• This Christmas break, enhanced by the divine convenience of landing on a Monday and Tuesday, was one of gifts, new media and giving. The most novel gift, given me by my girlfriend’s grandmother, was one of those remote control helicopters. Too small and light for any obviously useful purpose like strapping a camera to it as was my first impulse, one is resigned to simply enjoy flying it. I have been doing just this activity, and as I do I continue to be more amazed at the simplicity of such enjoyment.

    I watched three movies over the course of the last weekend. I’ll be discussing all of them here over the next few days. The first to the plate was National Treasure: Another Bad Movie with Nicholas Cage.

    National Treasure: Book of Secrets
    Having watched the original National Treasure only a few weeks before and initially dismissing it as a “poor man’s Di Vinci Code”, for some reason I went in with high hopes for the sequel. I left amazed that a movie with such a budget for special effects spent so little of it on the writing and screenplay. If I watch Transformers and the new National Treasure in the same weekend and find Transformers easier to believe, something is wrong. Now I know that the movie is fiction and based on manufactured stories of treasures and clues and hidden…things, but that basis is not the source of my complaint. The movie asks the readers to believe that a geek can hack, in no perceivable time, the most secure IT infrastructures in both the US and the UK, as well as believe that in England they have no cops patrolling the streets. The enormous amount of damage done to public property during the car chases and break-ins goes unpunished for the hero, nothing more than a rogue historian. The notion that this historian can singlehandedly gain access to, much less kidnap, the president of the United States is laughable. However, all these plot problems aside, in a world where people want to believe in conspiracies and base the believability on the special effects budget and speed of the car chases rather than the evidence and arguments, this movie is bound to be a hit.

  • This video will blow you away.

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fe11OlMiz8[/youtube]

    Merry Christmas

  • I normally dislike blond jokes, and jokes in general are more of an annoyance than anything respectable, but sometimes there are exceptions worth making.

    We sold over 1300 items in Olathe on Saturday, setting a record not for the number of lots but for the number of hours in a Purple Wave auction squarely at 12.5 hours. A long day indeed, we started at 10 a.m. and finished at 10:30 p.m., packed up and came home braving the wintered roads making it back hours after midnight.

    It was the first away auction in a long time that I wasn’t scrambling to make things go correctly. The last auction found me coding well into the third hour of the event before I could relax and know that our item presentation display wasn’t going to break. I could relax at this auction, which went quite smoothly, knowing that the improvements to our systems are starting to pay off.

  • From the May, 2007, show at Bobby T’s with Mason and G.

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAhcVwUzZOQ[/youtube]

  • I was reading my RSS feeds this morning. I finished with the most recent post from my friend Rob’s weblog, entitled Dream Not of Today. The blog post was entitled Boobjob. In it, he referred offhand to the “frozen wastelands of Kansas” and I thought to myself, “what a dickish thing to write about my state”. I turned off my Treo, opened the bathroom door, walked out to the living room and looked outside my Manhattan, Kansas, house.

    2462 2465 2468 2471

    Sections of town were closed off that I, in my eight-year tenure in the Little Apple, had never seen closed. Limbs had fallen on cars. Windows were broken, bonnets crunched. The main power grid was offline for many hours. My sister expects power restoration in days, not hours, as a tree fell on the line coming into her house and is a lower priority than repairs that will themselves restore heat and power to multiple houses.

    I was fortunate to retain power and Internet throughout the day. Spending the day coding and helping friends with their weather-induced hardships, I welcomed the relaxing, though slightly annoying, change of pace.

    I just put up some more videos and pictures of stuff and other things.

  • Here’s Archipelago from Bobby T’s on 4 May 2007.

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsnGMlFo3wM[/youtube]

  • Pictures are posted in the images section from the last three shows.

    Anyone else see a striking resemblance?

    Aaron and Elvis

    In other news, some friends from work had a little fun with some coworkers and me for the Purple Wave Christmas party. For the love of God, do not follow this link.

  • Ok, so I’m still hung up on Charlie Wilson’s War. I’m so excited.

    Winding down at another Purple Wave Christmas. It was a very good one this year. 70+ people in the middle of the war zone that is the renovation on the new Purple Dome. It already feels like home and they don’t even have all the walls put up yet or the offices built. It’s going to be a great year. I look forward to next.