Interesting, a set on Flickr.
Did Flickr change their “interestingness” algorithm? It seems to me that for ages most of my top 20 were taken with my iPhone, and most of those were bad panoramas. Now my top 20 is down to only three iPhones and one Kodak. The rest are from the D90. I don’t know when that happened, but I just noticed.
So when I posted that little thing about Dunks and Letters to Cleo and Boston today it was one of those things that was funnier in my head than on the screen. That didn’t stop universehub.com from linking to it and giving me by far my busiest day page view wise since switching to WordPress.com. Thanks!
I put a link in the comments to the pictures I took on the night the Letters to Cleo live record was recorded. Here are a couple that received some love on Flickr, just because Cleo still rules the planet, even after being gone so long.
The whole reason I started using wordpress.com was because I could host images on posterous and have them auto post to wordpress. Of course it took just a few weeks before those pics I sent to posterous started showing up in my wordpress storage counts. Then after a couple more weeks the posterous auto posting stopped working. Yeah, that was nice, huh? Now this week we find out that posterous’ parent company, twitter, is closing up the shop and posterous is going away.
I am afraid to see how much of my free wordpress storage space I have used. I have to be more diligent about using Flickr to host images.
Ticketmaster is a bitch.
I logged in ahead of time so that I would be all ready for the 10:00 start. I also entered my credit card onto my account so that I wouldn’t have to enter it later.
When my clock struck 10:00 I refreshed the event page and discovered that ticketmaster’s clock is behind mine. Figures. I refreshed again and got into the sale. The first thing it did was a friggin’ captcha. I hate those things. There has to be a way for the system to know I am a human, rather than me having to prove it. Get on that, would you please ticketmaster? Each new page had a timer on it. The captcha page’s was two minutes. Stressful, eh?
Finally I get to a page that actually offers me tickets. Of course they are nose bleeds, right? I know there were presales galor, and I know it’s a casino so the high rollers will get the very front, but I am as far away as you can get. Does ticketmaster start selling from the back these days?
I chose to buy the tickets and it asks me to sign in. Didn’t I just sign in? I even reset my password so I wouldn’t have to struggle with it. I entered my newly reset password and of course it failed. Blow me. I enter it again, it failed again. I enter the old password and it fails as well. I click to create an account and go through 20 steps only to be told that my account already exists and I get prompted for the password again. I chose to reset the password and finally get in. All of that happened while the 5 minute timer was ticking down.
Now I am signed in and I have my tickets selected and what does it do? Asks me to reenter my credit card for verification. Are you kidding me? I entered my credit card literally minutes before, now I have to enter it again. Assholes. Okay, so now I have my credit card reentered. What next? I click the button to complete the transaction. Finally. It asks me what credit card I want to use. Are you kidding? I only have one in the account and I have entered it twice already, now I have to select it from a drop down. Okay, okay.
Now I am at the screen that shows me my purchase and gives me one more chance to back out. I am about to click purchase when I notice a little tiny field, buried in a mess of related sales offers (no I don’t want a t-shirt or anything else you are bundling with my precious Rush tickets) that asks for the little security number on the back of the credit card. Really? Why the hell isn’t that field filled when you enter the effing card, and why the hell isn’t it right at the top of the page with all of the actually important information? Well, bullet dodged, thinks I, and I fill in the field and click purchase.
Next ticketmaster tells me they have to verify my card with my bank and that they will be taking me off of ticketmaster.com and sending me to my bank’s site. What the hell is this? Fortunately the processes was automated and all I had to do was watch my screen redirect five or six times. All while the clock is ticking.
Finally… Finally, I get to the screen telling me that my transaction is complete and that Jen, the love of my life, and I will get to see my all time favorite band again.
That was way too much work. Was it better than standing in line outside of a strawberries or tower records or newbury comics? Maybe, but I bet I would have gotten much better seats if I had stood in line.
Aw, who cares. We’re going to see Rush!
There was a run on this picture on Flickr today, for some reason. This will probably go down in history as my last gig. It was Break Even’s reunion, put on by Steve the guitar player. Tim the guitar player, who Steve and I replaced, came back for the fun. All three of us played Les Pauls. Mine is the custom with the black pick guard on the left. Tim’s is the Black one leaning on the amp. Steve’s is the standard with the white pick guard and the awesome trapezoid inlays on the right.
My sister posted a picture of herself from the 70’s on Facebook today. Of course I made fun of her.
She threatened to find a comparable picture of me so I beat her to the punch and posted this. Now I post it here too.
This must be, what, first grade? Kindergarten maybe? That would put it at maybe ’76 or ’77 or so, I think.
I kinda have the same haircut, wouldn’t you say? The part is more in the middle now, but not too different.
Maybe I’ll post a mullet pic next. I still have one or two of those laying around.
Let the rumors begin.
Word on the street yesterday was that Rush is about to release the dates of the second leg of the Clockwork Angels North American tour. It’s supposed to take place in March and April, just prior to the band going to Europe in May. There are no definite dates yet. There was a leaked itinerary that was pretty clearly fake. It featured three separate stops at one venue. That seemed very unlikely and it removed any possible credibility from the “leak”.
Still, the rumors suggest that there will be another stop at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. I remember back in 1983, reading in some lame rock magazine (Circus? Maybe?) that Rush had booked six nights at Radio City. Back then, that sounded like the most amazing example of success. To book six consecutive nights in one of the most famous of all US venues. It was hard to believe. The 13 year old me decided that someday, he would see Rush at Radio City.
I am still waiting for a chance. I have seen them in Manhattan twice. Both times at Madison Square Garden. As unbelievably awesome as those experiences were, they still weren’t Radio City.
I have been inside Radio City Music Hall once. My wife and I took the tour on one of our visits to the city. Hopefully the next time we’re there it will be to see the Holy Triumvirate of Prog Rock.
Sent from my awesome iPhone 5!
Inside the Red Head's Head 