Foo Fighters in Council Bluffs
It has been a day since the Foo Fighters show and my ears are still ringing. This had to be one of the loudest shows I’ve been to, and it was great.
Let me start with the bad news. Kent and I had talked about going to this show specifically because Motörhead was opening for the Foo Fighters. Yeah, we wanted to see the Foo Fighters but we also really wanted to see Lemmy and the gang. Kent put it all together and added a couple of other guys to our gang to head down to the show. Sadly, when we got to the Mid-America Center in Council Bluffs there was a sign on the door saying that due to travel problems Motörhead would not be performing. Ugh!
The silver lining though was the 2nd line that said the Foo Fighters would play for 2.5 hours! When Grohl was on stage he said
We’ve got 16 years and a hundred ******* songs. How many of those do you think we can play tonight?
They played all the best of them! I grabbed a couple of video snapshots from the show to give a sense of what it was like. Did I mention it was loud?
I had seen the Foo Fighters play on the Skin & Bones tour. That was nothing like this one. This was a hard, I might even say metal, show. Grohl and the Foos put on an amazing show.
The stage set was pretty cool. They had these 6 “video orbs” on cables that moved around and showed a variety of effects. The stage itself had video projected from underneath on the floor which I still can’t figure out how they did.
There was also a small stage on a platform that lifted about 15 feet in the air toward the back of the main floor. Grohl made a few trips out there and did the solo acoustic songs in the encore on that stage.
I just love this picture that makes the stage look like it’s exploding in light.
If you dig the Foo Fighters, go check out this tour.
Asking For Too Much
Softball season has arrived again and the B-Squad is back out trying to win a game. My softball team calls Dusty’s in Northeast home, and after every game (and sometimes before) you will find us at Dusty’s enjoying a Grain Belt Premium.
Part of our ritual is the jukebox and Dusty’s has now upgraded their jukebox to a fancy new version that has a touch screen display as well as a connection to the Internet to do various things. I would assume it gets new music that way. It also can get messages about what to play from the Internet and there is a handy little iPhone app that you can install for free to control the jukebox. I was eager to give this a try.
I downloaded myTouchTunes to do some remote control of the Dusty’s jukebox. I expected to just be able to install it, connect to the jukebox through some lookup and somehow pick songs. However, it seemed I had to create an account with myTouchTunes to do that. Annoying, but okay I thought. I’ll make an account and I’m guessing you can save some preferences or something for me (although, that could just be done on my phone). So I tapped the Register button to make an account and got this screen.
It was one thing to have to create an account, but why exactly does anyone need to know my age and gender to pick a song on a jukebox? Why is my zip necessary to queue up Black Sabbath’s Ironman. It is not! I closed the application and deleted it. I’ll stick to putting plain old dollar bills in and picking songs.
Seriously, what in the world is myTouchTunes doing here? I think asking for all that information is despicable on its own, but what in the world good is it doing them? If they want popular songs by area, they don’t need my zip. They know where the jukebox is. Why do they care if I’m a guy or gal? Of what possible utility is that to them?
I’ll pass.
Why I run my own websites
Marco Arment had a blog post today on the recent changes to Twitters API. He highlights that “Twitter is not Ours”.
Twitter can do whatever they want.
It’s the simple, brutal truth. Twitter must do what’s best for Twitter. They owe us nothing.
It’s not a public good. It’s not a right. It’s a private, entirely centralized service with no meaningful competition and a massive network-effect barrier to competitive entry. Twitter has all of the power in its relationship with users and developers.
You can replace Twitter in that reference with nearly any other social network or hosted blogging platform on the Internet.
This is why I run my own websites, on servers I pay for and administer, using open source software.
Did some testing with OmniPlan 2.0’s collaborative features today. Amazing. Can’t wait for the release version!
Technotarian
I was reading this very interesting article on Bitcoin by Jasan Calacanis and used the term “technotarian” and then defined it in a footnote as:
We made this term up to describe the “good people” of the internet who believe in the fundamental rights of individuals to be free, have free speech, fight hypocrisy and stand behind logic, technology and science over religion, political structure and tradition. These are the people who build and support things like Wikileaks, Anonymous, Linux and Wikipedia. They think that people can, and should, govern themselves. They are against external forms of control such as DRM, laws that are bought and sold by lobbyists, and religions like Scientology. They include splinter groups that enforce these ideals in the form of hacktivism, such as the takedown of the Sony Playstation Network after Sony tried to prosecute a hacker for unlocking its console.
Great term. A quick search also brought this 1995 definition of Technological Libertarianism.
Great piece on CaringBridge on the news tonight. Quality. Organization I’m proud to work with. Congrats Sona Mehring!
Just won the Change Game on 48¢!
Star ratings seem such poor taste for Classical music. Is there a website for reliable metadata for classical music? Trying to get my classical section of iTunes cleaner.
Happy that I remembered I have a thermos! Keeps the weekend Chemex coffee nice and hot!
One of my favorite photos from Minnebar. Paul DeBettignies prepared to deal with power challenges.
Created two new address book groups “MinneBar Pings” and “MinneDemo Pings” so I remember to nag people to get to events.
MinneBar 6 Photos
Yesterday was an absolutely great MinneBar event. I lugged the big camera around to get some shots. I didn’t get that many because I presented for the first three sessions. I got some good shots from the kick-off and a handful of others.
Minnebar 6
- I got the privilege of kicking off and introducing Ben and Luke this morning at MinneBar 6. About 1,000 people!
- MinneBar 6 is going down as the best MinneBar yet in my book. Awesome everyone!
- Leading a Minnebar talk on geeky tools to a room of geeks takes guts. Hats off.
- MinneBar Unix Geek
cat foo.txt | awk '{print $3}' | sort | uniq -c. - MinneBar Unix Geeks check out Cool, but obscure unix tools.
- What a great event! Pano shot from the stage at the start of Minnebar.
Twilight Zone on Netflix Streaming
How great! I was looking at Netflix tonight via Apple TV and noticed that the original Twilight Zone series is now available. Watching season 1, episode 1, “Where is Everybody?” now.
A couple of months ago we were at my Aunt Susie’s house and she had this bottle of wine with a very memorable name. Made me chuckle. 😀
Really bummed to be missing the Minnebar organizer/sponsor dinner tonight. I’m on Dad duty all weekend and couldn’t swing it tonight.
The new Beastie Boys album is just amazing. Floored.
Hotel WiFi is significantly worse than Personal Hotspot via iPhone. I’m surprised how often I’m using personal hotspot.
I spent the night at the Rosewood this week for an overnight trip to Palo Alto. Beautiful grounds and great view from the room.
