Margaret and I were fortunate enough to be able to get tickets to see “Wicked” at the Kennedy Center on Friday. After parking the car at Margaret’s office (And catching a quick dinner at Thai Kitchen), we caught the shuttle from GW Metro to the Kennedy Center.

It’s nice to walk into the Kennedy Center, have the usher check your ticket and rather then telling you to head all the way up to the top of the stairs, he directs you to the usher at the main entrance. It gets even better when the usher at the entrance sends you down the stairs to not the first usher, but the second. Yes, we were in the 5th row! Ok, all the way on the right side, but 5 rows back anyway…

I was a little nervous before the show started. “Wicked” has been sold out at the Kennedy Center pretty much since they went on sale. We were able to get ours (at a markup…) from a ticket broker. I was worried that we had gone to this effort to get to the show, and that we weren’t going to like it. Lucky for us, “Wicked” is one AWESOME show that we both loved!

The first song was tough for me. I have problems understanding people 6 feet away from me talking in a normal voice. It took a little getting used-to to understand what they were singing. But by the 4th song or so (“Popular”) I was hooked. This was also the song where Glinda (pronounced Guh-linda) basically stole the first act. I haven’t laughed that hard in quite a long time, and definitely not while listening to s song that you can’t get out of your head. In case I wasn’t hooked enough, the first act ended with “Defying Gravity”, which I spent the entire intermission singing.

While I did point out how much I enjoyed Glinda’s performance in the first act, I would be negligent if I didn’t mention Elphaba’s performance. Just awesome. You can imagine it being hard to get people to identify with a woman who is green, but she was able to pull it off. And let’s not forget to mention that she was a fantastic singer.

Nothing is perfect: I wasn’t that impressed with the part of the Wizard. I think the actor did a wonderful job with what he was given, but I don’t think he had a whole lot to work with. Particularly in his musical numbers. I found (And still find) the songs to be a little uninspired (”Wonderful”, in case you were wondering). And now my biggest disappointment: The end of the production. While they sent you out to intermission with a powerful, full cast, show stopping number, the show ended with a whimper. I still love the show, but I would have preferred another show stopping number to sing all the way home.

Universal is kind enough to host a Trailer where you can see a little of what the show is about.

In short, if you can get tickets, GO!

Tags: theater, wicked // // 0 Comments Trackbacks ()

The whole “What will Steve Jobs announce tomorrow at MacWorld” has finally gone too far when it gets featured in the comic “Foxtrot”.

But since everyone else is speculating, I mine as well join in the fray. Let’s start with the list of things I don’t think will be announced tomorrow:

1. Anything having to do with PowerPC based Macs. Everyone knows that Apple is moving over to the Intel platform and that they will come out sometime this year. Makes no sense to push one last PowerPC Mac since everyone will just wait for the Intel based ones later on this year.
2. New Powerbook. They just announced ones in October and it is way too soon to announce another update.
3. Plasma Displays. Because re-branding big screen TV’s worked so well for Gateway. Give me a Sony or a Panasonic any day….

Now how about some stuff that I think we may actually hear about tomorrow:

1. the new IBook. I think this is probably going to be one element on the announcement tomorrow. The ibook line hasn’t been updated in a while, and while I think it may still be a little too soon for the new IBook to be Intel based, Steve may just be surprising us tomorrow.
2. New IPod nano. Why not?
3. More video content available through iTunes. With everyone from Yahoo to Google announcing new streaming TV content for download at CES, I think Steve is going to have to make a move to keep up.

Like most of these speculating sites, I am probably 100% wrong. So don’t get your credit card warmed up based on my recommendations. Just tune in tomorrow to see what the announcements are. Even though the Engadget guys are still probably jet lagged and exhausted from covering CES, I would expect them to LiveBlog the announcement tomorrow.

Tags: apple, macworld, mwsf, steve jobs // // 0 Comments Trackbacks ()

CES is Nerdvana for many gadget freaks like me. I love following the general coverage, figuring out what all the cool new gadgets for the upcoming year is going to be, and also trying to spot trends into what the next IT thing is going to be. But also working for a startup company (Hillcrest Labs) in the Consumer Electronics space adds an extra dimension to the gadget watching, as I try and find all the press/blogger coverage of what we are showing at CES. So how do I do all this and still manage to get my work done? Web 2.0 to the rescue.

CES is a huge show. You couldn’t possibly imagine how extremely large it is. For this very reason, mainstream media is forced to only cover a small portion of it. Even organizations like PC Magazine and CNET for which this is their bread and butter, are not really flexible enough to give complete coverage to the show.

That is where the bloggers come in. Since they are really rather niche organizations, they can go in depth and cover whatever interests them. They don’t have to appeal to the more mass audience that the aforementioned places have to also cater to. For the purposes of CES, there are 3 blogs that have people at CES doing daily (sometimes live!) reports. Engadget, Gizmodo, and The Lost Remote. The first two are doing a lot of coverage, since their niche is rather large: Anything gadget. The Lost Remote deals specifically with TV stuff, so they post less frequently and really only concentrate on TV things. So I scan these blogs (making use of RSS and Bloglines) a couple of times a day.

Now the Web 2.0 coverage is not limited to just those blogs! You want to see pictures, lots of pictures, and nothing but pictures from the show floor? Check out the CES 2006 tag at flickr.com (RSS version). Lots of people photoblogging from the show floor. 1.5 days into the show (and only one day with the exhibition floor open) and already up to nearly 4000 photos. That’s pretty hard to follow as a traditional RSS feed. So I installed Slickr and told it to pull all the images from flickr.com that matched the “ces” tag and show that as my screen-saver. So I can still see all the great photos, just in a much more manageable manner.

And if just reading 3 blogs weren’t enough coverage for you, you can then use Technorati and find all the blogs tagged with “ces” (RSS). This will get any and all blog posts (including this one) that people have tagged as being related to ces (currently, 994 blog posts and counting).

All this stuff and I haven’t even touched on the podcasts. I know Engadget is doing a daily podcast from the show and I’m sure there are other podcasts doing it as well. But I do have other things to do in my life, so I haven’t checked in with any of the podcasting coverage.

If you follow all this advice and still find yourself yearning for more coverage, then I would save your pennies for CES 2007 and book your hotel room early and get yourself to the show. Because that is the only way you can get better coverage (but at least at home you don’t have to worry about the Toilets of CES).

Tags: ces, flickr, gadgets, podcast, slickr, technorati, web 2.0 // // 0 Comments Trackbacks ()

So I’m starting to get some links in on articles that mention my employer, Hillcrest Laboratories. I’ve started collecting them (using del.icio.us) on a page that can be found here. For those of you RSS inclined (including MyYahoo people), you can get the rss feed here: Hillcrest News RSS.   

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