Factoid from my calendar, which is all about Broadway theatre:

The Sound of Music opened at the Lunt & Fontanne Theatre on November 16, 1959. The seven youngsters playing the Von Trapp children received a group Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress, even though two of the actors were clearly boys.

strangest Google search term to reach my blog:

“boba jello shots”

This Sat Oct. 18th, bring your home movies to a worldwide Home Movie Day location near you. We’ll inspect the film in any format (like Super8, 16mm) and if it’s in good enough shape, we’ll project it! And teach you how best to take care of it so it’ll last longer. Or tell you where you can have it transferred. Etc etc. Even if you don’t have any home movies, you can still come and watch other peoples’!

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.1556448&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

i’m trying to figure out how to maximize my productivity using my new…iPhone! Well, it’s not brand-new. I spied a pretty good deal for it on Craigslist and found the seller to be pretty trustworthy, so I bought the original, 1st-gen phone. I think it’s worth it because I don’t need to pay an extra $20 a month for faster data speed.

In fact, I was originally gonna unlock it so that I could just keep my regular voice plan, disable EDGE, and go with just the WiFi, but I ended up activating it (which took exactly 3 minutes via iTunes), and now, after getting a taste of EDGE-speed access, I think it’s all right, worth the $15/month I have to pay.

Anyway, as soon as I activated and the Home screen appeared, it was Love. I’ve decided to name it Helmut.

Right now I’m loving Tap Tap Revenge, and Scribble, and the Maps application. Pandora would be cooler if you could run it in the background, and Twitterific would be better if it notified you of new tweets, like the desktop Twhirl app does. Maybe they should make Growl for the iPhone! Also, why do they constantly need to know where I’m located? That’s annoying and they should allow you to disable it.

Anyway, what I would like is for an effective way to tap in notes and tasks, and to get reminders, preferably without using SMS since I”m limited to 200 messages a month. Unfortunately, Remember the Milk isn’t free. So I’ll be working with gCal I think. And Twitter, I imagine.

Today I went to my internship in Little Tokyo and realized I wasn’t being useful at all there. They’re busy doing their thing, and there really isn’t much time to work with me to do what we need to do for the archive. So I think I’m going to quit.

I’m supposed to have my first class this quarter tomorrow. Actually, it was my only class. And I thought it’d be fun, but I’ve realized that it’s not really going to be all that useful for what I’d really like to do.

Fact is, I don’t think this whole “school” thing has been worth it. And since it’s still only two days into the quarter, I think I can get most of my tuition back for the quarter by un-registering, so I’m looking into my options for that now. Which is good because I *really* didn’t want to build my portfolio in two weeks, or take comps in four.

Of course, now I’m going to have to move out of my apartment, since housing is for enrolled students only. Too bad; I had two roommates this year but they were pretty awesome, surprisingly. Still, living alone is the best of all worlds; maybe I can move into my own studio or single now. Preferably somewhere in WeHo or further into the Westside.

Which I can now afford to do, because I got a job!! It’s not exactly related to anything I’ve been studying or learning, but still seems promising. Actually, I have studied for it, since I majored in French in college.

Basically, I’m going to be a French tutor for these kids, whose dad is bigwig who works for a major company around these parts. I found the ad on Craigslist and the pay was so re-donkulously high I applied on a whim (had my resume all ready! granted, it was crafted for an IA gig, but I just added a “languages” section and voilà!).

And I got it!

So I’m pretty excited. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Tomorrow being April 2nd and all. HA!

Manolo the shoeblogger has been posting excerpts from the autobiography of his idol, David Hasselhoff. At first I skipped right over these entries because while the Manolo has every right to indulge his devotion to the Hoff, I have every right to breeze through to get to the pretty shoe photos.

I accidentally read through last Friday’s, though, and realized I’d actually been missing out on some gems. Say what you will about Mr. Hasselhoff, he’s certainly had many more interesting life experiences than the average person.

And I agree with the commenter for that last story, every sentence *should* begin, “Someone handed me a koala bear, and…”

I was tickled to learn recently that Bordwell and Thompson write a blog. They’re the ones who wrote “ The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 with Janet Staiger, which contains some pretty fundamental stuff if one is interested in classical Hollywood cinema.

Anyway, today Bordwell wrote about some guy who gave a talk at their school (Madison) about his work on eyetracking in films. It’s really interesting, and I really like the psychology angle of it, but there was the added synchrony of a post in Boing-boing this morning about web usability guru Jakob Nielson’s eyetracking studies, which revealed some rather entertaining results. Bordwell seems to have read the same article, too, because he links to it in his own post.

Hilarious!

If Web 2.0 Applied to Real Life
Originally uploaded by darthservo.

I faved this when I was just getting into folksonomies and the wisdom of crowds, Web 2.0 craziness, and people were going completely nutso with the tags. *Every* web app had them, including us, whether or not they made any sense.

Yeah, that got old kinda quick.

I don’t love this photo that much anymore, but I’ll keep it in my faves just as a reminder of how crazy I was about folksonomies. I still believe in the idea behind this whole semantic web thing, but know it’s gonna be awhile longer before stuff like this will actually be of any use to anyone. And in the meantime, we’ll just poke fun at it. I mean, it is kinda funny, in a smiley-face way, if not wholly in a ha-ha way.

This is from a story about how politicians and the media often clean up certain things, either for propriety’s sake, or for general PR reasons.

Asked for President Reagan’s reaction after winning a hard-fought 1981 vote in Congress authorizing the sale of AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia, the White House aide Michael Deaver told reporters the president exclaimed, “Thank God!” What Reagan actually said, according to someone in the room, was, “I feel like I’ve just crapped a pineapple.”

[dangit, I lost the source link to this, but I'm sure if you Google around you'll find it]

I keep a “Quote of the Day” feed at the corner of my personalized Google homepage. I like the randomness, and as far as distractions go, a quote is short and sweet.

I particularly enjoyed this one from yesterday:

Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth. – Rex Stout (1886 – 1975)

I’m not sure why it struck my fancy, since I’ve never known any millionaires, period, much less any whiny ones. It just seems kinda funny, and it could be accurate, from what I do know about wealth and famous millionaires.

Still, it might not be as deliciously nasty as anything someone like Oscar Wilde might have said, but it’s definitely got the wry part down, a la Mark Twain.

And further still, I don’t think I’d mind having my fortitude tested in millionaire-dom. When will I get my chance?