Bother!

My niece sent me this Harry Potter parody; it's the height of twelve-year-old pre-teen humor!

And once you've had all the Potter Puppets you can stand (bother!), check out Snape on the catwalk.

Old Skool

So I'm transferring a bunch of old SVHS-C tapes I found in my closet to DVD, and a bunch of them are from a business trip to France in 1994, where I was programming a simulator ride for Futuroscope Park.

Watching this stuff only a short ten years later, it's like watching someone else's life. I mostly look the same, but it's just... odd.

Click here for a short clip (4mb) of the Beta version of Dave.

Back in the day, I brought my trusty JVC SHVS-C videocamera everywhere, complete with Steadicam -- but this was in the day before you could edit a feature on your laptop, and even though I bought two top-of-the-line SVHS decks for the specific purpose of editing, most of my footage stayed in boxes on the shelf.

All in all, I found a ton of great stuff:

- Trips to Disneyland and Sea World in 1992
- Behind-the-scenes footage of the installation and programming of "Back to the Future... The Ride" in 1993
- Some 1994 footage of the Folsom St. Fair
- EuroDisney (née, Paris Disneyland) in 1994
- The Chocolate Museum in Cologne, 1994
- A trip to Parque España, a Spanish-themed park in Osaka, Japan. It contained the single worst/best dark ride I've ever seen in my life, "Donkey's Sherry", which was about donkeys that get drunk on Spanish sherry and terrorize a village with their laser-beam eyes. Seriously. The park has unfortunately since retrofitted it to something less strange, the Shining Luminous Castle Sparkling Carnival Ride! (check the ride vehicles... they're still sherry barrels) Thankfully, I still have video of the original, which I'll post eventually.
- A 1996 trip to Orlando withfidgetcub (our first real trip together!)