@bluehost.com and I’m telling the internet about this exchange so when people consider bluehost they can know what to expect even if they’re a loyal customer. I did send this response back to support@bluehost.com:

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[EMAIL:]
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Thank you for your response,

Since you’ve decided that this wasn’t important enough for you to forward, so I’ve forwarded it to the internet via several publications and blog websites.

All you had to do was forward this email, but in response I’m flexing the collective consumer power since you believed me to be one consumer with a problem its fine if you lose one but I wonder if you’ll lose 50,000, 100,000, 300,000 customers because I’ve shared my disappointing customer service experience.

Hands down, I’m the customer, I pay money in exchange for your services, so when it comes to forward an email to have a problem rectified it is, in fact, your job to do so, regardless of what you’ve been instructed. I have already done my part in funding the company by paying for those services.

Just so you know, at $100 per person, a loss of 100,000 customers is $10 million loss. Losing 10,000 customers equals $1 million. Can the company afford to pass on those and future sales? Is forwarding one email worth a million dollars to you or your managers? We’ll find out.

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Final thoughts:

I feel like there must be a protocol there at Bluehost and either they’re sorely managed, or they are at an economic equilibrium with their current clientele. My account was recently renewed 1 month before expiration with charges being made to my credit card. It was reasonable considering that it was “automated,” but their automated response, or designated protocol, to a problem from a customer was disappointing. A click of a button was either too much effort for Chris, or was not in his instructions.

This has happened to me dozens of times but this time I had to do something about it. Paying $100 a year for a shared rack mounted server in Utah doesn’t line up. The overhead cost is miniscule to the company (its even lower if there are frequent blackouts). My point is that the majority of that money is to pay for support for problems like this and investigating what happened and also informing your customers of your findings, you know, following through… as if you were the absolute best in your field. Sadly, I’ve experienced that Bluehost operates well below the status quo among many other businesses yet they appear unscathed or without consequence simply because there isn’t much accountability, so I’ve spent 45 minutes drafting these remarks for other potential consumers to consider when shopping for a hosting provider.

I recently upgraded my DSLR body to a Nikon D7000 and I love this camera! I learned a lot from using the D50, and thankfully I was able to bestow it to a great guy I work with because he and his wife want to begin taking pictures of their family as their kids are starting to grow up.

Alright, one of the main reasons that I upgraded is because I wanted a more robust body and more importantly I wanted to capability to shoot video in HD with my Nikon optics. My previous solution for achieving cinematic quality video was using the Red Rock Encore. Though it’s audio capability was superior to the D7000, I recently “discovered” a feature on the D7000 that reassures my decision to buy this camera: Custom Exposure Curves, or the basic look of ungraded scanned 35mm film.

This allows a great latitude when you want to apply very fine color grading or correction to your images, and more pertinent for me, great latitude for digital visual effects.

What I used was the Nikon proprietary software (available for free included by disk with purchase, or via the Nikon USA website). The software is called ViewNX2 and when you open this app you have to then locate (via top of screen menu [in the File menu for Mac]) “Picture Control Utility”.

To create your own custom Color Profile select one of the presets (I always use Landscape) then to the right of that list of presets click the radio button for “Manual Adjust” then just below that click the radio button for “Use Custom Curve”.

Now you can access a Photoshop-like curve plugin interface. I made two settings:

• (LOG_SPACE_G2) Black output of 10 (left vertical boxes) and a gamma of 2.00 (bottom row, center cell)
• (LOG_SPACE) Black output of 10 and a gamma of 2.40

I use LOG_SPACE_G2 because it has of the lower gamma. When I use the setting with a gamma of 2.4 then it starts to bring out some of the flaws in the sensor’s shadow capabilities.

Now that you’ve created a custom curve you need to click the button on the bottom right of the Picture Control Utility window that says, “New…” then give your Color Profile a name.

Next, plug in an SD card via some kind of card reader then in Picture Control Utility click on the button that says, “Export…” it will prompt you to save your color profile to a list of empty slots. Save your profile to any open slot. If this is your first profile, then use slot 1.

You can then eject your SD card and insert it into your D7000.

In your D7000, make sure you’re in full manual mode, or “M” and then go into your Menu, in the Shooting Menu category (camera icon) then select “Manage Picture Control” > “Load/save” > “Copy to camera”.

Select the color profile that you saved to your SD card, then you’re in business!

In your menu, select “Shooting Menu” > “Set Picture Control”  then scroll to your custom exposure  and select it. You’re now shooting in a “Faux Log” color space.

Note: This only works in full Manual mode.

Nikon Website:

http://support.nikonusa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/61#Anchor-1

Logarithmic Color Space and how to work with them in Adobe After Effects:

http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/cineon-files-what-they-are-and-how-to-work-with-them

Knowing that Stereo 3D is in such high demand I decided to do a little R&D.This was a pretty simple process when going out of CG. The method for fixing live action stereo footage is post is extremely complicated, but there are surprisingly efficient workflows and tools already with NukeX and Ocula. I learned all about the value of convergence points and objects coming out of the glass or receding backward. This clip has the front cubes coming through the glass which is typically gimmicky but I’ll know for next time.

This was an extremely exciting project and I’m looking forward to doing many more projects like this.

I used Cinema 4D R11.5, SVI Editor, and NukeX.

Here’s another test I did with the new Mograph 2 dynamic engine in Cinema 4D. With a little help from Image Lounge in After Effects I think this was a pretty good test. It was a little tricky to get the right amount of bounce light coming in from the window in the back and balancing the correct intensity for the depth of field.

Overall, the modeling and simulation was a breeeze! I’m a big fan of the new Mograph 2.

Just got the newest version of Cinema 4d (R11.5) and I’ve been experimenting with the new Mograph 2 dynamics. Still a little more exploring to go but ultimately super easy to setup and speedy simulation!

More to come soon.

Pete Sapadin recruited me for this project with Robin Orr at RamPad. This was a little nod to my background in marching percussion so I agreed to help them develop a little promotional piece for their booth at the WGI World Championships this year in Dayton, Ohio.

This truly was a test to my skill in how I was able to shoot, edit, and finish within 12 hours. I feel that with all things considered this promotional video really hit the mark for what Robin needed this week.

www.rampad.com

This was a great project that I worked on with Ned Farr of Red Road Studios. Ned is a talented independent filmmaker and this newest film, ‘A Marine Story’ is his newest installment in his line of fantastic stories and I’m proud to have been involved.

I worked with Ned on a few compositing shots that he needed, some clean up and some fun shots like adding paintballs whizzing past the camera, sign replacements and explosions. This was an interesting look into the DI process of the RED camera workflow and experiencing the full exploits of the 16bit per channel world.

Here are a few of the challenging shot break downs. For each of these shots there were about a half dozen other subtle treatments that were difficult to exhibit but these are to show the effects at a glance.

Here is a bumper that I came up with to tack on to the end of some of my long form pieces.

Here’s a music video that I worked on back in February with Harder Studios. This was tied in with the new Alice in Wonderland film by Tim Burton. It was very interesting working in the editorial department with a good friend of mine, Lee Gardner where we worked with over 9 hours of footage shot on RED with some footage from the Canon 7D mixed in. Very bold costumes and wardrobes choices were the images on my screen.

This studio is definitely an artist’s haven with half of their studio devoted to paint and sculpture and the other to motion graphics and CG.

(Looks best in Fullscreen)

This is a little banner I worked on for an old site I used to run.

Thought it would be fun to bring in some photos I took years ago and basically throw everything in a bowl, mix it up and see if I could make something presentable.

Its funny looking back on my exploits from when I used to work on this website all the way back in 2004. I had been given free hosting through a friend with a whopping 300MB of storage! Boy what a treat!

I was able to provide content from some of the more exclusive upper level percussion groups which ranged from MP3 recordings, to actual sheet music that was in high demand. It got me to a point where when I would go to a drum corps show people would come up to me and timidly ask if I was the guy that runs RLRR.com. With hardly any more marketing than a mention on a friend’s website and word of mouth I received about 80,000 unique visitors over a period of 3 years and over 2 million hits.

Overall my thoughts: fun little project! Didn’t really have a plan going into it but I just thought “its too clean, it needs some dirt.” Then I just kept adding dirt, then the sunburst then I felt like it started to get a little motion and although this is a primarily warm/yellow piece I feel like it moves well with a lot of energy.