June 2007


The Police: Live in Concert

Once again, I am starting a post talking about how I haven’t been posting, with another two weeks gone by. There have been a few occasions worthy of their own entries. On June 20, Dad and I went to the last Wednesday at the Square concert which featured Bag of Donuts. They’re kind of a mix of a KISS tribute band and your basic cover band with a slight New Orleans flair.This past weekend, my family drove out to Slidell for a family gathering of a purpose I cannot recall with guests I mostly can’t recall either. It was interesting enough with good food. I really do wish I could remember the people who were there. I’m bad with names.Aside from those two days, it’s pretty much been business as usual. Work is what it is. I’ve started work on the next version of this website. That is to say I’ve been thinking and doodling.This evening, the family and I went to the New Orleans Arena to see The Police in concert as part of their reunion tour. Dad bought tickets for the concert as soon as we first heard they would have a concert here in New Orleans, which was almost as much of a surprise as The Police doing a reunion tour.I’ve been a causal Sting fan for a while and I know Dad has been fond of his music as well so for many years so this was a real treat. Although I’ve been to more than my fair share of live musical performances, tonight was my first concert of this variety with one band in an arena/stadium setting.The concert opened with a 40ish minute set by Fiction Plane, a band headed by Sting’s son, Joe Sumner. They were a perfectly decent opening act.What can I say about The Police concert? It was totally awesome. I could say that ’cause it was. I’m not a music critic so I can’t eloquently comment on the conundrum between altering the music for artistic purposes and being just a human jukebox. What I can say is the music sounded great and I had a really good time. There will be a review or two that will say it better than I can.I was up rather late (or early) that night as I just wasn’t even tired until three.

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June to Now

Again, it’s been a couple weeks since posting. There have been a couple days worthy of their own entries but I never got around to it. For the most part, it’s been business as usual. Work is work.I spent a lot of time in the last couple weeks working on a couple computers, both mine and Aunt Dionne’s. I was expecting the format/reinstall job on Dionne’s laptop to go rather smoothly, but it was not to be so. I thought it was just virus-infested but the hard disk was physically bad. I was originally just gonna let the bad sectors go but that was too trouble so I replaced the drive, which took a while with the online ordering. Even with the new drive I couldn’t get the recovery discs to work on the new drive so I installed Windows with a vanilla disc.The same day I finally got Dionne’s laptop working, my own desktop computer failed. Process of elimination narrowed the problem down to my motherboard, which wouldn’t properly recognize my SATA hard drives. When either of them are connected, the computer automatically rebooted after a 0x000000a5 error. Although I was hoping not to buy any more PC hardware for another year or so, I replaced the motherboard with an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe, which is about as good as you can get for the now dead Socket 939 platform. It’s a nice board but I was hoping my next board purchase would be an upgrade to a new platform. Anyway, $145 later, problem solve and I ha my computer back up and running yesterday. To go with the newly fixed computer I rearraged the desk a bit, moving the tower to the corner of the room. I also got a new desk chair, an AK Designs Octane desk chair, a huge improvement over the crap I had before.This past Saturday, the family got out of the house and went to the Tomato Festival in the quarter, which was a nice little event with music, cooking demonstration and Creole tomatoes for sale. It was an interesting event and a lot of people turned out for it. We wandered a bit and saw a couple cooking demonstrations, including one by Paul Prudhomme. Later thatg afternoon we had dinner at The Gumbo Shop and then went to see Ocean’s 13. It was much better than 12 but not as good as 11.Other than that, there isn’t much to speak of. Dad and I went out to Wednesday at the Square and saw Trombone Shorty & Orleans Ave, which was pretty entertaining.

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