So ordinarily, I’d be psyched about how much I’d be able to get done this weekend… Except that the stupid Harry Potter book is showing up in the mail tomorrow, and that basically means that it will consume every waking, lighted hour until it’s done. I love the books, I really do, but it’s really putting a crimp on my Python geek-out sessions. But I have to be done reading by Monday, that’s for sure, or else I will have to gouge my eyes out to avoid spoilers. My predictions: Snape dies (he’s obviously been set up for a hard-core double-agent redemption arc, so he’ll probably save the day somehow), Harry lives (and will be the best Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher ever), and Ron and Hermione will finally succumb to the powerful call of teenage hormones and romantic comedy conventions and hook up in a major way.

Oh, yes, and I’m going to see Howard Shore conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in performance of his Lord of the Rings Symphony tomorrow night, so that knocks out a couple more hours of potential coding time. Which I guess I can live with; enjoying some of my favorite music, conducted by its composer, performed by one of the world’s foremost orchestras, under the night sky, with a picnic and a nice glass of wine… Should be a real treat.

…

Tonight marks 24 hours since the arrival of the Apple TV. So far, I’m very, very impressed. I have modest needs, primarily to replace an aging SlimP3 that’s prone to chronic buffer under-runs ever since I replaced my dying firewall, and it solves all of my most common use cases with total aplomb. I’ve been delightfully impressed by its streaming performance, which, even with an 802.11b/g setup, is nothing short of freaking amazing. I’m also very satisfied with the image quality out of the component video cables (chosen since our altar to the television gods predates HDMI by a generation or so). My advice so far, to any prospective owners, boils down to two points:

1. Don’t do your initial sync over wireless if you don’t have 802.11n hardware. Wired ethernet is your friend by orders of magnitude.
2. Its case serves as its heat sink, which is to say it gets hot like you wouldn’t believe. Don’t set it on top of your DVD player or other hardware (unless you want to cook your gear), and make sure that it gets plenty of airflow. Honestly, I used oven mitts to bring it upstairs to wire it into my switch to finish the initial sync. Yikes!

Beware of the YouTube integration; Liz and I must have spent an hour tonight watching videos of cats doing stupidly cute things. It is a powerful and addictive time-sink.

…

Finally, I’m happy to report that the first of two freebie poster-size prints from Shutterfly arrived today and it looks great. I picked up a 50mm prime lens for my Canon (Digital Rebel XT) recently, and the folks at Amazon threw in a coupon for one free 11×14 and 16×20 print. The 16×20 (which I expect sometime Saturday or Monday) will probably end up framed and in our dining room, next to some other wine-related art, and the 11×14 (which showed up today) will probably find a home in our living room. I’m really quite tickled–I’ve never printed any of my work larger than 5×7 before–but I fear that I could start going poor making prints of my better photos. Oh well; Liz said I should find a hobby….

So! Laura braved the increased airport security, water bottle fascism and all, and arrived last Friday. Liz picked her up, and after getting settled in at the house, took us all out to lunch at Phnom Penh; to my amazement, Laura loved her loath chha! That evening we hit our local Winking Lizard and then went out to Will Farrell NASCAR movie (hilarious, recommended), got ice cream on the way home, and stayed up far too late playing Munchkin. Saturday we caught up on “Monk” and “Psych”, then went out to friends’ for their Wild Game BBQ, where there was much delicious food, frosty beverage, and wacky croquet fun, then zipped down to Blossom to chill out under the stars and experience the Cleveland Orchestra playing the scores to Bugs Bunny cartoons (and incidentally seeing a lot of folks that we don’t always bump into). Sunday we had brunch downtown, spent a few hours at the science center (note to self: don’t try the “virtual hang-glider” right after eating…), tried to get Laura hooked on “Firefly”, and played a lot more Munchkin and Apples to Apples.

Laura was up and out the door early on Monday to get to her flight on time; by all accounts she made it back home safely. I’m still trying to wrap my head around her pronouncement that I’m “an awesome uncle,” but for the most part I guess that’s pretty cool. The entire experience has left me a lot more optimistic about the idea of being a parent, a mental paradigm shift that is simultaneously comforting and scary as hell.

Liz had to work for most of Saturday, so I used the time to knock a bunch of things off my to-do list, including a trip to the library to refresh my influx of new music, and a half-day of being able to work in peace in the office. Saturday night, she took me to Grovewood Tavern for dinner, which was utterly fabulous (I had the “Quackitori”, seared duck breast yakitori style, and I highly recommend it, especially paired with the Parallel 45 Cotes du Rhone). After dinner, we hit the Velvet Tango Room for post-dinner cocktails, where I was introduced to the shimmering delight that is the French 75. I totally dig VTR’s vibe, and I got an especially geeky thrill from recognizing Winchester ‘73 playing on the TV by the bar. VTR is a bit pricey, but the experience–especially on the weekend, where your lady friend gets a perfect rose–is worth it.

On Sunday I managed to get more stuff on my list done, and then we hit the local movie theatre for a matinee of Thank You For Smoking, a cheerfully subversive little movie that anyone with two brain cells and a sense of humor should see as soon as possible. Seriously–run, don’t walk; it’s that good. My only issue was with the quality of the audience, as we seemed to be seated directly in front of, next to, and behind people who insisted on sharing their running commentary, explaining jokes to each other, and so forth. Sorry, folks, but if I wanted the commentary track, I’d buy the DVD, and you wouldn’t be part of it. Though it was almost worth it to hear the person next to me try to explain a joke and then, verbally, loudly, not get it… (Seriously, she didn’t understand why it might be funny that the firearms lobbyist set off the metal detector at a security checkpoint. “Must be something metal,” my next-door Ebert observed.)

Monday marked a return to workplace madness, but it ended early as Liz and I had picked up tickets to see K.T. Tunstall at the House of Blues. It was a pretty much spur-of-the-moment decision a couple of weeks ago when I realized that she was in town. I admit, I’m a total poseur, and it took her solo appearance on NBC’s “Today” show for her to arrive on my musical radar… I wasn’t sure what to expect from seeing her live, but I figured I wouldn’t be disappointed, and the ticket price was pretty fair, so I figured there were worse ways to spend a Monday night. We had a nice dinner at the HOB (assisted in part by a small parade of happy-hour mixed drinks), and then proceeded to be completely blown away by her live performance. She’s touring with a band to back her up, which helps fill out her sound nicely, and there were particularly nice bits featuring various band members soloing on drums, keyboards, trumpet, guitars, and cello. Mellower tracks had a nice dash of psychadelia that reminded me of early Pink Floyd, while the more raucus, upbeat numbers struck me as the perfect soundtrack for blasting down a desert highway, windows down and stereo cranked. In short, even if she’s getting mainstream radio (and worse, grocery store!) airplay, K.T. is the real deal, and you should check her out, especially live. Seriously good times.

I’ve graduated from being assigned weird shifts for monitoring the farm during Val to being on call 24×7 for the duration; I’m not sure if this is an improvement or not, but it allowed me to attend the Lord of the Rings symphony on Saturday night. Liz and I met up with friends for dinner at the Severance Hall restaurant (tasty, though I had the world’s dullest steak knife) and then marvelled at how tight the symphony had gotten since we’d first heard it. The Cleveland Orchestra brought their “A game” and really rocked my socks; I got all weepy-eyed in all the right places. Beautiful, and a great early Valentine’s gift to ourselves!

I spent a bit of time today fixing up some geeky things that have been bothering me. I twiddled pirnat.com’s CSS a bit to be better behaved in IE, moved my IE-specifc hacks into a separate stylesheet to help get me ready for IE 7. And I finally managed to hunt down the bug in feedparser.py that was causing it to mangle content so badly (any “<br />” ended up getting doubled twice by its “cleanup” routines, and some bits of nearby text and other tags would get similarly repeated). I filed a bug with a very simple patch, so hopefully it’ll get folded into the main release at some point, so no one else will have to suffer. It’s amazing how different <(\S+?)\s*?/> (bad) and <([^\s>]+?)\s*?/> (good) can be.

Other than that, nothing exciting (other than watching the Canadian women’s hockey team annihilate pretty much everything in their path). At this point, I’m just hoping to survive the next two days!

The setlist:

• “Breathe” (including the verse from the reprise at the end of “Time”)
• “Money”
• “Wish You Were Here” (beautiful, heartwrenching, perfect performance)
• “Comfortably Numb” (absolutely scorching, fantastic)

While I was delighted to hear anything performed at all, I was a bit disappointed by the absence of some would-be uncannily appropriate songs, such as “On the Turning Away”, “High Hopes”, or Roger Waters’ “The Tide Is Turning (After Live Aid)”. Of course, all of these songs were written after Waters had split from the band, so the setlist definitely reflects an attempt to minimize conflict between band members. And of course any of those would have been dead giveaways and possibly bordering on cheese. But still.

I would have preferred a longer set as well, but you can’t have everything, now can you? I guess I’ll just have to pray my heart out for a reunion tour.

…

I never watched any of the original Live Aid concerts when I was a child, and now I feel a strange mix of hope and cynicism. The blue state dreamer in me hopes that this mass of humanity coming together through music has some positive effect on the upcoming G8 summit, but the jaded cynic thinks that the most powerful leaders of the world don’t really give a rat’s ass about a bunch of people putting on a big concert.

Still, it’s a good cause, and I hope something will come of it all.

I wonder how many tokens I have to insert in order to get a ticket…

aquamindy

cynic51

mokatz

grimkitten_

The bands on the secondary stage were not bad, but not good enough to stand around and listen to for more than a song or two. But walking from the pavilion to the second stage in Lot A at least gave me a nice chance to stretch legs, enjoy the cool evening weather, and enjoy the buzz of the place.

The bands on the main stage were all pretty good. I’ll admit up front that ever since I left WRUW, I’ve been really out of touch with most music, and I had pretty much never heard of any of the opening bands before. So, Curiosa gave me a nice chance to hear totally new music, by totally new (to me) bands, live and direct. Can’t complain about that.

It rained for most of Mogwai’s set, weather which really lent itself nicely to their sound, which is sort of instrumental rock for rainy days. I don’t know that I’d go see them live, but I could certainly pick up and enjoy their CD’s. They are also incomprehensibly Scottish, so I have no idea what the hell they said between songs.

The Rapture was pretty fun, very upbeat and crazy. Their best stuff, I thought, was their opening song, which had some sort of modern-disco-ish keyboard stuff going on. But they get props for weird sax twiddling that reminded me a lot of some material from The Top-era Cure.

Interpol was also pretty enjoyable, seemed very polished as a group, and musically solid. Unfortunately almost all of their songs sounded identical, but that could just be an artifact of having never heard them before. cynic51 and I tried to pin down their sound, and I think the consensus was “AC/DC gone emo.”

The Cure… were amazing, though a touch off on a couple songs early in their set. But once they got the sound a bit more under control, it was pretty tight and overall excellent. The new material, for the most part, is not as strong as the classic stuff, but this year’s new material is, for the most part, much stronger than Wild Mood Swings or Bloodflowers.

The setlist, however… was not what I (or a lot of people, apparently) expected. It bothered me a little bit, because there were some of my favorites that I had really wanted to hear (”Just Like Heaven,” “Play For Today,” “A Forest,” “Disintegration”, “A Night Like This”) that weren’t performed. But a casual listener who only knew the radio-friendly hits (such as my wife) would have been totally lost (as she was). Not only has she not listened to the new album (thus not knowing a big chunk of what was played), she didn’t have the advantage of being obsessed with collecting and memorizing the Cure’s back catalogue during college. So where I was stunned and amazed to hear a lot of great older material that almost never gets played, she (and others) were not having such a great time with it. It was also very solidly on the gloomy side–with the rain and it being Thursday’s last night with the tour, I suspect Robert wasn’t in the poppiest of moods.

Things which were stunningly good to hear:

• “Like Cockatoos” — One of my absolute favorite Cure tracks, the sound of it is just amazing…
• “Siamese Twins” — My biggest complaint about the Denver ‘96 show was that there wasn’t enough material from Pornography played… so w00t for this classic!
• “A Strange Day” — Wow! More stuff from Pornography!
• “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” — Yes, played regularly, but by far one of the best, most solid things from the post-Disintegration albums. Epic, emotional, wrenching…
• “100 Years” — A starkly grim song paired with equally disturbing projected images of war and destruction. Extremely powerful. (And another from Pornography; Robert must really not have been in a good mood!)
• “Faith” — A rarity when played in Denver in ‘96, it seems like it’s a little more common now, but still beautiful.

Things which did not delight me:

• “Lost” — This opener from the new album just seems weak. Give me “Tape/Open” from the Wish tour, or “Want” from the Wild Mood Swings tour any day!!
• “Shake Dog Shake” immediately after “Lost” — a 1984-era opener, which by itself is a nice thing to hear, but two slow openers in a row just hurts, especially when they have many better things that could be played.
• “The Drowning Man” — Probably my least favorite track from Faith, I would have much rather heard “All Cats Are Grey” or “Primary”.

Of course, the major complaint about the Cincinatti show was that there was too much of the poppy stuff in the setlist. In my opinion, the ideal Cure show would have been a synthesis of the Cincinatti show and the Cleveland show (minus duplicated things, of course, and minus the things I didn’t care for). Alas, it was not meant to be. Such is the peril of going to see a band that has 90+ songs practiced and ready to go for a concert–the setlist will always find ways to disappoint and amaze.

Still, all that aside, I’m damn glad that we went. I’m even happier that for once in my life I had earplugs; maybe I have finally learned my lesson.

Possibly because we have tickets for Section 13.

w00t!!

I’m dancin’ like a monkey!

Tickets go on sale on Saturday, 6/12, at 10:00 AM EDT.

If you are among those who are interested in going and would like to be part of a group-type-thing (cynic51, mokatz, grimkitten_, I think this is you guys), please let me know ASAP! Pricing is not available yet (of course), but probably will be soon.

In the past when I’ve gone to Blossom (Moody Blues, John Williams), I’ve just gotten lawn seats and had a good time hanging out with folks… but if it’s been rainy leading up to the show, the lawn is super-ass muddy, and that’s what your butt will be when the show is over. I can say that this is super un-fun (speaking from experience). So… I am kind of interested in maybe getting real seats in one of the sections that unfortunately costs more money. Please let me know what you want to do, what kind of budget(s) are acceptable, would you want to get seats together or not, etc.

I’m way too excited about this — I can’t believe it’s been 8 years since I saw them in Denver! *bounce gothily*

Bowie
Wednesday night was the David Bowie concert. Originally, aquamindy was supposed to go with me (especially since she’d had the foresight to buy tickets for us), but at the last minute discovered that she had to go out of town for work. I ended up giving gieves the second ticket as a much-belated birthday present and combination “hey-we-never-do-anything-anymore” excuse to get together. After a quick bite at Panera, it was off to the CSU Convocation Center for the show.

Macy Gray opened the show; I must confess I’d never heard any of her music, and wasn’t expecting a whole lot. To my surprise and overall joy, I dug pretty much everything. She had a sort of psychadelic-funk-groove-motown thing going on, and was definitely a great live performance. I especially enjoyed her shameless repurposing of the Beatles’ “Come Together”, liberal use of the word “fuck,” exhortations for “only the sexy people” to sing along, and the polka about masturbation. I will admit, though, that it took me at least a few minutes to stop chuckling at the way her hair made her look like a giant hunk of broccoli in a fetching lavender dress; it was really quite uncanny. All in all, definitely one of the best opening acts I’ve ever seen.

It took about half an hour to get the set changed out for Bowie, and then things went pretty crazy. He played for a couple of hours and was generally hitting more upbeat things; evidently having a good time on the evening before his birthday. It’s hard to believe that a guy can simultaneously rock so much, look surprisingly healthy, and be turning 57. I mean, damn, this is one spry little Brit!

The overall experience of being at a David Bowie concert (at least for me) was one of thorough sensory overload. Awesome (and awesomely loud) music, crazy visuals going on the giant video wall, different close-ups on the overhead video screens, fantastic lighting, thousands of screaming fans… The only major down side was the pair of drunken crap sacks in front of me who would jump to their feet at oddly inappropriate moments in order to better rock out by waving a fist in the air and clutching tightly to overpriced swill beer with the other, all the while managing to completely block my view. I mean, I would stand up and rock out too, only these were the only two people in our section–heck, the only two people in three or four sections–who were standing. It didn’t seem right for me to block the people behind me if there were only the two of these yahoos on their feet. Admittedly, I did take some amusement from their desperate battle to maintain equilibrium, as they wobbled dangerously in their efforts to rock even one gazillionth as well as David Bowie.

Bowie played quite the charming host, breaking away from the plans to give us obscure literary jokes, self-acknowledged cheap plays for cheers (announcing his birthday), rants about how much commercial American radio is a giant pile of shit that never plays anything good anymore, to introduce us to his band, to ask us our names (how polite!), to shut the fuck up while he played a quiet song, and so forth.

As for the music, it was either things that I knew by heart and was thrilled to hear, or things that I had literally never heard before but that the rest of the audience knew. We’re talking things that are staples of classic Bowiedom, things that I am truly embarassed to have never heard before. Like “Ziggy Stardust”–I’d never heard it before Wednesday night. You can beat me up now for being a complete loser.

Definitely, one of the best concerts I’ve been too, ranking among the likes of Pink Floyd, Nine Inch Nails, and the first time I saw the Moody Blues. And by the next day, I could even hear again! Hurrah!

Work
Work remains busy, and I remain undermotivated. I suspect that I’ll manage to get it together sometime this week, as I have a lot of stuff to get done before the Valentine’s freeze if we are going to have any hope of surviving it. Bleah.

Champagne Happy Hour
Friday afternoon is champagne happy hour at Varietals, a concept whose time has truly arrived. A gaggle of us assembled there after work to belatedly celebrate aquamindy’s birthday in the best way possible–by drinking together! In attendance were such luminaries as gieves and her mother, oogby (who prefers pineapple juice to booze, and there’s nothing wrong with that), reasie, and some of Liz’s current and former coworkers. I had the champagne flight, which consists of a nicely balanced German sparkler, two progressively drier French champagnes, and an exuberantly sweet Italian asti. Munchies included baked brie, the ever-ordered an thoroughly irresistible olive tapenade, bruschetta, sweet Georgia browns, and nummy cheese fondue. I had a glass of one of their French Rhones as well, and that made me pretty happy.

The Weather…
…has been completely, thoroughly cold and yucky. Downright miserable, in fact. Frigid. Arctic. Face-rippingly brutal. I really want to get my car washed, since I’m sure that all the salt is doing bad things to it, but it hasn’t been above freezing all week, so car washing is pretty much out for the foreseeable future. Bleah.

The Weekend
This has been a delightfully lazy and mostly useless weekend. We’ve slept late both days, which I had really missed this past week with work and all. Saturday we did a double feature of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and, since it’s Short Round’s only other major role, and since Liz doubted that Sean “Samwise” Astin was little Mikey, we watched The Goonies. If only Return of the King was out on DVD, it would have made the perfect segue. As it was, The Two Towers is on Starz nearly constantly now, so we were able to pick up a few minutes of that before sleepytime. I had also thought of The Beatles’ Help! as a great follow-up to Temple of Doom, since it’s all about sacrificing Ringo to Kali (oh, those wacky, wacky Kali-worshippers!), but alas, Borders was sold out, so it was not to be.

Today was Geek Day for me. I installed MySQL, Zope, and the zMySQLDA connector, and got all of these things set up and chatting happily with one another. I’ve started to play with some database designs, and will start building things over the next few weeks as something to keep me busy and distracted from buying DVD’s and suchlike. The eventual goal is to produce three database-driven web applications, to track our CD’s, DVD’s, and lastly, but not least, our wine collection and tasting journey. The sad thing is that the umpteen hours of work that this will entail all spring from the fact that it’s getting damnably frustrating trying to remove and preserve labels from wine bottles we’ve had, and wouldn’t it be easier to just have digital photos, and wouldn’t it be nice to organize them, and wouldn’t it be nice to keep track of what we’ve had, and how it tasted, and and and… And that’s how things get crazy.

On the food front, Liz made a barbeque shredded beef dish yesterday that was just to die for. It simmered all afternoon in her new Dutch oven, and came out utterly fabulous. Today we did leftovers of the beef for lunch, and lamb chops with grilled bell peppers and leftover risotto for dinner. Yum!

And now it’s getting late, and it’s time for me to get back to snuggling with Liz and watching The Two Towers (again) on Starz. Tra la!

• Thursday, I managed to score tickets to the Cleveland “Trilogy Tuesday” showing of all three Lord of the Rings films. w00t!! I’m so giddy about it, I feel like a geeky little eleven-year-old! In other LotR geek news, I also have tickets to see Howard Shore in Columbus in March, conducting an assortment of LotR film music.
• Saw Kill Bill v.1 on Friday night with Liz. Aside from being one of the most singularly violent films I’ve ever seen, it’s also one hell of a picture. I know I didn’t catch most of the film geek in-jokes, but I did recognize a few things, like the Bernard Herrmann music, the Wilhelm Scream, a couple bits that reminded me of Kurosawa, and a nice reference to Wings of Eagles regarding Uma’s toes. Well worth a look-see, this goes onto my list of necessary DVD’s. “Volume 2″ can’t come too soon!
• Saturday, Liz walked in the Race for the Cure. I had originally meant to go root for her, but ended up getting permission to go back to sleep. So she got a nice walk on a gorgeous day for a good cause, and I got some much-needed beauty rest.
• Saturday afternoon, Liz took me to the zoo. (No, she wasn’t going to donate me.) The weather was amazing, and it was really nice to get out and enjoy it. We saw all sorts of zoo critters, including sleepy tigers (my, how those little guys have grown!), sleepy camels (phew, the stench!), and surprisingly un-sleepy wolves.
• Saturday night we grilled up some tasty dinner and enjoyed it with a pinot noir-based vin gris (yum!) from our visit to Napa, then rounded out the evening with Godfather Part 2.
• Sunday we went to “Say Yes to Cleveland”, a little networking shin-dig before the Browns game. It was okay, and the band was pretty decent, and the sun eventually came out, so it turned out all right. We had a nice lunch at Aladdin’s, then spent the rest of the day relaxing at home. Nice!
• Okay, it’s not the weekend, but tonight we’re going to see Stephen Hawking at Severance Hall. I know, wild times!

That said, I definitely could use one or two more days of weekend. Or a vacation. Or something.