Friday, August 21, 2009

Pizza, Otter Pop, and Movie Party

This is 4 months late, but we had a blast for the 7yo's birthday party. What do 7yos like? Pizza, otter pops, and movies.

We invited over a bunch of kids from his football team and from the ward. We bought a bunch of pizza, crazy bread and a whole box of otter pops. You should have seen their faces when we told them that they could have as many otter pops as they wanted! Sheer bliss. Then the otter pop massacre began. They really put them away! We rented Home Alone, and none of them had seen it before. Perfect Movie! They laughed and laughed.










Great Party (and really easy for the lazy parents).

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Friday, August 14, 2009

Pandora

As you may know, I am a cubicle dweller. I am chained to my desk for many hours a day. Fortunately a co-worker let me know about Pandora. It is a really amazing internet radio service, totally free.

I know that there are other internet radio sites, but I really like this one. Most sites have you pick a genre of music and then start sending in random selections of that type of music.

Pandora does it differently. You start out by entering one of your favorite groups, or a song you like. The software then does its magic and starts playing 'similar' songs. They are using the Music Genome Project database that is an attempt to categorize each song by unique characteristics. This is how they describe it.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

It may be that I just really like the tech behind this service, but it does deliver long strings of songs that I really like.

Once you have the basic station set up, you can then add additional groups and songs to the station definition. Also as songs play, you can tell Pandora that you like a song or dislike a song with their thumbs-up or down buttons. As you do these things, you further fine-tune the station down to exactly what you like.

You can also set up many stations. So if the mood hits you to listen to "music like KISS", go to town. Then you can open up that Carpenters/Beach Boys station to mellow out afterwards!

The only downside for me is that they only let you skip so many songs per hour. But, you can skip approx. 6 songs each hour, so that's 6 more than the radio. They have also started playing ads- maybe one 10 second ad per hour. Better than the radio? You decide.

You might think that a big negative is that you have to stay chained to your desk to listen. Well, actually, I have a Pandora client for my smartphone! It has access to all the stations that I created at my desk and I can plug it into my aux-in jack in my jeep and rock out.

You can, of course, also play it out of you home PC if your speakers aren't too tinny.

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Thursday, August 13, 2009

Cubicle life

This guy's wife had a baby. So we thought we'd give him something to clean up when he got back!
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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Tuesday, August 11, 2009

First Day of School: 2009 Edition


Unfortunately it's not the best picture, but the boys are off to a whole new year of learning adventure. I'm not sure what the 7yo's face is all about :) It looks like he just sucked on a lemon.

This year is 7th, 5th, and 2nd grade! The 7yo is so happy to go (Our first child that actually likes school).

The 10yo was very concerned about his teacher. Her name is Ms Stein, and he was sure that a teacher with such a strict name would be very strict, but apparently it is possible to have a strict name and still be nice. It helps that his best friend is in his class.

The 12yo is on his second year of middle school, so he has separate teachers and subjects each hour. He seems to like it better than the single teacher from grade school. However, his new band teacher has threatened that they will likely have to stand at the next concert. Also, the prospect of having to attend a study session at lunch 3 times a quarter to prepare for history tests ranks pretty high on the "ruin my life" scale. (somewhere between eating your own pinky toe and stabbing a knife into the fleshy part of your forearm, I believe)

It appears the the year is off to a splendid start. Oh, I forgot to mention that the 10yo got a flat tire on the ride home. Bummer.

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Saturday, August 8, 2009

Our pledge

Notice the sign that states never 3 people in line at one time. Then notice the 8 people standing in line. This store clearly needs more federal regulation.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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