Monthly Archives: June 2010

June 25, 2010 · 5:42 am

Project 365 6-19-2010 New Flops

Today was graciously uneventful.  Rene and I were allowed to enjoy a simple shopping trip to pick up all the loose ends before Father’s Day.  Besides about twelve trips to Border’s Books, we stopped at Broadway Show Warehouse, initially to see if they had good, inexpensive work shoes for Rene, where I found a nice new pair of leather flops.  I’m pretty sure that was a run-on sentence.

I lost my old pair when my parent’s dog, Pete, ate them.  I like having leather flops, they keep my feet from smelling, they wear well and they take abuse well provided that the abuse is not from sharp puppy teeth.  I’ve been looking for a replacement pair for a while but could never justify spending $50 or $60 on a good pair that I liked.  The nice thing about Broadway Shoe Warehouse is that they have very healthy discounts – discounts that allow a guy to justify new flops!

Today’s picture is of my new flops:

I’m very excited to go tooling around this summer in these.

See you tomorrow!

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Filed under project 365 2010, rene, shopping

· 5:31 am

Project 365 6-18-2010 Movies!

Rene has never seen the Sarah Jessica Parker motion picture epic Girls Just Want to Have Fun.  For my sister and I GJWTHF was a VHS staple when were growing up.  We would duplicate the dance moves and watch, re-watch and then watch again when the nun did the pommel horse routine!  I still love that part!

But Rene had never seen it.

When we were at Target she found the DVD for $5 when she was looking for Fantastic Mr. Fox and thought that $5 was a low enough price tag to risk not liking a movie.  So today we got that and Fantastic Mr. Fox.  We watched both.  Girls does not hold up quite as well to aged eyes.

Today’s picture is of our movies:

I can still recommend both of these highly, even if one of them benefits in a major way from nostalgia.  I’m also particularly fond of the Photoshop job done on the cover of Girls.  It’s worth a trip to Target just so you can see it in person.  I especially like how you can see the matte lines around SJP’s head.

See you tomorrow!

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Filed under movies, project 365 2010, rene

June 24, 2010 · 7:33 am

Project 365 6-17-2010 Back at Disney?!?

As some of you may or may not know, I do more than just act and produce stuff.  On occasion, when they will have me, I work corporate events.  Sometimes I host, sometimes I do speaking about leadership/motivation/team work and sometimes as a facilitator showing people how to do things.  Today was one of those events.

I was working for SMACNA – it has to do with sheet metal workers and even though one of Rene’s best friends is in charge of the O.C. branch I can never remember what the letters stand for.  What I can remember, though, is that I really like working these events!  Everyone is so friendly and I always learn a lot about buildings and construction and how things have changed over the decades.  In particular there was a book at the event that was written in 1938 describing the building codes of the time and the buildings described inside were beautiful… and nothing is made like that anymore.  I miss the attention to detail that old buildings have.  I wish there were more still being build that way.

The event was held at the Paradise Pier Hotel at the Disneyland Resort, a place where I occasionally and Rene for a while, worked!  Today’s picture is of me next to the Goofy statue in the lobby:

See you tomorrow!

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Filed under business, Disney, project 365 2010, rene

June 20, 2010 · 8:13 am

Project 365 6-16-2010 Wedding & Cake

Today I took away the wedding planning binder from Rene so that I could look at the costs and see just how over budget we might be.

That was an awful lot to have to go over late at night so I dulled the pain with Mississippi Mud cake.

I REALLY like Mississippi Mud cake.

Today’s picture is of the binder and cake:

Planning a wedding is a lot of work, especially when it’s your own, and there’s a weird feeling to it since it’s my second and Rene’s first.  I really want her wedding to be as magical and princess-y as possible, but I could, personally, just go for a nice easy Vegas wedding.

Although it’s possible that Rene may be thinking of that as well…

…time will tell.

For now I just need to worry about how all of the current plan is going to work.

See you tomorrow!

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Filed under project 365 2010, the wedding

June 16, 2010 · 7:52 pm

Project 365 6-15-2010 Oh Tuesday, why did you give me a headache?

It was a very full day today and I chose to spend a lot of it in office at school since I all of my appointments yesterday were in South O.C.  I forgot how awful florescent light is.  There are times when I really enjoy having/using an office space but you forget about the downside of office work – no matter how nice it is, it’s still an office and the lights can be lethal.  The dull throb in my skull was epic in it’s minor-ness and that made it even more annoying.

Even still it was a good day for business.  Today’s picture are the tools I used the most:

See you tomorrow!

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Filed under business, medical, project 365 2010

June 15, 2010 · 6:00 pm

Project 365 6-14-2010 Masochistic?

Monday.

Woke up.

Dressed for the gym.

Opened my email and saw an update about the an important deal memo.

All hope of going to the gym was lost for the morning.

There is a special level of hell where the damned are forced to read contracts and deal memos over and over again looking for how they are getting screwed.  I have a condo in this level of hell and willingly travel there as often as I can, there is no way to do what I want to do without having to go through this tedious and all too often disappointing ordeal.  I was saved from the more agonizing parts by just being sent the deal points… and then spent the rest of the morning discussing them with my partners.  After a lot of discussion and a scheduled conference call it looks like there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

I wish that all the deal we’re working right now could have this kind of momentum!

Afterward I had to run some footage for editing over to the editor.  The thumb with the data is today’s pic:

It’s nice to be shooting again.  I’m gonna’ keep this going as long as possible.  On a side note I do think it’s pretty amazing that technology has advanced so far that all of the footage I need can be put on a drive that is smaller than my thumb.  Technology is cool.

See you tomorrow!

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Filed under business, making movies, project 365 2010, technology

· 8:34 am

Project 365 6-13-2010 Sunday, Again.

Our Sunday’s are becoming the least memorable, least exciting days of the week.

I taught.

I came home.

I was really tired.

Rene and I were supposed to go to Target to get stuff, but the Tony’s came on and we parked in front of the TV and watched the whole show… even the parts when the sound was either screwed up or all together gone.  I find it very hard to believe that the highly trained sound professionals on Broadway, Radio City Music Hall in particular, people who are used to doing live shows eight days a week, cannot do a better job with a live broadcast.  Even assuming that the sound guys were from network television staff, these guys are supposed to know their stuff and it was strictly amateur night.  I was reminded by one of my Tweeps that the sound was pretty bad last year too.  And how about those cock-ups with Chris Noth and Sean Hayes when they had no idea what was going on or where to look.  I miss theater, I miss it a lot, but the award show left a little to be desired.

It still made me want to pick up and move to NYC, though.  GAH!

Later Rene and I went through a bunch of candy.  Today’s picture is the bone pile:

See you tomorrow!

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Filed under project 365 2010, rant, the tonys

· 8:08 am

Project 365 6-12-2010 Impromptu Date-Night

Rene and I were hungry, but we didn’t know what to eat.  We ran errands until we could think of something.  We stopped by my parent’s house, no idea what to get.  We got back in the car, no idea what to get.  Eventually, because we were by Fullerton, I suggested the Old Spaghetti Factory.  Rene countered with Rutabagorz…

…thus began our impromptu date night!

After Rutas we headed over to The Olde Ship for sticky toffee pudding and a beer.  Since this was also the same night as the US vs. England World Cup game the whole pub was deco’d in Union Jacks but we heard nothing about the game.

After that we made the spontaneous decision to see Shmimprov.

Today’s picture is of the clock when we rolled in and were about to sleep:

Of all the fun stuff we did tonight this is when I remembered to take a picture.

I was so disappointed.

See you tomorrow!

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Filed under date night, Improv Shmimprov, project 365 2010

· 6:38 am

Project 365 6-11-2010 Shootin’!

Today was a longer than expected shoot day for a contest to win a show on Oprah’s new network.  Director Zeke and I had a call time of 2:30pm with an expected three hour shoot for a three minute final video.  We actually shot for five and a half.  We arrived to a bit of a talent emergency, one of our guys had run into a major car problem – all the oil was gone and the radiator was leaking.

He was gonna’ be late.

Oddly enough the other guy that we hired for this small video was a friend of mine – but I didn’t know it at the time.  He was calling in that he was going to be late as well and as we talked I suddenly realized who he was.  It was wild!

When I imagined this blog I thought I was going to have all kinds of fun stories about how the shoot went and little things that went awry or well, but until the video is released I am not really allowed to give any clues about what we did – to be fair to the client.

Story wise the best ones are about poor Darric and his car: It crapped out at the bottom of the hill from where we were shooting, I had to jump the battery and Darric’s poor girlfriend was so understanding, but I really felt for her.

Today’s picture is of one of the cue cards that was written, but ignored:

See you tomorrow!

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Filed under business, making movies, project 365 2010, video

June 11, 2010 · 6:00 pm

Project 365 6-10-2010 Snail Mail Tech Support

YouTube and me, we got a problem.

Well, I guess not me, exactly, but more YouTube and Wiggy VonSchtick have a problem.  I have a YouTube account for Wiggy that I, admittedly, haven’t been using.  I started it really just so I could load sample videos for a project I was working on, but didn’t really do much else with it since the company went dark for a while right after the release of Stupid Teenagers Must Die!  But now that we’re back up and running, and I have content, I wanted to start posting stuff on it to raise company awareness and help promote the new items that are coming down the pipe!  We’ve got vlogs, behind the scenes videos and general muck that is perfect for the YouTube portal.

If you go to the Wiggy channel you won’t see those videos.  In fact, due to the privacy setting that I originally set back when it was just a preview page, it is virtually impossible to even find the channel.  Very early this morning I tried to log back in so that I could start the upload process and change all the settings and have something cool to both blog and tweet about on the Wiggy specific blog and Twitter pages.

I couldn’t log in.

It had been so long I had forgotten the login information.  I have a log that I use to keep track of old passwords just in case things like this happens, but the Wiggy YouTube info was not there.  Forgetting that I have since changed the Wiggy email – and no longer have access to the old account – I hit the password reset and now I’m screwed.

Totally screwed.

Just to rub salt in the wound, I’m pretty sure I know what the old login info is now and that gets me so mad at myself that my jaw is cramping right now!  But then shit gets even worse: so I go to the “help” section of YouTube thinking that I’ll be able to pop them an email with my sob story and have the problem solved by tomorrow.  Turns out they don’t do that, instead I was directed to the help forum, which is really just users talking about how they figured out how to fix things with the occasional official YouTube post about tough issues, none of which applied to me.  After a good twenty minutes of searching I found a post that said that there isn’t a direct email anymore and that I was probably just screwed.

I couldn’t believe it!  What the hell kind of tech company doesn’t have company sponsored tech support, especially when it is something that can be as buggy as YouTube?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?  I was not satisfied with this so I went to the “Contact Us” section of the website and, again, no email but they do list a phone number and a physical address.  I decided to write a letter – I knew I wouldn’t have the time or be calm enough to call today – and I mailed them my tech support question.  Looked a little something like this:

I’m hoping against hope that they will be able to help me get back on to my Wiggy page, and I’m also kind of hoping that they email me just so I have an email on record for them!  I have a shoot to do tomorrow, but if I have the time I might try to call – I think I’ll be able to keep my composure.

What do you think about this lack of YouTube staff tech support?  Let me know in the comments.

See you tomorrow!

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Filed under business, project 365 2010, rant, video