The launch of space shuttle Discovery was yesterday evening and provided some great visuals for anyone in the surrounding areas.

Couple photos from the front yard. Not great pics but they give a good idea of what it looked like. You could see the booster separation perfectly. The weather was perfect, not a cloud in the sky.

I have lived in Florida my whole life and have not been to a launch. I really need to drive down and see one before they retire the shuttle in a few years.

Check out Nasa.gov for more pics and video of the launch.

The lovely and talented Miss Imogen Heap has decided to release a completed vocal track of an unfinished song she did for another project. I am going to take this wonderful bit of generosity and challenge myself musically. I really want to write a great instrumental backing track for this. So I’m giving myself till the end of Feb. to get the basic idea of what I want to do down and then finish it off in March. I really want to take this seriously and make the best music I can.

If you also want to play around with the track, you can go Here and download it. It is in many formats: Separate tracks, Logic, GarageBand or ProTools session files.

I will post my final version in March or earlier if it is finished.

Imogen Heap: Twitter Website

The past couple of weeks I have been taking some photos of the sunrise down in St. Augustine. The market we go to is right next to the beach:

Every Wed. I am down in St. Augustine at a farmers market, and I usually see some interesting people from time to time but this I was not expecting:

This Tuesday PBS is airing a special titled “Car of the Future“.  Click and Clack, of Car Talk fame, are hosting the special, which should make for a comical event. It looks like they are going to be covering a wide variety of alternate fuel and energy cars. And from the trailer they are even taking the Tesla for a spin.

I’m really excited to see where alternate energy goes over the next 10 years, (Personal opinion here) as long as it doesn’t involve food based products for fuel, i.e, corn. I think using food supply for energy is about the most stupid thing we could do. That discussion is for another day.

Remember April 22nd 8pm Tuesday night. Check your local listing.

Who said you can’t beat on the furniture.

This is from Musical Furnishings.

So I have been getting HBO for free for a while now.(don’t tell comcast) Since I have been blessed with this gift, I can now watch a new special titled “John Adams”. This is a 7 part mini-series based on the book of the same name by David McCullough. I have really enjoyed the show so far. It is a nice insight into the world of early America and its foundation.

The first 2 parts were this past Sunday and Episode 3 is this coming sunday at 9PM.

Learn more from the show site Here

Playing at my grandparents when I was younger I would look through this device but had no clue what it was supposed to do. I probably just thought they were binoculars with a picture slot on it. For some reason later down the road I never looked into what this thing was or what it was made to do. Life has a great way of showing you things from your past with things in the present.

So one of my favorite music groups Tool released their latest album “10,000 Days” almost 2 years ago. I always buy their cds because the packaging is always another art form for them to express themselves with. Tool’s packaging for this album is very original in a packaging idea but not in art process.(they did win a grammy for the packaging) Their album packaging was this old device called a Stereoscope.

I’ll just give the very basic process of what the Stereoscope does. If you want more info, google is your friend. The basic process is you look through 2 lenses at 2 identical photos and it creates a 2-D image with 3-D depth. The only thing I can think of to compare it to visually are the pics in newspapers in the Harry Potter movies. It has that same look but with stationary objects.

This was a great way to revisit the past and finally learn what this thing was supposed to do. If you can ever find one of these devices, either an old one or a new one, try it out.

I just got to see the Musical Monty Python’s Spamalot. This musical as said by the complete title is “a new musical lovingly ripped off from the motion picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail”. As you can tell from the title this musical is exactly in the same comical vein as the movie. They do add and subtract to the story line, but a lot of the movie is there. If you know the movie well you will find yourself saying the lines as they are said on stage.

This is a musical, so almost all songs are new. The thing I loved is that some of the the songs are based off of mocking stereotypical musical plot structure. If you see it you will understand. The musical is also loaded with multiple pop cultural references. There are so many small things done on stage and in song that it would be great to see it again just to see if I missed anything. You really have to be on your game during this show. The jokes come so fast and subtle at times it is hard to keep up. But I love stuff like that.

An extra bonus for me was that I got to see a guy I went to high school with in the musical. Paddy(Patrick) Heusinger is playing Sir Lancelot. In my opinion he has all the great roles in the show and most of the classic characters from the movie.(The French Taunter, Knight of Ni and Tim the Enchanter) It was great to see him on stage again.

This musical is really fun and entertaining. Not a musical I would buy the soundtrack for, but a great time out to the theatre.

I saw this via digg.com today and thought it was too cute to not share.