jim's blog

OK, so it's been a while, again.  I guess the every-Sunday regiment doesn't have much staying power....  So going forward, it seems most likely that I'll just blog when I want to. And the rest of it can just 'go on holiday'! With that said, I now feel like getting my blog on...

Okay, it's been well established now that we're right in the thick of "March Madness".  And this madness, particularly of the basketball variety, is well documented.  I know I felt it myself last weekend big time (during the "Elite 8"), when I didn't pick a single game right (note - I still can't believe that Florida, tied with Butler, with 30 seconds *and* the ball, wasn't able to score and close it out)...

Last Thursday afternoon I was pretty pumped, being that it was only a few hours away from the beginning of another "March Madness" In fact, I was so giddy I even came up with this ridiculous Facebook post:

It's back! That magnetic Madness that manifests magnificently in the month of March (mainly).

So when I was in grade school, I really liked to write.  I always did it in between classes, during some of the frequent "open" time that we had back in our grade school (Campus Lab)...

Eventually, around 5th grade, I started writing a story: "The Mystery of the Rocket Tubes".  At the time I considered it a serious story, but thinking on it now is pretty hilarious (especially when compared with an 8-year-old Freeman Dyson's "Sir Phillip Roberts's Erolunar Collision")!

I've recently gotten my stuff together (literally!) to actually start making music videos.... However, I first got my digital video camera back in December 2006.  At the time, I'd actually been considering doing it for a couple years. As to what made me actually get the camera and start filming, there's probably 3 main reasons...

Last Thursday, after dinner, I had 1 "mission": Drive from Kimball to Maple Grove and get some ADAT tapes. My plan was to leave at 7 p.m., get to Guitar Center by about 7:50, leave around 8:10 and be back by 9. Here's how it actually went, as seen through 2 "filters"...

Last Saturday I did a pretty good 'JB Final' Mix for the song "Right as Rain" It was the result of 3 interesting days of mixing ;) Like the 3 songs before, it was very much a situation where i took my time, enjoyed the process, and tried to stay in the moment while doing it...

Earlier today, right after President Obama's State of the Union speech, a friend posted this on his Facebook wall:

"President Obama is a great leader and undoubtedly, the best we could have at this time."

Grammar aside, I was surprised to see this viewpoint expressed by this person in this way. And then I quickly realized that I agreed with pretty much every word ...

Last night, about 11 p.m., I was folding clothes in front of my parents' TV set. I found myself flipping between (opening day) Australian Open tennis, the Will Smith movie "I Am Legend", and "The Other Boleyn Girl". Incidentally, could Natalie Portman be any more comely in this movie??  I mean, there are many examples, but this scene will do...

So i haven't really been able to blog for a while, as I decided to make some website improvements.  These "improvements", by the way, are absolutely invisible to the end user (except for some possible speeding up in page loading times).

In spite of this, I went ahead - and ended up with about 9 days where the website looked something like this...