A few years ago my brother picked up drumming. He is pretty good, as a result of him getting into the ‘music scene’ I have inadvertently started to pay more attention to music. One of the bands I really learned to love in the past few years is Led Zepplin - especially the drums. This weekend I was goofing around on the computer and came across the following 12 minute (!) Moby Dick drum solo by John Bonham at a live concert. It simply amazes me how this guy just ‘rolls with it’ for so long. Rhythm ran through this guy’s veins.

So today I arrived in South Beach Miami. I am here for a trade show for work. I have never been to Florida before, but so far it is very neat. Our hotel is RIGHT on south-beach, like literally the back of the hotel borders sand. We arrived around 4pm local time and posed around south beach, because it is Monday night there isn’t much to do. However, even on Monday night there is something neat going on - we went to a bar called ‘Mangos’ which is like this latin club / bar. It had live Reggae music and dancing performances.

As we walked around south beach I saw about 5 places with ‘reef tanks’. They were actually FOWLR with tons of aptasia sp. :(.

This week should prove to be tons of fun, although I miss Giselle like crazy already :(.

Today I went with my Wife and a coworker to Disneyland. I am no stranger to Disneyland, about a year and a half ago my Wife and I got yearly passes, and we renewed them again this year. Today we went, and we largely just walked around, looking at the people, and some of the things none of us had seen before. We went and saw some of the first Mickey cartoons, and looked around at the miniatures. Our coworker brought a book that had all of these secrets about things.

One of the things the cast members at Disneyland did while building all of the attractions was put “Hidden Mickeys” into the rides. We found a bunch of them, in the Snow White ride on the turtle on the stairs, in the Pirates ride on a piece of armor at the end, and a few more.

I took a bunch of pictures, we showed up at about 4pm, the lighting was gorgeous and I took a bunch of pictures of reflections in the water, I am really impressed with how they came out. They are really much better than most pictures I am used to taking. I am going to start trying to take more pictures, hopefully they will come out half as good as these.

Castle Upsidedown	Castle in the Water	Castle in the Water
Castle	Castle	Trees in the Water
Trees in the Water	Trees in the Water	Tower in the Water
Bridge in the Water	Bridge in the Water	Statue

So today I went to lunch with my wife and a friend of ours from work. On the way we stopped at an Orchid shop. I picked up a sweet looking purple / pink orchid. It looks great on my desk. I think I am getting the hang of this green thumb thing.

Know what I hate? I hate it when a vendor advertises a price which appears like it might be quite low, but then charges you all sorts of surpluses and fee’s. A great example is a restaurant that REQUIRES gratuity, what’s up with that? Why don’t they just charge more for the food so they can pay their server’s a reasonable wage? Why do they need to trick me with low prices just to charge me later anyways?

Another thing is offices that have no public parking, and im not talking about downtown high rises where space is a serious issue. Here in west LA there is a plethora of buildings that are not stressed for space but charge for parking anyways. Why? because they can. It dawned upon me the other day when I was cleaning out my car and I had like 15 parking receipts. People should just charge the price all-inclusive without tricking people.

I had heard awhile back that in the mid-west some local politician passed an ordinance requiring movie theaters to advertise the actual time that the movie was started, instead of the industry standard of advertising the time that the 30 minutes of commercials start. This is a step in the right direction, kudos.

So today I was at lunch with a friend of mine. We were at a medium sized mall in West LA. The restaurant that we were at had windows so we could see outside into a major ‘game trail’. As we sat talking I couldn’t help but notice the countless lemmings that walked buy with the latest designer whatever’s and watdchamacallits.  It kind of grosses me out that these people were shouting their self image to the rest of the world, flaunting and struting.

I think what these people don’t get is that their actual personality shouts even louder, via body language and facial expression. It was quite apparent to me that most of these people had  very low self confidence and felt that by being aggressive with their dress and strut that they could fool others.

It is a sad world that people need to communicate via dress and fashion, but I guess that the retail company (who are making tons of money off of the fashion industry) are not going to do well if people just talked to one another.

I recently went to a party with people I mostly didn’t know. I started talking with this guy who was working on his thesis at Cal Tech. He was a computer science major and specialized in optics. He worked on grants that funded his work on the DARPA grand challenge.

So this dude is talking this party up on his work, how the funding process works and the type of work they do. The kind of work he was doing, was very un-spectacular to say the least. The types of things he was working on was very ‘middle of the road’ in terms of complexity. Furthermore - he went on to boast that all he had to do to get this big funding was to get ‘a few papers published’ so that he could report something back to the government grant comitee a the end of the year.  I was disgusted.  I left the party.

This sort of attitude would never cut it in the corporate world - where results are what pay the bills.  Must be nice to live in a world where you are judged on just ’showing up’ - reminds me when I was 8.

I have to wonder if the government pays into these sort of research programs with no hope of any sort of meaningful return? This reminds me of a grand parents that pays their kid to do chores around the house - it’s sort of an excuse to give them money, because in the long run you know that they will have some sort of benefit from it.