Well for 21 weeks now, I’ve been giving you stuff you don’t want to MISC, which is my cheesy way of doing a weekly summary of stuff usually not important enough to be its own blog entry.  Some people use “Bullet Sundays” some have a “snacking” of various sorts, and others even do video.

This week I thought I’d mix it up. I thought maybe I’d MISC my own entry!  That’s right!  Sunday went by and no weekly summary from Wayne.  Were you all impressed with how creative I can be?  See how I turned it around?  Clever, eh?  I sensed thousands of you sitting at your computer waiting for my post and HA I tricked you!

Ahem, ok, well, on with your regularly-scheduled thought-provoking and incongruous hilarity.

The Orchestra Concert was awesome!

I don’t think any other student had more people at her Orchestra concert than Caitlin.  We had twelve people there.  TWELVE!  And the music was amazing; simply amazing.  When you get the best of the best together, and they spend a couple days practicing with one of the best conductors around, it fails to matter that the musicians are in middle school.  It fails to matter that they’re at the beginning of their journey into true excellence.  It fails to matter that they’re entering puberty. 

I simply could not tell that I was listening to 13 year olds.

And then a couple of us stayed to listen to the High School Orchestra — and as you’d surmise, it’s made up of the best of the best of the high school aged chillen, and BOY were they good.  And I got a special treat in that they played a couple movements from Pictures at an Exhibition.  This song is special for me because back in *my* high school days, our band played a superb adaptation of this song as our marching band song and won several awards for it.  The music brought back many pleasant memories of practicing, marching, goofing off, and excelling with my fellow band members.  I can still sing and recite every word of the “Hallway of Men” song.

Car fire on Parmer Lane

Here’s 13 seconds of a car fire I encountered on Saturday right before Caitlin’s concert.  This is my first successful youtube upload with my Samsung S730 camera.  I’m very impressed with the quality of video from such a small, cheap ($99) camera.  It’s 7.2 megapixels, too!  (battery life sucks though)

Next

We watched Next, that movie with Nicholas Cage about a guy who can see two seconds minutes into the future.  I absolutely loved it!  I highly enjoy movies that take quite a bit of thinking and really good writing in order for things to come out right in the end.  It reminded me of the movie Primer - I mean, the writer had to really spend a LOT of time making sure things work out.

I’m thinking that kind of plot device could easily be made into a TV series.  And when I say easy, I mean it would be a success if it was done well.  It would be very difficult to write for and to come up with original story lines, but I know I’d watch it.

The movies special effects were great, Jessica Biel was hot, it had great action, it stimulated the brain, and I stayed interested throughout the entire movie.  What more could you ask for?

Well, I guess I could have gone without the Clockwork Orange flashback.  Ewwwwww *shudders*

Cabling and Recabling

A co-worker of mine and I spent many hours up at work this past weekend during our big remodeling project for the Austin facility.  One of the things we knocked out was a significant portion of re-cabling for our facilities.  We’re not done yet, but you can probably judge for yourself how much of an improvement we made:

Before:

After:

Man it just plain feels better to have it looking good.  The spaghetti is more well formed.  We still have a few loose ends to tie up (as you can see) but those require a well-planned-ahead maintenance window.

*content sigh* there’s just something about a well-organized cabling architecture that gets me all warm and fuzzy.  Here’s the new rack we put in, minus some key horizontal cable management (still on order) but before we get any more cables in, we’ll have the cable mgmt in and we will be looking prett-ty spiffy.

Jaden’s writing

How sweet is this. He wrote ‘elephant.’  *sniff*

I just realized I forgot to leave a comment congratuating Caitlin! Congrats, Caitlin!

And, Wayne, zomg, BEAUTIFUL CABLING JOB! (You know I mean it.)

The Jadengram is adorable. :)

There was a show like Next. It was called Tru Calling.

I can’t say that I “misc”-d you ’cause I’ve been a bad visitor lately.
Congrats to Caitlen! Wow.
I haven’t seen “Next”, but heard it got bad reviews. I have, however, seen “Tru Calling”… is it really similar?

It’s about freakin’ time you got that cable mess cleared up. I can ‘t believe you let it go that far, since that room has a glass front and everyone could see it… It looks a lot better.

How could you even WANT to go near that cabling?? I shudder when I have to plug in my printer. eeeesh.
I plan on seeing “Next”. Haven’t seen or even heard of “Primer”, I might check that one out. You’ve seen “Memento”, yes?
Maybe we could Caitlin as the poster child for the “‘See how great it is to have music in schools’ campaign” to get music back into our schools.
You’d better slow your son down, next thing you know he’ll be playing with cabling and guitar hero. ;o)

Poppy, Caitlin virtually and very shyly says “thanks”. And I like the “Jadengram” moniker - I think I might use it.

Avi, sounds interesting. I looked it up and at first glance it seems more like Groundhog Day. It does seem like it fulfills many a wish where I’d like to re-live the previous day. Or like one of my favorite books “Replay,” re-live a whole section of life.

Sue, I haven’t found a reviewer or critic yet that even comes close to my preferences, so I *never* believe or trust any review. In fact, more often than not if something says a movie is bad, I’m more inclined to watch it.

Absurdist, hey, I had a sign! it said “please excuse the mess”. Of course, it was up for a year…

Michelle, I loved Memento - another good example of a strong mental movie. Primer was an extremely low budget movie but it worked out well in this same category. wrt school music, I’ve found our schools to have more music than we had when I was in school, so I’m quite satisfied. Oh, and Jaden can already beat “medium” on Guitar Hero I, II and 80’s - but he uses the normal controller instead of the guitar. It’s freaky good stuff.

I was happily surprised by “Next”, too! And I didn’t feel cheated by the ending at all (the critics need to loosen up, geez) because they’d done such a good job during the movie … I felt confident it would all work out. I’ll keep an eye out for “Primer”, thanks for the tip.

sourpuss, that’s a good way to put it - happily surprised. I typically have very low expectations for all movies, so maybe that’s why I’m generally happy most time I watch them.

Absurdist, and here’s the sign I had posted for so long.