Somehow almost three months have slipped by without a blog post in a rush of images that include SuperComputing 2007, an unexpected Thanksgiving trip, travel every week of December, a forced hiatus from the internet over Christmas and New Years, more travel and work reviews in January and February, parent-teacher conferences... Crazy man...

It's that time of life when you're busy living, working, parenting and trying to fit in creative moments to help inspire the day to day.

Toward that end, with our 12 and 14 year old kids away for the weekend snowboarding at Faceplant (a multi-church ski/snowboard weekend), my husband and I spent 12 hours and 20 minutes yesterday watching the Oscar nominated Best Picture movies... 

Atonement

Juno

Michael Clayton

No Country for Old Men

There Will Be Blood

All fine movies with parts that are quite technically good but it was Juno that caused the full theater to break out into spontaneous applause after the movie ended. The applause-o-meter ratings for Michael Clayton came in just behind.

Even on personal time my mind still wanders back to data... and thinking about how much better the experience would have been if the theater had been streaming the video directly. The copy of Michael Clayton had a damaged audio track and the theater offered a free movie pass to the 200+ folks who were in the movie viewing marathon (~$2000 loss - ouch).

Sun provides a couple of solutions for video -- an appliance configuration wtih StreamStar and a reference architecture using Shared QFS and Solaris Cluster (currently deployed at HBO). We'd be happy to help movie distribution and theater companies with a less costly, less error-prone, higher quality movie distribution and viewing experience. How can we help simplify your data management?