Black Friday

Even though we were in Vegas over Thanksgiving, tradition had to be continued. So, Karl, Jon, and I woke up at 3:30am and ventured to wait in extremely long lines and deal with chaotic crowds. Fun stuff. While we weren't out for anything huge, we did score some pretty neat stuff. I came home with 100 DVD-R's (that should last a while), 50 Cd-R's, a 2GB flash drive with U3, and a few other Christmas items that would not be in my best interest to mention here. In all, despite running on three hours of sleep, it was pretty awesome, as usual.

Thanksgiving was great; there we're 15 of us at my Uncle's house and we ate a lot of good food. The tomato jello thing wasn't my favorite, but otherwise the food was great and it was nice to spend a great Turkey Day with family. And yes, that's our turkey.

I mentioned above that my new flash drive supported U3. While I always knew this technology existed, I never realized how cool it is. You can customize applications on the drive, so when you plug it into any system that system basically becomes your custom system. Very nice.

Too bad no stores had this mega-monitor on sale Friday. I could definitely go for one of those suckers.

Hungary? Make a sandwich. Oh, wait... sorry, you can't do that. At least you can't if McDonald's gets their way and puts a patent on the sandwich and, more specifically, the "simultaneous toasting of a bread component." I'm sorry, but that is absurd. One more reason to boycott McDonald's.

This has to be one of the most amazing basketball baskets ever made. That thing seems to defy the laws of physics. One word: wow.

Compliments of my Uncle, here is a comedy on airline pilots. Pretty funny stuff. Scary thing is, I can somewhat see him acting like that.

Well, that's all for now. I'm going to go try and figure out why I'm getting a rash from a fake Christmas tree.

Happy Turkey Day!

Five Days Off!

Finally...a much needed break. I was actually able to sleep in until 7 today, so that was really nice. I think we're heading out tomorrow for Vegas to spend Thanksgiving at my uncle's, so that will be nice.

I just spent 4 hours this morning recording my audition cd for All State. It's nice to get that done with semi-early (unlike last year's day before thing). I think it sounds good now, but I'll probably listen to it later and end up redoing it on Sunday.

Other than that, life has been busy as usual. School's been good, band has been...bandish, and T of R is coming together nicely. Jon's surprise birthday party was at my place on Saturday, so between the people, food, and Karaoke, it was pretty cool/fun.

In case you're new to the planet, the Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii were both released last week. Naturally there we're people in line a week before with riots occurring at Palmdale Wal-mart. Yes, we made CNN. It's wonderful to see what our community is nationally known for. William Warford had a column in the AV Press on Friday that puts this whole craze in prospective. I couldn't find it online, so I scanned it in. Pretty funny read.

Continuing on the theme of stupid people, here is what has to be the stupidest criminal in the world (or maybe just the unluckiest). Make sure you watch the whole thing, it's worth it.

This guy photoshoped a picture of his kid to look like famous people. Pretty funny yet sort of twisted. Poor kid. Don't get any ideas, Karl.

That's it for now...have a happy Turkey Day.

Happy Veteran's Day

A nice three day weekend…finally. Definitely much needed break.

Once again I apologize for the lapse last week. We had our first practice for T of R (more on that later), and I didn’t get home until pretty late. I will have to find a temporary new posting routine. It will probably be just whenever I can get to it.

The T of R band can only be described with one word: awesome. It is a true marching band with 21 (no typo) tubas. Yes folks, 21 tubas. That’s a lot. It is really quite nice to play with a hefty low brass section. After one week, it already sounds pretty good. It’s going to be a little time consuming to memorize everything, but it will be worth it.

The QH band played at the Chino Invitational last week. While we could have done a tad better parade wise, we still placed 5^th with the overall combined score, so that was pretty cool. This morning we played for the AV Welcome Home Veteran's Day Parade. It was just a regular parade…nothing too special (besides the B-2 and Apache flyover). I heard it was on national TV or something, but haven’t seen anything yet so who knows.

I got the Copland Concerto! I’m really excited…if you haven’t heard it let me know and I’ll get you a copy, it’s a really nice piece. Too bad I don’t have any time to practice it between the Mozart and T of R stuff.

The new Blogger Beta is available to anybody with a Google Account now. If you already have a blogger, it's worth the move...there's some pretty cool new features.

So the Dems now have control in both the House and Senate. And Rumsfeld is gone. Pretty cool stuff.

Will it Blend? In his latest installment of the wonders of the kitchen blender, Tom Dickson blends up a bag of marbles. One question: why?

This is a pretty cool slideshow of some of the best pictures people have uploaded to Flickr. Some of them are pretty cool...others are kind of "out there."

There are some pretty stupid people in the world. I'm sure you already knew that, but just in case you needed another example, here you go: "A man is in hospital with severe internal injuries after trying to launch a powerful firework rocket from his backside."

Adobe is offering a free beta of a new sound editing program (similar to Audition) called Soundbooth. Looks pretty interesting. Just in time to record those All State CD's.

While you're at it, pick up your free beta of Vista.

Considering tomorrow is another one of those insane days, I think I'm going to go sleep.