Concert Review: Journey and Def Leppard

In: music, concerts

I'm just back from the Journey and Def Leppard concert at the Smirnoff Music Center. Journey opened and played most of their well-known songs. Deen Castronovo, the drummer for the band sang three songs and did an excellent job on all three. Jeff Scott Soto filling in for Steve Augheri because the latter is suffering from a chronic throat infection, did a good job as well.

Journey set-list (partial):

1. Stone in Love
2. Wheel in the Sky
3. Faithfully (vocals: Deen Castronovo)
4. Lights
5. Ask the Lonely
6. Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'
7. Any Way You Want It
8. Open Arms (vocals: Deen Castronovo)
9. Don't Stop Believin'
10. Who's Crying Now (vocals: Deen Castronovo)
11. Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) - Encore


Def Leppard did well. Their drummer Rick Allen lost his left arm in a car accident a 1984. He then learnt to play with just one hand. Listening to him, you couldn't tell he was playing with only one hand. They played the same set they have been playing all the places on the tour.

Pacers: Trade# 3

In: sports, pacers

So the Pacers traded AJ to the Dallas Mavericks for Darrell Armstrong and two other players. Also Fred Jones is going to sign with the Toronto Raptors. You know how I feel about the AJ trade! As for Fred Jones, the former slam-dunk champion was another player who played through injury for the team. I'm disappointed that he was let go too. For once, I agree with Bob Kravitz! But unlike him I do think we can still make it to the Playoffs. But I'm not sure how much noise we will make up there. I think we are looking at another first round exit. I hope I'm wrong!

Learning the Guitar

In: experiences, music

I'm learning to play a guitar. Again. Riff had helped me choose an excellent Carlo Robelli electric/acoustic guitar about three years ago. Unfortunately because of my lack of discipline I gave up practising after a short period of time. But after my friend Suhas bought an acoustic guitar and since I started listening to Dimebag Darrell (RIP) and Pantera, I felt like I had to learn to play it once again. Started with Silent Lucidity and Nothing Else Matters. The calluses have started forming again on the finger tips and it feels good. :-)

Falling in Love with Talent

In: sports, pacers

Are the Pacers in love with talent? Who wouldn't be, right? But what do you call a team that will support talent that never delivers for a variety of reasons and then continue to support it? And what do you call a team that admits its mistake and only a couple of months later repeats that mistake? At the end of last season, Larry Bird referring to Ron Artest said "We fell in love with talent.". He made that statement after he had traded the former Defensive Player of the Year to the Sacramento Kings for Peja Stojakovich, who in turn was recently traded to the New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets. Now Larry Bird is on the verge of doing it again by keeping Jamaal Tinsley and trading Anthony Johnson to the Dallas Mavericks for Darrell Armstrong. If you recall, the latter was the only Pacer who showed up in last playoff's first round loss against the New Jersey Nets. Larry Bird in a press conference at the end of last season had said "If Jamaal Tinsley's healthy and in shape, he's about as good as you're going to get in this league.". IF he is healthy! The same Jamaal Tinsley has mostly been missing from the Playoffs for the last three years. To be fair to Tinsley, he was a major reason for the Pacer's winning game seven at the Fleet Center in Boston two years ago. But his injuries have always kept him away from playing in the most important games for the Pacers. How far will a team go to keep him? The Pacers recently waived another talent Jonathon Bender after he decided to retire because of his knee problems. Bender played a total of 385 minutes for the Pacers in the last three years.

Now coming back to the potential trade, Darrell Armstrong is a veteran and a leader and a spark of the bench. And I would love to see him as a Pacer. The Pacers need someone like him on the team. But at the cost of Anthony Johnson who is as tough as they come? I liked Anthony Johnson when he played for the Nets. I thought his determination and his will to win always made him play better then his skill level. He may not be as talented as Jamaal Tinsley or Tony Parker or a lot of point guards in the league. But he makes up for it with his attitude and his sheer hardwork. The Pacers badly needed someone like him on the team as well. Now all that the Pacer's are left with is Jermaine O'Neal who has promised a career season next year and a lot of talent most of which is still unproven! Could this be a reason why the Pacer's haven't won a ring yet?

I hope Larry Bird knows what he is doing!

Indian Government blocking Blogging sites?

The Government of India seems to have started blocking blogs hosted on popular blogging services such as Blogger, Typepad as well as sites hosted on Yahoo's Geocities. Bloggers from all over India have posted their experiences of being unable to access these sites. These same sites are easily accessible from elsewhere. There is no official Government notification about the incident yet. But the scale of people affected by the event does not rule the Indian Government out. If it indeed is a government initiated action, whatever the reason, it sets a bad precedent and puts the largest democracy in the world on a road that can get very rough soon. Its important to note that no specific blog or site is being targeted and the blocking affects any site hosted on the affected domains. Hence this may not be censorship per se` which tries to restrict access to opposing thought. Whats taking place is a general blocking out of a mass-communication medium or atleast a large part of it. Censoring/blocking thoughts or access to a medium of expressing them will never help any cause good or bad. I hope the government reverses its policy at the earlier. Updates regarding this blocking can be found on the BloggerCollective, a Google Groups forum for discussions concerning the blocking. The organizers of the same group have also setup Wikis to provide updates here.

Update: IBNLive reports that the Indian Government has lifted the ban on blogs it had imposed a couple of days ago. It's now understood that the Government had asked the ISPs to block certain specific blogs for their content, which amounts to censorship. But the ISPs ended up blocking entire domains. Either way it's hard to find any justification for the Indian Government's actions which has the potential to turn into a huge Public Relations disaster for them. With the step already taken once one can hardly trust the Government to refrain from doing the same again. Also the whole issue came to light because of the mistake on the part of the ISP's. If the ISPs had done as the Government has asked and blocked only the specific web pages, I wonder if this censorship would have ever been known to the world. [via slashdot]

Two Dead Laptops and an Apple

In: experiences, apple

The last week and half was a roller-coaster ride of emotions for me. Pray allow me to explain:

First my dependable and trusty Dell notebook (HAL) of four years suddenly died. This notebook was my companion in good times and bad. It even accompanied me on my trip across the "seven seas" and back. It never complained and although a bit moody at times, it never let me down. But last week, it suddenly stopped working. I thought it was in the midst of one of its occasional mood-swings. But after a couple of days of failed attempts, I'm gradually resigning myself to the fact that my fried is no more. Somehow I'm undergoing the same emotions that Alberto felt for La Poderosa ("The Mighty One") in the Motorcycle Diaries, when he had to let her go. RIP HAL (2001-2006). But I still have memories of HAL with me (and literally might I add) as I have bought an external enclosure to house HAL's hard-disk. But the tragedy above was only the beginning. My company had placed an order for an Apple Macbook Pro for my office use. The day it arrived, my work notebook hard-drive crashed. All my work of the last few months suddenly seemed a distant memory (I can't help wondering how the word 'memory' can lend itself to so many puns). Luckily for me, the Macbook Pro arrived the same day and in memory of HAL and a bout of egotism christened the new comer iHAL. The next five days were one of ecstacy (no pun intended here of course) as I began to understand why the Mac is considered one of the best things to happen to mankind since bread came sliced. Things just worked and the Desktop looked so polished that Windows looked stone age. But just when I was starting to dream about how I was going to use the Mac to become the best programmer the world had ever seen, tragedy struck again. On the morning of July 14th, 2006, as I was having my morning cup of coffee and checking bloglines, without any warning, the screen went phut. I don't use that word much. But I felt I had to use it in this post. I thought the display broke or something. But turns out the screen was so dim that I could hardly see anything. And trying to increase the brightness using the keyboard shortcut didn't do a thing. And remember the Macbook Pro was less than a week old. My introduction to the Apple way of things couldn't be cut short in such a drastic manner! Anyways, I called Apple Support and the end result of a full 60 day-time minutes of my cell phone usage I was told the since it was within the fourteen day grace period since the device was purchased, it will be classified as DoA (Defective on Arrival). I could either get it replaced for a brand new device or return it for a full refund. With the happenings of the last week and a half, I said no thank you. I'll go for the latter. And so there it came to be. The short-lived experience of using an Apple computer. Not that I expect this to be the end. I will buy an Apple some time in the future. But I find it ironic that my first experience with using an Apple computer known for "it just works" had to come to a crashing end.

So there it is folks... The story of my last one and a half weeks. By the way, it seems poetic to end this piece with the news that I'm now typing this on a computer running Ubuntu. Yes the same Ubuntu that so many long-time Mac enthusiasts have been migrating to. Why poetic? Well because I was reading news of this mass-migration just about the time the Apple Macbook Pro was on the way and I was thinking to my self - "hmm...". Well as it turns out, I did give in the Mac and did start using a Ubuntu. That it would happen so soon was something I could have never predicted!

Spirit of Mumbai

In: Mumbai

I found this link from among the comments to a post by Search journalist John Battelle who in a post calls Mumbai "one of the most perilous places on earth (at least, last week it was)." The post was about how his book which is quite niche still found its way in the stack of a pirated-book peddler in Mumbai. I'm a bit taken aback by the above statement of John Battelle because I wonder if that statement was really needed at all in the context of that post. I wonder if someone would have characterized NYC or London or Madrid in a similar manner one week after the terrorist bombings in those cities. But I'm a fan of John Battelle's SearchBlog for his dependable coverage of the Search technologies and business. His book is on my wish list as well. But I'm a little disappointed by what I would like to characterize as a poor choice of words at the wrong time. But to come back to the original reason for this post, the link I mention in the first line posts an open letter to terrorists around the world about the spirit of Mumbai and is written by a Mumbaikar Namrata Bansal. Do read it as it displays a spirit that we all need to display in order to counter the insanity of violence that is taking place all over the world.

Pacers: Trade# 2

In: sports, pacers
Contrary to what was thought to be the case, the Pacers announced on Wednesday that they had signed and then traded Peja Stojakovich to New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets for draft rights to Andrew Betts. This deal gives the Pacers a $7.5 million trade exception that can be used for trades in the coming year. It was earlier thought that Stojakovich was planning to sign with the Hornets as a free agent. Explaining the trade and the trade exception, Conrad Brunner, the staff writer for the Pacers Organization writes:

A traded player exception is basically a one-year credit line a team receives when it trades away a player (or players) whose contract far exceeds those received in return...

The Pacers have up to one year to use the exception, but it can not be used to sign free agents. It can only be used to acquire existing contracts from other teams; on other words, to consummate a trade. The Pacers, in theory, could now trade away a player making $3 million in return for a player making up to $10.6 million (there's a $100,000 allowance on top of the $7.5 million). A traded player exception can also be used in parts, rather than as one whole amount. This therefore gives them enormous flexibility on the trade market. [Conrad Brunner on Pacers.com]

That was a good move by Donnie Walsh, Larry Bird and team. For one it makes sure we did not lose Artest for nothing. And two it buys us room to sign some good veteran player in what now has suddenly make a very young and inexperienced team. Donnie Walsh also hinted that more trades are in the offing for the Pacers when he said that he hopes "to add another big, physical player, find a shooter and reorganize the point guards into a more cohesive unit."

Technorati Tags: pacers, satchit, sports

Mumbai Blasts

A sad day for everyone... Hope you and your's are fine... When will this insanity stop?

Some thoughtful posts about the tragic incident:

1. SwB

2. Vantage Point

3. A first hand account by Seattle_Smoke

Pacers: Trade# 1

In: sports, pacers

Thought I would keep a track of the trades the Pacers make this summer. So here it is:

1. Pacers are trading Austin Croshere to the Dallas Mavericks for Marquis Daniels.

Croshere was is in the final year of his contract. Daniels seems like a good player. Wikipidea even has a page about the latter.

Strangest Thing....

Monday night, I went to Blockbuster to rent a couple of movies. While I was browsing through the collection, I suddenly felt like renting Oliver Stone's The Doors. So I take the case to the counter and find it is already checked out. The case is just what they keep on the rack to display the name of the video. So then I go and rent Apocalypse Now (Redux) instead, which begins with a Door's song The End. Then while I'm on my way back home, I find out that it's The Lizard King's death anniversary. Strange coincidence...