There are tons of great acts this year (Kings of Leon, anybody?), including one band in particular which is very near and dear to the hearts of us living in The Shoals – Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit.  They’re not the only ones who have close ties to the home of our Tennessee Valley headquarters, but what ties they do have would probably be considered the closest.  If you are/were a fan of Drive-By Truckers and wanna give these guys a listen, you can check them out on Spotify and LastFM.

Now, view these random photos from Hangout Fest (including some good shots of our Confetti gear like the CryoFetti System, which you can get right here):

The post Photos From Hangout Fest! was written by Jamey Austin and appeared first on Global Special Effects. Global Special Effects - The Best Choice For Special FX!

Right now, during the month of May, you can purchase a CO2 Cryo-Jet and GET A SECOND ONE FOR HALF-PRICE!

That’s right, you heard it here.  Buy 1 Cryo-Jet, get the 2nd half-off.  Please place your orders via phone by calling our office at (256) 229-5551 and speaking with Kathy, Mike, or Mark.

You can also email them by clicking their names (above), or you can place your order here on the website — just be sure to remind them about the offer when they follow up with you to collect payment information.

Our Cryo-Jets are kind of like Lay’s potato chips.  Nobody buys just one.  So hurry up, and take advantage of this offer while it lasts!

Click here to view all of the FogMasters products by Global Special Effects.

The post May Dubbed as Carbon Dioxide Awareness Month was written by Jamey Austin and appeared first on Global Special Effects. Global Special Effects - The Best Choice For Special FX!

This is somewhat of a rant blog that we’ve been holding onto for quite sometime until the time came to post it, and now we feel that the time has come:

A [somewhat] recent L.A. Times article reported a story about a man who we now recognize as a competitor…a charming young fellow, who got his start as a humble stage magician and went on to create evaporating snow.  His snow business really took off, thus opening the door into the special effects industry, which he made his home, where he now markets this amazing product to Hollywood and other related industries…This guy started out as a stage magician, but couldn’t come up with a suitable fake snow effect for his performances, so he set out to create his own.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” (as the character on the left would say)…doesn’t this sound a little too familiar?  We’ve been scratching our heads for weeks around here trying to put our finger on why this story didn’t exactly sit well with us, and after we had all been successfully treated by a professional for acute-onset deja-vu, we realized that – lo and behold – this was the exact same personal life story of our own president Francisco Guerra, himself!

The article really goes into detail about the events of how this competitor got to where he is now and the processes he went through while coming up with this amazing idea for evaporating snow.  We found the uncanny series of events to be quite hilarious, while at the same time, a tad-bit infuriating.  Please let us explain something, just to set the record straight for those who might be unaware:

Evaporative Snow® is a registered trademark of Global Special Effects, Inc.

Francisco Guerra, President and CEO of Global Special Effects, is the original and sole inventor of Evaporative Snow, which he created in the early 1990′s in order to come up with a better artificial snow solution for his magical act.  (Francisco was formerly a famous touring stage magician, very well-known by Las Vegas and industry professionals, such as this stranger standing to his left.  Oh wait, never mind…that’s David Copperfield.)

After months of lab testing and experimentation, Francisco came up with a proprietary solution that worked perfectly.  Demand for this effect spread quickly throughout the entertainment industry, and SnowMasters Evaporative Snow Systems™ was born.

Within a few short years, SnowMasters™ snow machines had become the Hollywood standard.  Requests started coming in for other types of special effects, so eventually SnowMasters blossomed into what is now known as Global Special Effects™.  SnowMasters Evaporative Snow and snow machines are today not only the Hollywood standard, but the world standard.  With distributors in more than 24 different countries worldwide, Global Special Effects is pretty confident that people will know who to call when they need snow — and that also goes for real snow (yes, we have also done real snow for years, as well.)

When certain Hollywood special effects companies and devoted users and distributors of SnowMasters Evaporative Snow got wind of this LA Times article, they immediately forwarded it to Francisco, apparently in hopes that he would be able to hunt down his own doppelgänger before it was too late.

Maybe it’s all a big coincidence, sort of like how Francisco Guerra’s biography mirrors the origin and quick rise to success of fellow Cuban immigrant and self-made man, Tony Montana.  Who knows?

All we’re really trying to do here is protect our reputation as the special effects industry leaders who set the standard for others to follow.  We’re not bitter about this situation, we’re just trying to let these guys know they’ve now found themselves staring down the barrel of a pretty overwhelming dose of competition…and in the words of Uncle Si, “hey – if you mess with the bull, you gon’ get the horns, Jack.”

The post Impostor! Impostor! We’re Setting the Record Straight About Evaporative Snow was written by Jamey Austin and appeared first on Global Special Effects. Global Special Effects - The Best Choice For Special FX!

We have stepped foot into a wild, new frontier for GSE – the world of Amazon e-commerce!

Many of you will recall how we have been persistently trying to make our products available for immediate purchase on the web without having to go through a sales associate.  This has proven quite difficult for our specific situation, because we sell such a wide variety of products that ship via various methods to locations all over the world.

After much experimentation, we finally came to the conclusion that the WordPress framework was just utterly incapable of providing a sufficient shopping cart that could adequately manage our needs.  Therefore, we switched to a Shopify-based website that was custom-coded in order to perfectly manage the products that we could sell and ship immediately over the web, while displaying the ones which required a sales follow-up.

However, the Shopify website received mixed reviews from staff, and we went back to the old format.  We are now offering a completely different approach.  While our website will become more Amazon-oriented in the future, as of right now, there are 3 completely different ways to purchase our products:

1. Order by phone by calling (256) 229-5551
2. Place an immediate web order via our Amazon storefront
3. Place an order on our website, which will take your order and contact information, and a sales associate will follow up with you to take payment information over the phone.

There are a couple reasons why ordering via phone or our website would be a better idea, including the possibility of getting a discount for ordering in bulk or based on your shipping location, since shipping is built into the Amazon prices, which allows the instant checkout without a follow-up.  Otherwise, you can now feel free to save yourself some time and hassle, and get your stuff immediately!

If you have any questions about products, feel free to email Kathy, Mark, or Mike, and they will be more than happy to help!

Click here to go to the Global Special Effects Amazon Storefront.

The post FREE SHIPPING on ALL GSE Products NOW on AMAZON.COM! was written by Jamey Austin and appeared first on Global Special Effects. Global Special Effects - The Best Choice For Special FX!

Well, we finally had time to fix the ridiculous-looking space at top of our website that was only showing up in Google Chrome (for some reason.)  It happened after we upgraded to the newest version of PHP, and it took a lot of Firebugging…although we obviously had to use Chrome’s editor to get it sorted out.

Other News:

Global Special Effects, Inc. to Become a Microsoft Partner

We’re “this close” to becoming an official Microsoft partner, which will probably be finalized sometime this week.  More on this soon.

GSE Achieves Ultimate Deliverability and Fights Spam by Making the “Google Switch”

We have finally made the official switch to Google Apps for Business for sending and receiving email.  It was a long and difficult process to have been completed in such a short time, (with “short time” being a highly-relative term, depending on who speak to!)  For our specific situation, Google’s official documentation said it should take around 90 days on average, and we came in somewhere around a month.

BUY 3, GET 1 FREE SALE ON ALL FOAM FLUID!!!

For a limited time, we are having a sale on all foam fluid.  For every 3 gallons you purchase, we’ll give you one for free.  Even on the 5 gallon sizes!  To take advantage of this special offer, please call our office at (256) 229-5551, or email Mark, Mike, or Kathy.

More updates really soon.  Promise!

The post Updates! …and FREE FOAM! was written by Jamey Austin and appeared first on Global Special Effects. Global Special Effects - The Best Choice For Special FX!

So apparently, we got a bit mixed up when composing the newsletter that went out today.

The link was supposed to be “howsecureismypassword.net” (like we referenced in our previous blog post)…not the link that we actually posted, which was…yeah, right.  We’re not giving them anymore traffic!

Yeah.  It was definitely pornography, and definitely unintentional.  Sorry guys!

The post China Got Us (sorry for the porn link…) was written by Jamey Austin and appeared first on Global Special Effects. Global Special Effects - The Best Choice For Special FX!

Global Special Effects has been on a heightened state of alert this week after multiple intrusion attempts on our main network at our headquarters in Lexington, Alabama.  Apparently, these hackers had absolutely no idea what they were doing, because all attempts were unsuccessful and will hopefully bring much shame to the Chinese hacking community, seeing as how unprepared we were for such a thing.

We never considered ourselves much of a target, so we never really took much precaution against something such as a secure shell intrusion.  Normally, it would not be much of a problem, seeing as how we are on a Windows-based network, and Windows Server doesn’t even support SSH by default.  However, we also run OSX Mountain Lion Server in our Marketing/Design/Web Development Departments, and the SSH port was NAT forwarded to that server.  Provided, the hackers would technically have access to our files through this more-comfortable UNIX environment, the important stuff is still stored on our Windows-based servers — which means that even if they could possibly gain access to the Windows environment, they would still have to scan the dozens of computers on the local network and figure out which one was the one they actually needed access to.  Not an easy task.

Fortunately for us, they were too dumb to even figure out our ridiculously-insecure password, which according to howsecureismypassword.net, could be cracked instantly.  So obviously these guys had no idea what they were doing.  They didn’t even try to login as root.  Such amateurs!

Luckily, our Director of Marketing & Design keeps an instance of the constantly-updated OSX system log directly viewable on his desktop via the handy GeekTool application for Mac, so he was actually keeping an eye on this embarrassing debacle as it was taking place in real time.  Chinese hackers apparently work under the cover of darkness.  Unfortunately for them, it was broad daylight over here.  Sorry ’bout that.  Better luck next time?

On a more serious note, we have actually traced the IP address to an actual host, and we have reason to believe that it belongs to a translation company based in Shanghai.  It appears as if they were trying to obtain our product design documents in order to translate them for a third party, who could then rip off our intellectual property and sell extremely cheap, low-quality versions of our products for next-to-nothing and make loads of profit from it — a situation that is running rampant in China right now, and continues to be a growing problem for product designers and manufacturers here in the U.S.

Let us pause right here and make an important note:  Currently, every single Global Special Effects product that is intended for professional use is 100% made in the U.S.A., manufactured by our own hands right here in our Lexington, Alabama facility.  Some of our products that are made for mass retail, such as The Amazing Snowman, are manufactured in China, but as you guys have seen in the past, we are completely transparent about that, and love posting photos of our facilities there.

The distinction we are trying to make is that we actually have offices in China, run by people we know personally, and we travel to those facilities very frequently to oversee the manufacturing process in order to give direction and to make sure the products are built according to our standards, whereas on the other side, it has been a growing concern for companies like us, that our products are being blatantly ripped off, being copied (very poorly) in Chinese factories, and being sold very cheaply in order for thieves to profit off of the ideas of others — profit which might have otherwise gone to the original product designers.

However, some of our own personal product engineers in China have recently developed some pretty outstanding professional machines that we are actually considering selling right now…because frankly, they are so impressive that they will blow your mind.  These specific prototypes were developed according to our standards in materials and manufacturing, and because they originated in China rather than here in the U.S., we will probably manufacture those certain machines overseas, because it will obviously be cheaper than “outsourcing” to the United States.

So you see, we obviously don’t have a problem with Chinese manufacturing in general, although we frequently see many, many cases of shoddy craftsmanship and stolen intellectual property in disguise that comes directly from that region of the world — an issue that hits very close to home for us, because it has directly affected us, as well as our sister company, LMP Inc., who is currently on the verge of a national press release concerning this exact situation that involves one of their closest intellectual property clients.

All that being said, we have consequently forwarded our SSH port to one that will be much harder to figure out, and we have changed both the root passwords for our main network server, as well as our web server (since CPanel was recently compromised by hackers as well), to an easy-to-remember string of characters that will take approximately 578 septillion years to crack, according to howsafeismypassword.net.

The post GSE Response to Chinese Cyber Threat: “Denied.” was written by Jamey Austin and appeared first on Global Special Effects. Global Special Effects - The Best Choice For Special FX!

So we’ve been extremely busy around here lately, which is the reason there hasn’t been a blog post in so long.  Many of you received our newsletter last week, which gave you some ideas of things we have in store for you in the very near future.

There are a several very big things that have happened recently that we have not had time to cover, most importantly our deal with Delta Fan, the largest fan manufacturer in the world — but those topics will require their own blog posts.  In this post, we will try to briefly go over a few details of some pretty crazy stuff, so that you guys will be back in the loop.

New Dedicated Server!

Many of you probably read our most recent post about us and our partner sites making the switch from shared hosting to our own dedicated server.  Don’t bother looking for that post now; it was only posted as a temporary update to clue you in on what was going on over here.  That was the last post we made from our shared hosting account, and it was of course deleted after the switch, because we had to restore from a backup that was generated before the post was written.  We also experienced a little bit of unexpected downtime, because we ran into some DNS issues and had to wait for the new settings to propagate,  but all is well now!

Web Hosting???

Our new server is quite a hoss, indeed.  The best part is that we made some new connections and partnerships during this whole procedure, and now we are able to utilize the resources of our data center in order to provide our own web hosting.  We will be able to offer dedicated server, cloud server, and VPS hosting solutions immediately, and if you plan on migrating a group of websites that need to pay for themselves, we will also probably be able to setup a shared hosting environment, as well.  Contact jamey@globalspecialeffects.com with your requirements, and he’ll provide you with a custom quote.

Let’s Talk Speed…

If you’ve noticed our website acting kind of funky during the past week, it’s because we’ve been optimizing it for speed.  We had previously been using a combination of settings that were optimized for a shared hosting environment, but now that we’re on a dedicated server, we decided to open up the throttle and push this baby to the limit!

We did exhaustive testing and benchmarking to see what settings would work the best, and we now believe everything to be fairly well-optimized for performance.  Included in our testing was the new mod_pagespeed Apache module, created by the Google development team.  It sounded like it could be an all-in-one quick-fix solution, however, it turned out to be quite a nightmare for our setup.  We are running so much custom code and modifications on this site, that there was no way that it could work perfectly out of the box by using the default settings.  After realizing it would take months to debug, we decided to use multiple solutions to create the ultimate speed demon.

Anyone familiar with web development knows that it’s hard to beat the speed created by the reverse proxy and http accelerator combination of Nginx and Varnish.  However, there are also numerous things that are handled better by Apache.  Well, we figured out a way for all three of those fellas to play nice together, and they’re responsible for the back-end speed we’re experiencing now as a result of their nice cooperation.

We also serve all of our static content such as scripts and images from two different content delivery networks, simultaneously.  The CDN content is located on multiple servers distributed all around the world, and delivers content from the servers located closest to where the request originates, which means you will always receive fast content, no matter where you are located.

On top of that, we added several different types of caching to our website, and combined with the CDN, we have been able to reach the speeds that you can witness for yourself in the image above.  Please note that this was not just a one-off result.  We saw these same results numerous times.  What you are witnessing is absolutely amazing.  We are serving up a 1MB page in 872 milliseconds.  For those of you out there who are not mathematicians, that is more than 1MB/s.

Of course these results can vary, based on location, browser, broadband speed, etc., but these are the average results, which is pretty astounding.  We were even getting 1.2 seconds from Amsterdam!  Our website should not take more than 3.5 seconds to load on your very first visit, and that’s on a completely empty cache, which you might experience while we are conducting maintenance and/or debugging.  For every subsequent visit, depending on how warm the cache is, you should be seeing speeds at just over half-a-second.  We are proud of this!

What’s even more amazing is the fact that our partner company, LMP Inc, is getting the exact same results within a couple milliseconds, and their page is twice the size of ours!  We believe the reason for this is that they were able to utilize enhanced APC opcode caching on their site, and the opcode just doesn’t want to play nice with our site.

We’re also jealous of their performance grade, which is 92, compared to our 87 — but the 87 was expected, because we had to break a few “best practice” rules in order to squeeze the juice to its limit.

Speaking of juicy, we have much more news to tell you about, so keep checking back often, because it’s about to get juicy!

The post Finally! Some Updates! was written by Jamey Austin and appeared first on Global Special Effects. Global Special Effects - The Best Choice For Special FX!

Check out this photo of GSE Superhero Mike Giles and his new best buddy, The Amazing Snowman.  Apparently, they travel everywhere together, and sometimes Mike even lets him drive.

The Amazing Snowman is our most affordable Evaporative Snow machine.  It is also an awesome Christmas decoration for your yard.  It’s our first snow machine intended for non-professional use, and it has gotten quite a big response.

Click here to see a video of Mike’s house this past Christmas, featuring his new pal.

The post Mike’s New Friend was written by Jamey Austin and appeared first on Global Special Effects. Global Special Effects - The Best Choice For Special FX!

Here are some statistics to think about, some of which will allow us to re-evaluate some things to make our website more user-friendly and accessible to certain users, while expanding on some popular areas of the Global Special Effects website:

• In 2012, globalspecialeffects.com was accessed by visitors in 159 countries.

That’s more than 81% of the countries in the world.  When you take into account the fact that over 30 of those countries had less than 100,000 total internet users in 2011, this statistic becomes even more impressive.

• If our website was Maroon 5 playing at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, it would take more than 6 sold-out performances for the number of fans to equal the number of website visitors we had in 2012.

• Nearly 85% of our entire blog consists of posts from 2012, further showing what a big year this was for us.

• Surprisingly, our busiest website traffic day of the entire year was June 26th – not even during our ‘busy season’.

• Our 2 most popular products in 2012 were the Flogos-Lite and Flogos Stencils.

• Our top 5 search queries were ‘flogos’, ‘global special effects’, ‘snowmasters’, ‘flogo’, and quite-surprisingly, ‘the beatles love’.

We hope you’ve enjoyed these random statistics.  Just to put our current web status into perspective, we currently have 3 Bluehost Pro shared hosting accounts that host the GSE website and most of Global Special Effects’ Partners – including Guerra Holdings, LMP, Inc., Global Home, Tech Stars, SendCity, FX Direct, and The Cosmic Waterhole — and we’ve now outgrown all 3 accounts.

We’re now looking into Virtual Private Server hosting solutions, and even dedicated server plans (leave a comment if you have any web host suggestions; we’ve already ruled out HostGator, and the current front-runners are Hostv and Dreamhost)…and by the way, if we get a dedicated server, there is a 99% chance that we will start our own web hosting company this year.  So stay tuned for that one.

We’re definitely looking forward to what 2013 holds for Global Special Effects.

The post GSE Website: A Year in Review was written by Jamey Austin and appeared first on Global Special Effects. Global Special Effects - The Best Choice For Special FX!