Cat Cake and Dog Cake for Brandee’s birthday

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Brandee and I spent the last two wonderful days creating two cakes.  The inspirational theme was our animals, Bella the Cat and Jackson the Dog.  Bella’s cat cake is entitled: “Happy Furr-Day” and Jack’s dog cake is entitled” “Happy Bark-Day”.

Below is a slideshow and a video of the wackiness!  Hover your mouse over the image below to navigate the photos.

 

IMG_0746 (QuickTime format video)

Four Christmases (movie review: Comedy)

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Brandee, Jack, Bella and I watched the movie Four Christmases (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0369436/) yesterday and this will be my first movie review in the Comedy genre.

This was a good flick if you are looking for a decent comedy. It was very slap-tastic at points but humorous and a well thought-out plot. It was quick moving as to not bore me like so many other movies do that don’t have enough good content.

The story is simple. A couple visits their four sets (each parent is divorced) of families for Christmas. I didn’t get a chance to watch the movie straight through so I’m sure I missed some good parts however I did get to see much of the film and I liked what I saw.

The characters all were very believable and funny. In particular I remember the scene when Vince Vaughn’s character was introducing his father’s side of the family to Resse Witherspoon’s character for the first time. The brothers were named Dallas, Denver and Vince was Orlando. They were all named after the cities that they were conceived-in! Also, Dallas and Denver were like amateur UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) fighters or something. There were the totally stereotypical ‘meatheads’ and were constantly antagonizing each other.

The cast of characters was impressive and two of my other favorite actors, Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek, played outstanding roles. Overall this was a fun movie to watch on a lazy day after Thanksgiving. It also was a good tone-setter for the upcoming holiday season and put a smile on Brandee’s face so I deem Four Christmases worthy of 8 Steelers Stars.

End of September, Beginning of October 2012 updates

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Work:

I’ve been very busy the last few weeks.  Most of it self-imposed work too but I like it that way.  I really, seriously can’t stand complacency and I see way too much of it, frankly.

One of the projects I’m working on is a set of technical innovative solutions.  Some of these solutions are simple just put the piece-parts together kind of stuff which is rather easy for me with my fortunate networking experience.  Others are conceptual and require some level of custom software development work.  The main points I would like to portray is that we are at an incredible time in technology innovation where people with basic knowledge can design incredibly efficient solutions without the enormous costs, time and complication needed historically.  I’m passionate about sharing these new ideas and having constructive conversations because I realize that it takes vision to get organizational support for radical ideas even though the benefits can be tremendous.

 

Stanford Cardinal versus Arizona Wildcats college football game:

Our annual Stanford Cardinal football game and, most importantly, pre and post tailgate adventures took place this past Saturday.  It was a wonderful pleasant day, weather-wise and the game did not disappoint.  First, let me briefly describe our seating position because this was very unusual from our past games where I have participated for about the past 5 or so years.  One of our mutual friends is a Stanford Alumni and always gets the tickets.  Usually they are great seats and we are only a few rows from the field.  Well, this year we weren’t so close to the field.  In fact we were barely in the stadium!  How can we go from one extreme to the other is beyond me.  We were literally three rows from the very, very top of the stadium.  Fortunately Stanford Stadium went through a major remodeling a few years ago and the stadium is a wonderful place to watch a game regardless of your seating position.  I wish I didn’t have to witness these ‘bleacher seats’ for myself to get that perspective but none-the-less we did.

We were able to see all the plays and also could follow the action on the big screen displays on either end of the field so it wasn’t that bad at all.  The game itself was exciting.  No defense what-so-ever.  Each team compiled 617 yards of offense for a grand total of 1234 which is amazing.  Stanford was looking really bad because they were down by two touchdowns with only about 9 minutes left but they rallied to tie the game.  Then they eventually won in overtime.  Very exciting.

The pre and post game festivities are always the highlight of these events though.  There is a group of about 6-8 of us that do it annually.  I can’t wait for next year!

The Cabin by the Woods (2011)

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The Cabin in the Woods PosterThis was surely “one for the ages”.  The wifey and I decided to order a pay-per-view ‘horror’ movie tonight and just relax.  Cool and cool, and horrific is absolutely what we got!

This movie started with no clear plot that I could figure out what-so-ever.  It was just plain gratuitous violence.  Blood and guts, severed heads, screaming and yelling and all the typical things you’d see at the END of one of these types of movies.  So, I must admit, this movie had me intrigued to being with.

Okay, I can deal with the silly, and totally ridiculous violence since that is what we bargained for, but through-out the movie they would include intermittent scenes of some type of Command Center/Control Center.  We were thinking like “what the hell is this for?”, because it seemed so random but it appeared they were building a plot of some sort.  It turns out that the Command Center wanted people for being “young”.  Five young people had to die according to Sigourney Weaver.  Yep, she stooped to a new low for sure with this bomb of a flick!  She made about a five minute on-screen appearance and that was the most true insight to any sort of plot I could find in the movie.

All I could figure out with this movie (or that I cared about) was that the mega-pot smoking dope-head was somehow immune to the effects that this Command Center was infecting people with.  That minor detail went unexplained as I recall also.

Anyhow, there were some good things in this 1 ½ hours of yuck though.  Namely, it made the wifey jump out of her skin several times which was quite hilarious.  It left her cuddlier with yours-truly (or at least I would like to think so).

In the end, I just quizzed her on if she understood the plot anymore or any less than I did.  She said she was as confused as me so I will leave it at that.  It’s unfortunate because at about one hour into the movie it looked like the movie was building to be something interesting.  I assure you – NOT!

This movie is a true stinker and gets only three Steelers Stars.