RIP Steve Jobs

I will miss Steve, you will miss Steve, all of us, will miss him. His sense of humor, his sense of design, his ideas for the future, and his qualities as a business man, have taught all of us what it means to be an entrepreneur. I used to dream of the day when I would work at his company. While Apple will live on, without our Captain, its just not going to be the same ship. All of us here at DurbrowVideoServices.com are in tears tonight. Forgive me for not having the words to express the honest and true sorrow in our hearts.

Elizaveta - new to me

Today's free iTune of the week is called 'Dreamer' by a young lady named Elizaveta. I really enjoy her voice, she has a mixture of operatic quality power and a singer songwriter's sensibility. She is very clever and I do like her arrangements/production quality. I am often grateful for the free iTunes songs because I often would not have found these artists on my own. I wish they had a new category on iTunes just called "Cleverness." I would check that out every day.

Person of Interest

POI is a new show helmed by Jim Caviezal. I really enjoyed the cleverness of the script, the acting was believable, not an easy thing to do considering the story has a certain level of unbelievability to it, a requirement for anything truly interesting, not just passable. If you liked "My Own Worst Enemy" with Christian Slater, definitely give POI a try. I especially liked that the pilot episode did not go exactly the way I expected it to. I hope that POI has a chance of surviving an entire season without being given the ax, unlike MOWE.

Fun With Numbers

I came across this fun little youtube video. It is a little game you can play with numbers. I think its fun and good for a 5 minute diversion from work.

Sarah Ferguson: a critique

This afternoon I watched an episode of "Finding Sarah:From Royalty to the Real World." The title of the episode is "Braving the big city." I want to preface my critique with the fact that I don't see anything wrong with her attempting to continue writing her books or even getting them animated. However, I do believe that she is going about it the wrong way. In the beginning of this episode, Sarah pitches her story "Little Red" to a roomful of older, caucasian, men who work for Nickelodeon. These men were not impressed.

Sarah's stories may have merit but the way she presented them was not effective. Sarah seemed to think that the problem had to do with her recent scandal when in reality, the problem was her pitching style. She went in telling them about the theme and using diplomatic language that would be appropriate at a diplomatic function where she had to give a speech about how children should be raised in this global village.

Fergie seems to have missed the point of animated movies, and that is to entertain. She didn't (at least not in the TV show.) tell them about why Little Red is so exciting and about the tremendous adventures Little Red will have. Fergie talked about teaching humanity when what she needed was a pre-fab roller coaster ride, book deal, pre-cast animated project that the whole family will love and will sell DVDs, tee shirts, and a special edition of Monopoly.

Fergie thought her brand was relevant, but the truth is that in the world of animation a divorced former princess is not a selling point. If she wanted to sell the stories she should hire someone else to pitch it, someone who does not carry baggage into the room. The point is to make the sale. Then, once the product is successful, reveal who the author was and thus repair Fergie's name and brand.

I don't suppose Fergie will ever come across my blog, but I really hope that someone clues her into how this is done. It would be too bad if perfectly good stories got lost because the author doesn't know what to present when.

fan ho

Once again, Dudecraft has brought an amazing artist to my attention. Fan Ho's photography is to art what love is to true love. Just one word can do it justice: wow.

Jackie Evancho

I really like Jackie Evancho's new album. It is available on iTunes, of course. Her voice is lovely and quite mature for her age. The arrangements are stellar and the recording engineers did an excellent job. I really appreciate all of the production choices that were made. I highly recommend that if you enjoy classical style vocals that you go and check her out.