davebryan.com

Out little Bella Kitty is now featured in her very first short, Rockband Birdie Cat! Dru plays Rockband a lot and now Bella plays along in between the songs.

It was a great time in the Black Rock Desert. Ken McGrath accompanied me on my return trip to the launch site on Saturday. Seeing this 12 foot beast blast off made the whole trip worthwhile!  It was also great to see so many other spectacular launches. I’ll post videos of them soon.

Compare this version of the video that I uploaded to YouTube. I might just post videos this way from now on as the quality is now higher with its HQ setting than exporting my flash movie files using WordTube. What do you think?

Oakland can be a great place to live - but it’s true,  jaywalkers are everywhere and are real, real slow.

I’m going to attempt the trek out to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada this weekend so I can watch Aeropac’s high power rocket launch. Aeropac has a launch waiver up to 100,000 ft. so there should be some exciting rocket flights!

As some of you know the playa is an interesting and challenging environment. This time of year there can be lakes, floods and lots of mud. Here is a recon video shot yesterday.

Improv Everywhere which brought us Underwear on the Subway and other flash mob participation events, now brings the Mp3 Experiment. Participants started on NYC’s Roosevelt Island, then started listening to  programmed set of steps from a Mp3 file on their iPods. The creepy voice and its series of events reminds me of Negativland’s A Big 10-8 Place.

As a lifelong fan of the Beatles and avid Rockband player, I was checking out the E3 introduction of the Beatles edition of Rockband. This is the impressive animated intro by Pete Candeland, known for his work with Gorillaz.

I went down to Santa Cruz  couple weeks ago and shot this little video of Jay working on his new mobile home.

Thrilling race through the streets of Monaco - a vain spectacle for sure!
I still have to figure out where you can catch it on TV. I’ll probably just find it on the Internets somewhere…

I hope my friends and their loved ones in the beautiful Santa Barbara area are safe and their homes preserved in this seasons horrible inferno.

Photo by Susie Gray

While attending DeLaveaga elementary school, whenever the projector was rolled into the classroom we knew we were in for a treat! Various films were shown to either fill in for the teacher’s incomplete class plans or to give the kids a little bit of a ‘fun’ break. A lot of films were public safety oriented or educational in some way. My all time favorite was this freakish bicycle safety flick, “One Got Fat”. In the early seventies anything with monkeys or monkey people was popular - “Planet Of The Apes”, “Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp” were big hits at the time.

“One Got Fat” still holds up pretty well, at least on a dark level. Poor bicycle riding was punished in gruesome accidents, even one with a steam roller, how classic! The background music and sound effects are also delightful. I’m sure now days, this film would be un PC in some way. Also featured, is the original snark narrator, Edward Everett Horton of Fractured Fairy Tales fame.

New app for the Twitteratti from the good folks at Sandwichdynamics.

Why can’t other app demos be like this one? Dig the Popcorn in the background!

My friend Ken McGraff just sent me a link to this video of The Monitors, a 1960s sci-fi movie on YouTube. Great soundtrack!

This afternoon I had a wonderful visit to the Alameda Government center to visit the office of the Treasurer & Tax Collector. In order to not be hit with a huge penalty for paying late, I thought I’d visit in person and get a stamped receipt as proof of paying in a timely manner. When you arrive at the Alameda Government center on Oak St., you are greeted by Sheriff Deputies and an airport style security arrangement where I had to remove my belt, keys and iPhone and run them through a metal detector. After passing security, I was free to stand in a long line to pay my taxes. After the line seemed to stop moving, an employee came out and told the taxpayers that the, “system had gone down”. Since I just needed to drop off a check and get a receipt stamp I waited another ten minutes to get my property taxes processed.

Happy that I had gotten this chore out of the way, I was walking down the halls of government when I noticed this amusing sign for the Treasurer & Tax Collector. The logo seems to symbolize some kind of Utopian world of money, houses, computers and people! I snapped a couple shots with my iPhone right in front of some of the Deputies when one asked me what I was doing. I told him I was taking a picture of the sign on the wall. He then told me that he thought it was against the law to do that. He then conferred with another deputy that said it was against the law. He then asked me if I could delete the picture. I told him that it was too late - it was already, “in the cloud”! He asked me what I was taking the picture for. I said it was for my blog and that I cover interesting events in the community. The deputy admonished me that this was no good and that I need to get permission to take pictures. He repeated I better delete the picture when I get home and that it was a misdemeanor. I shrugged then left.

It is sad that our daily newspapers are shrinking or disappearing altogether. It makes me wonder though, in the case of our local San Francisco Chronicle, how much of this was an intentional neglect so they can get co-publishing mergers approved in Washington? The Chronicle was bought a few years ago by the Hearst Corporation and they are now losing over a million dollars a week.

Suggestion to the Chronicle’s Managers; making the paper smaller, with uglier typesetting and putting the business section on the back of another section isn’t going to help.

Tasty burger!

Took a trip up to Vallejo to visit Mr. Zorko. After picking him up, we went for a beautiful scenic trip up to Napa and then to St. Helena, home of Taylor’s Refresher where they have the best darn, tasty burgers. Got some fries and Fat Tire beer to wash it down. For dessert, a decadent green tea milk shake! Good thing bootcamp workouts start in a week…

Growing up I loved eating cereal. Lots of cereal! Cereal brought me tremendous joy, especially, the brands that my parents forbid me to eat. Many of these cereals have left the planet and are now only a memory. Here is one of my old faves, the curious Pink Panther Flakes and Nerds cereal because, it’s such a ridiculous tribute to a candy - which most cereal resembles anyway!

See more of your old crunchy, sweet faves here!

Funny vid by Julian Smith. I somehow avoided the 25 Things Meme on Facebook as the colossal waste of time to do it would be better spent doing some other inward realization exercise somewhere else.

Irina Slutsky covered Macworld as only she can with her humorous coverage of last January’s event.

Video from Carls Fine Films

What are your favorite things from Trader Joe’s? I hate when I get caught singing along to the 80s songs in the Rockridge store.