Harvey Danger at Great Scott - 10/5/06

For a while now, I'd been keeping in the back of my mind that Harvey Danger was coming to Great Scott on a Thursday night. I was all jazzed to see them, but I also knew that I might have a basketball game that night, when we'd already be short players. So I didn't buy a ticket ahead of time.

Thursday rolls around, my game is at 7pm, and the show is at 9pm (which means HD probably don't go on until 11:15 or so). I get out of work and fight traffic to get down to Waltham on time for the game. It's the first game of the season, so it's always a bit of an adjustment to get back into the flow. I also have a tendency to be overly critical of my own play. However, I rocked. Probably the best I've played in a few years, which I think was directly related to the fact that the other team constantly kept throwing passes that I could just rip and start running the other way for easy hoops. So, it's probably a whole lot less my good than the other team's bad. But whatever. I'll take what I can get.

After our victory (a narrow 1 point win because we were short players and played 4 on 5), I drove home and checked out the Great Scott website just to make sure the show wasn't sold out. Of course, they just can't tell me, so I call them and the fellow answering the phone is nice enough to let me know that they're definitely not sold out yet, but it looks like the crowd is starting to get there. So I should hurry.

I hop into the shower and remember that I'm out of shower wash or body wash or whatever you call it. So I squeeze out a couple of handfuls of the anti-bacterial hand soap that's on the bathroom sink and use that. I'll smell like hand soap, but I'll be germ free. I throw on my rockin' Dear Leader tee and my nerd glasses and get into the car, realizing that I've yet to eat dinner and I'm certainly not going to eat it at Great Scott. Needing money, I stop at Walgreen's to hit the ATM and grab some quick food. I buy a fruit punch Gatorade, some weird caramel nut balance bar, and a bag of Jelly Bellys. Quite frankly, if I pass a bag of Jelly Bellys, I have to buy them.

Guzzling Gatorade and eating something that passes as chocolate, I head down Fresh Pond towards Soldiers Field Road. My normal route takes me up Market St. then back down Cambridge St., but only because I've never figured out which road crosses the two (I now know which one!). I turn down Harvard Ave. for parking, before realizing I'm about to park to go into Harpers Ferry. It is just now, right about 9pm, that I realize I don't remember exactly where Great Scott is.

Making my life more ridiculous, it's at this moment that I crack open the bag of Jelly Bellys and pull out the first one ... which I get into my mouth only to realize it's plum, the bastard child of all Jelly Bellys. I hate plum.

Thankfully, I notice some people walking and realize that I'm not insane and Great Scott is just another block down. I slide down, hang a left on Comm Ave., just hoping I can luck into a parking spot.

And I do. About a block from Great Scott. Things are looking up. Haven't hit another plum bean and I found free parking in a great spot like a block away.

I head up to the door, walk in, pay for my ticket, and get a Sam Adams Octoberfest. It's a decent crowd, though when you're in Allston and school is in session, it's hard to gauge how many folks are there for the show versus how many just decided they wanted to hang out for the evening. As I'm looking around, Sean Nelson, the lead singer of Harvey Danger, walks by. He's not a small man. Probably 6'2" or 6'3".

The opening band, Harris, is just getting ready to start, and I find myself a nice spot on the wall where I can lean and not be too much in the way. Harris starts off and their guitarist closest to me is just all over the place and really fun to watch. As local bands go, these guys were pretty good. They obviously have a little bit of a base, as they had some folks there singing along with them. They had one song, "Carousel", that stuck in my head and could easily be on the radio. The rest of it still seemed a bit rough around the edges. But, apparently they'd had a shakeup in the band and people were playing different instruments. They seemed like nice guys, too. A pretty decent opener and the set break allowed me to go get another Octoberfest.

So Many Dynamos followed up Harris. They're out of St. Louis and they play music that I don't generally find enjoyable. Except they rocked. They are an indie rock/pop/electronic band; it's not really my genre, so I wouldn't even know who to compare them to. And, quite frankly, if I heard that album, I'd probably be pretty disinterested. But they were just so fun on stage, bouncing around, bantering wittily ("We're halfway through the set. I'm feeling pretty good: I only feel like we're a third of the way through"), and just having a good time. It was infectous.

If you're wondering, most reviews seem to compare the band to The Dismemberment Plan and as a punkier Hot Hot Heat. I've sadly never heard the former, and can sort of see the latter comparison. Very "sort of".

Smartly, I took a moment between songs to go grab another beer and hit the bathroom (except in reverse order). If you've ever been to a show at a place like Great Scott or TT the Bear's, you know why.
When So Many Dynamos finished, things got crowded fast. All of the folks who were only there to see Harvey Danger, sort of stormed to the front. I don't mind so much when it's people who seem to actually dig the band (in this case, it was mostly those type of fans). I do mind when it's people who've heard one song and think that entitles them to push their way to the front. Which always reminds me of the night at a Fountains of Wayne show when I saw two college aged girls try to push their way to the front, bitching at people left and right. One of them tried to push past the wrong people and got laid out (right in front of me!). It made my night.

I digress.

I had my spot, had a beer, and was ready for Harvey Danger. I have a tendency to check out band sites before a show to get an idea of what the set might be like, and I'd learned that the aforementioned Mr. Nelson had been having some throat/voice issues. As he took the stage, he acknowledged as much and said they were going to start out with a quieter song to get warmed up. He breaks into "Pike St./Park Slope", which is a fantastic song and helps to illustrate some of the, shall we say, verbose lyrics that Harvey Danger utilizes.

Maybe we could run away and start a little repertory moviehouse or something.
She said, "sorry but I think you might be just projecting on to me. Why don’t you try LA?"

Repertory. Awesome. I mean, come on, this is a band that can work the word interminable into a song. How can you not dig that?
After that, I don't really remember the setlist. They played a great mix of stuff off of all 3 CDs, and sounded pretty amazing for a band that hadn't toured in 5+ years. They turned a song off of the re-released version of Little by Little called "Picture Picture" into a crowd sing along, which was lead into by a very funny 60 second or so monologue describing the "sacred covenent between an audience and performer" in a call-and-response chorus. There were even helpful cue cards to make it easy. That sounds like it could be very pretentious or even cloying, but it wasn't. It was really cleverly done. The band worked into "Little Round Mirrors", which I enjoy a lot, neatly working the chorus from Guns-N-Roses "Paradise City" into it.

At some point, I can't remember if it was during the normal set or as part of the encore, they pulled up a woman onto the stage (she was a friend of the band, it seemed) and she did the female backing vocals to "Old Hat", which is probably my favorite Harvey Danger song. Just an all around great set, with no discernable voice problems, no discernable jackasses, no problems at all.

They finished the set with "Flagpole Sitta", which is the song that they're most famous for, but, as you'd expect, has a tendency to bring out the douchebags. And bring out the douchebags it did, as someone decided it was a good opportunity to start a mosh pit. But, my faith in humanity was restored when his girlfriend yanked him down to the floor by the back of his shirt. Ah, I loves the rock.

After that, I made the quick walk back to my car, and headed home. I had some Jelly Bellys on the way home, and even the plums tasted ok.

(Image from Flickr via splunkton who I don't know, but I found the image then followed to his website which is ridiculously awesome. Seriously. Check it out.)

Reunited

So, this past Saturday was my 10 year High School Reunion.

I'm honestly not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, it was pretty cool to see some people I hadn't seen since June of 1996, many of whom have obviously grown up, matured, gotten married, had kids, but still seem almost exactly the same. On the other hand, it was odd to be standing there surrounded by people who've grown up, matured, gotten married, had kids, and I'm still living in an apartment, playing video games, and trying to avoid doing anything that requires responsibility. On the snarky hand, there were enough people who've put on a lot of weight to make me feel good about where I'm at physically. It sounds mean, but I'm sure people were mocking my shaved head and nerdy glasses. So nyah.

Advice on surviving your reunion:

• Don't show up early. Show up like 45 minutes in, so you can likely spot the people you want to avoid ahead of time.
• Drink.
• Go with a friend who will have your back when you're talking about someone and they start walking towards you. Always a faux pas to mock someone as they come up to say something complimentary.
• Find a spot where you can only be attacked from one, maybe two directions. If you can see people coming, you can plan accordingly--play the alphabet game to remember their name, think of what you had in common in high school, invent some obscure rumor about someone who isn't there.
• Drink.
• Try to remember that everyone else probably feels the same that you do. And take advantage of that by making up important facts about yourself.
• Don't talk about your porn movie.
• Do talk about your girlfriend's porn movie.
• Drink.

In all honesty, it was a pretty good time, and I survived and even saw some people that I wish I had seen more over the past 10 years. I'll enjoy it again in another 5 or 10 years.

In other news ...

Harvey Danger tomorrow night!

New Tees!

I just bought myself two new tees. I've got a couple of old reliables:

The Peeps T:

The Jelly Belly T (this isn't the exact one I have, but it's close):

My Dear Leader lion shirt, which I can't find online, and my Ben Folds "Rockin' the Suburbs" shirt which I also can't find online.

Courtesy of Busted Tees, I'll be adding two new ones to the rotation:

The Oregon Trail!:

Saint Dorothy Mantooth!:

I'm quite excited.

I Despise ColdFusion

I really, really do. I despise it. Over the past few weeks, we've been battling in our hosting environment to come up with solutions to a myriad of issues with ColdFusion and how it scales. Now, I don't think that ColdFusion was really designed to be used in a shared hosting environment, with hundreds of sites and thousands of hits per second throwing traffic at it. It certainly doesn't scale well enough.

Now, I know there's a ton of heavily trafficked sites that use ColdFusion. It is possible for it to scale. It's just not possible for ColdFusion to scale when the code in question isn't specifically designed to do so. We've got thousands of customers spread across a handful of servers, and they've all written code that, well, let's say it's not professional. It's all basic "open database, run query, output data" code, 99% of the time against an Access database.

75% of the time, ColdFusion handles its end of the bargain pretty well. We're running IIS6, Windows Server 2003, all the normal stuff. The problems end up being two fold:

1. ColdFusion still uses ODBC
2. ColdFusion uses Java

Our two basic problem scenarios are cases where we get a lot of concurrent database queries and ColdFusion's ODBC service simply decides it can't handle it. Rather than fail gracefully (allowing us to catch the stopped service and restart it accordingly), the service just keeps running, but simply doesn't do anything. It actively rejects all TCP/IP database connections, and leaves customer sites basically dead in the water.

We've worked around the ODBC issue by having a test page that makes a database connection, which we query every X seconds, determine if the ODBC service is still working, and if not, we actually kill the process and restart it. Obviously, we're adding a little overhead to the box by doing this (not a ton, but it's overhead) and we're not really solving the root cause, which is that the ODBC service doesn't behave the way a normal Windows service should.

This issue is sort of hinted at in this ColdFusion TechNote, but there's no solution other than to limit connections, which is not easy to do in a shared hosting environment (well, not in any meaningful, cost-effective way). Not to mention the fact that using ODBC and DSNs is pretty antiquated and I'm not sure why ColdFusion hasn't deprecated it completely in favor of DSN-less connections (which are not only more reliable and have marginally better performance, but are far far far more portable).
The second issue is simply that ColdFusion uses Java. There's nothing inherently wrong with Java (just as there's nothing inherently wrong with .NET or any other run-time environment). They all have their places. This just isn't a place that Java works well. The Java process gets progressively larger because customers don't write applications that really care about garbage collection or optimization. They're not homogenized. There's hundreds or thousands of very different applications, that instantiate different objects, and then the Java garbage collection has to try to figure out exactly how to handle it. Sometimes it works well. Other times it thrashes the CPU usage up to 100% and causes the box to simply hang out while it decides what to do.

We've been mucking with ColdFusion and JRE settings to work around this, and we've basically mitigated this problem through trial and error, and also some monitoring that will push traffic over to another server if the main server is "hung" and then route traffic back again when things are back to normal.

It's taken us a few months to get to this point, a few calls to Adobe, and a whole bunch of trial and error. Each time we solve one problem, another pops up that needs investigation and resolution. Having now played with ColdFusion for about a year, I can safely say that I would never pick it over Perl or PHP, but I can see why someone might select it over ASP or .NET, which have slightly more difficult methods of connecting to and handling database info.

Still, I despise ColdFusion. It encourages its users to do stupid things (I cannot even tell you how many customers I've had to inform that their code doesn't work because they're using a reserved SQL word as a variable or table name -- something that happens far less frequently with ASP or PHP users). It relies on a bunch of server-side technology that renders its usage fairly non-portable. It's got a horrible design for IIS, leading to cases where ColdFusion dying can cause IIS to stop serving HTML pages on the box (thanks wildcard ISAPI filter!). In a nutshell, ColdFusion has pretty much been the bane of my existance for a few months now, but we seem to have it handled at this point. If I ever ran my own hosting company, I'm 99.999% sure I'd never offer ColdFusion, at least not without charging a significant premium.

I despise ColdFusion.

Information Overload

I went out after work a couple of nights this week. Good times.

Then I came home.

• 3 movies from Netflix.
• 13+ hours of new stuff to watch on the DVR/TiVo.
• 450+ items in my feed reader.
• 10+ hours of podcasts in iTunes.

I'm slowly working through it all. Thankfully, looks like the weather will cooperate and this will be a nice weekend to catch up on some TV and movies. I get weirdly stressed when this happens. But then I just browse through it, remind myself I'm not really missing out on anything, and I feel better about things. I lead a somewhat puzzling (lame, boring, ridiculously stupid) life.

YouTube on YourTV: Thanks Nintendo!

So, I'm a Nintendo dork. I talked about the Nintendo DS a while ago, and I still play the crap out of it.

I'm now completely enamored with their next system, the Wii. Silly name, awesome idea. I'm sure I'll talk about it more at some point.

But I just realized today that, because the Wii is going to support the Opera web browser, and because it's going to support Flash .... I can watch YouTube videos on my TV through the Wii. I can't tell you how awesome that is. I don't love watching TV on my computer. Well, I do, but not as much as I love watching it on my actual TV.

Think of all the stupid stuff on YouTube. Now think of how much more stupid stuff you'll watch when you can do it while laying on your couch. That right there is icing on the cake.

Go watch this movie for free and then thank me

My friend Greg has started posting again and running his movie on his website, Project Working Stiff. It's a funny movie, more of a romantic comedy than you'd expect from the subject matter. It has a couple of literal laugh out loud moments, and some really great indie rock/pop music.

Go watch it. If you like it, post about it, or tell someone else to watch it.

Heck, I might setup a little spot on this here site for you to watch it (except it means I need to setup a Brightcove account, which I don't have time to do right now ... but stay tuned).

Dear Leader & Campaign for Real Time @ TT the Bears

I've seen Dear Leader a whole bunch over the past few years. I'd say they're easily my favorite local band, and I'll pretty much see them whenever they play. But, after playing the Best Music Poll earlier this year they headed into the studio to record a new album and didn't play any dates in the US.

When I saw them show up on the TT the Bear's Calendar, I knew I'd be there. The fact that Campaign for Real Time, the latest winner of the Rock 'n Roll Rumble, and apparently a pretty amazing live band, would be opening, it made for an interesting bill.
So, fighting a little bit of sleepyness, I headed out to Cambridge to catch the show. I got there a little after 9:30 to catch the tail end of Boone's set. There were moments of good here, but it just didn't resonate with me. They, honestly, sounded a bit noise rocky to me (though, it could have just been the mix at TT's last night, which was atrocious), but it just didn't work. I like my songs to be a bit tighter.

The second band was the New Idea Society, which features Stephen Brodsky of Cave In fame. I've never been a big Cave In fan, but I'd seen him play a live solo show where he showed off his musical tastes, covering Brian Wilson and a bunch of great little pop tunes. Some of that pop goodness bleeds into the New Idea Society sound, and there were a couple of songs that had me nodding along and wondering how I had missed these guys before. Then they'd break out a song so excrutiatingly navel-gazing that the crowd literally didn't react. They finished a song, stopped, and there was just no reaction from the crowd. Just sort of stunned silence. At this point, I was dreading having to wait another 75 minutes for Dear Leader to arrive.

Then Campaign for Real Time took the stage and pretty much owned the place for the next 45 minutes. I don't even know how to describe it. It's a rock/funk band with some smattering of the new wavey sound featuring some Moogs and organs, and then the occasional drop of some hip-hop. All topped off with more energy then anyone should be allowed to display. Ever. It was impossible not to be drawn in. Just a great show, even if the mix was so bad that I really had no clue what they were ever saying. Given that Dear Leader's sound is a bit more straight ahead and driven than the manic energy of C4RT, I was a little curious how they'd follow up this act.

Well, they did it by just playing straight ahead balls out and blowing the doors off the place. It's not always a good thing when a group takes the stage and basically plays all of the songs from their new album, right in a row. But Dear Leader's been working on some of these songs for the last 6-9 months, so most of the crowd had heard them before. Starting off with the amazingly anthemic "Nightmare Alleys" and moving right into "Radar", opened the show fantastically. They just blew through songs from the new album, one after another, with little more than a couple of sentences to the crowd, instead just milking in the fact that pretty much everyone there knew most of the words to a bunch of unreleased songs.

Finishing off the set, they broke out the crowd favorite (and my personal fave) "My Life as a Wrestler" with crowd participation, segueing nicely into "Raging Red", including the chorus from The Pixies' "Monkey Gone to Heaven". They walked off stage leaving a pretty raucous crowd behind, before coming out to blow through two high energy versions of "Corroded Anchor" and "Billions Served" before the rest of the band bowed out while Aaron Perrino finished with the newish tune "Lead the Way".

We got one more Aaron solo encore, and is was well worth it, as he came out and broke into the opening riff from The Sheila Divine's "I'm a Believer" and it was pretty much crowd singalong time, which seemed to amuse Aaron to no end, and finished off a tight 75 minute set. Well worth the 10 bucks to get in and has me pretty amped to get the new album (in November) and hoping that they start playing more shows to continue to show off the new stuff.

Remember you can keep track of the shows I'm interested in my checking out the Concert Calendar.

Woo hoo! Sept. 8th! Fireworks!

I have no idea why there's a bunch of fireworks going off outside my apartment. But there they are. Maybe we're under attack.

Nope! Apparently it's Town Day. Exciting!

Labor Day, My Ass

Monday holidays are useless, especially in a global business. You come back to work and rather than just having 2 days of email and issues to deal with, you have 3 days. On top of that, you need to compress all of your normal work for the week into four days.

All holidays should be moved to Fridays. That is my decree for the day.

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