i am khayyam: Social Retards Dream Big

There were more than 34,000 people from 200 countries that submitted their efforts and wishes to take up a position in the Great Barrier Reef for $150,000 for 6 months.

What I'm speaking of here is the Tourism Queensland's Best Job in the World promotion. Get this, it's a 6 month gig that will land the winner some posh accommodation at the deluxe Hamilton Island Villa.

Job description: Clean the pool, feed the fish, collect the mail and explore the island and report back.

The campaign took off with the viral push from twitter (who are we kidding here, you know it did) and trickled down from there to the point where the site could not handle the traffic and rendered it useless. The overwhelming traffic resulted in more that 2.5 million people going to the site initially. I can't imagine how many they've had now. Probably one of the most successful tourism campaigns of in the history of humankind (did I go too far?). The process for application is to submit a 60 second interview/video that will be shortlisted to 50 by the end of this week. There is also a wildcard based on voting that ends on March 24th.

This weekend alone, over 3000 entries poured in as the cut off date of Feb. 22nd approached.

Admittedly, we are two social retards that are confined to the indoors in the tundra-like and barreness of the cold recesses in northern Canada (Saskatoon, SK). We were sick of the cold and decided in one day (the last day) to shoot and edit. The time difference was 15 hours, which gave us a deadline of 7am and I had less than a few hours to put this together.

I had never used iMovie before but remember playing with it once and making two pictures fade into one another. So I loaded up the videos, imported them, and they didn't show up. I started freaking out. I ran everykind of conversion software there was and re-importing them. #FAIL. Since, Voodoo was already asleep and these were the witching hours, I had to make an executive decision ;) Was one of our other videos approximately 60 seconds? Just upload it in the raw and hope for the best? I could do it...

I ran some 3ivx or Divx codecs, I have no idea what they really do other than sometimes you need and sometimes you don't to watch video. That didn't work. I tried using the camcorder software and it seized up my computer. I just walked away and prayed to something that it would work. I came back and it worked!! The video imported - 4:32am. It was fun looking up tutorials on how to make movies in iMovie just didn't have the time for it. By the way, I commend Apple for providing very comprehensive and useful tutorials in their support section for iMovie ;)

And with 5 minutes remaining on the countdown, I uploaded and submitted the application. I did the same with Voodoo's video as well. We used the same video application since we promote one another and doubled our chances... so we thought. The video file had uploaded and an error came back because the profile pic was in tiff format. So quickly one, twoed a jpg off and hit submit. Problem is is his was delivered past the 11:59pm cutoff. On the island reef job site, it states there are NO EXCEPTIONS with NO DISCUSSION. So I guess that means you up the creek with no paddle.

So, hopefully it made it in before the 11:59pm Australian cut-off and the RIAA doesn't suspend my video because I used copyright materials. They sent me an email and told me that there would be an email in my mailbox this week! Until we get our voting link on the official site, what we can do is present to the jovial application to make for an entertaining motley crue of two that will represent and bring Island life to you.

Please vote us up ★★★★★ on YouTube. Thanks to you!