Al Kamajian’s Kamajian Live Percussion has been performing at the Opera Ultra Lounge in DC from time to time. For those who aren’t familiar with the new Opera Ultra Lounge, here’s an interesting video interview with the owner.
It’s a good insight into the place.
Al performed there last Saturday, and will surely be there again in the not too distant future. The best way to track him is probably by way of his Facebook page. If I get advance notice of his performances, I’ll try to keep the Skere9 Calendar here updated, but be sure to “like” him on Facebook if you really want the latest, greatest information.
The Atlas Shrugged II “Teaser Trailer” is out and is scheduled to be in theaters this weekend. Click here to see it for yourself! The scheduled release date is October 12, 2012.
Mike O’Hearn just invited me (well … me, and a few thousand of his friends) to a live event where he will attempt to break 24 panes of glass AND the world record for doing such a thing, to be filmed for the TV show Guiness World Records. The event is at 2 p.m. today in the Los Angeles area, and it’ll be scheduled for worldwide broadcast soon, stay tuned for specifics. I have a hunch Mike will pull it off, he’s one of the most impressive and physically powerful people I can think of. That, and he has a heart of gold, he’s a great guy. More on this later.
Yesterday we all heard the sad news about the passing of legendary actor Ernest Borgnine. Fans will remember him from the classic TV show McHale’s Navy, and a ton of great movies. He’s probably best known for Marty, but he played a wide variety of characters and was known for being a really nice guy. What some folks might not know, however, is that he was also the subject of one of the first “reality show” type of productions. And while I’m saying “one of the first”, I personally think it’s probably THE first, but I can’t say that I’ve researched that.
What I can say is this: the reason Borgnine has this incredible distinction is because of my very good friend from high school named Jeff Krulik, one of the most innovative filmmakers in the business. Years ago Jeff created a film called Ernest Borgnine on the Bus. It follows the classic film icon on his summer vacation across the country, driving his own personal humongous bus to tourists locations, bus stops, and shows Borgnine being just a regular guy. It’s fantastic film and highly entertaining. The full version is now on YouTube:
It was WAYYYY ahead of his time, which just proves what all of us at Bowie High School knew years ago, that Jeff Krulik is a real visionary.
Bowie is the same school that produced other visionaries like dazzling guitarist Todd Bauchspies, vocal legend Eva Cassidy, guitar-maker-to-the-stars Paul Reed Smith, and the overall entertaining Kathie Lee Gifford, and many more – I’m leaving some out but I’ll do my best to get to them all here at Skere9, along with some other greats – like the amazing Doug Hayden, who is rocking the political satire world even as I type this with Insanity Island. But we’ll get to all of that here at Skere9, and keep an eye on the YouTube channel for more about the Skere9 Gallery of Stars.
I just read a great blog piece by legendary data guru Curt Monash, and it’s titled Why I’m so forwarding-leaning about Hadoop features. The bottom line: Monash is encouraging Hadoop uses to err on the side of new features, and not worry so much about using earlier, more stable versions of Hadoop. His reasoning is that, at this stage in the Hadoop product life cycle, the benefit provided by the latest features is greater than any benefit to product stability.
It’s good logic, of course, we expect no less from Monash. He’s been publishing a number of excellent common-sense posts about Hadoop in the last few years – see Enterprise-ready Hadoop, including its link to Annoying Hadoop marketing themes that deserve to be ignored. Curt’s a great voice of reason amid a lot of hype and bravado.
Curt first got my attention with his discussion about Google’s patent application for MapReduce, and the fact that Hadoop functionality is hardly new, and has long been doable in an Oracle environment. His article titled More patent nonsense – Google MapReduce should be required reading for all data professionals with an interest in Hadoop solutions.
The bottom line: the “big data” trend has merit, particularly for some specific, unique business cases, but there’s a tremendous amount of hype around them, and even Hadoop, at its core, depends on relational logic in order to be of any use.
Ok, so listen … there’s no time to waste. Things are happening way too fast.
First, this site is about a bunch of people I know – family members, friends, and acquaintances of mine – who are outrageously talented in the most amazingly diverse ways imaginable. I want to brag about them all. And I will. And I guess that’s all you need to know for now.
More later as we get going. And I’m telling you that now so I can blab out the next post …