Eryn Sings Rock Band

Eryn and I had a day of Rock Band (not the whole day, but part of the day - we also returned heaters to the rental place in Richfield and bowled three lanes at Lariat Lanes in Richfield) yesterday while we were home on winter break. Eryn wanted to play drums and sing. Here she is, singing Kryptonite and Spirit in the Sky while wearing her new Kit Kittridge outfit from American Girl. It's not perfectly melodious, but I think she has a career in punk ahead of her.

Kryptonite:


Spirit in the Sky:

Perhaps the Strangest Thing I've Seen in a While

The Nerdist has an absolutely peculiar post up about a video game where you turn into an animal and run around. It's worth watching the whole eight minutes if you've never seen it before.

Sank's Movie Meme - First 15

Sank has a movie meme up on his blog.  I feel compelled to participate.  The rules, per Sank:

The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen films you’ve seen that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen films you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.
Not in order of preference

My movies:

1 The Princess Bride

2 Triplets of Belville

3 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

4 Risky Business

5 Roman Holiday

6 My Neighbor Totoro/Howl's Moving Castle - I always think of them together because of Eryn

7 American Flyers/Breaking Away - I also always think of these two together, I almost always watch them as a double feature.

8 The Wall

9 The Aristocrats

10 Unforgiveable Blackness: The Rise & Fall of Jack Johnson

11 Urban Explorers – but not because of the watching, because of the production event

12  Close Encounters of the Third Kind - took my little brother for his birthday

13 Oldboy

14 Ran (Kurosawa)

15 Apocalypse Now

Cool Christmas Present

My secret Santa gave me a Chris Sells bobble head doll!


See?

Christmas Present

She Says sent us some Christmas presents. I thought I'd model mine:

Almost Merry Christmas

My family celebrates Christmas eve tonight. I'm pondering how that's going to go down with the kitchen still full of ornaments, wrapping paper, sewing machine paraphernalia and guitars. Maybe we'll just do annual fondue on the floor.

Here's some Christmasy cheer from Jed Whedon and Maurissa (Mo) Tancharoen (Jed's wife, and cowriter on Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog):

Oatmeal

A friend at work (Rick) recommended this site to me based on my discussion of email, meetings and managers.  "If you do this in an email, I hate you!" Wonderful.  I particularly empathize with the gmail search and the reply to all.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/email

On a related note (insomuch as it's sort of low-graphic art with a high humor content), this is my favorite snrky.com in a while: http://www.snrky.com/2010/12/what-he-said.html

Email, Meetings (and Managers)

A cross post from my corporate blogging...

A local blogger (Conner McCall) posted these email rules he wished co-workers would adhere to:

1. No email shall contain less than one actionable item
2. No email shall contain more than three actional items
3. Any email that is information only should be posted to a wiki/website/blog and not be sent by email
4. Anyone responding to an email that follows rules 1-3 which asks a question whose answer can be found within the email they are responding to, shall be fined $5
5. Senders of emails breaking rules one or two must buy any recipients of the email lunch.

Tough love!  I can only imagine the fine he'd leverage on someone who hit "respond to all."
Along the same lines, Midwest TED has a presentation by Jason Fried of 37Signals called "Why Work Doesn't Happen at Work" (15:21 minutes) which includes the quote, "Meetings and managers are two major problems in business today."  Harsh, but managers should be actively working to eliminate unnecessary meetings and all the distractions that prevent team members from doing work (and I'd add, as a member of the the corporate initiative team currently finalizing the career planning framework, that the discussion about which meetings need eliminating and what can be done to remove distractions is an action item at every level).  I think we see that voiced more clearly in our Agile projects where discussions about roles that don't include whether managers and architects are vestigial organs - I'm not saying they are, but it's a thread in some Agile commentary if you're an avid reader - frequently focus on the necessity of the manager to rapidly eliminate roadblocks to team velocity, particularly at the touchpoints where a non-Agile team or process (procurement, budgeting, discussions with other management, et al) can completely derail forward momentum.  Meetings can definitely be roadblocks to momentum.

If you have meetings that are unnecessary, or email strains (those pesky chains that generate much email for little worth and could probably be handled with a status elsewhere) that should be pruned or purged, consider recommending how to remedy the situation and freeing up some productive time for everyone on your team.

Happy Christmas

Courtesy of a tweet from Felicia Day. Eryn thought it was hilarious.

Happy Holidays from DANIELS on Vimeo.

Cold Ball/s

I took this picture back at the end of November where there were several kids standing in my front yard cranking sticks and balls skyward.  At one point, they almost managed to get a second basketball stuck in the tree.  If you walk outside now, almost a month later, you can still see it wedged up there.



Here's why a simple ladder won't do the trick.  Someone has either a really good, or a really bad, jump shot.

Belleville Rendez-Vous

A scene from Eryn's evening and my evening with Pooteewheet gone to Tucson.  She enjoyed the movie immensely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMzoNO3wdY4

Giant F-ing Snowstorm

That snowstorm sucked.  My official tally was six shovelings of from 1-6" each time.  According to the weather news, we got somewhere around 15-16".  I know it was bad because my back still hurts, and I had the urge this morning to take a tape measure to the driveway to see if I could figure out how many pounds of snow I'd actually lifted.  Then I thought, "I'd just have to take into account the differing densities of fresh snow versus snow plow toss up, and the varying lifting power between the original one foot lift and end state five foot+ lift.   Supposedly, 15 minutes of lifting snow is moderate physical activity.  Might as well have been rowing for hours.

But it made for some good pictures and video.

Mandatory picture of the bird bath showing approximately how much snow we got.  We actually got more than this - it piled up too high for the bird bath to be accurate.


Eryn at the front door coming out to help me shovel.


Writing her name in the snow.  Later, the dog would help her.


The dog likes to pretend she's a mole or a groundhog.


She loves the snow.  Loves it.  Even if it's 17 below (like it was today), she's happy bounding around the snow banks until she's covered head to foot.


Told you Luna wanted to help with the writing.  She's really taken to Eryn lately.  They're good friends most of the time.


Luna as a snowplow.  That's not our cat behind her, just a cat sculpture in the "garden".


Ice dams on the roof and the joys of a lot of wind coupled with a lot of snow.


Eryn and Luna in the front yard.


A view from the fourth floor.  We drove over to the corporate kids' holiday party, despite the snow.  It was earlier in the day, so the Ford Fiesta was capable of the drive.  If it had been later, we'd have been in a bit of trouble.  Apparently enough people skipped that they were handing out the kids' gifts today at work.

jne

I don't think I've done a miscellaneous posting list in a while. Now that I have an iPad, I have a habit of just twittering the links so I can comb back through them any time I please. But there are a few items I've found particularly interesting lately.

• How Pac Man's Ghosts Decide What to Do (via Boing Boing)
• Why I Didn't Like Riding the Bus as a Kid (e.g. Nazi Bus Ride) by Oatmeal
• Dilbert's Confusopoly - hits a little close to home
• The benefits of unemployment $ vs. tax cut dollars (Taylor)
• Tea Party Nation President Proposes Taking Away Vote from Tenants (funny if you have a duplex you rent)
• The Winter 2010 Intelligence Report (SPLC)
• Anti-gay Groups added to SPLC hate groups
• Loop Optimization (via Dr. Dobbs) and Loop Optimization Theory on Wikipedia
• Adam Savage Mythbusting TSA Airport Security (video)
• The SPLC Hate Map (one of my favorite links)
• What the f*** are you wearing - I include this because I can't decide if it's funny or obnoxious.  Likely both.

Single Ladies

Apparently I'm not following my sister's YouTube feed closely enough, because I entirely missed this:

Nerdflake

I made Eryn a snowflake using the three hole punch. She referred to it as a nerdflake. Not very nice. Perhaps accurate. But not very nice.

Alicia Wiley II

I guess I could have dropped in a real video for Alicia Wiley instead of a still with a soundtrack. But her content can be difficult to find with only almost 500 hits. The stupid Pokey and Gumby video I have on YouTube that I made when Eryn and I were in Arizona has over 81,000 hits, which just goes to show that life isn't fair because my artistic inspiration for that project can be measured in terms of a bottle of Summit. So here's halfway home, video by local director Wayne H. Johnson, Jr.

Alicia Wiley

I saw a write up about Alicia Wiley in the City Pages. "Half Gone" off her new album, Both Sides, is a great song. More Sarah McLachlan than Fiona Apple, which is who everyone who writes something about her seems to compare her to. I Wish I would have picked up the paper before she had her album release party on Thursday. I'd have liked to have gone and heard it.

Alicia's Web Site.

Eryn's First Cake

Eryn made a cake and there was still some left for Thanksgiving when company arrived. She did most of the mixing and almost all of the frosting (little bit of help when I demoed how to do the sides). Originally, the intent was to make cupcakes.  But the cupcake pan is either long gone, or it's found a place deep in the recesses of the cupboard where even me sticking almost my full body into the storage, past the pans we use once every five to ten years, can't find it.  We decided to err on the side of too much frosting rather than risk areas that had none, which can be appreciate in the pictures below.  I think her favorite part wasn't so much the finished confetti cake with sprinkles, but the leftover frosting which she made me keep for later consumption with a spatula while she watched Mythbusters.

The cake in all its glory:


From the top, in order to truly appreciate the Christmas sprinkles.