Evan Agee: Live from Richmond Indiana

I started an interesting hobby this last weekend. It sort of came upon me out of the blue when Kristen and I were walking around Veach’s, a local toy store supreme. As I was walking around looking at all of the cool edutainment games they have I noticed the “Matchitecture” kits they had. Some of them were incredibly elaborate (and expensive) but I managed to find a couple of kits that were less than $20. I ended up choosing the Chrysler Building kit, though I also considered the Empire State building.

The kits are pretty cool, they contain a big bag of matchsticks, a cutter for trimming the sticks to the right size, a small tube of wood glue with a fine tip (perfect for putting tiny drops of glue on tiny sticks), large tweezers to more easily handle the matchsticks, a sheet of acetate to glue the sticks into place and easy removal and obviously design plans to help guide you as you construct your masterpiece.

I found the practice of cutting the sticks to size and gluing them together to be very therapeutic. There was a real sense of accomplishment as I finished each substructure for the building. I’m not very far into the project and it’s becoming clear that this project is going to take quite a bit longer than I had expected. I’ve put about 6 hours into the project so far and I’m probably only a fifth of the way to being done.

More pics to come.

It’s done!! Click on the photo for larger version and description of all of the work we had done.

I’m happy to announce that the Agee Design website V.1 is now live and ready for visitors! I’m very, very proud of the site, as it’s one of the best examples of my work to date. There are all sorts of cool technologies and methodologies at work. You can visit the site at http://www.ageedesign.com.

The work, however, is not quote finished. I’ve still got to design and develop the portfolio section. I’m still playing around with ideas for that, and should make a decision soon. I’ll also be adding more information to the services section to beef that up a bit.

As I mentioned in an earlier vidcast, I don’t plan on doing any heavy marketing anytime soon, just want to take some steps to getting the word out there. A few new projects here and there would be fun.

So, take a look and let me know what you think! Doesn’t it feel like the warm sun is shining in your face?

I happened to catch a few minutes of Fox News this morning. They had conducted a poll of their viewers of the “top 5 worst lyricists”. I love the idea that the general public is in any way qualified to judge the writing capabilities of anyone, but hey. So, I was a little surprised when I saw the results of this poll, not only were most of the lyricists on the list decent lyricists, but Sting was number 1 on the list. To those of you who aren’t familiar with Sting’s lyric writing capabilities, this is tantamount to having a poll question of “Is the sky sometimes blue” and the results coming back as “NO”. It’s just ludicrous.

I’m not sure whether the poll was multiple choice or freeform or what. My guess is that if it was multiple choice Sting was placed there as an option merely for a control, so the overall accuracy of the poll could be judged later. They would know, if a majority of the polls came back with Sting as the number 1 answer, that the poll results are not accurate and therefore shouldn’t even be published.

There are only a couple of reasons why it would make sense for Sting to have “won” this poll:

1. The Fox News viewers who took the poll weren’t familiar with who Sting was, thus putting him at the top of the list because “he must not be that good if I don’t know who he is”.
2. The Fox News viewers who took the poll wouldn’t know talent if it slapped them in the face.
3. Both 1 and 2

There were other surprising lyricist in the top 5 such as Creed frontman Scott Stapp, who is by know means a wordsmith but still doesn’t deserve to be on this list. I just don’t understand why there weren’t any obvious choices in the top 5. There are so many carbon copy groups that are popular right now that should have all been sitting pretty at the top of this list, but nary a name was found.

So, to those of you Fox viewers who took that poll (and chose Sting as the worst lyricist), I’ll gladly spotlight your ignorance:

Children’s Crusade (Sting)

Young men, soldiers, nineteen fourteen
Marching through countries they’d never seen
Virgins with rifles, a game of charades
All for a children’s crusade

Pawns in the game are not victims of chance
Strewn on the fields of Belgium and France
Poppies for young men, death’s bitter trade
All of these young lives betrayed

The children of England would never be slaves
They’re trapped on the wire and dying in waves
The flower of England face down in the mud
And stained in the blood of a whole generation

Corpulent generals safe behind lines
History’s lessons drowned in red wine
Poppies for young men, death’s bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed
All for a children’s crusade

The children of England would never be slaves
They’re trapped on the wire and dying in waves
The flower of England face down in the mud
And stained in the blood of a whole generation

Midnight in Soho nineteen eighty four
Fixing in doorways, opium slaves
Poppies for young men, such bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed
All for a children’s crusade

Copyright (c) Sting

I experienced today, for the first time, being a member of a jury pool. I had some expectations going into the process and most of them turned out to be true. There was a lot sitting and a lot of waiting. First there was the pre-jury-selection phase which involved me and the other 30 or more people sitting awkwardly in silence reading our juror booklets provided by the bailiff. I found the material in the booklet to be pretty interesting, most of the material wasn’t something that was covered in my high school government class. It’s odd how we just accept things as common place and lose sight of our truly special privileges, like trials by jury.

After a while out in the foyer it was time to enter the courtroom where we were shown a nicely produced video covering much of the same information in the booklet. Once that was over we were ushered back into the hallway. A few minutes later the bailiff came back out and started calling people by name. The jury selection process had begun.

Long story short I never even got to sit in one of the seats for prospective jurors. I remained on the sidelines, hoping that my chance to respond to the counsel’s questions would come, it never did. It was however, very interesting to hear the questions the attorneys asked as they sought to determine whether or not the prospective jurors would be suitable for the jury. After each attorney had their chance to question the potential jurors they would meet with the judge and determine which jurors needed to be excused, once they were excused, names of people in the pool were called to fill the now vacant seats.

Three and a half hours later a final jury was chosen and I was excused, back in the car and back home to work. It’s interesting, I went into the experience with a bad attitude, not too happy that I was missing a partial day of work. However, not long after the jury selection began I was really hoping to be able to do my duty as a citizen of this county; committed to taking the duty seriously, as I would want a potential jury member to do were I the person sitting on trial.