k0an.com

Woke up at 4:30 to avoid the heat. Had a blast!

A fun music website application. It's really easy to use and you can make cool little tunes.

I went to the Great American Food and Music Fest with the kids, Holly, Simon, and Raj. It turned out to be the biggest disaster of an event I've experienced. They tried to be clever by putting RFID chips in the wristbands that you would then use to pay for your food. However they were experiencing an internet connection problem so the system didn't work. Why would you want to introduce a dependency on internet connectivity in order to let someone buy a hot dog?

So the thousands of people there were forced to wait in two hour lines while everything was figured out and most people didn't end up getting any food. So thousands of people went outside and waited another hour in line to get refunds. It was a complete and utter failure.

However, the kids enjoyed running up and down the grass hill at Shoreline. I guess I should have just taken them to a park.

Update (6/16/09): Article from the Mercury News.

I didn't know much about this musical before seeing it today in Livermore. I actually thought it was a play instead of a musical. It's the first bit of entertainment I had the pleasure of attending at the new Bankhead Theater. The building is very comfortable and since it's not too large every seat is a good one.

The musical had interesting characters with clever dialogue that had the audience laughing throughout the whole thing. All of the performers did an excellent job and were up to the task of singing/dancing/acting in a Broadway performance.

The first half of the musical was awesome. One great part is they brought in three member of the audience to go on stage and participate. They were incorporated into the spelling bee and were gradually eliminated. They also had one local celebrity on stage, 2007 National Spelling Bee champion Evan O'Dorney from Danville! He was just as geeky as you'd expect and the audience loved him. The best part was the part of the musical where he needed to be eliminated but he knew how to spell each word they threw at him. The actors broke character because they couldn't believe that he kept getting all the insane words they were coming up with. Finally on the sixth or seventh word they were able to knock him out and the audience gave him several rounds of applause.

The second half of the musical lost some steam. There was one song where the character Olive had an imaginary reunion with her Mom in India and it seemed like it went on for 15 minutes. The mournful tone of the song really seemed out of place with the rest of the musical and it really sucked the energy out of the room. Also, none of the songs were very memorable. They were just typical of any musical where people are singing over each other but completely lacking a chorus anybody would care about.

However, all of the low points of the performance were attributed to the creators, not the performers. The performances were excellent. One actress, Yvonne Same stood out in one performance where she twirled a baton, played the piano, performed karate, danced, sang, and did the splits!

Another highlight for me was the awesome set design. The set for the whole musical consisted of a perfectly crafted high school gymnasium represented in a pleasantly exagerated perspective.

Highly recommended!

I love this group...