This is by far my new favorite video.  Hasn’t Bruce Willis held up well?  I’d lost touch with the Gorillaz, but I’ve got my fan fan cranked up to 11 for Plastic Beach.    Just my fan fan, though; my ACTUAL fan is just sitting idle, as the following data illustrates:

DATE: July 2, 2010
TEMPERATURE: 55 degrees, Fahrenheit
PRECIPITATION: 100%

For those of you who would like to crush my head with a rock for complaining, let me point out that I was born in Southern California.  I like the sun.  I NEED the sun.  I miss the sun.   Here in Seattle, we get 9 months of crappy weather, with 2 months of sun.  This year, no sun at all.

Arg.

Backstory?  OK.

I have a friend who has been traveling outside the U.S. for a couple of months, visiting places like Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand.  He had a blast, but missed certain things, like Starbuck’s and some good red meat.  He called me a couple nights ago, and I told him we were having a BBQ, so he asked me to have a bite for him.

D, here you go.

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Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

My beautiful wife and I have been HP fans since the beginning of the franchise.  I’ve really enjoyed J.K. Rowlings writing, and the movies have been excellent as well.  But most of all, I like the themes that she presents throughout: losing someone is really hard (but you can recover), friendship matters in ways you can’t possibly anticipate, and real magic is just a state of mind.

Not sure about that last part.  Maybe that’s just what I believe.

On a seemingly unrelated note, I’ve never understood why people get tattoos.  Everyone I know has a story of someone who got a tattoo of their boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/canine unit, only to have to scratch it out or tattoo over it later in life.   Ha, I thought to myself, I’ll never do that.  I’ll never permanently mark myself in some way that I might regret later.  Never.

Never!

Mischief Managed

Boeing Museum of Flight Walkway

Last ‘Holiday Season,’ we visited the Boeing Museum of Flight.  By ‘we’, I mean most of the extended family, including my parents, sister, and my brother-in-law.  One of the cliches of living in any town is that you never really visit the attractions nearby.  In my case, that included the Museum of Flight, and I was really happy I finally went.

As museums go, this one is excellent.  There is a fantastic exhibit on the start of aviation, including a very detailed Wright Brothers fabrication shop.  I was amazed by the the wind tunnel that they constructed to test lift of their wing designs, and was further amazed to learn that they actually ‘fixed’ the drag co-efficient algorithm to achieve flight.  There was also an incredible ‘Space’ exhibit, with interactive displays documenting the beginnings of rocketry and the Space Program here in the United States.

Lounging at the museum

As cool as the indoor displays were, my favorite part was outside.  You walk over the adjacent street over this really cool covered walkway, and then, there before you, are an actual British Airways Concorde (that you can walk through!), and a retired Air Force One.  Whoa!

British Airways Concorde - Nose

I had a very difficult time fitting the whole Concorde into a picture.  I was using my cell camera, but that thing is LONG.  L O N G.  Really long.  Walking through was very interesting - the plane is tiny inside by today’s standards.  One very narrow aisle, with two sets on either side.  That’s it.  I have no idea of how the flight attendants managed it, pushing carts laden with Dom Perignon.

British Airways Concorde - Fuselage

Air Force One was equally interesting (and also primitive).  Cabin room seemed almost as restricted, and paled in comparison to modern jet accomodations.  It also reeked stank smelled bad still had the odor of stale cigarettes, 50 years later.

Air Force One

Check out the very cool website for the museum - on top of being an excellent museum, they also have an excellent site.  I highly recommend going there if you are in Seattle.  If you actually live here, don’t wait 30 years like I did.

Boeing Museum of Flight - Kids on the walkway

I work in a fast-paced environment.  My employer (it’s a contract) is a website builder, and the team is made up of five people who all communicate over IM and email.  My ‘b0ss’ is very demanding, and I’ve noticed that he really likes instant status updates.  Looking through my chat logs, I have lots of messages that look like this:

Boss: Try to connect to the server
Me: OK, trying to connect…
Me: Server error, trying a different login…
Me: Connected, running server scripts…

Instant status reports, handed out on a minute-by-minute basis.  Crazy!  But it seems to work.  I’ve learned how to Get The Job Done Right Now, even if I only have 10 minutes to get something important out.  Or, just a blog post.  Like this!

5:07 PM

My high school band director used a great metaphor.  He said that the secret to a great performance is emulating a duck on a pond: on top of the water, the duck just seems to glide serenely across the water.  Underwater, however, the little web feet are paddling like crazy.  My own Father (a physicist) has studied paddling a canoe, and can tell you that there is a fairly massive amount of science that goes into ‘paddling’, so it’s not quite that easy.

And THAT is how I feel: it’s not easy to crank out work that is correct, on-time, and FAST.

5:11 PM

But that’s what I’m doing, both at work and in my own personal life.  I had an assignment due at the University of Phoenix last week, with only 40 minutes left before the deadline.  So, I just waded in, learned the material as quickly as I could, and aced the assignment!  OK, the acing part was a bit of a surprise, but it was proof-positive that it can be done.

Getting a duck image…

duck

Whew!  5:14 PM.  See you tomorrow.

For example:

Shortly after I got laid off  from my job at Adobe Systems, I shot a video of myself creating a snow angel in my backyard.  It was the result of a bet I lost with my beautiful wife.  I used the the song Super-massive Black Hole by Muse, from the Twighlight soundtrack (I’m crazy like that), and I really liked the final result.

Then, YouTube got smarter with tagging.

They STRIPPED MY VIDEO!  Well, lots of videos, actually.  Every ‘unauthorized’ audio track that represented possible copyright infringement was stripped out of EVERY video.   I went to my videos and watched my Goodfather Snowangel, and .. total silence.  It was lame!

Then, YouTube got smarter with tagging.

YouTube RE-INSERTED my soundtrack!  Complete with artist information, copyright info, and a $5.00 bill in the mail!  Actually, I didn’t get 5 bucks.  But, I did get my video back.  And for lack of something interesting to say today, here it is:

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Wow, it’s a mess around here!  I’ve gotta do some house-cleaning.  My ‘big countdown’ got stuck at ‘2′, I should fix that first, I guess.  I’ll try to get it down to ‘1′ by tomorrow, just to see if it will catch up.  Or, perhaps a different number?  Or letter?  I’m trying to figure out what I should put up there, and having a hard time.  Maybe I’ll redesign everything, and go with a whole new theme.

I haven’t really blogged in quite a while, but for those who re-find me, we’re doing fine.  Actually, we’re doing really well, considering the turmoil we’ve experienced over the last year.   I’ll blog about our experiences as I remember, we’ve got tons of pictures, so I’m sure I’ll have lots of inspiration.

But for tonight, I think I’ll just post this picture, from a recent outing to the park near our house.