in the following places:
Feb.26, Montreal
Feb.27,28, Boston
March 2-3, NYC sold out
which one do I pick? I need help. All these places involve a 3 hour drive.
Also (I love living here) Aimee Mann will be at Montreal in February.
It was good. In terms of quality, much better than when I saw Dylan in Sioux Falls way back when (although that night was memorable in a number of ways: 1) it was Dylan, after all, 2) Ryan (Scott's older brother, and one of my roommates at the time) could NOT stop shouting "It's f***ing Bob Dylan! It's f***ing Bob Dylan!", 3) to our left sat several of the Dordt profs, including Charlie Adams and wife, and Syd Hielema). After all these years, Dylan's voice just does not sound the same any more, whereas B.B. King's guitar work sounds as tight as his screaming singing blues. And if not for the chair where he sat during the concert, it'd be hard to notice he's 80 years old already. Some interesting moments of the evening:
- I park, start walking to the Palace Theatre, and hear a man inside a car asking two cops for directions to the garage (where I just parked). One of the officers didn't know, and was pointing in the wrong direction. I approached, said "No, it's not there, go down this street, take the first left". The one cop glared angrily at me, the other one smiled and nodded "thanks".
- The two opening acts featured lots of blackface Twin Reverbs, which made me proud, although I'll NEVER get those sounds out of mine.
- B.B. King's Lucille was plugged into some sort of heavily scratched maroon solid state-looking amp, which after some research is a discontinued Gibson Lab 2x12.
- Near the end B.B. King invited a young lady in the audience to come up and play with him. She had loooong hair, down to her ankles, and was a really good blues player. They sat her next to King, and that was the best part of the concert: both trading licks. It was beautiful to watch his face while she played, you could tell he was having so much fun.
In conclusion I'm very glad to have been there. I mean, he's an institution.
I was trying to start this paragraph with "One thing I really hate" but that doesn't do it justice. No, I abhor it, I loath it, it creates a strongly negative physiological response, it flattens my mood, etc. You get it. I HATE revisiting old code (that I wrote) to fix a bug. And my co-workers agree: it gives one the chills.
For you non-programmers out there, I'm sure you can understand the situation: creating something you think was well done, and then finding out (months later) that it wasn't.
Aaaaaaarrrrrg! (gabe angry)
Google's "Don't be evil" motto is no more. Yesterday they bowed to peer pressure and struck a deal with the Chinese government. google.cn is the new search engine portal in China, but results will be censored. Try for yourself: type "Tiananmen Square protests" in google.com, and then compare.
Google doesn't need more money, but they can risk looking bad. A couple years ago this would have been bad PR, but now they're impossible to avoid. I'll do my best, however, and start using Teoma for a change, at least until Nutch becomes implemented.
Next is changing the google browser toolbar...
Last summer I spent a considerable amount of my free time learning AJAX (for those who don't know what I'm talking about, see here and here). The goal of my very small 2-person team was to produce a tree-like navigational web application. Actually, the real goal was to experiment with AJAX and non-relational databases (read U2 and multi-dimensional) instead of the ubiquitous LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). One of my computer science profs was all about ditching the relational database, an effort which I think is in vain, since they're here to stay. Plus the alternatives are much harder to learn, so we're done with that point.
Anyways.
Using AJAX turned out to be not-so-simple, and made me remember the infancy of the interweb, the late 90's, when using JavaScript to detect browsers was commonplace. Ugh. Like anything else, it's what you know (or not) that makes it harder than it should be. In this case, I very much didn't know enough to get that groovy navigational app going... but the appeal was so strong! Think Google Maps, or GMail, or Google Suggest, or Flickr, etc.
Alas fate had other plans in store for me. I got hired as a server-side programmer and went back to Java, XML and other J2EE technologies.
Until now. Having a little bit of experience with afore-mentioned technology, I got put in charge of coming up with an AJAX framework for the next version of our software. This is exciting news indeed, since in my opinion we should all be embracing it (of course, as long as we remember form follows function). Step number one was to pick up the latest AJAX book. Step number two was to read as much as possible in 5 days, and start coding. Step number three was to stumble upon a Jeffrey Zeldman article, on ALA, that mentions "wireframing AJAX is a bitch"? Surely it can't be that tough... And even more puzzling, a bunch of ALA members posting agreeable comments???
Maybe the coming together of server-side programming and web design that AJAX represents is making some web monkeys afraid, because of their lack of business logic skills (as well as other non-related computer hacking, bostaff and ninja skills). Maybe Zeldman forgot about all the third-party libraries that will put together nifty AJAX apps. Maybe I never really tried coming up with a production-ready framework (this is true) and it WILL be a bitch to wireframe.
In any case it's here to stay. As for the raging debate re: Web 1.0/2.0/3.0, who cares...
