Posts Tagged ‘gigs’

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Gigs, big and small

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

This thing always seems to lag behind things somewhat, so most of you will already know in the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen both Nightwish and Iron Maiden in concert… both were completely awesome -

Nightwish played at the Palais Theatre in St Kilda, which is a grand old place, (think like the Theatre Royal in Chch) and totally appropriate for their gothic overtones :) The new singer, Annette, though not as operatic as the old singer, was great, they did mostly stuff from the new album that she sings on, but she handled the old classics very well too. Also, she’s hilarious. (more…)

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Melbourne week two (and three, and four…)

Monday, January 28th, 2008

I’ve been here a month now.. I really ought to have kept this more up-to-date. Seems every time I should be doing an entry, I’m just too tired out and ready for sleep…..

I started my new job on the 2nd of Jan.. I was pretty much launched right into the thick of things… they had me working on bugs in one of the main apps by the first day. I’m working right in town for a private contracting company, but located right in the offices of the state govt agency who are responsible for managing the wildfires across the state. There’s an emergency co-ordination centre right next to where we’re working (it’s all a bit mission-control) and quite exciting to look at :) They’ve recently had me working on Ruby on Rails apps, which has been quite a rapid learning experience, but it has been surprisingly quick to pick up. My impression has been that rails is cool, but still quite immature.. with time I expect it will improve. (more…)

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A night out

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

Well, after having what I can only describe as a fairly bad week, I managed to get out of the house, and off to some gigs, accompanied by Miss Caroline.

Went to see Liam Finn (again), but this time he was playing in St Michaels church in town, supported by Dictaphone Blues (which is one of the guys from Degrees.K backed by the Heavy Jones Trio). They were great, but due to our expected lateness, only caught a couple of songs from them. Was very impressed though, the acoustics in the church were amazing.. all venues should be long, and have very high angled wooden ceilings. Liam was also excellent, and segued (quite a bit) into crazy layered noise jams right in the middle of quite lovely pop songs. It was very entertaining at least. I’m thinking I’m going to have to buy his new album, the material is very good.

Went back to the Dux, and got there in time to see the Charlie Ash (hadn’t seen them before), who played some quite dancable sexy electro-pop (perhaps the girls in the blue and yellow leotards helped), who were excellent. Bumped into Fran just as she was leaving there to go to “The Loons” in Lyttelton, for the “She’ll Be Right Records” showcase show.

Once Charlie Ash finished, went over to The Loons, which I have now decided is the coolest bar in the greater Christchurch area. There was a blues jam band playing (whose name I managed to miss), and Shay and Jodi giving out raffle prizes.. just an awesome vibe.

Got breath tested on the way home, but I’d only had a couple of beers all night, so that was all good. All in all had a really good (non-date-styles) night, and has lifted my spirits a fair bit :)

Got a phone interview with a place in Melbourne tomorrow afternoon. Should be interesting.

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Weekend of random

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

Friday: Went to see some bands with Rosalie, Ronnie and Adam showed up as well. Rosalie’s friend who was supposed to be playing that night didn’t. Also, the bands all turned out to be of the heavier variety, which made me very happy. Best of the lot were the most excellent Magnum Opus from Wellington.

Saturday: Woke up feeling a bit shit, Chantel suggested I come over, and go for a wee drive for a bit. She suggested we go to Kaikoura for Fish and Chips, and me being in a go-with-the-flow kind of mood, said, “Sure, why not?” Drove up there, got the food, got in the car, and she said “Why not just keep going?” So we did. All the way up to Nelson.
Got there, decided we needed somewhere to stay the night, so I thought we could try the Tahuna motorcamp that we stayed at last time we were there. Made it over there right before the office was about to close.. and asked to get a room with linen, pillows etc, as we only had the clothes on our backs and whatever else we happened to be carrying at the time we left. Got a pretty nice cabin too.
After watching a bit of Terminator 3 (so funny), we went into town to see what was going on. Being winter, only about half the bars were open, and to my horror, the local Grumpy Mole was the pick of them. Chants got accosted by two very drunken Chilean guys, who spoke very little English, and one of whom was quite determined to have his way with her practically right there in the street. Joff to the rescue with as much Spanish as I could remember, and into the Grumpy we went, danced a bit after Chants made the poor bar girl make us Castaways.

Sunday: On the way home, we stopped at the swimming hole south of Blenheim, took a bunch of photos, stopped at a small boutique chocolate factory / stop where I got a couple of treats. Chants drove all the way from Nelson to Kaikoura.. including over the rickety old car/rail Awatere bridge (we got some video footage of that to freak out Mo).
Arrived at Fran’s birthday pot-luck dinner probably only an hour late. Pretty good effort if you ask me :)

PHOTOS HERE

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On Lindon Puffin and Eric Raymond’s dating tips

Sunday, May 6th, 2007

On Friday, I cruised along to Al’s Bar (next the Pak n’ Save of all places) to see Lindon Puffin play a show for the release of his new (and very long awaited) CD, “Show Pony”. As always, Lindon was very entertaining, and was in fine form… the stories were very funny – I feel sorry for “Emily Archer” for whom he wrote clever little song about only meeting someone a couple of times and forming an obsession over it. Turns out a few people at the gig know Emily Archer.. and someone called her on his cell and was like “Yeah, Emily… yeah.. he totally did the song…. yeah….” (and then walked off outside). It’s a darn shame it’s not on the album. Was a little sad that he didn’t do more songs from “Stuff like that”, but the new material is very good, as were the cover songs he did, including unforgettable moments such as Snoop Dogg’s “Bitches ain’t shit” done on the Ukelele. He’s touring soon, so if you get a chance to see Lindon Play, do…

By some total random chance, I ended up going to the Christchurch Symphony on Saturday night.. one of Liz’s friends ended up with a spare ticket, and a few frantic last-minute txts, and a hurried jog to my car later, I was in the town hall listening to Grieg’s Piano Concerto, which was actually pretty enjoyable – the last time I’d sat down to listen to classical music was probably in my first year at university…

A google search for ‘geek dating’ turned up these three pages, which seems to offer some pretty sound advice, but the most disturbing thing, is that they appear to have been written by none other than Eric Raymond. Yes, this Eric Raymond:

Eric Raymond.. doing.. something

Of course, one cannot mention him without mentioning the excellent Everybody Loves Eric Raymond webcomic.

Oh, I solved my async JMS callback problem, using a fairly in-elegant hack, where I have a singleton object which maps the session bean instances to a reference ID, which I then pass in via the JMS message. It’s ugly, but it works :-/

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