quick­ies for today

I had a couple things I wanted to hit and I’m going to try to do all of them rapid fire…. here goes:

high school

I’m going to my 10-year high school reunion this week­end. I’m not sure what to expect. I’m look­ing for­ward to seeing people but the entire thing seems a little sur­real. My plan is to watch Grosse Pointe Blank before I go. Hope­fully I won’t have to kill anyone while at the shindig.

HELLO! Kitty

Joel had posted about the Hello Kitty ummm… mas­sage prod­uct and thought it was some type of boot­leg. Well, as it turns out, unlike the Hello Kitty Gat, it is an offi­cial Hello Kitty prod­uct. Thanks to Destroy All Mon­sters for the info about it. You can buy your own Hello Kitty “Back Massager” on eBay.

follow up thoughts on the rights and respon­si­bil­i­ties of free speech

Thanks for all the feed­back on that post­ing. Joel had asked if I thought the same was true for the visual arts and yes I do think it is. And I real­ize that it’s a slip­pery slope that we’re on. But it’s socially irre­spon­si­ble for people to deny the per­va­sive con­scious and uncon­scious effects of any form of media, espe­cially on group behav­ior. I’m not advo­cat­ing cen­sor­ship (in fact, one of my favorite quotes is from the great supreme court Jus­tice Black “Censorship is a sign of a society’s insecurity”). But for a photo editor at Vanity Fair, People, or Enter­tain­ment Weekly to sug­gest that they don’t influ­ence our per­cep­tions of beauty for exam­ple is ridicu­lous. The prob­lem is, that once you admit this you become a party to it and most people don’t want to accept the impli­ca­tions of that respon­si­bil­ity. It’s easy to do any­thing when you don’t think you’re affect­ing anyone else.

Pledge of Allegiance

ummm… I’m going to save that one for another day. I just don’t have the time or patience right now to tackle that.

light­ing seeds

some­times I love kodak.com. I mean really love it. We just had a huge light­ing storm hit rochester and a group of us, includ­ing the head of kodak.com, all gath­ered at the large win­dows in our office and stared to the west and watched the storm. It’s moments like that which make this place great.

i finally fig­ured it out

it took a while but i recently real­ized what i don’t like about like about Eminem. For me he epit­o­mizes our society’s desire to embrace “rights” with­out embrac­ing the “responsibility” that goes along with them. A few days ago I had the chance to listen to a some stuff off of the new album, The Eminem Show and songs I heard all had a sim­i­lar theme: “all I’m speakin’ is words and I’ve got a right to do that and my words don’t really effect what people do.” Sweet baby jebus, some­one tell me when and where this idea that words don’t affect people’s behav­ior came from? Or what’s worse why every time the idea that words might have an effect on people is brought up the entire enter­tain­ment indus­try wraps itself in an Amer­i­can flag and starts wail­ing about First Amend­ment rights.

The funny thing about the First Amend­ment is it pro­tects your right to speech (as it should) but it doesn’t pro­tect you from the respon­si­bil­ity that right requires. It also doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily pro­tect you from the results of your speech. I mean Em, or is it Mr Nem, you can’t seri­ously believe that your lyrics don’t affect the way that teens (let alone adults) think or act? I mean just about any form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is about affect­ing behav­ior. That’s the power of any mass media form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion (why can the indus­try charge so much for Super­bowl ads? Nah, adver­tis­ing goal isn’t to influ­ence behavior…. never).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sug­gest­ing that the First Amend­ment is a bad thing. In fact it’s a cru­cial part of our demo­c­ra­tic repub­lic (remem­ber, we’re not a democ­racy). But for God sake, can people at least take respon­si­bil­ity for their words? ‘specially those moving some 3+ mil­lion albums in less than five weeks.

busy, busy, busy

Title says it all. I still haven’t suc­ceeded in putting down any of the balls I have in the air. Work has become much more excit­ing (which is good) but also my time con­sum­ing (which is bad). As Tom, my boss puts it, this will be the Summer of Learn­ing. 100% of my focus will be on recre­at­ing kodak.com’s learn­ing con­tent. Ever since I joined the com­pany I’ve wanted to take a crack at it. And now I’m get­ting my chance. But at the same time it’s a huge and high pro­file project, one that requires a lot of atten­tion. And I need to figure out how to give it that attention.

Com­pet­ing with it is the cur­rent play that Exact The­atre is work­ing on: Jean Genet’s The Bal­cony. And that has been one heck of a learn­ing expe­ri­ence. In ret­ro­spect I don’t think stag­ing it this summer was the best idea. We’re doing our best to split our time between get­ting this play done and plan­ning our first full season. Oh and trying to find people to spon­sor the sea­sons (if you know any rich people who are look­ing to spon­sor a small the­atre com­pany, please let me know). On the plus side we’ve all but nailed the plays for the season. The big debate is if we should do two or three plays. We’ll have set­tled that by August.

Another thing I’m bal­anc­ing is Mar­tial Arts and gen­eral mind and body fit­ness. I’m run­ning every other morn­ing, which is still a tough thing to do for me. I haven’t had as much mental time to work on Kung Fu and I’m really dis­ap­pointed about that. Plus, the week­end of the Super Sum­mers Mar­tial Arts con­fer­ence that I’m attend­ing is also the open­ing week­end of the show. Oy. So I’ll be there for the first two show nights and miss the third performance.

Plus some­where in there I need to fit my friends. And of course the uni­verse would see fit to choose this exact moment for a new girl to come into my world. Darn Uni­ver­sal Irony… it gets me again. Any hoo, I’ve met this super cool new girl named Drea. We’ve been out a few time (well more than a few time, but not yet a lot) and things are going well. Thank­fully she is as busy (if not more) as I am, so at least that smoothes things out a little big.

But in all of this, blog­ging is falling to the bottom of the list. So I’ll prob­a­bly stay on every other day updates during the week for a while. Plus I’m trying to work in an occa­sional week­end update and a redesign in there somewhere.

ohhh my achin’ head

Actu­ally it’s my neck. Heather posted a great blog about mar­tial arts a few days ago and how she’s craft­ing a per­sonal learn­ing style for her­self. Long ago I found my learn­ing style. That style is called pain…. Maybe I’m exag­ger­at­ing a bit when I write that. I def­i­nitely don’t go out look­ing for pain. It just find me, usu­ally in new and oh so sur­pris­ing ways. Last night was no exception:

We have been work­ing on a demo to per­form at an upcom­ing con­fer­ence. As usual we are work­ing on cre­at­ing a bad kung fu movie. One that would make the Shaw Brother’s proud. My role is this one is, and it’s a stretch, as the clumsy stu­dent who doesn’t really know mar­tial arts. I do get to show­case a couple “hidden moves.” These are tech­niques that really are hits, but make the person per­form­ing them seem like he (or she) doesn’t actu­ally know what they are doing. But even­tu­ally my char­ac­ter gets, well, thrown on his head. When we prac­ticed that sequence last night I blew the break fall. The result: new pain.

Basi­cally I go in to tacked the oppo­nent and fail. That results in my being kneed and elbowed. Then he latches around my stom­ach and lifts me so I end up with my back on his shoul­der facing the sky. He then racks me for a moment or two and then swings me back down to the ground. To help him with the lift, I jump and tuck my body. The only prob­lem was I didn’t untuck fast enough as I was being brought back to the ground. So instead of my feet hit­ting first, my head hit the mats first. Owww! Thanks to that I’ve had a sore neck since then.

As the final demo will be on a hard wood floor we are most likely going to change the throw. I learned a good lesson, but at the same time I have no desire to tempt fate. Espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that as my family might com­ment, I’m not the most coor­di­nated person out there.

credit where it’s due

Check out Heather’s newly redesigned blog, it totally rocks! Just don’t refer to it a Posey.com… she’s kinda touchy ’bout that.

On a slightly dif­fer­ent note, this is some­thing that you gotta see. I don’t watch much tv (’specially late night), but I do know about Tri­umph the Insult Comic Dog from the Conan O’Brien show. Any hoo in crus­ing blogs this morn­ing I came across this quick­time video clip: Tri­umph at the Episode II open­ing in NYC. It’s big (23 mb), but if you’ve got broad­band and haven’t seen it already it’s soooo worth the down­load. ‘Specially if you need a pick me up or if you have even a little geek in you.

Once you’re done, check out Black­wolf the Drag­on­mas­ter, Duke of Talisker — New York City’s first and only Unof­fi­cial Wizard home­page (you’ll rec­og­nize him from the video)… The fact he posted his per­sonal D&D stat’s says more than I could ever hope to… no the stats aren’t for a role play­ing char­ac­ter, for him­self. Really. Check it out.

Oh, the Beth Orton con­cert rocked. She’s pretty cute in an androgenous-​chrissie-​hynde-​sorta way.

Well, its 5.53pm and I’m still at work. So blog­ging prob­a­bly isn’t a great idea if I want to get out of here soon. But I just needed to take a break from the mind­less spread­sheet work that I’m doing.

San Diego was a great trip. It gave me a lot of time to clear my head on a lot of things. Plus it was one of those where I was able to turn some­thing neg­a­tive into a pos­i­tive. For the first two days and the final day that I was in Cali I was sup­posed to be stay­ing with another friend going out for the wed­ding. Unfor­tu­nately that friend got sick at the last moment and had to cancel out. When they did that they also can­celled all their hotel reser­va­tions and car rentals. So the day before the trip I found out that I didn’t have a car or place to stay. So I arrived in San Diego with­out having any­thing planned. Of course it’s a big city and it was easy to find every­thing I needed. But there is some­thing refresh­ing about being dropped into the middle of nowhere (or at least the middle of a city) and having to fend for your­self. The expe­ri­ence served as a great reminder that I can do that.

As for this week­end, tomor­row I head for Wash­ing­ton DC to take in a Beth Orton con­cert. I really shouldn’t be spend­ing the money (at the time I booked this I wasn’t expect­ing to have bought the car). But this will just have to be the last of my lavish trips for a while.

so where have I been you ask…

I real­ize that I have a habit of dis­ap­pear­ing from time to time. This most recent absence was due to a trip to San Diego! I was out there video­ing a Cindy and John’s wed­ding! Check it out by click­ing on the cute video­g­ra­pher!:

I also got a couple days of sight seeing in as well.

Today was my first day back. It was also Band­ing Day for the fal­cons. The “babies” were pulled from the nest at about 10.15am and then mea­sured, banded, weighed, and named. In the mean­time I had the task of going up and per­form­ing main­te­nance of the nest and cam­eras. All the while their par­ents were buzzing me. One dived bombed so close to me that it’s wing tips clipped the back of the fire helmet that I had on. If I can get the tech­nol­ogy to work I’ll post a video of the expe­ri­ence I took with my mini-​DV camera. In the mean­time, here are some stills:

Yes, that is a fireman’s hat I’m wear­ing. And I was glad to have it on con­sid­er­ing how close those birds were get­ting! Within an hour the chicks were back in the nest much to their and their parent’s relief.