Friday, 6pm, Backspace… Portland Bloggers.
There’s been no substantial discussion on other meeting times or locations, so we’ll stick with what we’ve got for now. See you there, then, I hope!
Month: May 2005
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The Great Genesis Road Trip
Back in the distant reaches of time, namely 1992, my distant but still good friend Steve McMullen and I cooked up a scheme. The opportunity to see our all-time favorite band, not just once but twice in the same week, simply could not be passed up. This is back in the days when you could get free tickets to really big concerts just by working at a radio station, and so I procured tickets to the Tacoma Dome show while Steve bought tickets to the Dodger Stadium concert. We both managed to get floor seats, good ones even.
Here’s the catch: the concerts were three days and most of the west coast of the USA apart, and I didn’t drive. (I still don’t, mind you.)
Steve, bless his diehard-fanboy soul, drove up from L.A. to Portland to retrieve me. Wendi and I were living with her folks at the time in that big crowded house on Ivon Street. Steve also arranged crash space with his folks in Seattle so we could catch at least a bit of shuteye before the big drive south.
The Genesis show in Tacoma counts as the first time I’d ever seen my favorite band live on stage, and it was an exceptional show. I especially loved the old medley, as well as some of the longer pieces and the inevitable drum duet.
That night we slept, and early the next morning we started southward. Steve drove almost straight through. We didn’t have the time to actually stop anywhere for the night. Sure, we were fueled by enthusiasm and the energy of the previous night’s show, but that can only carry you so far. I remember a dreary, dry, flat stretch of I-5 in California during which we had no choice but to pull over for a couple of hours and catch some brief shuteye at a rest stop. As it is, we still made it to his place just in time to get a solid night’s (and most of the following day’s) sleep.
My one and only visit to Dodger Stadium involved nothing to do with baseball. This time Steve and I knew (more or less) what to expect, so in some ways we could relax and look beyond the most obvious parts of the live performance and really get a feel for everything that was put into it. The set list was a bit different, but the showmanship still impressed the hell out of us. Mind you, Phil still goofed up the lines to a particular song the same way in both cities, but that was made up for by the amusing change to the lyrics of “I Can’t Dance” for the live performance. All in all, it was another outstanding show.
I crashed on Steve’s living room floor once again, then took the Greyhound home. That was, sad to say, the last time I saw my old friend, though we were in touch for a few months longer. I do wonder what he’s up to nowadays and what he thinks of the last Genesis album, for that matter. Heh.
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Magical Lyrical Mystery Tour
This one sort of tickled my fancy, so I decided I’d take a stab at it. (Thanks, Sarah!)
Step 1: Get your playlist together, put it on random, and play.
Step 2: Pick your favorite lines from the first 20 songs that play.
Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song the lines come from.
Step 4: Cross out the songs when someone guesses correctly.1.
“If I said it, I meant it / I’m not really demented / I’m just saying it’s been said again and again”(Sarah herself got this one: Econoline Crush, “All That You Are”)
2.“There was a bright light / A shattering of shop windows / The bomb in the baby carriage / Was wired to the radio”(Sis got this one: Paul Simon, “The Boy In The Bubble”)
3. “The face that launched a thousand ships / Is sinking fast, that happens you know”
4. “Tell me baby how you generate longevity / Tell me baby how you really hate publicity”
5. “He likes to work with his hands / He’s an apolitical man”
6.“I’m relying on your common decency / So far it hasn’t surfaced but I’m sure it exists”(Lil’ answered: Depeche Mode, “People Are People”)
7. “Another little flare up, storm brewed in a tea cup / Imagine any mix up and the lot would go”
8. “You’ll have to take me just the way that you find me / What’s gone is gone and I do not give a damn”
9. “I’ve been stripped of everything / Except some flesh that bleeds”
10. “I’m waiting for my heroes to tell me what to dream / I’m waiting for my neighbors to tell me what’s obscene”
11. “Cause we’re cleansing our souls every night with a bar of soap opera”
12. “She smells of the sun / And she’s constantly saying / That it’s all right / Because lies sound so nice.”
13.“You stroll, you jump, you’re hot and you tease”(The recent birthday-boy gets this one: Robert Plant, “Tall Cool One”)
14. “Synchronize but don’t comprehend / ‘Cause where I stop that’s where you begin”
15. “Yes I think there were five good men here yesterday / But they were asked to leave”
16.“And what’s in it for me, my pretty young thing? / Why should I whistle, when the caged bird sings?”(A commentor called ‘gman’ spotted: Sting, “The Soul Cages”)
17. “I won’t feel guilty / No matter what they’re telling me / I won’t feel dirty and buy into their misery”
18.“Oh, father of the four winds, fill my sails, across the sea of years / With no provision but an open face, along the straits of fear”(IRQuick waited a few days to announce: Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir”)
19.“With every step you take you touch my soul / With every breath you will succeed”(My beloved twinlet got this and the next one: The Space Brothers, “Shine”…)
20.“Work it harder / Make it better / Do it faster / Makes us stronger”(… and Daft Punk, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”)No Googling allowed. Nobody likes a cheater!
I threw entire albums into my playlist, but I did take some creative license along the way. I skipped over instrumentals and foreign language cuts, as well as some of the really obscure stuff. (Hey, some of these songs were actually played on the radio!) There’s also only one track per artist represented here, though that statement should be taken with a grain of salt. You, of course, are free to take this and run with it in your own fashion, and you’ll probably want to make it a bit more… accessible. Me? I’m just a lawnmower, you can tell me by the way I walk.
Er, sorry about that. All these song lyrics, you understand. Ahem.
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A return to normality?
The weather has returned to late-spring normal, thank goodness. I may be able to sleep comfortably tonight.
I certainly hope that’s so, anyway. I still have a very full schedule tomorrow, including a trip to work. Go, me.
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Die, spammers, die!
It was bound to happen sooner or later. Today, I received a complaint that someone out there has been spamming one of the dotcomments installations on our server. “Oh, joy,” I thought. “Now what do I do?” As it turns out, I didn’t have to do much. The spammers were hitting the script, sure, but they were doing so in such a way that even someone with as poor of coding skills as I could block it fairly easily. I’ve now implemented the fix on all four appropriate comment systems.
Heaven help us, of course, if the spammers get more clever. It is remarkably non-trivial to excise individual comments from the files, and if that becomes a real problem I’m going to have to look at another comment system… thus abandoning all of the thousands of existing comments to date. May that day be a long one in coming, eh?
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Easy Upgrades R Us
The webserver that this (and other, far more important and interesting) sites resides upon was taken down today, the hard drive removed and placed into a nearly identical chassis… that just happens to contain a much faster processor. And the entire process took less than half an hour from shutdown to fully resumed operations. How’s that for slick?
Now all I need to do is find out why Perl can bring a 2.4 GHz processor to its knees just by running a log-processing script and I’ll be able to rest a bit easier. Ugh…