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Blog « Previous Entries Next Entries »Of 2006 Shows
Wednesday, January 31st, 20072006 was not a banner year for concerts for me. I thought it’d be like every other year, but as the saying goes, life got in the way. After 3 shows in March, I went 0 for the century the rest of the year, thanks to myself and everyone and their brother getting married, having parties, etc. Blah! 🙂 Anyway, this year I’ll at least double my count! I have six shows in the next upcoming two months, plus one more probable one in April! As of now, here’s what I’m headed to (as in, I have tickets for):
Sat 2/10 – Breaking Benjamin/Burden Brothers @ Town Ballroom (Buffalo)
Mon 2/19 – Papa Roach @ Harro East (Rochester)
Sun 2/25 – Killswitch Engage/Chimaira @ Dome Theater (Niagara Falls)
Thu 3/8 – The Tragically Hip @ Harro East (Rochester)
Sun 3/25 – Lamb of God/Trivium @ Harro East (Rochester)
Sat 3/31 – Stone Sour/Lacuna Coil/Shadows Fall (Jager Music Tour) @ Dome Theater (Niagara Falls)
I’m more than likely headed to this one, but don’t have tickets yet.
Wed 4/4 – Aaron Lewis @ University of Buffalo
Year In Review Survey
Wednesday, December 20th, 2006As always, stolen from someone else… Krista, this time around 🙂
Best Albums I’ve Bought/Burned This Year:
All That Remains – The Fall of Ideals
Breaking Benjamin – Phobia
Killswitch Engage – As Daylight Dies
Lamb Of God – Sacrament
Stone Sour – Come What(ever) May
Trivium – The Crusade
Crappiest Album I’ve Bought/Burned This Year:
I downloaded the Blue October disc and absolutely hated it.
Bands I Really Loved This Year:
Was a year for the harder stuff – pretty much whoever was up above, plus Chimaira, Shadows Fall, and a couple others.
Bands I Hated This Year
The rise of rip-off Metalcore, and the pop-punk-emo crap.
Best Concerts This Year
Damn, there were only three… and all three were in March! Nine Inch Nails in Rochester, Queen Plus Paul Rodgers in Buffalo, and Chimaira / Stemm in Buffalo.
24) What was your favorite song from 2006?
Toughie… I’ll say Lamb of God – Redneck
25) What was your favorite record from 2006?
See earlier list made above.
26) How many concerts did you see in 2006?
only three… (What’s happened to me?)
27) Did you have a favorite concert in 2006?
Gotta be NIN Rochester
Your Favorite Band Sucks
Friday, July 14th, 2006Let Me Tell You Why…
…[Insert your favorite metal band here] sucks:
1. they have a video
2. theyve sold more than 5 copies of each cd
3. they tour with bands like slayer
4. they were on ozzfest
5. their music isnt as fast as cryptopsy
6. lead singer’s haircut during 2002-2005
7. they have machine recording their record! shouldve recorded it on a fostex 4 track in their moms basement for a real UNDERGROUND sound.
8. they have enough money to make a living off music
9. these dudes have instrument endorsements! SELLOUT!
10. they have a tour bus
11. they bang girls
12. they’ve only been around for 10 years
(shamelessly stolen from blabbermouth!)
Switching Into Living
Saturday, March 18th, 2006Now that we’ve had the better part of a month to settle in, things have settled down a bit. It’s just the little projects, and maintaining until it gets warm enough to tackle the outside. I missed the one awesome Saturday we had, because I had to cover a day shift at work 🙁 Tiff did an awesome jobs getting the leaves raked and the deck cleaned off (yes, the former owner didn’t really do much in that department). I rocked my first home electrical project, adding two light switches in the unfinished part of the basement (why they went with pullstrings on the fixtures I’ll never know), so I’m all proud of myself for that. Amazing what some Romex and a book will do for ya!
And I’ve been bitten by the concert bug once again. As you see from the review, last Thursday was the big Nine Inch Nails show here in Rochester, and just last night, he-who-never-wins-anything actually won something. Earlier in the week, I got an email from the Sabres Insider mailing list that I’m on (put out by the team, weekly updates, ticket offers, etc.) offering a contest to win tickets to Queen Plus Paul Rodgers. I entered on a whim, and imagine my surprise when I got an email Thursday night saying I won 4 tickets! The review will be forthcoming, but suffice to say that it was a pretty awesome show, and now I can say I saw Queen!
So now it’s a matter of waiting for the weather to break, and we’ll start to attack the outside of the house, but until then, it’s more little interior stuff, and just living in the place!
My MP3 Player Can Beat Up Your MP3 Player
Monday, December 5th, 2005
This the new toy I’ve been playing with for the last couple weeks. Behold the Archos Jukebox 6000 MP3 player. Produced in 2001, it’s not exactly cutting-edge technology, but that’s exactly why I got it. The facts that I picked it up for $40 on Ebay, and it has a 6GB drive in it notwithstanding, there’s a handful of reasons why I chose this over an iPod or other similar players.
First off, unlike most all (if not all) current mp3 players, the Archos doesn’t have any DRM (digital rights management) whatsoever. This means that I can freely copy music off the player back on to any other computer with no problem, while all the other players only let you copy back to your own machine. Add that to the fact that I’m not tethered to iTunes or some equally craptacular music program, and I’m a happy camper.
Which brings me to the second thing it has going for it. It works as a standard USB hard drive, and since my makeshift case has room for a USB cable, I have storage anywhere and everywhere!
Thirdly, since the original firmware that came with the Jukebox wasn’t all that great, some enterprising coders came up with replacement firmware called Rockbox, which added all kinds of features and customizable screens. Pretty nifty.
And now to the best reason for getting the Archos. That aforementioned 6GB drive? It’s a standard 2.5″ notebook hard drive, which means…. yep, you guessed it. It can be swapped out. For something much bigger. MUCH bigger. Like 100GB bigger. All I have to do is format the thing with FAT32 (NTFS won’t work, and based on the Archos architecture, there’d be no performance gain anyway), and I’m ready to rock. After Christmas, it’ll be out with the 6 and in with the 100, and the entire music collection will roll with me everywhere. 🙂
Throw in the FM transmitter I picked up, and I have everything at my fingertips in the car also. With more flexibility and far less money than an iPuke, this Archos works for me. I’ll trade a little bit more weight (and I do mean just a little bit) and a little bigger footprint for all of the aforementioned features.
Saving My Bandwidth
Sunday, November 13th, 2005A couple posts ago, I mentioned how I reworked my archive pages so my bandwidth doesn’t take such a hit. The google image search isn’t killing me anymore, but I had to fix my next biggest problem (which compared to the google thing isn’t *that* big).
My next problem is MySpace. Not the site itself, but most of the inhabitants. (Note: Bands that use myspace because of the ease of showcasing their music are cool by me. It’s great for that. DISCLAIMER: I actually have a myspace page, I created it awhile ago, and I don’t really use it. There’s next to nothing on it.) Myspace is a haven for middle and high-schoolers (or those of that mental persuasion) to hear themselves talk. It’s worse than a blog, because it’s nothing but people listing their interests with terribly-designed page with tons of unecessarily huge graphics.
My problem is that, in the process of displaying their 573857845 favorite bands’ album covers, I have over 200 idiots that hotlink to the albumcovers off this site. *HOTLINK* being the key phrase, meaning that every time someone loads their shitty profile page, I take a bandwidth hit for the image they have on their page. This adds up. Go ahead and save them to your harddrive, I could care less about the credit, but don’t steal my bandwidth to do it. But I suppose it’s asking too much for these jerk-offs to find a dedicated image hosting company. There’s tons of free ones out there, so it’s not like they have to spend money.
So in response to this, anytime I get a request from a myspace.com address for an image, the request is filled with a replacement gif image (whose file size is only 2.5k, as opposed to an average of 10.5k for an albumcover). I figure it ought to get their attention when this shows up on their page:
Moral of the story: Don’t hotlink me!
On People, Posers, and Mallcore
Monday, September 5th, 2005Other people are fascinating. As we were walking around the New York State Fair on Thursday, it occured to me that people watching really is one of my favorite pastimes. And there’s really no better place to do that then at large public gatherings of people, of which fairs would be a fine example. The cross-section of the population, and more specifically their habits, just astound me. And while everyone makes snap judgements, you see various families, or groups of people, and you wonder what their home life is like, what their house looks like, etc. What possesses someone to walk out of the house looking the way they do, wearing what they’re wearing? Why the hell do you act like an imbecile in public? For once, I don’t have any concrete examples from the fair, but rather an overarching, cynical, completely baseless continuing belief that John Q. Public is still an idiot.
I’m actually very thankful that Tiffany loves to comment on the people and surroundings as much as I do, because what fun would it be to see these things and not have anyone to bounce them off of? Every time I hear Carlo speak about his psych minor, or Sara about her psych major, I wonder if I should have gone into that, because I’m just fascinated about why people do what they do, and why they act the way they act.
Along these lines, I feel like now more than ever before I’m actually paying attention to trends, especially with the glut of back to school ads on TV and in the stores. While I realize that everything is something to be marketed, and every age group is a target market, I’m just a little surprised at how subtlety has gone out the window in regards to marketing. The ad execs will latch onto anything that seems hot and exploit it for all its worth, and then some. I think the reason I’m noticing it a lot more these days is because of the rise and continuation of the “rock star”, or “vintage” fashion trend that’s currently popular. Mallcore, if you will. I’m not even talking about places like Hot Topic, although they’re part of it. I mean walking into the department stores and seeing them sell clothes with concert/band/backstage icons or slogans. Now this is probably the music snob in me coming out, but half these kids wouldn’t know a rock concert if it hit them in the face, and the other half that actually go to shows just stand there, just so they can tell their friends that they were there and had a “killer time”. You are not rock fans, you don’t rock, you’re not “with the band” as your shirt proclaims. You only know two songs (singles?) from the band whose shirt you just bought at Hot Topic (and that band probably sucks anyway. See My Chemical Romance for a wonderful example). Case in point, the two kids that were in front of us at the 3DD/Staind show. Mom and Dad brought them (which is admirable, rock on Mom and Dad!), and they were each decked out in their brand new $50 Staind hoodies, yet during Staind’s entire set, sat, SAT in their seats, and never once looked to be into the show, singing along, headbanging, nodding, dancing, ANYTHING. Nothing like paying almost $40 per ticket to keep the seat warm. Yet, they’ll go to school this week raving about how awesome the show was, and how they’re Staind’s biggest fans to their friends, who are wearing their crisp new Fall Out Boy t-shirts and gushing about how cute the lead singer is.
I know I’ve made this argument before, but it used to be a much smaller subset of kids that tried to get in on it. Mallcore has become a much bigger epidemic in the last year or so, and from my observation, this back to school fashion season is the peak of it. Makes me want to puke.
If nothing else, remember two things:
1. Nothing is any good if other people like it. And if a lot of other people like it, then it REALLY sucks. (This goes for me too, I know, I know.)
2. (and this also goes for me) “I didn’t sell out, son. I bought in. Keep that in mind.” Words to live by.
Upcoming Concert Calendar
Monday, June 27th, 2005Ripping off Sara, here’s the upcoming concert calendar. Shows in bold are things I either already have tickets for, or plan to have tickets fairly soon.
# 06/29/05 – Opeth, Chimaira, Strapping Young Lad, All That Remains – Penny Arcade – Rochester, NY
# 06/30/05 – Thornley, Hurst – Arizona’s – Thorold, ONT
# 07/06/05 – Tea Party – Water Street – Rochester, NY
# 07/07/05 – Tea Party – Sphere – Buffalo, NY
# 07/08/05 – Tea Party – Sphere – Buffalo, NY
# 07/10/05 – Def Leppard, Bryan Adams – Frontier Field – Rochester, NY
# 07/16/05 – KROCK-athon: Seven Mary Three, Cake, Shinedown, Trapt, Ra, Boyhitscar, and Zakk Wylde’s Black Label Society – Cayuga County Fairgrounds – Weedsport, NY
# 07/21/05 – Ozzfest – Darien Lake PAC – Darien, NY
# 07/22/05 – The Allman Brothers, Gavin DeGraw – Finger Lakes PAC – Canandaigua,NY
# 07/22/05 – Killswitch Engage, As I Lay Dying, Soilwork – Magic City Music Hall – Binghamton, NY
# 07/26/05 – Warped Tour – Darien Lake PAC – Darien, NY
# 07/30/05 – George Thorogood – Fallsview Casino – Niagara Falls, ONT
# 07/31/05 – George Thorogood – Fallsview Casino – Niagara Falls, ONT
# 08/11/05 – ZZ Top – Erie County Fairgrounds – Hamburg, NY
# 08/11/05 – Cinderella, Firehouse, Quiet Riot, Ratt – Shea’s – Buffalo, NY
# 08/13/05 – Green Day, Jimmy Eat World – HSBC Arena – Buffalo, NY
# 08/20/05 – Buddy Guy – Buffalo Bikefest – Buffalo, NY
# 08/21/05 – The Fabulous Thunderbirds – Niagara Square – Buffalo, NY
# 08/27/05 – ZZ Top – Finger Lakes PAC – Canandaigua,NY
# 09/01/05 – Nickelback, Seether, Crossfade, Dark New Day – New York State Fairgrounds – Syracuse, NY
# 09/02/05 – Motley Crue – Darien Lake PAC – Darien, NY
# 09/03/05 – 3 Doors Down, Staind, Breaking Benjamin, No Address – Darien Lake PAC – Darien, NY
# 09/04/05 – 3 Doors Down, Staind, Breaking Benjamin, No Address – New York State Fairgrounds – Syracuse, NY
# 12/09/05 – U2 – HSBC Arena – Buffalo, NY
…And That’s When I Dropped My Donuts.
Wednesday, May 11th, 2005So after our whirlwind parents weekend, we’re back to the usual home life, plus a dog and a cat for a week. We’re pet-sitting for Tiff’s parents while they’re having fun in Vegas, and while I’m getting used to it, I’m not prepared to get used to it for the long haul. I’m simply too lazy to deal with the pets as far as the feeding, walking, making sure the door is closed, etc. Don’t wanna deal with it.
I saw an accident on the 590 (Northbound) on my way into work this morning. Everyone else stopped, and some lady in a prism didn’t. Sucks to be her, as the front end looked like it was in rough shape. (‘Twas amazing how the back end bounced once or twice too!) Gotta pay attention folks!
I “acquired” the new Limp Bizkit and System of a Down albums last night, and ran through both of them this morning. The SOAD disc sounds much like the single does, like the System of old, but a little bit more produced. (It’s only 36 minutes, and they had to do a double disc?) Kinda political, kinda goofy. Everything you’d expect. Now the LB disc was surprising. Out of morbid curiousity, I listened, and now that Wes is back in the band, it actually sounds decent (it was a steady decline, but Results May Vary had no redeeming songs whatsoever on it, even Starfish had a couple). As one review put it, this should have been put out after 3 Dollar Bill, but as such, it’s 6 years too late. But decent (and only a half-hour long!). Fred doesn’t whine, and he doesn’t say Limp Bizkit 57298728935 times. As much as it pains me to say, I actually somewhat like it.
Lewis Black Coming To Rochester!
Friday, April 29th, 2005So maybe I was out of the loop on this, but tickets go on sale TOMORROW for Lewis Black at the Rochester Auditorium Theater, on Saturday, June 25, 2005. $32.50 a pop. I know some of you are Lew fans, so take heed!!
And speaking of shows, here’s the latest list of stuff I’m either going to or thought would be interesting to mention:
Tomorrow 2pm – Tony C and the Truth @ RIT Spring Festival (on the lawn, FREE!)
Sunday May 8 – Mike Doughty (the guy from Soul Coughing) @ Milestones
Thursday May 12 – Chevelle / Dark New Day @ Water Street (I got my ticket)
Tuesday May 17 – Chevelle / Dark New Day @ Sphere (Might go again, dunno yet)
Sunday July 10 – Def Leppard / Bryan Adams @ Frontier Field (ha! what a show! hehehe)
Saturday August 27 – ZZ Top @ Finger Lakes PAC (I’d like to see them!)