They’re Some Badass Motherfuckers!!

That was the phrase uttered by the guy sitting behind me at the Prog Nation concert last night once Dream Theater had wrapped up their initial performance. This guy came to see Zappa Plays Zappa and had never really heard of DT before. Needless to say, he was blown away!

It was a great show. FIVE hours of music. The first band, Scale the Summit, was not ½ bad and I’d check them out again given the opportunity. I only caught the last two or three songs, though.

Next came Big Elf. I wasn’t real impressed. I certainly wouldn’t consider them progressive. Take Deep Purple and combine it with Alice Cooper and then make the lyrics less than interesting. It just wasn’t my thing.

But then Zappa Plays Zappa took the stage and things really turned around. I didn’t know what to expect from Dweezil, but he’s a pretty rad guitar player. They covered some classic Zappa with a great ensemble of musicians. The original progressive band – Zappa. They basically laid waste to the place and I don’t feel that many bands could have topped the performance.

But it’s Dream Theater we are talking about and sure enough, they brought the house down in no short order. Those guys are just amazing to watch. The hard part is figuring out which one of them to watch, and the guys doing the video presentation must have figured this out at some point because they were splitting the large screen and showing two or even four of them at one time – just their hands mind you.

One thing interesting is that Jordan Rudess was smoking on the keyboards and I noticed he was using an iPhone of all things for one of his effects. It’s a little application called Bebot. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFG7-Q0WI7Q

But it was an awesome show. Made even more awesome by the fact that they aren’t playing in Texas this year and my trip to CA just happened to coincide with them playing here.

The Cheap Bastard Real Doll

My g/f picked this up for me since she knows I can’t afford a Real Doll

Banned From Guitar Center Part II

I got a response back to my letter that I mailed to the Guitar Center executives. True to behaving like a bunch of pussies they elected to forward my letter to the Arlington store and not answer it directly. And of course, the letter that I received had no return address on it, which is fairly ridiculous considering I know where it came from.

Here is the letter that I was sent:

Hello *NAME*
I received a copy of your complaint letter from our main office. It does seem like the situation could have been handled more professionally on our end. We will use this as a training tool for the front door staff and management of the store. We do care about our customers experience and please accept my apology for the bad experience you received July 18th. You are not banned from the store. We do have a procedure of verifying inventory leaving the store. So, if you do shop here, don’t be surprised if you are asked to present your receipt upon leaving. You can refuse, and hopefully you won’t be confronted the same way.

Thanks for your feedback. Feel free to call me if you would like to discuss this further. I did not have your phone number, otherwise I would have just called.

Thank you,

*NAME*
General Manager
Guitar Center *CITY*

Armed Protesters

About a week ago my friend Bling! sent me this article on a bunch of protesters in Phoenix, AZ that showed up armed to an Obama speech.

It’s worth a quick read, and I’ve had a bunch of mixed feelings about the article since I read it. Just in case you don’t want to do the quick read – it’s legal to openly carry firearms in AZ. A bunch of anti-Obama folks showed up at one of his speeches fairly well armed. One guy even had an assault rifle. They weren’t let into the convention, but they were clearly in close proximity to where the president would be.

One of my first and immediate thoughts is “good for you!” Some people had the balls to really show their dissent and disapproval of what is happening in the government today in a very open and insulting fashion.

But I also think that these people behaved completely inappropriately. We aren’t talking about a few protesters showing up to say that they didn’t agree and that because they are in AZ they also happened to be carrying firearms. No, these people intentionally armed themselves and went to the meeting in a coordinate and organized fashion.

What is wrong with this? Well, let’s face it. Carrying a gun is not the same thing as carrying a sign or a banner. True, you might be able to use a sign to swing at someone but a sign or banner is clearly not as threatening as a gun, even if what was written on the sign is really good.

Part of being a gun owner is showing responsibility above and beyond that of non-gun owners. If anything the public eye is always upon us (if you know we are carrying) and our actions should transcend that of the common citizen. Carrying firearms into or near a political rally in protest is not a sign of prudent thinking and responsibility. Political arenas are a microcosm of emotion and prone to arguments and disagreements. This is not the type of environment to which you introduce even more uncertainty and potential threat of personal harm. If I know I am entering into a situation like that, I leave my gun at home or I don’t go.

We are also talking about a speech given by one of the most controversial presidents in recent U.S. history. Clearly there are a lot of people that don’t like him for whatever reason and the U.S. Secret Service has a great responsibility of protecting him. A bunch of protesters carrying firearms is a nightmare for them. I don’t believe that there should be a law that says a gun can’t be carried within so many feet of POTUS, but again a little exercise in good judgment would be prudent.

I can only think of all the anti-gun people saying “look at these gun nuts! What do they think they are doing??” But I’ll say this –

1 - They were exercising their rights, even if it wasn’t in the best taste.
2 - There were NO incidents that day amongst anyone carrying a firearm.

Updates From Cali!!

I know…I know….I never update this anymore. I’ve been out in California at the home office. We are developing courseware and labs around Cisco’s new Nexus 1000 Virtual Switch. We are also updating the labs and courseware for the Nexus 2000, Nexus 5000, and Nexus 7000.

I got assigned to write the lab guides for the Nexus 1000v. Not being a huge VMWare guy, I’ve had a massive learning curve. Dicking around with VMWare is not the same thing as administering VMWare in a vSphere environment and troubleshooting issues with it.

Also, since the Nexus 1000v is so new there just isn’t a lot of good supporting documentation or user groups. When I’d search Cisco or Google for error messages I’d be lucky if even got a hit or two – and usually it was some poor bastard having the same problem without being able to find a solution for it.

So my days stretched out and my hours got long. I think I’ve been averaging about 14 hours a day on this stuff. That includes working on the weekend because there just isn’t a whole lot to do when you are hanging out of town for a while.
But finally, I’m about ½-way done with writing the lab guides for this course. It’s not something I normally do. Design it? No problem. Implement it? No problem. Write lab guides or courseware? Umm….can we get someone else? Nobody ever likes the lab guides anyway.

But I have found a little bit of time here and there to enjoy a nice meal or hit the beach for a bit. Of course the beach was cold both times I got there, which was a nice relief considering it’s still hovering in the 100’s back home.

My g/f flew out for the weekend and we had a good time checking out Sausalito, Pescadero, Los Gatos, and a few other places. There is a really cool toy store in Sausalito. Someone with a warped sense of humor obviously buys their toys. Like this nifty Deluxe Jesus Action figure.




Genius.

They also had the Lunch Lady action figure, which my g/f found highly amusing.



And, Dream Theater is playing out here next week so I have to go see them as they aren’t playing any Texas dates this year. If I am lucky I’ll be going home after that and getting a little downtime. Five / Six weeks on the road is a bit much……

If You Agree, Pass it On!

If not, suffer the consequences!

I’m sure everyone gets these types of emails. I get them all the time. Mostly I get them from well meaning people that are upset on some level about some issue. I could probably categorize them into a few categories:

Illegal immigrants
The Baracalypse
God and / or Country
Gun Rights

Now, it’s not that I think that these emails aren’t interesting. Most of them are a re-hash of some other email that may or may not contain truthful information. More often than not, whatever is contained inside the email never happened but is composed to get a point across. Who cares if whatever was written actually happened?

I do. And this is not the point of this post. But if you don’t care then why pass it along unless your only objective is to motivate someone else through fear or anger? And if that’s the case, then you may be a person whose ends justify the means. I find these to be dangerous people and it’s the same people that are in politics with this mentality that so many of these emails are about.

I’ve often thought of compiling a spreadsheet that shows how many times I got the email and from whom – in some cases I get the same ones from the same people over the span of a few years. But what do the emails really do? They convey a message and that’s about it.

I mean, seriously, it takes just a moment a couple of mouse clicks to forward the email on to your next 173 closest Facebook “friends.” But what have your really accomplished? A few people will read it and say “YES!” and forward it on. Some will delete it after reading and some will delete it outright without reading it. You might even inform some of the sheeple out there about an issue that really means something to you.

But that’s it. That’s the extent of your accomplishment. Not very compelling when you think about it.

Do you really want to do something? Then yes, go ahead and forward the email….but rather than telling the next person to forward the email or suffer the consequences how about encouraging them to write their senator, congressmen, and state representative? How about you doing the same thing.

I’ll admit I’m a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to this. On the one hand I know that if we really used the system the way it’s supposed to be used, and voted these assholes out of office that they would really listen to what we have to say. But we don’t do it. You forward your email, nobody writes them, and then we don’t go and vote. So on the other hand I am just as apathetic as you are and often times don’t take the time to write them unless it’s something I am seriously concerned about.

Want to put this bullshit to rest about illegal immigrants? Write your politicians.
Want to make English the official language of the U.S.? Write your politicians.
Want to stop all the bullshit gun control stuff? Write your politicians.
Want to stop all the government spending and crazy bills being passed? Write your politicians.
Want bullfighting midgets coming to your home town? Well, not sure that writing your politicians would help here, but it’s worth a try.

And when it comes time to vote – go vote. Get them out of the office if they can’t do what you want. Come tell me how so-and-so voted for or against something you feel passionate about and get *me* to vote them out of office.

Or, forward your email…. I might read it.

Midget Strippers

Would you go? I would. I was going to, but unfortunately I had to fly out of town.