Here’s a roundup for the summer of 2010 in Seattle and the Eastside. Some of these locations are pet-friendly, in case your dog likes to watch movies:

• Redmond - Alternating Fridays and Saturdays at the Redmond City Hall and Idylwood Beach Park. They’ll be showing Iron Man, Monsters vs. Aliens, Invictus, Where the Wild Things Are, The Blind Side, Mama Mia, and Mulan.
• King County Parks - Wednesdays at Marymoor Park. Austin Powers, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, The Blind Side, The Neverending Story, Star Trek, and The Princess Bride.
• Issaquah - Monsters vs. Aliens on a Saturday in September.
• Bellevue - Tuesdays at the Bellevue Downtown Park - Lineup includes Cloudy With a Chance Of Meatballs, Where the Wild Things Are, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, Monsters vs. Aliens, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Spy Next Door, The Blind Side, and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.
• Kirkland - Saturdays at Carillon Point. The lineup includes Star Trek, Moulin Rouge, Monsters vs. Aliens, Overboard, Twilight New Moon, and Up.
• Woodinville - Thursdays at the Redhook Brewery. They’ll be showing Step Brothers, The Sandlot, The Hangover, Super Troopers, Blow, and Fight Club.
• Fremont - Dawn of the Dead, Ghostbusters, The Hangover, Zoolander, Metropolis, Pretty in Pink, Goonies 25th Anniversary, all on Saturdays in a Fremont parking lot.
• Seattle Center - Saturdays in August at the Seattle Center Mural. Lineup includes The Princess Bride, Twilight, Twilight New Moon, and Star Trek.
• West Seattle - Saturdays in July and August. They’ll be showing Mama Mia, War Games, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Star Trek, Wayne’s World, and Up.
• Seattle - Fridays at Cal Anderson Park. The “Blonde But Not Forgotten” lineup includes Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Legend of Billie Jean, Desperately Seeking Susan, and Candleshoe.

Enjoy!

The green screen is a simple piece of fabric from EEFX. They sell “remnants” for very reasonable prices. The remnants are very small when compared to the giant pieces that they sell to their commercial customers, but are perfectly adequate for use in a home studio.

I want to be able to use the same webcam to record myself while sitting at the desk or standing in front of the green screen. I explored a number of different ways to do this and finally decided to use some Vex Robotics parts to build a webcam platform that I could activate using the Vex remote control. Years and years ago, Radio Shack dumped their entire inventory of Vex parts at half price and I picked up everything I could find and tucked them away on a shelf.

Here’s what I came up with:

Here are two videos of the platform in operation:

And here’s the view from the camera as it pans up and down in front of one of my shelves of programming books:

I still have room to make this better, and I want to add a third servo so that I can rotate it, but I am pretty happy with my progress to date! Stay tuned for some AWS videos starting next month.

We love to make pizza from scratch. For years we’ve looked at pictures of various wood-fired pizza ovens and told ourselves that we’d buy or build one sooner or later. Well, it is now later and we really want one now (in time for the summer of 2010). We want something like The Pompeii Oven, large enough to let us cook pizza, bread, and other goodies.

If you are in the Seattle area and if you’ve built and used one of these before, I’d like to talk to you ASAP. I’ve got the cash, the backyard, and the appetite. I’d like to see some pictures of your work and I’d like to talk to one or two of your clients.

Email me (jeff@vertexdev.com) and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

I know that there are plenty of “build your own oven” guides online. I’ve read several of them and I’m positive that I don’t have the necessary mechanical or artistic skills. I want the finished product to be sturdy, functional (from what I’ve read it is necessary to get the proportions just right), and attractive.

Feel free to pass this along to anyone who might be able to help me in my quest.

I looked in to the University of Washington’s Technology Management MBA program last year. It is a good program, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I decided that I was more interested in enhancing my existing skill set than in learning entirely new skills.

A few years ago I was invited to join the advisory board of the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at the University of Washington. The advisory board met each quarter to review the state of the program and to make recommendations to the staff and faculty.

As part of the planning for each quarter, program director Hanson Hosein would send around the course list. Last fall I looked at it and thought that every last one of the courses looked interesting. Hanson said that I was welcome to sit in on a class or two and I considered doing just that. However, I gave the whole matter some thought and decided that it was time to go back to school, and applied to the MCDM program!

I spent some time going through the application process — getting letters of recommendation, ordering transcripts from schools that I’d attended over 25 years ago, and writing a statement of intent. I got it all in by the deadline, and awaited the response.

I received notification last week that I had been accepted, and I am really looking forward to becoming a student at the ripe old age of 50.

My son Andy is already at student at the UW, and my daughter Tina is awaiting word on her application. With any luck, all three of us will be on campus at the same time.

Wish me luck!

Yesterday was Saturday and the weather was great, so I rode the Ginza line of the Tokyo Metro to Kappabashi to pick up some things for my family. Also known as Kitchen Town, Kappabashi consist of about 8 blocks of stores selling kitchen and restaurant supplies of every possible size, shape, and color. There are stores with a wide variety of goods (breadth) and others with a wide variety of one thing (depth). Stores that sell nothing but display cases, knives, signs, packaging, plastic food, and so forth. The entrance to Kappabashi is marked by the giant chef, shown in the picture at right.

Anyway, I picked up the things that my wife had asked for, and got back on the subway to return. I was listening to Sensored, Cory Doctorow’s newest podcast. In the introduction, Cory says that his daughter had recently turned two and that they celebrated with ice cream at London’s Fortnum and Mason.

Five or six minutes later, a woman boarded the train and sat down across from me. To my astonishment, she was carrying a bag labeled Fortnum and Mason! I was so surprised that I actually rewound the podcast to make sure that this was the name that Cory had mentioned. I had never heard of this shop before yesterday and the name was unfamiliar to me. This must be a billion to one coincidence.

Now that’s a case of synchronicity! This event also gave me a great idea for a sci-fi story. I need to think it through a bit more, but I may soon realize my dream of writing some fiction.

I will be heading to London next month for some talks and meetings. If I run into Cory, that would take the oddness to a whole new level!