1. I have a lot to get done to move to another city so I’m going to have to take a break from blogging.
2. I have been blogging too frequently to put the quality in I would like.

So, for the next couple weeks I’m going to take a break from my scheduled blogging times. When I come back I’m reducing the amount of scheduled posts to 2 a week. I will do this by staggering the posts. So one week I will do a Just Another Magic Monday post along with a Flash Friday post. The following week will consist of a Sunday Funnies post and a Wednesday Warrior post.

Hopefully this change will allow for me to put more time into my blog posts. At the same time, it should help me to continue to post even when certain major events occur.

So, until I am settled – adieu.

He has a lot of great routines, so how does one choose a routine to share. As with comedy and magic, it’s all about the timing. This being the JAMM post before people go out and celebrate the new year, possibly in a bar but most likely with some drinks, I thought I would show his Glass and Bottle routine. There may be more slick routines out there for this but Lance performs in a way that just makes it look easy. He is a true master magician.




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Daryl is called the Magician’s Magician and lives up to that moniker. Just the other day the About.com magic newsletter had a list of the top 10 close-up magicians. Daryl came in at number 4.

Of course, when I started magic I had to take a look at some of Daryl’s work. I love his sense of humor. It reminds me a lot of wrestlers who are great on mic. Often they will speak to the smarks ( smart marks ) who know something about wrestling but probably don’t know as much as they think they do. Daryl follows in this tradition and speaks to the people who might know some possible ways who is performing his tricks. In this way he keeps people who know magic and people who’ve never seen magic engaged.

If you read his wikipedia entry you’ll learn that he is famous for his Ambitious Card Routine. I found his routine on youTube and thought it would be a great way to show off his abilitites. The finale to this routine is tremendous.

All in all, Daryl makes me glad I have a nickname to use in magic. He has the Daryl market locked up pretty well

Do have a magician you think I should look at for one of my JAMM posts? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

For more information visit his website foolerdoolers.com.

Who needs bottle opener when you have ingenuity?

One of my favorite shows from when I was a kid was MacGyver. I know many people are a fan of the show. Even people who only watched an episode or two ( maybe they never watched it ) understand what a MacGyverism is. I am sure the show led some people into a life of science, or at least ingenuity.

The site There, I Fixed It shows the lower end of people’s ingenuity. Some stuff is a total win, but most stuff is fodder for failblog.org. For instance, the item in the picture that starts this post is a neat solution to someone needing a bottle opener. At the lower end of the spectrum ingenuity usually collides with procrastination, laziness and budgetary concerns.

An example of one of these lower end “solutions” is the following example. When your bathroom sink is broken or missing what’s your first thought? Is it,”If only I had a plastic bin and some duct tape I could take care of this problem.” Probably not, but some people do think this.

Stow and go hygiene!

In the world of programming, non-elegant solutions that get the job done ( and usually make the code less stable ) are called kludges. There, I Fixed It! is a wonderful kludge collection. Some kludges, make you smile and others make you laugh. There are some, though, that make you cringe. You cringe because you are scared for your and other people’s safety.

For example, some people insist on fixing their own cars.

So for a laugh and a cringe check out thereifixedit.com or subscribe to its RSS feed. Enjoy.

In learning how to best manage our servers, I’ve learned to rely on Rackspace and their expertise, rather than attempting to teach myself the necessary skills. Plus, they are always doing their best to handle requests for things they are not even required to do. Then when the cloud came there were many unknowns for us, but the benefits were to great to pass up. Once again, Rackspace – having bought the Mosso cloud – has made the transition fairly easy. As for email, our clients were very worried at first – and rightly so. Email is the communication pipeline of many businesses. Now our clients are singing the praises of a much better email system and Rackspace makes it much easier to support. Finally, in regards to server migration. Well, server migration sucks anyway because there is so much time involved but moving SSL certificates and Unique IPs was a breeze ( for me anyway ) thanks to Rackspace. In fact, the migration was finished ahead of schedule.

Rackspace and their fanatical support reminds me of a book I read once – Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles. There fanatical support makes them worth every penny we spend with them.

Cloud Computing

Movie poster for The Musketeer

Tonight I decided to watch a movie I hadn’t seen in a while, The Musketeer. This is the movie my wife and I were watching when we chose D’Artagnan as the name of our first child. Having such a fondness for my french heritage, I loved the name. Unfortunately, I had only seen D’Artagnan as portrayed in The Musketeer, The Man in The Iron Mask and Disney’s version starring Charlie Sheen, Keifer Sutherland, Oliver Platt, Chris O’Donnel and a host of other big names. Since then I have also seen a cartoon made in Australia based on the novel and a year ago I finally started reading the books.

Reading the books, quickly made the movies a disappointment. They each take so much liberty with the story that it isn’t the same story at all. In fact, the one that keeps closest to the original is the Australian cartoon version that is barely 30 minutes long.

Who can blame the movie companies though? The Three Musketeers is a long book with enough sub plots to make 3 or more full length movies easily. The second book in the D’Artagnan romances doesn’t even start until 20 years after the first ends so there probably aren’t plans for a sequel. Finally, if they kept precisely to the book(s), people of today would not understand the culture of gentlemanly honor – something that makes D’Artagnan and company ( especially Athos ) much more interesting. In fact, I would say it defines their characters and the time period.

So, when I first started watching The Musketeer I quickly became annoyed. It just wasn’t as good now that I had read the book. Especially since “The Musketeer” is the least similar to the actual story in the book. So I started to think about why a movie could still be about The 3 Musketeers. As I thought through the different version, I noticed something. The major concepts, if not plot points, are there but just modernized and presented in a differing fashion.

For instance, The Disney version portrays the bonding brotherhood between D’Artagnan and the 3 Musketeers quite well. The Man in the Iron Mask shows how so much has changed since the Musketeers were young and yet as they come together much of their youthful vigor is returned. The Musketeer… well at least that movie has Planchet in it ( sort of ) and Cardinal Richelieu isn’t pure evil. And of course, it was marketed as The 3 Musketeers like you’ve never seen them before.

So in much the same way as most people call facial tissue the brand name of Kleenex, any movie with D’Artagnan ( and possibly Porthos, Aramis and Athos ) is somehow The Three Musketeers. The names, locales and even the story may change but it all goes into the same cultural mythos of musketeers. I guess that’s not really a bad thing, considering the stories are works of fiction anyway. Perhaps all the rest are just Musketeer fan fiction – with a budget.

That reminds me, I really should try to find episodes of Young Blades.