Mini Van

On my way home from lunch with my Dad today, I stopped at the Honda Dealership. I turn my Monte Carlo back in in a couple of weeks, so I figured I'd check out a dealership. We bought our Dodge Caravan in 1998 after Maddie was born, and bought a pretty bare bones model. It had power nothing. I've always driven the new car, so I figured it was time for Cathie to get the new car. I'd spent a lot of time looking around online, checking eBay and dealership in the area . At the Brighton dealership, I found a van that I really liked, so I made sure Cathie test-drove it (I've made the mistake of NOT doing that before and paid dearly for three years). We ended up buying a 2003 Honda Odyssey with leather and power everything, including a built in DVD and GPS system. It's a certified vehicle and covered like a new car until 100,000 miles. I'm going to be driving our other mini-van until it dies. Hey, it's paid off.

Cathie told me about this. President Bush is doing a Q&A at Kansas State and someone asks him if he's seen Brokenback Mountain (Will's favorite movie):

Bad News

I've got some bad news for the Kurt family... The shared family photo gallery has died. The good news is that it has risen, indeed! Apparently some kind hacker exploited a security loophole in the application, nuked my database and killed all of my images. Nice, huh? I spent about 5 hours trying to recover it, and then gave up. I've since reloaded the application, patched the hole and established a new set of backup procedures so that this won't happen again. Those of you who are users in the gallery will need to re-register your account and re-upload your pictures.

Tags: Gallery2

Spiritual Disciplines

I was reading this morning in The Divine Conspiracy about Spiritual Disciplines, which he defines as "any activity within our power that we engage in to enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort". Anytime I start reading and reflecting on these disciplines, the disciplines of silence and solitude alway strike me. In a bad way. I'm scared to death of just being quiet and alone by myself without something to distract me: Music, Podcasts, TV, the Internet, a book. I suck at being quiet and alone. I thought this part was interesting, "This idea of doing nothing proves to be absolutely terrifying to most people I speak with. But at least the person who is capable of doing nothing might be capable of refraining from doing the wrong thing. And then perhaps he or she would be better able to do the right thing." The idea of even doing a half day personal retreat is something I'm not looking forward to enough that I'm sure I'll put it off for a while.

Tags: The Divine Conspiracy, Spiritual Disciplines

Morning Workout

We're in week four of our morning workout. This morning we were all dragging. We had a new guy join us, Kevin, who was a linebacker for the Cleveland Browns last year. He's a big boy. I ended up working out next to him, and did my best to keep up with him. Kirk had us do a bunch of one-legged squat jumps until we were all numb. On the last set, I just about threw up. Kohne asked him how what we did in these workouts compared to pro-football, and he said that this stuff was much tougher. It was interesting hearing how they train, and how their expected to get a lot of this stuff done on their own.

Weekend

On Saturday, Nate had his second basketball game. He's still digging it. The first game, the kids were all over the place, just trying to cover their man. In the second practice, they learned how to play a certain position, so the game started off with kids so busy playing their position, they forgot about getting the ball. Nate's the tallest one on his team, and does a pretty good job rebounding the ball. It's amazing that even in 3rd grade, it gets pretty physical out there.

That night we had Brad's surprise party for his 52nd birthday. Eli, Bob, Brad and I all found out around 10PM that the following Sunday is fifth Sunday. What's this important, you ask? The four of work on the "The Crew", our church's load-up and take-down crew on the fifth and first Sunday's of the months. It involves getting up about 6:30 AM on Sunday, loading up some huge crates on wheels, taking them to church and then unloading all 15 of them around the church. We setup some of it, setup a billion chairs (to Mark Hamilton's exact specifications), and then go grab breakfast. After church, we do it all in reverse. Anyways.... Going to bed at 2 didn't make it any easier getting up at 6:30. The pouring rain made it more fun, but not as much fun as having only Bob (he looked like death warmed over) and I showed up (Sue came later).

The kids dug the unloading part of it, and Nate was a big help. He volunteered to help out next time, even after I explained to it how early we get up in the morning. We had Ground Zero tonight, where Jason talked about the relationship between culture and holiness.

My 'Happy' Friend Rudy

Bob, Brad, Will, Eli, Ron and I got a chance to hang out with Bob and Brad's brother-in-law Rudy at Brad's surprise birthday party last night. Rudy is a very unique kind of guy, and a big reader of the blog. He mentioned a couple of times that since 'rudiculous' is taken, he wants to be known as Rudilicious. Go figure. That's the 'ol Rudmeister for ya.

Here's the latest on my Mom from my Dad:

Lynn finished her 5th chemo treatment today. She was elated when the nurse told her she gained almost 2 lbs during the last two weeks. Lynn has been feeling very fatigued. You all know that Lynn is usually full of energy, but because of the chemo, “her get up - got up and went.” Her appetite fluctuates; some days she has no appetite, while other days she has special cravings.

Since she didn’t have a chemo treatment last week, Lynn felt fair this week. It also helped that she had some of her grandchildren come for short visits, especially 5 month old Libby who she was able to hold on her lap.

She continues with treatment once a week, on Fridays, with 5 more treatments to be completed by mid-March. This is normally a 10 hour ordeal. The docs monitor the pathology reports very carefully and so far they remain okay for her to continue the cisplatin and gemcitabene chemo treatments.

After these treatments, Lynn begins daily radiation and chemo treatment for 5 weeks.

We feel blessed that as bad as Lynn feels some days, it could be so much worse. She talked to a lady who is a friend of a friend of ours, who had pancreatic cancer 4 years ago and is now in remission. She was unable to have the Whipple Procedure because her cancer was too far along. In addition to having many of the symptoms Lynn has been experiencing, she had severe pain. She went through chemo and radiation treatments and is now doing great. Through the grace of God, the great medical team, you-our loving family and friends, Lynn will be in remission soon.

Thank you for your continued prayers for my Mom. Please keep it up. It makes a difference.

Tags: Pancreatic Cancer, Lynn Kurt

LinkedIn

I'm way behind on this trend, but LinkedIn has become the mySpace for professionals. It gives you the chance to create an online resume, create a network of people, receive endorsements, and put yourself out there for job opportunities. Half of my company is out there in this thing. Create your profile and invite me into your network via dave_kurt @ yahoo.com.

Tags: Linkedin, myspace

Back from Leesburg

I have a love/hate relationship with the National Conference Center in Leesburg, VA where we hold many of our meetings. I've been coming in for the ten years I'm with Xerox, and it's a place we all love to complain about, but as a company, it's a huge part of our culture. The place was designed in the 70's as a training facility for Xerox, where reps would come and spend months at a time learning new product. In order to shock your system, the place was designed as a giant maze, complete with multi-level color-coded tunnels winding every which way. It's taken me well over 10 years of coming here to not get lost at least half the time. Just when I think I've got it figured out, I end up somewhere other than I expect. The place has a bar on-site called the Black Olive, and part of the Leesburg experience Karaoke night on Thursday. Senior VPs get into the game - everyone, good and bad, gets up, by themselves or as a group to do karaoke. Last night was no exception. Thursday night (aka Prom Night) was at the end of a grueling week of meetings and everyone wanted to blow off some steam - and they did. I got to bed last night about 4, and was back up at 6:30 to put together a presentation for this morning. Needless to say, today was a loooong day.

Tags: National Conference Center, Xerox, Karaoke

Adventures in Travel

Never a dull moment in traveling. I flew out of Dulles this afternoon, wanting badly to get home. As we were getting ready to pull out of the gate, they pulled back in and announced that they had to remove luggage from the plane because a passenger was not on the plane to accompany it. Later in the air, the pilot explained that a passenger from Air France's luggage had made it onto our plane, but he hadn't. It turns out he had been selected for additional screening and he tried to run. They arrested him and figured it was best to remove his luggage from our plane. I'm okay with that kind of delay.

Tags: Dulles, Security Breach

The show Lost has started to lose a little of it's luster for me, based on the fact that the show makes such infantesimile progress each episode. This is probably the most comprehensive theory I've read on what's really going on in the show. This guy's either way too smart, or has way too much time on his hands.

Tags: Lost

Stacy's Graduated from Law School!

On Sunday, my sister-in-law Stacy graduated from Cooley Law School, on her way to becoming a lawyer. She takes the bar in February, which she's busy studying for right now. We're super proud of her! Congrats Stacy!

Tags: Cooley Law School, Stacy Lebbon

Jon, Beth and Libby's Visit

Jon, Beth and Libby came to visit this afternoon while they're in town this week. They came over about 4, hung out for dinner and then Jon and I took Nate to his basketball practice. Maddie, Jon and I had our annual headstand contest while Jon tormented his nieces and nephews.

Tags: Headstands

Motocross Video

I uploaded this Motocross Video to both YouTube and Google Video at the same time to compare the time and quality. YouTube was available to view within 60 seconds, Google Video took 3 days. Google Video allows you to download and gives you a bigger size and viewing area on the screen, but I'm not sure it's that much better. Compare for yourself and let me know what you think.

Tags: YouTube.com, Google Video

Group Shot

This is kinda cool. It's a tool from Microsoft that allows you to take multiple group photos and combine them into a single good one where everyone's looking at the camera. Your pictures need to be panoramic and taken from a consistent angle and distance, but it seems to work.

My Mom

I'm at the tail end of a year long read of The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard, a book I've been chugging through 5 pages at a time, with a lot of breaks. In in the last chapter, which is talking about spiritual formation and discipleship in terms of dealing with circumstances, temptation and adversity. I read these two verses this morning and thought a lot about my Mom and how she's been dealing with her Pancreatic Cancer.

James 2:1-4:

2Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides. 3You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. 4So don't try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way.

Romans 5:1-5:

1By entering through faith into what God has always wanted to do for us--set us right with him, make us fit for him--we have it all together with God because of our Master Jesus. 2And that's not all: We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that he has already thrown open his door to us. We find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand--out in the wide open spaces of God's grace and glory, standing tall and shouting our praise.

3There's more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we're hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, 4and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. 5In alert expectancy such as this, we're never left feeling shortchanged. Quite the contrary--we can't round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit!

I thought about my Mom not so much as to remind her of these, but as the way that she's modeled these verses for me in terms of how you're she's dealing with her cancer over these past months. She have every right in the world to complain and pity herself throughout this process - but she doesn't. Each day I talk to her, she genuinely looks for the blessing in all of it, in each day, in each thing. If she's sick one day, she focuses on the fact that it could have been worse, or that it will be better the next. Reading the part where James talks about "You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors", I think her true colors have really shown themselves, and to quote a commercial - they're beautiful. Through all of this, she is teaching me so much about me about perseverance, faithfulness and what it means to be formed into the image of Christ through adversity. She's really an amazing woman. But if you know her, you already know that.

Tags: Dallas Willard, Lynn Kurt, Divine Conspiracy, Adversity, Cancer

I've worked for Xerox for 10 years, and I love my job, and I love the company. They're not perfect, but they do some amazing stuff, that makes me very proud to work here. Xerox has a social leave program that employees can apply for. It gives employees the chance to take a fully paid leave from their job for one year to go use their skills in the community to help non-profit organizations. Read more about it here. Our President and CEO, Anne Mulcahy (a leader I very much admire also) models this same kind of focus in the stuff she's involved with, like this Pakistani relief effort. Anne has lead a huge turn-around at Xerox over the last 7 years, and we're expected to announce a strong fourth quarter, largely from Anne's leadership. She's darn good. I even got an e-mail from her a while back after she used a case study video of one of my customers in a worldwide communication meeting.

Tags: Xerox, Anne Mulcahy, Social Leave

My first Segway ride

We had our Project 311 Board meeting tonight at one of the board member's office. He owns the company and gets around in a Segway. I got to take my first ride on his Segway and fell in love. It's so intuitive that it took less than a minute to move around at high speeds.

My Makeover

The kids had friends over today, and since Cathie wasn't around, I ended up being the candidate for a makeover. The picture doesn't show the pounds of glitter the girls put on me, the eyeliner or the lipstick I'm wearing, but you can clearly see the pigtails on the top of my head they were kind enough to give me.

Tags: Makeover

BFF

I'm all for brad trying to be just like me, but the early morning calls to find out what I'm wearing are getting a little strange.

Our Saturday

We had a pretty lazy morning this morning, hanging out, with me cooking some custom pancakes, complete with choclate chips, rasinettes and carmel. Nate and I went to his first basketball game at noon. It's a co-ed team with 2nd and 3rd graders. They had their first practice on Tuesday, and I'm suprised at how well it all went. The kids play a 40 minute game, two halves of 20, each with 4 5 minute periods that the groups of five switch out. It's a non-competitive league, so they don't officially keep score, but Nate filled me in on exactly what the score was at half-time. The goal is to teach the kids the fundamentals of the game in a pretty loose environment. The refs are there to call major infractions, but let the kids play without being too picky. This is Nate's first time playing basketball on a team, and he did pretty well. He didn't get any baskets, but he did a good job rebounding and on defense.

After the game, Nate and I went out for lunch to celebrate his first game and then we headed home to watch Emily and Madeline put on a musical. Maddie's been digging being able to give kids piggy back rides, and now she's figured out that she can carry Emily around the house. Not sure how I ended up in this picture....

Cath and I are going on a date tonight, heading to Ann Arbor for dinner and coffee and whatever else they do in Ann Arbor.

Motocross Night at the Palace

Some guys in the neighborhood and I took our boys to the Freestyle Motocross night at the palace last night. I'd been to a monster truck rally with Nate before, but never to something like this. These guys were amazing. We had the best seats you could have, 20 feet away from the landing ramp, right at eye level. There were times where the guys would be in such ridiculous positions, you were sure they were going to die. The guys would be parallel with their bikes, lying in a superman position and let go of their bikes for a second - stuff you just shouldn't be able to do 50 feet above the ground. The boys had a blast, and Kohne and I kept it interesting with an ongoing $1 bet during the elimination round.

Even with the great seats, I had a really tough time getting any decent pictures with my camera. I tried every combination of Aperture, speed and lighting settings I could think of, without any luck. A good digital SLR would have been perfect for these types of pictures...

Since my camera didn't seem to be working too well for pictures, I took a bunch of video footage, edited them (on my Mac Mini in about 5 minutes) to produce this video montage of tricks.

Tags: Freestyle Motocross

Snow Storm

On Wednesday morning, I woke up to a 5 inches of snow and this in my backyard. This morning, I woke up to 50 degree weather and rain. Gotta love Michigan.

(I just noticed when looking at this picture and typing this that my tire swing rope has broken. I went out back to look this morning and sure enough, the rope finally broke. This thing is hung 30+ feet up in the air and it's a pain to get up there, let alone a little scary to hang the thing. Guess that's why I had my brother-in-law Kevin do it for me.)

Come Thou Fount

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

--Come Thou Fount Lyrics

Tags: Come Thou Fount

Chauncy Looks Good In Yellow

Most of the guys who do our morning workout get up around 5:20 to make it there by 6. It's dark and some of us (ok, Bob) apparently have our workout clothes hanging up in the closet right next to our wife's clothes. We all appreciated Bob's bold fashion statement this morning with a yellow dress shirt for his workout attire.

(Rudy - I thought you would like this picture, now that you know that Bob is just like Will, Brad and I)

Tags: Bob Rays, Chauncy Billups, Fashion Statement

700w

I finally did it. I swapped my Palm based Treo 650 out for the new Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 based Treo 700W. The main driving force for the change was the fact that it can sync e-mail/contacts/calendar directly with my companies e-mail server, as opposed to the separate computer I had to dedicate to the task and keep online, connected to our corporate VPN 24/7. The new phone has EVDO, which is in essence broadband to the phone. It gives me near DSL speed when I'm online and allows me to connect to my phone via bluetooth and go online when I'm traveling, at DSL speeds as well. One nice added benefit is the ability for the phone to multi-task, so I can be on the phone while my TomTom GPS software is running in the background. I know a lot of this sounds like I'm just justifying my new phone, but after selling my 650 on eBay, it ended up being a push financially.

Tags: Treo 700w, Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0, EVDO, TomTom, GPS

Morning Workout

We're at the end of our second week of the Triad workout team. This morning it was Bob, Mark, Joe, Kirk, Myself and Jason. Kirk brought out these two-looped rubber bands, we paired up, and each put a loop around our waist. One person would run two 50 yard wind sprints while the person behind you acted as a drag, digging their feet in. How hard this workout goes is directly related to the partner. If you and your partner make a deal, life can be good. I got paired with Kirk and went first in the set. The only good thing about that was that I could cause him as much pain as he caused me during my set. We ended up pushing each other pretty hard and at the end, our legs were all toast. I hated every moment of this thing, but in the end, it felt good to push myself that hard, and do it with a group who was all in equal pain. Community is a good thing. We all went out for breakfast afterwards, which was nice. Brad didn't show this morning because he had a toothache, if you believe that.

Tags: Triad, Workout

Top Ten Trouble Poker Hands

Good article by Poker Stud Daniel Negreanu on which hands can be nothing but trouble
.

Tags: Daniel Negreanu, Poker Hands

Clerks 2 Is Close!

It looks like Clerks 2 is coming soon to theatres near you. You can check out the Clerks II Trailer here.

Tags: Clerks 2, Kevin Smith

Champion of the World

Cathie had an Elders meeting tonight, Maddie was at Girl Scouts, Nate was out sledding - so Emily and I hung together tonight and played a few games. Here's the sad part: She won them all. We played a few games of Hi-Ho Cherry-O and Concentration, and she crushed me in both. She beat me in Concentration 9 - 6 and 13-2, and then in three games of Hi-Ho Cherry-O in a row. This wasn't a case of me letting her win. I was beat by a four year old. Badly.

Tags: Hi-Ho Cherry-O, Concentration

The Idol

I watched American Idol for the first time ever tonight. I've heard from everyone that the first couple of episodes were the best, and I've gotta admit, they were darn funny. I have no desire to watch it beyond these episodes, but watching Simon, Paula and Randy mock the horribly awkward moments was worth watching. I have no desire to watch it beyond this first part. Watching Simon, I realized that Shinn was born with the sarcasm to do Simon's job.

Tags: American Idol, Jason Shinn

Sad as this sounds, I've been procrastinating for about a year on getting my Passport because of the photo that's required. I have headshots I can use, but never got around to figuring out what the actual dimensions should be. This website takes care of all of that for you. You upload a a digital picture, and it will resize it appropriately and generate a 4x6 picture with a number of small pictures that are the appropriate dimensions for your passport. Kinda cool.

Tags: Passport Photos

Sure it's immature, this made me giggle. I'm naming my next kid this. Should you refer to her by her full name every time? Noel: Help me out here.

MythBusters

I'm a big fan of the show MythBusters. If you've never seen the show, they take common myths and go through all sorts of elaborate things to debunk or prove them. Here's a collection of
Myth Busters Lost Experiments. The Ping-Pong Ball/Sea Otter one is the best.

Penny Stacking

If I had an unlimited amount of time on my hands (like my brother Jon, I would learn to Stack Pennies like this.

Tags: Pennys, Stacking

J did a talk last night at Ground Zero around Jesus' interaction with the woman caught in adultery. We talked a lot about our own change, the garbage we have, how we deal with it and how God looks at us in the midst of it and what he thinks about it. One of the big things that stuck with me was this quote:

When you can no longer change the situation you may change yourself.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
--Viktor Frankel

Not too shabby for a guy who spent three years in a concentration camp.

Tags: Viktor Frankel, Ground Zero, Life Change

We watched 24 last night. The bad guy has the same Plantronics Voyager 510 Headset as me. So he's got that going for him, which is nice....

Tags: Plantronics Voyager 510, 24

My Weekend

We had a day of just hanging out yesterday. Last night Bob, Brad, Mark, Will, Eli, Kirk and I got together at Bob's to watch the New England Game and play poker (I won both games, which is a first for me). The football game was a so-so game to watch with some small bets going back and forth, until with 8 minutes left Brad decided to offer up a 15:1 $5 bet for New England to win the game. Seconds later, Brady threw a bomb to bring my $75 closer to reality. In the end, I ended up losing at football, winning at cards.

We had church this morning and then after helping with load-up, we went out for breakfast with Dana and Eli and the kids. Nothing like a peaceful breakfast with 6 little kids, five of them girls. I've got our Youth Church tonight - Ground Zero, and then we've got a bunch of friends coming over to watch the season premiere of 24 tonight.

Amusing Links for a Saturday Morning

Geek Tattoos - These are my people


Collection of iPod Hacks


15 Tech Concepts you'll need to know in 2006

List of the top 100 Downloads for XP - Very Comprehensive

Tags: iPod Hacks, Top Downloads, Geek Tattoos

Consent to Kill

I just finished the book Consent to Kill by Vince Flynn. If you've never read this series of books, they're one of my favorite series. The main character, Mitch Rapp, is like John Clark from Tom Clancy books. The plots are equally complex as Clancy's, but without some of the painful minutiae. This book was definitely the best yet - one of those books where you're fighting to stay awake at night because you want to keep reading.

Tags: Consent to Kill, Vince Flynn, Tom Clancy, Mitch Rapp, John Clark

A Shocking Experience

Because of the big bomb scare, I ended up getting together with a bunch of co-workers and after dinner we got together to play poker. Normal Texas No-Limit Hold-em. Well, almost normal. The only thing that was abnormal was this: When you went out, you had to take a shock. A shock from the dog collar. The guy who's house we were playing at (Matt) had a dog with an in-ground fence accompanied by a remote control. The first round, we played at a level 3. I won that round. It didn't seem to hurt everyone else that much, so I suggested we up it to a level 5 for the next round, to turn it up a notch. I was the second person out. For the record, level five hurts A LOT.

I'm in Kansas City with my team today out at a customer site We had some excitement today and they evacuated the whole school. Everyone sat across the street watching as the bomb disposal unit and robot came to dismantle the bomb, as the FBI and police swarmed the place.

Tags: Park University, Bomb Threat

Real Men of Genius

"Bud Light presents Real Men of Genius"(Reaaaaal Men Of Genius) Today we salute you, Mr. Delusional Michigan Fan (Mr. Delusional Michigan Faaaaaan!)

Season after season, year after year, you try to justify your absurdly high preseason ranking (clutching at straws!) Season after season, year after year, you scramble to make futile attempts at damage control when the Wolverines lose to a grossly inferior opponent(How'd Northwestern score fifty fouuuuuur?) Inevitably, you'll bring up the past, and boast of National Championships won 40 years before you were born (those were the daaaaaays!)

You will point out that you have more wins than any other program as though that is relevant to the current season (been playing since the 1870s!) Go on, ignore that home loss to your arch rivals in the regular season finale and continue to believe that you'll defeat your bowl opponent with striking ease (we'll win by thirteeeeeeey!)

So crack open an ice cold Bud Light, oh Emperor of Excuses, and take comfort knowing that when you don't finish in the top 25, you'll be back to number three when the preseason polls come out next year (Mr.Delusional Michigan Fan!)"

Tags: University of Michigan, Real Men of Genius

Travel Blues

I just about missed my flight this morning.  I’m normally able to do my trip to the airport with my eyes closed, arriving in plenty of time.  I had a tough time finding a place to park, I needed a shoe shine which took longer than I’d planned, and they’d moved my gate back to the B terminal.  Normally, no problem.  Today, they were getting ready to shut the doors as I walked up to the gate.

Maybe it’s because of wireless Bluetooth Headsets, but I’ve noticed that a lot more guys talk on the phone while in the bathroom at airports.  Do women do this?

E-Mails

I was looking at my Outlook folders for last year, and it looks like I sent 7935 work-related e-mails and received 18873 e-mails last year. The sad thing is that I get some kind of sick sense of satisfaction when I have an empty e-mail box - like I've really accomplished something. I sent less than 250 personal e-mails.

Tags: e-mail

Very good article around the finances behind movie theaters:

Popcorn reportedly makes 90 cents on the dollar, which means that the "large" popcorn they charge US$4 for cost them, at most, 40 cents. Soda products are the Original Ripoff™, but everyone has already been regaled with stories about how a $3 dollar Coca Cola costs 10 cents, or some such (the actual numbers are secret because companies like Coke negotiate private deals). Wash, rinse, and repeat for everything else they sell that you can stuff in your mouth. Bottom line: they make a killing off of concessions.

And some advertisers are paying more than $50,000 per screen annually, especially to theaters willing to pump up the volume to near ear-shattering level so that seated customers will pay attention. Since there are virtually no costs involved in showing ads, the proceeds go directly to the theater chains' bottom lines. But to fit paid advertising into the gap between showings, multiplexes have to cut down on the length of the studios' coming attractions (which are free advertising), a decision that hardly pleases studios. (Often, getting the coming attractions shown involves the studios "leveraging our goodwill," as one studio executive explained. The studios will threaten to hold back a popcorn movie, such as the new Harry Potter or Star Wars sequels, unless the chain agrees to play a full reel of trailers.)

Tags: Movie Theater Profits, Concessions

Spirituality and Mysticism

Read the following this morning in the book The Holy Longing and really rang true for me in terms of what gets in the way of my faith - simple stuff, that is on the surface not bad:

To have a living faith today one must at some point in his or her life make a deep, private act of faith. That act, which [Karl Rahner] equates with becoming a mystic, is unfortunately itself very difficult because the very forces that have helped erode our cultural, communal faith also work against us making this private act of faith.
What are these anti-faith forces? They are not the product of some conscious conspiracy by godlessness. They are, instead, all of those things, good and bad, within us and around us that tempt us away from prayer, from self-sacrifice, from being more communal, from being willing to sweat blood in a garden in order to keep our integrity and commitments, and from mustering up the time and courage to enter deeply into our own souls. Hence they are not abstract, foreign forces. They live in the house with us and are as comfortable to us as a well-worn shoe. What blocks faith is that myriad of innocent things within our ordinary, normal lives which precisely make our lives comfortable: our laziness, our self-indulgence, our ambition, our restlessness, our envy, our refusal to live in tension, our consumerism, our greed for things and experience, our need to have a certain lifestyle, our busyness and overextension, our perpetual tiredness, and our obsession with celebrities, and our perpetual distraction with sports, sit-coms and talk shows. These are the anti-mystical forces of our time.
--Fr Ronald Rolheiser

Tags: Ronald Rolheiser, Mysticism, Spirituality, The Holy Longing

Question of the Day

So the question of the day today in Fusion to the middle school kids was this:

In exchange for $100k, for one year, would you be willing to:
Shave your head and regularly dye your entire body purple, all while attending a new school. If asked why you're purple, your only response can be: "I'm an alien"

Surprisingly, none of them would do it for $100k. All of them would do it for $1M. How about you?

Beauty Shop of Horrors

After church, Nate went to a birthday party, Cathie went to a movie with some friends, so the girls had a couple of friends come over and we ended up playing beauty shop. As you can see from the picture, the big girls did the little girl's nails. I swear they had at least a hundred different nail polishes, gels, stickers and other stuff that I don't understand, all to choose from. Because I don't have the best track record at staying in the lines when I paint my daughter's nails, I got to sit back and watch, in more of a general manager role. In the end, we had no major accidents, but we have a little more color on our dining room table than we did before.

I'm a big fan of the two documentary/reality shows on MTV - Made and True Life. Made is a show that takes an average high school kid with a big dream to become something way outside the norm for them - a football player who wants to be an ice skater, a prep who wants to be a BMXer, broadway singer, dancer, etc. They pair them up with a coach who is typically a pro in that area, and walks with them towards their goal. It's a great show that lets you see the kids transform not just in their ability, but their perceptions of the world, and others perceptions of them. By the end of the show you want to see them succeed so badly, it's fun to watch. Anyways, it turns out that MTV is coming to our local high school on Tuesday, here in big 'ol South Lyon, to conduct auditions to cast someone for an upcoming episode of Made.

Tags: True Life, Made, MTV, South Lyon High School

Life Lesson

Leadership lesson #233 from the show The Office:

Sometimes you have to take a break from being the kind of boss that's always trying to teach people things. Sometimes you have to just be the boss of dancing.
--Michael Scott

Tags: The Office, Leadership, Michael Scott

Wild Boyz is Back

It looks like one of mine and Cathie's favorite shows is back on MTv with new epsiodes - Wild Boyz. The episode we had tonight had the guys in Buenos Aires and Argentina watching Killer Whales eat Seals, Spitting Lllamas, Chris Pontius dressed like Superman scaling a wall of ice and Johnny Knoxville kissing an armadillo. It doesn't get any better than that.

Tags: Wild Boyz, MTV

Pottist

Cathie's parents got Maddie a kids pottery set for Christmas. Maddie and Cath decided to break it out this morning and see what they could do with it. An hour they were still having fun with it, just a little messier for it all. We'll make sure we send this along with Madeline next time she visits Grandma and Grandpa.

Ouch

The support has been overwhelming and I've been inundated with requests for updates on my injured finger. Here's the latest photo now that the nail has come off. It's pretty fascinating watching this thing grow off as pieces heal and parts fall off. The crescent part on the bottom is the new nail actually growing upward.

Tags: Finger

Game Night

The kids got a bunch of new games for Christmas so at night, we've been playing a lot of games as a family. Whoonu is one of them, which I've yet to win, and Family Cranium is another. Nate and I played against the girls tonight and got smoked. The kids are at an age where I no longer have to let them win, and rarely win myself, even in the Chess games between Nate and I.

Tags: Whoonu, Cranium

Using the fundage from my eBay junk sale, I've finally been able to buy a TomTom GPS system for my Treo 650. I've been looking at getting one of these for a long time, especially for business travel. When I travel to a new town, I have to rely heavily on Mapquest, which typically hoses me at some point with a innocuous East/West switcharoo.

Tags: TomTom Navigator 5, Treo

Perhaps there is nothing in this world as powerful to break selfishness as is the simple act of looking at our own children. In our love for them we are given a privileged avenue to feel as God feels - to burst in unselfishness, in joy, in delight, and in the desire to let another's life be more real and important than our own.
--Ronald Rohesier

Tags: Ronald Roheiser

When I got Noel's Christmas list this year, I thought this one item was a little strange, but who am I to tell him what's art and what's not. Towards the top of his list was one of these custom pictures:


I guess he thought it would make him feel closer to Jesus. It's probably a "pastoral" thing, I wouldn't understand. My brother Jon has ordered this dog one for his daschunds:

Tags: Noel Heikkinen, Jon Kurt

Scrubs is back

Scrubs is back! I love this show. I'll say it again - this is one of the best written and funniest shows on television. I want to buy multiple life-size cut-outs of myself and pose them around the vicinity. Two episodes of Scrubs tonight - surrounded by My Name is Earl and The Office. The hour of power is back... Truly must-see-tv.

Tags: My Name is Earl, The Office, Scrubs

Great comprehensive review on the new Treo 700W Phone.
Updated: Thanks to Erik for showing me Mossberg's review of the phone. His reviews are typically dead-nuts on, and he says the 650 is better - plus it's the first time I've ever seen the phrase "Wicked Fast" in the Wall Street Journal.

Tags: Treo 700W

National Champs

I went over to Bob's last night to watch the Rose Bowl with Bob, his boys, Kohne and Joe. It was one of the best played, closest football games I've ever seen. There was so much hype around both teams, and players on both teams, that anything was going to be anti-climactic from how they'd built the match-up up all year. Everyone at the Ray's house was rooting for Texas, and the talk of Vince Young was reminiscent of the SNL Mike Ditka sketches (Vince Young vs. the entire 1966 Dallas Cowboys, who do you pick?). Before the game, they had Will Farrell and Matthew Mcconaughey do a point, counter point about the game. It was hilarious, including Will Farrell having two Heismen trophies sticking out of his ears. "It smells like waffles". Amazing game. I'm tired.

Tags: Vince Young, Rose Bowl, Will Farrell

My memory stinks. I've been trying to go through the exercises and tools on this site for memory improvement. Good stuff.

Tags: Memory

Willy's New Look

I like Will's new hair piece, I just not sure about the striped green shirt with the long sleeve black shirt. I'll be he's wearing nice shoes though.

Lullabye

Emily walked downstairs crying because she'd fallen out of bed and hurt her leg. It hurt too much to walk back upstairs (of course), so I carried her up. I laid her in bed and she said, "Dad, I can't sleep. Will you sing to me?" For reasons obvious to anyone that's heard me sing, I haven't sung to my kids since I'd rock them to sleep as babies. I rubbed her back as I sung to her and she closed her eyes and smiled. I couldn't think of anything to sing to her at first, so I sung "Rock a bye baby" and then Kenny Roger's "The Gambler".

Ten Commandments

As I was laying down with Nate, we were reading through Exodus, the part where God gives the Israelites the ten commandments. We read through each commandment and talked about what it meant. We got to the last commandment:

¹⁷ You shall not covet your neighbor's house.

Without being asked, Nate jumped in and said, "I know what that means. It means we're not supposed to toilet paper our neighbor's houses."

Tags: Ten Commandments, Toilet Paper

Workout

I was a sloth during the Christmas/New Year Holiday. I haven't taken a ten day break from working out for a couple of years. I started back today and I really enjoyed it for the first time in a while. I'd been going through the motions for the past couple of months, doing it because I had to. Today was different. A bunch of guys (Joe Muzzi, Mark Kohne, Bob Rays, Jason Raitz and Kirk Vickers) are starting up a new workout 3 days a week, 6-7AM out at Kirk's gym. Should be fun, but early.

Tags: Exercise, Triad

Velvet Elvis

I just finished the book Velvet Elvis. I liked it. I'd heard a lot of it before in the teachings I've downloaded from Mars Hill, but there was enough new stuff to make it worth reading. I think maybe I just read it too quickly for much of it to sink in, but one of the biggest concepts that came through to me was the idea of how the church is supposed to impact the world around it:

..the most powerful things happen when the church surrenders its desire to convert people and convince them to join. It is when the church gives itself away in radical acts of service and compassion, expecting nothing in return, that the way of Jesus is most vividly put on display...

Oftentimes the Christian community has sent the message that we love people and build relationships in order to convert them to the Christian faith. So there is an agenda. And when there is an agenda, it isn't really love, is it? It's something else. We have to rediscover love, period. Love that loves because it is what Jesus called us to do. We have to surrender our agendas. Because some people aren't going to become Christians like us no matter how hard we push. They just aren't. And at some point we have to commit them to God, trusting that God loves them more than we ever could.

I've done the second way and I'm learning how to do the first - loving people just because and watching what happens. Amazing results.

Tags: Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell, Faith, Church

Technorati Tags

I've been trying for a while to figure out a way to incorporate tagging into my blog. Blogger doesn't support it, but I found a Firefox Greasemonkey script that adds the capability into the blogger 'create an entry' page. 'Tagging' is a way to categorize your content for easier searching on a given topic. The particular script I found integrates in with one of the tagging services called Technorati.

Tags: Greasemonkey, Firefox, Blogger, Technorati

Thanks Mom and Dad

My parents got my son Nate a remote control fart machine for Christmas. Great present, he loves it, except for tonight. He came down tonight telling us that everytime he's close to falling asleep, it goes off randomly. I found this funny. I think it would be funnier to hide it somewhere in my parents house and have it do the same thing. It goes off just randomly enough that you'll never find it.

School House Rockin

I was going through some old tapes recently, and came across a tape Noel gave me around 10 years ago, in his pre-big-shot-pastor-days, back when he worked at the Michigan Family Forum. It was a tape of covers of all of the different School House Rock songs by bands like the Lemonheads, Better than Ezra and the Biz Markie. I downloaded it and Cathie and I were listening to the tunes in the car ride to Lansing, singing along.

Tags: School House Rocks, Noel

A Case of the Mondays

We went to Lansing today to see my Mom and Dad and then to my Grandma's to visit. Cathie was able to open the Christmas presents that she missed out on due to her Christmas flu. We headed over to my Grandma's to visit and showed her the pictures from Christmas and New Years, since she was sick as well. The girls had put together a photo album for my Grandma a while back that had pictures of her life dating back to her childhood and following her all the way through until now. I sat down with the kids and took them through some of their history, including a lot of their relatives, including their Great Grandpa, that they never got to meet.

We got back just in time to head out and meet up with Will and Monaca to go see the new Johnny Knoxville movie The Ringer, about a guy who tries to rig the special olympics. It was a good movie, but kind of uncomfortable at times. It portrayed all of the special needs people in a great light, but some of the stuff was just akward to watch in the movie. Probably worth waiting for video. We ended up going to the Brighton Grille for dinner, which was excellent.

Release the Hounds

Imagine seeing a guy running down the street throwing orange powder on the ground, being chased by a group of 30 people. I happened to look out my window this afternoon and saw a bunch of people running down the street. I stepped outside to see what was going on, and saw people a couple of people come running out of my back yard. Apparently, they're all a part of a drinking and running club. They all run after the guy down with the orange powder - I'm not sure if they ever catch him. They end up at a bar afterwards to drink. Chasing someone is way more interesting than just running for the exercise. If only there was a way to introduce some kind of weapons into the mix.... Like paintball guns.

Brad Dies

Brad Jeffrey's namesake and body double, Blue, from Old School (aka Patrick Cranshaw) has died. Brad will be growing a beard as he is in mourning this week. Brad earned the name when he first grew his beard out and just so happened to look like him. Patrick Cranshaw and Brad are also the same age.