Last week, my wife Carey and I went to a Cirque du Soleil show, KOOZA, in downtown San Jose. I gotta say, it was well worth the $90 per seat we paid! Incredible performances, great stage set, and great music. It’s just so spectacular and entertaining, and the clown acts are hilarious. It was longer than I expected too; about 2 1/2 hours including the 1/2 hour intermission. If you ever get a chance, go see Cirque du Soleil. This year the KOOZA show is coming to Hartford, Philly, Chicago, and Boston.
I’m a tennis fan, and I’ve sure been enjoying the Australian Open this year. Incredible matches; the level of play has been remarkable. Unfortunately, not many Americans made it to far into the tournament.
Yesterday, Novak Djokovic crushed world number one Roger Federer in the semi-finals. Glad for this as Federer just wins too much! And my favorite two players on the women’s side are in the finals, Maria Sharapova and Ana Ivanovic.
Ana Ivanovic
I had high expectations when I went to see the new movie Beowulf last weekend, and man, I was not disappointed. It was awesome! I saw it in IMAX 3D which made it even more incredible. Although there were a couple major changes to the original plot of the epic Beowulf poem, I think it was for the better.
Factoids:
- Beowulf is an old English epic poem thought to have been composed sometime in the middle ages. The poem tells the story of Beowulf and his battles against three different adversaries.
- The only surviving manuscript of Beowulf is the work of two, rather than one, scribes who transcribed the poem from another earlier manuscript and it now resides in the British Library.
- The truly epic poem Beowulf has survived through the centuries and is the only surviving example of Anglo Saxon heroic poetry.
- Despite being a mainly Scandinavian story with most of the storyline taking part in Scandinavia rather than England it has risen to become a national English epic.
- The poem consists of no less than 3,183 lines and the events described in the poem take place during the 5th or 6th Century.
I read numerous RSS feeds, mostly related to front-end web development. But there are a few that I read that are not tech-related…
By the way, I use NetVibes, an awesome personalized “home page” which can not only read and organize RSS feeds, but also blogs, email accounts, social networks, search engines, instant messengers, photos, videos, podcasts, and game widgets!
I was fortunate enough to recently attend the An Event Apart, San Francisco (you can view a collection of ALA SF photos on Flickr). The first thing to mention is, to my pleasant surprise, how funny Jared Spool and Jeffrey Zeldman were! In addition to the sessions, the atmosphere was electric, a made a few good professional contacts, and the food was excellent 
I also had the opportunity to personally speak (even though briefly) with Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Joe Clark.
It would be great if every web designer and developer in the world could attend this conference as it promotes the right way to do web development–namely web standards and accessibility. There were also a couple excellent sessions on web design.
Eric Meyer, the infamous CSS guru, presented twice. He showcased his data table-to-bar chart CSS, which was really impressive. The second session focused on CSS and IE7, mostly about CSS selector techniques. Jeffrey Zeldman also presented twice–on Writing the User Interface and Selling Design. Other notable presenters include Jason Santa Maria of Happy Cog, Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering, and Kimberly Blessing of PayPal.
A few good quotes used in the presentations were:
I’d have written it shorter if I had more time.
Design helps people read less.
An interface is worth a thousand pictures.
Went to the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit, Michigan, last Friday. There sure were some really cool cars. I especially liked the concept Ford Mustang, concept Ford Airstream, Lexus LF-A, and the Chevrolet Volt. The MINI exhibit was the coolest; it had games, live DJ, and great cars. My two-year-old son Carson had a great time too!
Flickr pics of North American International Auto Show
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