Mac Ingenuity at its Finest

I gotta admit I'm a Mac fan. As a proud owner of a MacBook Pro and an iPhone, both which I love, this video hits my funny bone rather well. In fact, I must say I have been enjoying very much comedy videos from the Onion. I am impressed with the level of production they are able to obtain. They score extremely high on news parody - they did so in print and now in picture.



Very funny.

The Christmas Lights are Still Up

This post is made after our neighbor comments to my wife Morgan - "Hey, what's up with the Christmas Lights?"

Disney Dollars Hard at Work

At this time of year I usually work on the Disney Media Resort Showcase and that is in full swing again this year. It takes place in Feburary but this year things are starting early. My work on them is generally to create characters the radio broadcast media can interview - they usually carry the current marketing / branding / PR messages from the Resort perspective in an entertaining way.

This year is all about affordability and value of the Resort Benefits, plus a new vacation package plan. So Penny Pinter (she's nicknamed Penny Pincher) and Val Eugenio (she's a Value Genie-us) help deliver that message. They're neighbors and friends and have started a club for Mom's across the country - Bargain Reconnaissance And Savings Hunters - they're BRASH Mom's. You see how I did that - clever clever - that's how I make those Disney dollars - with a ton of those wacky word play characters.

Today, as well as being Inauguration Day we had a high level review with the Walt Disney Entertainment executives. All went well, and luckily the work continues. I have done this project for the past 4 or 5 years, but somehow it seems to be much busier this year, taking up much more of my time. I remember in the first years the job was creating the characters and prepping them for the interviews.

Last year they added an element called the "Dream's Player" where each broadcast media partner has a Disney site customized for them that their listening audience can check in with to follow their journeys. We schedule the radio personalities for various segments that can be played and viewed later from their respective site. The characters I develop will have an interaction with each radio personality that is loosely scripted. All that development and scripting is added into the mix.

Every night there is some or other themed dinner or dining experience we send them to. One of those for this year seems to have blossomed into a large scale dinner event. The theme is What Will You Celebrate? - one of the current promotional themes at Walt Disney World this year. I am floored with the amount of production and money that flows through Disney events such as this. As a Show Director at Disney I get to live an alter ego life compared to my SAK life. As is often the case, however, the SAK experience is closer to my heart, and ultimately more fulfilling. So this week I hurt my head concentrating on how we can find a thousand dollars for 2 LED light instruments for our SAK show, and I unveiled a vision for the What Will You Celebrate dinner event with a team of 5 designers from different departments all eager to bring that vision to life - for only $60,000!

A collision of 2 completely different worlds.

Resolution Held

Okay I'm two weeks into my resolution and luckily we're still holding. Seems there's so much busy work - the weeks go by so quickly. It's been almost 4 months since the Pleasure Island clubs closed, which made up about half of my Disney work, but there is no shortage of work to be done. 4th Quarter of 2008 had me very busy with SAK stuff. Keith moved to Nashville and we're looking for an in-house Sales person. In between all the interviewing and getting set for that transition I've been the Sales person, Production Coordinator and Production Manager. Lots of layers of business.

This weekend is Robyn Pedretti's (one of our SAK ensemble) wedding. That's the good news. The bad news is she's invited the whole SAK ensemble to the wedding. The good news is I've scheduled a Comedy Warehouse Reunion Show that Saturday. The bad news is I might have to hang back and be at SAK to be a conduit of familiarity for the Comedy Warehouse peeps. We'll see. I'd sure like to be at the wedding if that is possible. I'm also trying my best to plan around what promises to be a very hectic traffic night down at SAK. These are the times that try our patience and test the fortitude of our audience. We've got Riverdance at the Bob Carr (which I'd really like to see sometime) and Ringling Bros. Circus at the Amway Arena. Now those Ringling cats is some hard working folks. They've got 3 shows scheduled on Saturday - 11:30am, 3:30pm and 7:30pm. Wow. I guess for the acts it's an okay schedule - just do your act 3 times in a day but my goodness, circus folk work it. The epitome of cross-utilization. If they're not swinging from the trapeze 40 feet in the air, they're holding the flaming hoop for the zebra to jump through. (Incidentally the zebra's not a zebra, it's a white-haired horse who's just gotten charred from the flaming hoop over time. I think they switch them out every couple of performances.)

Finally - a Christmas lights update. This year I was fortunate enough to have the time to put up extensive Christmas lights on our house - thanks to PI closing. they look great - best on the block - and I love Christmas lights. They are still up and I'm not sure when they will be coming down. If it was up to me I'd have them up all year long. The only downside is the electric bill. But it seems like we just got them all up and now it's time to take them down? I'll keep an update as to the date they actually come down. It will be a sad day for me.

Resolved for 2009

Forgive me Father for I have sinned. It has been 4 months since my last blog entry. Holy Samoli! What's the use of having a blog if you never write on it? Well, this is a new year, old habits are off, new ones to begin. I am resolved in 2009 to blog more regularly. In fact, my resolution is to write on my blog at least weekly. What has kept me generally from blogging more often is that I think too much about what this or that entry will be and then go about trying to make cute graphics to go with it so it doesn't look like just a bunch of words. To make this resolution come to pass I may need to sacrifice some of that. I believe I am prepared to do so, although even the thought of just writing words makes my stomach churn a little bit. Surely this will be a good growth experience for me. I did however, in preparing this post, make a little slide show of our end of year/holiday times. What a great time of year. I just love Christmas and the holidays. This was our first holiday season in our new house and we just love it. We bought this house at the end of last year - closed on the 17th of December and moved in Christmas Eve night, so we did have our Christmas here last year. But this year we were all settled in for the whole Christmas season. I had some extra time on my hands this year what with the closing of Pleasure Island at the end of September, so I got to do one of the things I've always wanted to do but never really had the time - put up Christmas lights. I like that very much.

So this is the beginning of a more regular output schedule as far as my blog goes. You can expect posts at least weekly. Keep in mind, however, without much forethought sometimes the posts might get a little boring, be very brief and have no pictures or graphics. Who knows, that might be better in the long run anyway.