My entire family went to Dream Theater perform their double concept album “The Astonishing“. Besides the moron in the back shouting “Revolution!” every oh 8 minutes this concert was near flawless.
Not many concerts I have been to don’t want you (even hound you a bit) to not take any pictures. The highlight one on this post I had to sneak like a criminal. Kinda weird but I guess it’s because they put so much into their stage design.
This is my second time to see Dream Theater Sam and I saw them at Starlight on their “A Dramatic Turn of Events” tour in July 2012.
The artistry of the musicians in Dream Theater is hard to beat, from their spot on sound to their inventive scores they really are something to take in if you enjoy music and watching musicians be musicians.
Today I was trolling around on Facebook, both wasting time and looking to see what mischief my internet “friends” are up to. I scroll past a Lane Bryant post that has a video of Ashley Graham doing her thing on a cat walk for some fashion show. So being the Ashley Graham fan I am of course I clicked on it, you know for research.
So clearly this video separates us into three groups of people:
Those more prudish than I who think this is pornography and I have some sort of questionable moral code by watching a lady prance around in essentially a commercial for underwear.
Those, like myself, who watch this in a loop for an excessive number of times wondering why it has taken the internet so long to deliver things of wonder and beauty to us. What? 300 times is totally normal…
People who think Ashley Graham is “fat”. Please unsubscribe me from your mailing list as I don’t wish to hear your clearly incorrect ramblings. No doubt she is a curvy girl, and she doesn’t give two craps what you think about her and her curves; both of these things make her awesome.
The first act was K Philips & The Concho Pearls I had a hard time getting into them, the lead singer kept giving facts about his life that were super depressing. Father currently in rehab, his wife left him, etc. Rock it man, bring the passion and energy not bring down the vibe – geez.
Rob Thomas came on with a bolt of energy and kept it going belting out his and Matchbox 20 tunes, which my favorite was “Fire On The Mountain” well done sir, well done!
Rob Thomas on stageSet change picture
A 30 minute set change and out comes Counting Crows, I am excited been looking forward to seeing these guys for several years. I immediately notice the set seems a bit bare, but that maybe is just “artistic”.
Counting Crows on stage
The lights behind these guys seem to be designed to block out any way to actually see, like blinding mechanisms to distract from the truly awful moans/rambling coming out of Adam Duritz. The band was great good energy and keeping up with Durtiz randomness was impressive to watch. I did like the jam like sessions where Duritz would invite up Rob Thomas and his band, K Philips and The Concho Pearls something like 20 people on stage – was neat to watch.
For the next 70 minutes or so Angie and I sit and wonder what the hell is going on. Duritz is sometimes scating, sometimes just rambling changing words to songs everyone else in the audience is singing. It was truly bizarre we couldn’t tell if he was being “too cool to sing these tired songs” or just inebriated in some way. At this point we are glad we got $20 tickets on Groupon.
Most of Steve Martin’s jokes were well thought out and took a minute to get. Martin Short danced around with his hand acting like his man parts. So really two different kind of things mushed together. Seemed weird to me but Steep Canyon Rangers were interesting to listen to.
Midland Stage Setup
Steve Martin, Martin Short, and the Steep Canyon Rangers on stage
Was hoping these guys would bring it and show the other two how to do it. Ah, well, Jeff Keith seems like a serious goofy guy and the band well they did play their music – I would not say they brought their A game. A disappointing set of about 40 minutes.
Reo Speedwagon
Ok, I admit it. I was expecting these guys to be like the Yes experience (old men shuffling around) – color me surprised. These guys were awesome, showed those Tesla whipper snappers how to bring your A game. Well done gentlemen, well done. Their set was just about an hour.
Def Leppard
I will be the first to admit I am not the biggest Def Leppard fan. I wasn’t expecting much – I was sorely wrong. These guys had great production quality, graphics were excellent, sound was a bit overdriven I thought. Still they did about 80 minutes with a 2 song oncore. Oh and watching the marvel that is Rick Allen is something.
Me and the misses (yes I am wearing my coveted Dream Theater 2012 tour shirt):
As far as performances Mike Posner should be headlining soon, clear talent passion and stage presence. No doubt Demi can sing but she tends to Christina it up a bit. Nick well I guess he is pretty, the ladies seem to like him.
This concert had several firsts concert wise for me (and I have seen dozens of concerts).
So much advertising; Macys, Honda, Guess. Many commercials placed before and during set changes.
An actual car for an advertisement down on the GA floor. A Honda Civic which Honda customized for/with Demi was down on the floor behind the mixer board area.
Two headliners? I could not tell who the actual headliner was as both Demi and Nick played about equal songs, together and shared the same set.
People positioned up in the lighting bars. After Mike Posner a middle section of lights came down and three people crawled up into some harness looking seats to operate spot lights. The lights then went backup and those folks sat in those seats for the duration of the night (nearly 3 hours).
Spotlight crew sitting in the lights.
A video wall that spanned the entire arena. The video wall was likely the biggest I have seen in person and certainly the largest I have seen at the Sprint Center.
Here is a list of Three Letter Acronyms I think every developer (and those professionals involved with software development) should know, at least be familiar with:
1NF First Normal Form
2NF Second Normal Form
3NF Third Normal Form
ALM Application Lifecycle Management
API Application Programming Interface
BDD Behavior Driven Development
BRD Business Requirements Document
CBS Cost Breakdown Structure
CMS Content Management System
CRM Customer Relationship Management
CTM Close To Metal
CTS Clear To Send
CUA Common User Access
DDD Domain Driven Development
DDL Data Definition Language
DML Document Object Model
DRY Don't Repeat Yourself
DTD Document Type Definition
EOD End Of Day
EOF End Of File
EOL End Of Line
EOM End Of Message
ERD Entity Relationship Diagram
ERM Entity Relationship Model
ESB Enterprise Service Bus
ETA Estimated Time Of Arrival
ETL Extract, Transform, Load
FDD Feature Driven Development
FTP File Transfer Protocol
FTW For The Win
FUD Fear Uncertainty (and) Doubt
FYI For Your Information
GUI Graphical User Interface
IDE Integrated Development Environment
IPS Instructions Per Second
IRC Internet Relay Chat
ISO Internet Organization for Standardization
JIT Just In Time
KVM Keyboard, Video, Mouse
LOC Lines Of Code
LOE Level Of Effort
LSB Least Significant Bit
LTR Left To Right
LUN Logical Unit Number
MDA Mail Delivery Agent
MDA Model Driven Architecture
MDI Multiple Document Interface
MIS Management Information Systems
MOM Message Oriented Middleware
MSB Most Significant Bit
MUA Mail User Agent
MVC Model View Controller
NCQ Native Command Queuing
NDA Non Disclosure Agreement
NFS Network File System
NIC Network Interface Controller
NOC Network Operations Center
NTP Network Time Protocol
NaN Not A Number
OID Object Identifier
OLE Object Linking (and) Embedding
OOE Out (of) Order Execution
OOM Out Of Memory
OOO Out Of Office
OOT Out Of Town
ORM Object Relational Mapping
OSS Open Source Software
POC Proof Of Concept
QOS Quality Of Service
RAD Rapid Application Design/Development
RFC Request For Comments
RFP Request For Proposal
RFQ Request For Quote
RIA Rich Internet Application
RLE Run Length Encoding
ROI Return On Investment
ROM Rough Order Of Magnitude
RTC Real Time Clock
RTL Right To Left
RTS Ready To Send
SCM Source Code Management
SDI Single Document Interface
SDK Software Development Kit
SMT Simultaneous Multi-Threading
SOA Service Oriented Architecture
SLA Service Level Agreement
SPA Single Page Application
SQL Structured Query Language
SSO Single Single On
SSL Secure Socket Layer
TCP Transmission Control Protocol
TDD Test Driven Development
TLA Three Letter Acronym
TLS Transport Layer Security
TTF True Type Font
UAC User Account Control
UAT User Acceptance Testing
UDP User Datagram Protocol
UML Unified Modeling Language
UPS Uninterruptible Power Supply
URI Uniform Resource Identifier
URL Uniform Resource Locator
URN Uniform Resource Name
UTC Coordinated Universal Time
UTF Unicode Transformation Format
VFS Virtual File System
VPN Virtual Private Network
W3C World Wide Web Consortium
WAI Web Accessibility Initiative
WET We Enjoy Typing or Write Everything Twice
WFH Working From Home
WFI Wait For Interrupt
XML eXtensible Markup Language
XSD XML Schema Definition
XSL eXtensible Stylesheet Language
XSS Cross Site Scripting
YTD Year To Date
One day a man was watching his wife prepare a turkey for the Thanksgiving feast. She got out her 5lb pot, reached for her 10lb turkey and immediately trimmed off half of the meat from the turkey. She then proceeded to forcibly stuff the turkey into the pot – meeting with resistance and having to lean into it to get that turkey to fit into that pot.
Curious the man asked “Why do you prepare the turkey this way?” to which his wife responded “Well it’s the way my mother does it and it’s the way I have always done it for 10 years now”.
The next year with a new grandchild the couple decide to spend Thanksgiving with her parents. The time comes and the man watches the grandmother get out the 5lb turkey and a 5lb pot proceed efficiently to put the turkey into the pot and put it into the oven. He asked why she taught her daughter differently which she responded “Oh the market was all out of 5lb turkeys that year so I got a 10lb one”.
Seek to understand why we are doing what we are doing, don’t assume the standard course is the best direction.
My steps I did to get my ASP.NET MVC application I created on my Windows 10 box running on a Ubuntu 15.10 server.
Setup ASP.NET 5 on Ubuntu following this:
http://docs.asp.net/en/latest/publishing/linuxproduction.html
http://docs.asp.net/en/latest/getting-started/installing-on-linux.html
