In the past two days I have just been amazed by talent.  Two remarkable dance performances and one Montreal street guitarist.
The first dance came from Pilobolus who I was first introduced to several months ago the same way many others did – on Conan O’Brien show or on YouTube – Summer In the City – The shadow play performance.  Shadows of full busloads of people, Statue of Liberty, and even a bust of Conan.
Well, yesterday I was surfing TED for interesting green ideas when I saw their name and had to investigate. This performance was mesmerizing.  I like dance, but I’ve never seen synergy like this before. And I love that they were part of the TED conference because of course art belongs in the same category as business and technology. It is all about innovation and maximizing the human potential and delighting in the world of possibility. Take a look
Today I was amazed by a Swan Lake performance presented by the Great Chinese State Circus.  The intro is charming as four frogs delightfully romp/leap around the stage. The swan dance then seems like any other performance I’ve seen and then I take note that she is dancing on top of someone. At one point she is piroetting on his right deltoid.  AMAZING strength and fluidity.
[flash http://www.sonnyradio.com/swanlake_0001.swf]
Lastly, for now at least, on the same website that brought us the Swan Lake performance an incredible guitar tapping musical performance by Erik Mongrain, a Montreal street performer with a critically aclaimed album.
[flash http://www.sonnyradio.com/airtap.swf]
Wow what incredible and beautiful paradigm shifts. Take artistic standards and their expectations rotate them 90 degrees literally and figuratively and discover a new art-form, a new style, a new awareness, a new thinking.
Xerox Phaser 6130
This spring I bought myself a new toy (ahem) professional office support device – a Xerox Phaser 6130 color laser printer. I LOVE IT!!!! It duplexes, it makes booklets (2 pages per side), it is super fast, great pictures, and relatively low in cost to operate.  I was fed up with ink jet printers that never seemed to give me the value for the ink. Xerox even goes so far as to calculate what your costs are per sheet depending on color content.
4Inkjets.com
Anyway, the one downside to the printer is toner – FOUR toner cartridges at MRP of about $85 each. So I did some research and found “4InkJets.com” and found they had outstanding reviews and quite a following for ink and toner refills. They sell a fully compatible cartridge (I think they are either the OEM or have direct connection to the factory as they truly are identical) for $39.99 – that’s a savings of $45 each right there. And if you add your 10% off cashbaq coupon, it becomes $35.99. If you order 2 you don’t have to pay for shipping (over $50) which would normally run about $8 anywhere.  They have been exceptional in service to me.  Only once was something backordered, but only for a couple of days. These toners have a life cycle of 2500 for the black and 2000 for the color ones.  I don’t think my inkject printer came anywhere near that number of prints before they’d crap out on me.
Cashbaq.com
While researching toners I stumbled upon a cool little site that handles online rebates.  I’ve always been annoyed by rebates that you have snail mail in. This is all handled electronically when you start your journey as cashbaq and use one of their many coupons for online stores.   I was a little skeptical at first, but it didn’t cost me anthing except my email addres which they don’t spam.    They have coupons for hundreds of online stores ranging from 5% off to free shipping to much larger.  That is cool in itself, but the real selling point is that this is a rebate center. In the example of 4inkject they collect 20% rebate from each sale and offer 10% off coupons.  So in our toner situation.  The price is $39.99 which gets knocked down to $35.99 because of the cashbaq coupon. Then in about 3 months you will receive a cashbaq check in your paypal account. In this case 20% rebate.   So if I include the 20% rebate in my costing decision each cartridge costs me just $28.79. So about the same if not cheaper than my office jet ever was.
It really works, and you totally forget about it until one day you get an email saying that they have deposited money in you paypal account.   They even start you off with a $5 credit to your account and focus.  So far I’ve received 2 rebate payments this year.
http://www.MatthewRecommends.com/cashbaq.htm
Target Center in a crowd of late 40-50yr olds and their children on occasion tonight’s Journey concert was opened by Cheap Trick who is probably best known for the opening song to That 70s Show. They opened with that and dragged audience through a painstaking 10-12 songs that most of the audience never heard before or wished they would forget quickly. They did play another oldy but goody “I want you to want me” to close and then followed with a six song encore when one was clearly not asked for. They ended and ended and ended. I finally pulled out the Palm Sudoku to pass the time.
To add to the misery were the terrible attempts at humor by one of the guitarists. These guys were with the wrong audience. At one point the was a reference to us (we Minnesotans) being ecited about the presidential visit which landed flat of course. When he mis-interpretted our lack of interest as not understanding – he tried to clarify that he was speaking of the Republican National Convention held in our twin city two weeks ago. The Boos nearly shook the stage. Tough call if the booing was for cheap trick or the RNC. Unfazed he stumbled over find the angst. RNC. Then proceded playing another five unwanted encore songs.
