fueled by ramen puts on a good concert

technically it was not actually staged by fueled by ramen, but most of the acts reside or have something to do with them. it was a typical monday night in cincinnati. we headed down to riverbend to see some amazing music of the live variety. the line-up was quite impressive: cobra starship, paul wall, the academy is, plus 44, and fall out boy.

the reverse headliner (their words, not mine) rocked out pretty hard – once the sound guys turned on the stage mics. i had only heard a few cobra starship songs before, but i liked them quite a bit. then came paul wall. why he was there, i have no idea – and neither did anyone else i talked to. honestly, the beats to most of his songs sounded the same to me. it’s not to say it wasn’t a good show – but not quite my style – and it definitely didn’t fit with the rest of the bands. but, at least we got to show off our “grillz” and he did ask us to throw up every combination of fingers during the course of his set.

up third was the academy is… they sounded good, although i was hoping for a bit better. everyone else thought they sounded good, so maybe i am just crazy. it’s a bad venue for good sound unless you are a really loud band. but i like tai, and i will keep liking them. plus 44 played fourth. another band i had not listened to before – but their set seemed to just keep getting better as it went along. their songs seemed to get harder and harder with each song – and the blink 182 cover was a nice touch (there are after all two members from blink). and finally, there was fall out boy – the headliner. they played everyone’s favorites and a few songs off their new album – and they all sounded great. they were loud and sounded as good as i’ve ever seen them.

overall, a great show and a great time overall. now it’s time to wait out the week until lucky boys confusion on saturday.

microsoft popfly might just hit a homerun

popfly is a new…uh…api(?) microsoft put together that is basically a drag and drop widget mash-up tool. the idea behind it seems like yahoo pipes to some extent, although i never spent any time with pipes so i can’t give a real comparison – someone will i’m sure. it requires silverlight 1.0, but doesn’t yet support 1.1. it’s all client-side, which is pretty cool and allows you to share your creations with your friends or the world. the collaboration aspect is intriguing as this could lead to some very powerful and useful interfaces. i’d be interested to see the scaling capabilities of this as that will be a really big factor in popfly’s success.

this looks like it will be very cool for everyone who enjoys getting their data in one place, their own way. i really like the idea that they expose the code and allow you to write your own javascript – and it looked like c# at first glance – to do a little more in depth mashing if you please. it’s in extremely limited alpha, apparently, so we’ll see if my spot in the queue makes it within the initial group of 2000 invites they claim to be giving out.

if ms does this right, it could be very big – so here’s to hoping that they do it well and respond to the feedback of the testing groups. they seem to be giving the collective a bit more input into their products these days and this would be a great place to allow the community at large to get their hands in the microsoft sandbox.

via [scobleizer]

apple and rumors and memos, oh my

i’m sure everyone has read about the “internal apple memo” which turned out to be a hoax. there have been retractions and apologies and even sympathy shown. but really, how does a stock lose $4 billion (yes, that’s with a ‘B’) in market cap in just six minutes? methinks something is amiss here, and i doubt that i’m alone in thinking this. i’m no stock expert and don’t plan to become one, but this is just a crazy story that probably doesn’t really deserve all the press it will get. things happen, people jump the gun, others jump to conclusions. i’m just glad that i’m not a journo trying to figure out what is legit and what is not.

so what will happen next? my guess is nothing. apple’s stock will go right back to where it was, probably even higher. as they say – any publicity is good publicity – and this was definitely publicity. so, the three people left in the world who hadn’t heard of the iphone now have and everyone else has gotten their iphone news fix for the week. i guess everyone wins – especially anyone who bought up a bunch of aapl when it was momentarily down.

happy mother’s day

i just wanted to write a quick post to say happy mother’s day to any mother out there who is reading this, and especially to mine. have the best of days.

my new mobile

i just recently got a lg vx9400, which has turned out to be the coolest phone i’ve had thus far. as much as a fan of Nokia’s as i was becoming, this one is really a lot more fun. Nokia had the utilitarian role down – i could pretty much throw it across the room and know it would work. but this LG has proved to be pretty solid as well. dropped it on the concrete once and it still feels – and runs – as solid as day one. the call quality has been great and i’ve had a superior signal everywhere i go.

lots going on, little writing

haven’t written much lately because i’ve been too stinkin’ busy. between the two greatest sporting weekends (nfl draft, kentucky derby) – in my opinion at least – a bunch of concerts and some new toys to play with, i am swamped. oh, and i saw a few concerts.