Here is some of the stuff I wrote about the site as I started pimping it on misc boards:

Hi guys,
I thought I’d refer some of my friends from Mud over to a newish community I started called “Hazard Assembly” – Hazard Assembly – The Ultimate Place for Dirtbag Adventuring. It is more oriented towards the guy who sort of does all sorts of adventures so the cruiser is sort of “the tool” rather than the being and the idea is we’ll have skiers and kayakers and MTBers and ideally lots of good times. It’s sort of eco focused to an extent and is really about just having a good time. I figure as the site takes off we should start seeing some really good stories and interesting or hopefully riveting adventures… The irony is we probably have about a couple dozen cruiserheads there already. The whole site is on an old New Mexico license plate… I’ve met a lot of you at particularly Cruise Moab, guys like Beno . I figured it would be right up the alley of a bunch of us…

Hazard Assembly – The Ultimate Place for Dirtbag Adventuring

We also have a gear giveaway going on. Post in this thread.

Cheers, Andre

And here is some misc Hazard Assembly photostream. A little bit of everything…

What is a TBIC site?

Hazard Assembly is the first of a few sites I plan to develop called “TBIC” sites, short for “topic by Internet Community.” It’s basically a publishing platform powered by lots of people, not just a few.  In the case of Hazard Assembly, it is simply a blog that has several users, but the community provides the bulk of the data.  In the long term TBIC will be a software platform that extracts quality data for publishing.

Anyway, WordPress 2.8 is here and the best way to sort of highlight it and what it is and how the back end works (and all the new features) is to post their video about it. I’ve already updated easily 50% of the sites I have running WordPress with it (and it takes about 2 seconds to do, which is another nice feature of it).  Even on a complicated site like www.hazardassembly.com, with all sorts of crazy plugins (for example the site’s entire login feature is powered by vbulletin for example off a completely different database) it upgraded flawlessly and effortlessly.

Here is the video explaining it all.  For the tech geeks out there, enjoy!

Little did I know that I’d made it on some New York Times blogs, be it years ago.  In both cases the original bloggers directly responded to my question/inquiry and in one case even included my original post in the blog itself.

Once in a blue moon I Google myself to see what the world according to Google says about me.  Hey, I admit it.  And everyone does it (or if you don’t, you should — you may not know what the Internet says about you, your habits, & what sites you frequent, etc.).  But it is funny because it truthfully it doesn’t offer much more insight as it pulls extremely diverse data.  In my case I made a post, back in college in 2001 or maybe earlier, about the effectiveness of some sort of device called “beer goggles” meant as a marketing tool to prevent drinking to underage youth.  I said they were counter-productive of course: what college kid wouldn’t strap then on and say “cool!” 

Anyway, several pages in I found two entries I’d made on the New York Times site; one in 2006 and another early this year.  These were comments I made on their blogs. 

The first was a question and response from Andrew Revkin, the Times’ increasingly famous environmental reporter on topics about global warming, the environment.  I was curious about his opinion on a free market approach to solving global warming as at the time, I actually possibly believed Bush about the issue and thought a legislative-down approach might not be the best idea.  This idea had actually been beaten into me from arguing about global warming skeptics on the Expedition Portal vehicle enthusiasts social media site.  Something about car enthusiasts sites yields about 60% fierce conservatives on average, who are usually “non-believers” of global warming policy. However, Revkin shot this I idea down pretty quickly.

The second post intrigued me as the blogger went back and actually added my comments to the blog itself:  Here is The Blog (The Lede on NY Times – big blog!), and the comment. I called out some fully-erroneous reporting by the Los Angeles Times about the premier of Morgan Spurlock’s new film Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden.  Really, was the guy even there?  Did he fall asleep?

Speaking of which, I was lucky enough to quickly meet Spurlock at a party for another film at Sundance Film Festival.  He is an incredibly nice guy and is also very down to earth.  

If you get a chance, also check out Spurlock’s show 30 Days, on the F/X channel.  F/X is putting a lot of really interesting stuff on the air that violates “everything we hate about TV,” aka, it’s “not crap.”   One that comes to mind is Dennis Leary’s awesome, gritty NY comedy/drama, Rescue Me. On Spurlock’s show, he is crazy enough to lock himself up for 30 days for example, just to show what it’s like.  And the last is the critically acclaimed It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia with Danny deVito.  I haven’t seen it, but I hear it’s also raw and gritty, full of curses and sexual content and all sorts of other stuff, a lot Rescue Me though it’s solely a comedy.

An awful pic; I know…

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