On May 20, 2008, the Eau Gallie High School Combined Choir (Concert Choir, Women’s Choir, Encore, and Finale) performed one last show together — the EGHS 2008 Spring Choir. Their instructor and mentor, Mr. E. Jason Armstrong, announced earlier this year that this would be his last year in the Brevard County school system (after 14 years of service in the music program).

His students (and some returning alumni) put together quite a show for us to enjoy, and gave him a fantastic (and entertaining) sendoff. To watch the whole thing online in one shot, view my YouTube playlist for the event. Here’s the program and links to individual songs/scenes (note: if you’ve got the bandwidth, set your YouTube preferences to “High Quality” to get better versions of all these):

1. The entire Combined Choir opens the show with Duel of the Fates.
2. The Encore Show Choir performs C’mon Everybody.
3. Finale singer Laura Diebel performs Hymn.
4. The Encore Women’s Choir performs The New Girl in Town.
5. The Women’s Show Choir performs California Dreamin’.
6. Encore singer (and my buddy) Shannon Biagi performs What I Did For Love.
7. The Women’s Show Choir performs More Today Than Yesterday.
8. Finale singer Olivia Frost performs My Almost Lover.
9. The Men’s Show Choir performs Two Too Wet!, a medley.
10. The Finale Show Choir performs Thanks a Lot, But No Thanks.
11. The Encore Show Choir performs The Song of Purple Summer.
12. Alumni Mallory Gleason performs Why.
13. The Concert Choir performs There Once Was a Man.
14. The Concert Choir performs To Where You Are.
15. The entire Combined Choir closes the “formal” show with You Can’t Stop the Beat and takes their final bow together with their instructor.
16. EGHS Alumni return to perform I Will Be Here.
17. The entire group offers Mr. Armstrong some parting gifts.
18. Finally, a bit of a Tricky stunt as Mr. Armstrong and his Choir close out the show.
19. After the show, students get a closer look at the collage presented to Mr. Armstrong.

Enjoy the show!

Technorati Tags: Media Video Youtube

Saturday night I got to sit in on a performance by the Eau Gallie High School folks of the Broadway play Beauty and the Beast. Most of the leads (especially the Beast and Gaston) were great and the ensemble was fantastic. The dance numbers were astoundingly good (I have no clue how the cast kept all those steps in their heads, or how the choreographer(s) put all that together ), the band’s music was great, and the sets were impressive.

It was pretty easy to forget we were watching a performance by a high school cast and crew — apart from a lackluster Belle and some minor problems with two wireless mics (apparently a flap of fabric on two of the costumes cover up the little mics, but fortunately the two actors with the problem had strong enough voices that they projected just fine without the mics), this is the caliber of show you could expect to see on Broadway. The $10-per-seat ticket price was a steal for this

My congratulations to the cast and crew! My buddy Shannon snapped some shots backstage with my camera (hehehe — nobody said the cast couldn’t snap a few pictures behind the scenes!); they’re available right here, or right here on a separate page in case the “embedded” version goofs up. Standard procedure for both: click the thumbnails for bigger versions; a little magnifying glass w/plus sign icon in the bottom-right corner zooms in even more.

Technorati Tags: Media Performance Pictures Site

I’ve recorded a few things here and there and uploaded them to YouTube (let them handle the bandwidth requirements so I don’t have to ). For now, there’s only a few things there, but I’ll update this page (and my YouTube collection) as the pile of videography grows.

• The EGHS Spring 2008 Spring Concert
• Space Shuttle Discovery launch on October 23, 2007
• The EGHS Fall 2007 Talent Show
• Space Shuttle Endeavor launch on March 11, 2008 (a night shot — amazing fireworks!)

Technorati Tags: Media Video Youtube

In case anyone is even remotely curious (and, to my astonishment, 157 people so far have been ), I recorded a (decidedly amateur) video of NASA’s launch of Shuttle Discovery on Tuesday of this week. You can view it on YouTube. While you’re there, you can catch another video of my friend performing Stuff Like That There from her talent show appearance this past Thursday.

I’ve got a couple gigabytes (yes, that’s with a “g”) of photos from the last year uploading as well … that takes a long time since the United States is mired in this laggy, bullshit asynchronous broadband hell in which I can snarf down a CD image at almost a megabyte per second, but can only upload stuff back out at the snail’s pace of 50 or so kilobytes per second. That’s okay, because I’m also assuming my web host is going to shit a brick when I set the gallery off to the task of importing those 4,500 images It’s set to de-prioritize all of its work, so it won’t step on anyone else’s site performance, but who the hell knows how well this will work

The new camera has been well-behaved so far; it’s capable of taking 3 megabyte pictures (with JPEG compression), but fortunately it has more sane settings that drop that down to 500-600k or so while maintaining the same resolution and picture quality.

In the meantime, enjoy the videos!

I’ve added another pile of pictures to the collection at my gallery. Have a look if you’re so inclined:

• See a list of all new pictures on the tracker page.
• Scope out the first pictures of Rugen on the new system/site.
• See new pictures of Monty doing goofy things.
• Marvel at the cats behaving in a relatively civil manner towards each other in some group shots.

More posts to come tonight; my desktop’s been working overtime to piss me off today and there’s some other good topics that deserve some attention, too.

No character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false.
— Alexander Hamilton

What a depressing thought.

Microsoft has a disturbingly reliable tendency to follow the same pattern for every new market it decides to enter:

1. See a huge market and decide to break into it while pretending to express no interest.
2. “Suddenly” (after the requisite leaks to press and rumor-mill feeding) announce a brand new product. Flood the market with hype. Spend lots and lots of money on clever ads and commercials.
3. Release an actual first version. Compared to competitors, it is a piece of shit. It includes Microsoft-specific idiosyncrasies and caters to “big business” interests even at the expense of customers.
4. A small die-hard group of Microsoft fanboys goes apeshit over even the crappy first release and helps hype the product as the next “biggest thing since sliced bread.” The rest of the world chuckles and goes back to using the better stuff they were always used to.
5. Microsoft either exits the market after being completely crushed, or it gets a clue somehow and revises the product for a new release — the new release is generally “okay” but still not the best. Sadly, Americans are typically dumb enough that “okay” is good enough.

Think I’m making this up? Let’s look at the markets they’ve nosed into with varying degrees of success, following a universally, hilariously bad first entry: Read the full story...

[acidfree:883 align=right title=”“]I’ve uploaded a bunch of new pics from assorted things, including some silly shots I didn’t take (or edit) myself. You’ll know ‘em when you see ‘em.

• Marvel at disgustingly cute pictures of cats (these weren’t mine; see the page for citation)
• Some new pictures of all the cats in the pets section
• Check out some shots I took of the Sunset Cafe up in Cocoa Beach, including some really spiffy long-exposure shots.

Click, browse, and be merry

Life is both difficult and time-consuming.

Heh, and to think, the new pictures I’ve tossed online tonight are less than half of the new stuff I have to upload, and probably less than a tenth of what the old photo gallery had (that I still intend to rebuild here). Who cares? Let’s look at some spiffy photographs (click the links to see that specific album, or visit Will’s Gallery to see the whole bloody thing):

• I took a tour in early October 2006 to the Kennedy Space Center with a friend.
• Later that month, the same friend (and the rest of her immediate family) took me up to Orlando to check out Universal Studios Orlando and the “Halloween Horror Nights” promotion they were putting on. She even got me on a big thrill ride (a first for me, yikes!). Thankfully, we did not buy the picture they took of my distorted, twisted face as we plunged down a 90 foot drop.
• She also participated in a Halloween Show at the Super Flea & Farmer’s Market this year; lots of good shots of all the participants in the show here.
• Catch a couple shots of my debut karaoke show at the Dog House in Palm Bay back on October 27, 2006.
• Look at my cat, Maggie. She’s cute. Admit it. You know you want to.

There’s more coming, but I’m getting tired tonight

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it’s still a foolish thing.
— Bertrand Russell

Where was this damned quote when I was writing my PHP rant a bit ago?