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Indiana Jones - Bleck

I really wasn't expecting much from the latest installment in the Indiana Jones franchise. After reading Hershey's review I was expecting even less. A group of us from licensing school decided to go see the movie last Friday night to end our week together. A couple of people liked it, several of us seriously considered getting up and leaving.

I knew it was going to be cheesy - heck we wanted it to be cheesy. After about five minutes the cheese quota was pretty well covered. The only part of the movie that really felt like an Indiana Jones movie was the classroom scene at the start of the movie. It had the right look, the right type of editing, the right dialogue. The rest of the movie was just off base.

I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't suffered through it yet, but the entire premise is a but too much for my tastes. I'm a SciFi fan, I'm an action/adventure fan, I'm a historical thriller fan, but they can't all go into one movie. It felt as if the plot was composed of a series of brainstorming sessions thrown together. "I wonder if..." and nothing got left out of the plot.

My friend Lisa joked about it sucking until they blew the world up at the end. That probably would have been an improvement. 

Sushi at Kubota - Japantown, San Jose, Ca

A group of us went out last night to Japantown in San Jose.  It is one of only three such communities left in the US (there were more than 40 before the internment of Japanese during WWII). At a tip from Rob Brooks-Bilson we went to Kubota for dinner. 

Several of us ordered the chef special sushi, which is essentially all you know before it shows up. This is a picture of my plate, although I'd already eaten a couple of pieces. One measure of good sushi is whether or not you need to use soy sauce and/or wasabi. I'd poured some soy sauce into the little bowl, but after lightly dipping the first piece realized it wasn't at all needed. Each piece had a different amount of wasabi that provided varying levels of heat to each piece. The toro and the hokkigai were easily the best two pieces. We finished the dinner with mochi ice cream, always a treat.

We took the light rail to Japantown but by the time we left it had finally cooled down enough to walk back. This evening, the group of people and the sushi, was one of the highlights of the week. 

Adobe Community Summit 2008

One of the highlights of my year is getting to hang out with a group of Adobe community leaders from around the world in San Jose, CA at the Adobe HQ. It's a fun week of hearing strategy from Adobe, training, and catching up with some great people. The group is about 60% developers and 40% designers from more than 16 countries. The best part is getting exposed to what people are doing creatively and a roadmap for the future from Adobe. It's always a lot of fun and a time of creative renewal.