Mike took some good pictures of Wally engaged in his favorite passtime - chasing things through the air. Maybe we should have named him Astro instead.

Finally got around to watching this film. Ok, blah blah blah, romantic comedy, etc. All that aside.

It starts off slow, but with a lot of visual comedy - the things out of place or taken too extremes. That’s sort of a fake manipulation until the actual plot starts to unravel, which is half way into the film - after which the cheap gimmicks end.

Basic story, guy hasn’t seen his family in nine years - comes back home because his mother has died. Longer story - guy has been in self imposed exile because of something really bad he did when he was nine and has been on so many drugs for the last 17 years that he doesn’t feel anything at all… and now he’s going cold turkey.

I thought this was a good flick, but as Jason will tell you - I thought Punch Drunk Love was good too - and that was balls to him. Portman is a damn sight better then she was in the starwars movies, and the bong smoking friends and boat at a bottom of a quarry type things was a nice touch.

So - I’d recommend it - it has slow points, but if you can get caught up in the story, you won’t notice. Soundtrack attempts to be very modern and cool, they probably hired a VW pa to put it together or something, it’s almost too slick. I’d guess that for most people, if they go in expecting it to be good - it’ll beat their expectations.

- from an online discussion with a guy who wants to open a nightclub
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4p’s
Product -> what are you going to give to your customers? whats going to seperate your club from others? whats going to make the customers want to keep coming back? etc
Place -> where are you going to set it up? some place easily accessable by a lot of people? designing the layout of the club itself so it makes it easy for your customers to generate you revenue. The bar. etc
Price -> going to have it cheap? then you gotta think about the image and reputation this gives to your business. expensive? makes it look a bit more special but then you put up a barrier to potential clubbers because of said price etc
Promotion -> how and where are you going to advertise your new club so it attracts the target audience you want etc

SWOT
Stengths
Weaknesses
Objectives
Threats

I haven’t posted in a while - pretty much because I was so worn out both physically and emotionally from the daily grind that I didn’t have the extra energy.

So - now I’m a product manager.

In the past, I’d been all about the technology. Now my new focus is about the business case. Like how we bring something together that everybody else could sell and potentially make us all money.

It’s a whole new world. First - it’s a ton of forms. Sometimes the sarcastic side of me thinks the goal is to drown all participants in paperwork until they give up. But there’s actually more to it. At times, it’s some cog-in-the-wheel function. Other times, I’m standing on the cliff edge by myself.

There’s really good days, and really bad days. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m going down in a manic-depressive tornado. One day, I blow through 5 sheets of paperwork, proof engineering diagrams, and send it all down the line. Other days, the most repeated word is “what?”. I wonder how long I can play the “I’m new here, what is this *abc* you speak of” game.

In the long term - I get to design a game that ends with a significant business impact on a $B company. That could be fun. Plus, I’m about three steps closer to the top then I would ever be in the old job.

But in the meanwhile - I learn more about the *business* then I ever would have in my old slot. That should open some windows somewhere down the road.

This headline about some Christians protesting the secularization of Christmas caught my eye as I was perusing the news.

Maybe we should go full circle back to the pagan holiday of Yule for the whole commercial aspect of the season. It would make more sense and possibly offend less Christians.

Quite unusual, I wonder what Chris actually thinks of them?

Mr. Walken - you are welcome to come dance at my birthday party or anytime you damn well please.

I picked up Badasssss! from Netflix while looking for award winning movies that I hadn’t seen yet. It’s suprisingly good, and I didn’t really understand the background until after I’d seen the film.

It’s the actual true story of Melvin Van Peebles, played by his son Mario about the first of the “blacksploitation” films. It’s an amazing story about Melvin’s bravery in making the film and the huge struggle he went through to do it in a way that wouldn’t compromise his goals.

It’s interesting to see the son playing the father and you can tell the things that made a big impression on him during the original events.

This film is more honest then probably anything else that you have watched in the last year. Very well done.

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12/16 -z: Slashdot stole my story again
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Watching this version of the great books on SciFi is kinda sad. It’s like meeting a good old sentimental childhood friend and finding out that he’s become a male prostitute junky.

What’s wrong with these people?

I read the first one when I was about ten. Why take a series that is clean and simple, and has won multiple awards, and is very well known to so many people? But then again, why create that whole shouting weapon voice thing and the original Dune mistake? Steven King once said that after Maximum Overdrive, he made certain he had an artistic veto on the additional novels made into movies. Wish that had happened here.

The EarthSea four-book trilogy (ahem) has won:
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Boston Globe-Horn Book Award
Lewis Carroll Shelf Award 1979
Horn Book honor list citation
American Library Association Notable Book citation
National Book Award for Children’s Books
Nebula Awards (5) (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America)
Newberry Honor
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Better yet, hear what the Author has to say about it.

It’s very cool of SciFi to attempt this project - but why did they have to shit all over it?

It’s like Madeleine L’Engle said when asked if she was suprised about how “A Wrinkle in Time’s TV version came out. “And did it meet expectations?
Oh, yes. I expected it to be bad, and it is.”

Please, Please, Please… hold onto that Phantom Tollbooth until you can keep them from ruining it. Tim Burton might do a nice job.

That he told Tonya (in his sleep) that I wanted to borrow their taco bar. Well, YEA.

My movie workin’ brother has started a blog about that wild and crazy hollywood life.