QotD: The Best Part of Waking Up

What's your morning beverage of choice?  Coffee, tea, juice?  Homemade or store-bought?

I like how this Question feels the need to give examples of morning beverages, as though someone might mistakenly write "eggs and toast" or "blue." In any event, this is a squishy Nerf ball of a question, which is fine for this morning. Sadly, I wasn't able to write much last week...and I'm not entirely sure why. I guess it was busy, but I don't recall it being insanely hectic. On Friday, though, I did go to the Disney studio lot in Burbank for a "Best of CES" presentation, wherein we again demoed our BD-Live functionality for the general Disney employees (Disney apparently brings these CES demos to their studio every year to keep their work force connected and interested, I suppose...not a terrible idea). Still, given that our demo was geared toward the in-the-know CES attendee, it was met mostly with shrugged shoulders by the general "workaday" masses, as they weren't even terribly familiar with Blu-ray in the first place. So as the day went on (I was there from 7:30 AM to 3:30 PM), I gradually shifted from demoing our new-fangled interactivity to just showing off the pretty pictures...which garnered more interest.

Don't take that as a judgment, though...it was just the wrong content for the crowd. Still, some people were pretty rude about it. It's not like we were trying to sell them anything right there and then...it's just a demo and doesn't require a haughty "not interested," complete with storm-off. So between the less-than-interested reactions from the crowd and the standing for eight hours aspect, I teeter on the brink of using the word "grueling" to describe the day. But really, it was an interesting adventure and was exciting to see another studio lot and get out of the office. Plus, my day was over at 3:30 as opposed to 6, so that was a bonus. And they had a really nice commissary...the Disney lot is much like a college campus, as opposed to our Sony lot (which used to be the MGM lot...they've filmed everything from The Wizard of Oz to Spider-Man 3 here), which is far more movie-studio-esque. It was really neat to see the Animation buildings, though, given the history of it all (though I believe the Animation building I saw was built in 1988...still, given that movies like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King were all made there, that's enough history for me). Anyway, it was an adventure, and it was flattering to be asked to present there by the higher-ups.

Oh, but the Question: I have coffee in the mornings and I make it at home, alongside my oatmeal or cereal or what have you. I tend to save my orange juice for dessert, though I will have it alongside my coffee if I know I won't be at home for dinner that night. Fascinating, I know.

Outside of that, I don't really have much to discuss at the moment. As anyone who has seen my Flickr page already knows, I bought a new digital camera last week, as my old one died after returning from my December trip to New York (it actually died on New Year's Eve, thus depriving me of captured memories from that evening...which might be for the best). I'm kind of in love with it, as it takes high-def pictures and is infinitely more advanced than my old one (and slimmer, too). Plus, thanks to my Sony discount, I didn't have to go into debt to acquire it...which is nice.

I haven't really seen any movies of note lately...certainly nothing in theaters. I was a good son and watched The Jane Austen Book Club with my Mom this weekend...oh, it's painfully bad, but it was light and frothy enough to not make much of a scar. I also saw Elizabeth: The Golden Age on Friday, which was pretty and dull (though I wasn't enamored of the first Elizabeth, either...I do like period dramas, usually, but these...not so much). I also re-watched The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, now on Blu-ray, and enjoyed it again. Why the Academy saw fit to nominate Jason Fucking Reitman (his full name) instead of Andrew Dominik is beyond me. It's not the Greatest Movie Ever Made, but it's a fine film with a definite skill behind it. I would recommend it if you like nearly-three-hour dramas where you already know the ending (ie: Titanic...but without the spectacle and excitement). I'm also in the midst of watching Hidalgo, that horse movie with Viggo Mortensen...kind of boring, as well.

But I will take a quick separate paragraph to say that I've revised my opinion on Con Air. It's vastly stupid, predictable, and represents the worst of Hollywood in some ways...but it's also pretty damn entertaining. That's all I really have to say about that.

All right, that's about all I have for right now. Don't worry, I don't think you missed much during my absence last week...and I'm certain I'll have a meaty diatribe about Valentine's Day this week (my least favorite "holiday"). But for now, I'll leave it at this.