Ron Awakes from his Coma

What a delay! Wow! Work has been insanely busy as we get ready to close this shop down and move it to India. Yes I am a victim of offshoring - well not really, I keep my job but my site closes. So a quick review of everything that has been happening-

Obama wins- Yeah! America gets it right. An intelligent, reasonable, articulate guy gets elected over the Senior Citizen and Moose Hunter. I saw this on line and thought the slogan was lame but the picture is kinda cool

So good luck Mr. Obama - you get the right to inherit all of the problems of this country and get blamed if you can't fix them in four years. What else - Jen, my sister, had an ultrasound and sent out the first picture of her baby:

So cute! Those ultrasounds have better resolution now. I remember looking at one of my co-worker's once and it looked like a Rosarch blot. "See that there - thats the arm" "That? Oh ok, I see it now". But now you can see clearly.

In my exercise battle, I have 2 miles conquered now this week I have to hit 2.5 miles. I jogged around Lake Merritt the other day. A very nice park in the otherwise kinda dreary city of Oakland.

I have been hitting YouTube a lot lately just clicking on random videos and watching things for the hell of it. There is a comedian on there who is funny. His name is Kevjumba. He is a high school kid who listed himself as a comedian and now has millions of page views. For fun, I recommend his video "I love my Dad" where he interviews his father. I laugh at it everytime.

I also found a really cool video of the Concord Blue Devils doing their warm-up routine called "Space Chords". I think it is amazing and really demonstrates a foundation of music called Chord Resolution. Your ear expects dissonance to resolve to consonace and when it happens there is a reaction. Listen to the chords near the end and when the chord resolves - people react. It is amazing:

There are some great DCI clips too. I was watching the Madison Scouts Alumni corp do a version of Malaguena that rocks. Search for Malaguena DCI and watch the 2006 Madison Scouts. It is awesome. Finally, here is a great video of Maynard Ferguson, my favorite trumpet player, performing "Give it One". It was done in 1977 which if you remember my other posts - a great year in music. In fact, in 1977 our high school jazz band went to Reno and we saw Maynard perform at the Pioneer Theatre - so this was the band we saw. Check out all of the facial hair.