Rough Draft

The David Akers Show

If you saw the opening kickoff (any one of the three) you never would have guessed that David Akers would kick a game winning field goal in the final minute of the game.

After the opening kick, Akers crumbled to the ground holding his right leg. He had pulled his right hamstring partway through last week's game, but apparently he had been doing ok in practice. He finally got up and got off the field, but then had to come back on and kick off again because one of the Eagles was offsides. He kicked off again, this time not putting much into it and again dropped to the ground holding his leg. And then rather unbelievably, the Eagles were offsides again. This time Mike Bartrum kicked off but it went out of bounds before reaching the 40 yrd line so the Raiders got the ball at the 50 yard line. It took the Raiders less than three minutes to get a touchdown. Wow, that is so not the way to start off a game.

The whole Eagles team looked off the entire first quarter, like a whole different team from last week. Part way through the second quarter, the Eagles defense really picked up and didn't allow another touchdown until late in the fourth quarter. McNabb was off the entire game (probably due to chest and groin injuries) and made some wildly inaccurate passes and missed wide open receivers several times.

In the second quarter McNabb eventually got in a little groove and connected with Westbrook a couple times which lead to Westbrook's 18 yard touchdown run. Linebacker Mark Simoneau attempted the extra point, but didn't get enough lift on the ball and it hit his own lineman in the back of the head. He's now 1 for 2 on extra points on the year.

McNabb got a little better in the second half, and lead the Eagles to two touchdowns in the third quarter. Akers came on and successfully kicked the extra points (if barely) and pretty much fell to the ground after each one.

With Akers not doing kickoffs, the Raiders were consistently getting amazing field position, but the Eagles defense managed to shut them out in the third quarter. However, late in the fourth quarter the Raiders tied the game at 20 a piece.

The Eagles quickly drove down into what normally would have been field goal range, but they had to keep trying to get a touchdown. Eventually with less than 30 seconds left the Eagles got inside the 10 yard line and Akers came on to attempt the game winning field goal. And he made it! Simply amazing! I don't think there is a tougher kicker in the league.

Other Notes:

• The game was riddled with penalties (13 for Oakland, 10 for Philadelphia). Though I think Oakland's penalties tended to be much worse for them. There were several scoring drives of the Eagles that were kept alive by Oakland penalties.

• The Eagles run defense was superb, holding the Raiders to under 30 yards rushing

• The Eagles offensive line provided amazing protection for McNabb. If Mcnabb hadn't been injured, he almost certainly would have had a repeat performance of last week

• Did I mention David Akers is the man?

iLap

I'm thinking about getting the iLap for use with my 12" Powerbook. The reviews I've found are all positive. Anyone out there used this or any other kind of laptop stand?

I Love Katamari

I stopped by GameStop on my way home from work today to pick up We Love Katamari, the sequel to Katamari Damacy. After only an hour or so of playing time I have to say it is a perfect sequel.

So I ended up writing quite a bit, so I'm adding this here: if you have a PS2, get this game. If you've never played Katamari Damacy, you are missing out on an awesome gaming experience. If you already own the original, there seems to be plenty of improvements and new levels in the sequel to keep you entertained for a good while. Now on to my observations on the game so far.

The core gameplay is unchanged, you roll around your katamari to pick up stuff to have them turned into stars and planets. However, the developers did not just sit back and release the same game with some new levels. The biggest improvement is a fix for the camera problems which plagued the last game. The camera movement is pretty much the same as the last game, but now when you are rolling underneath something, or a large object is positioned between the camera and your katamari, an area of the large object becomes transparent so you can always see your katamari. It works really well.

The physics of the katamari have also changed slightly (and for the better). First, it's stickiness seems to have improved, as even when running into larger objects, things seem to stay attached to the katamari much better. I like this because in the last game you very often had things flying off your katamari, but the amount of stuff that flew off never really had a very large effect on the katamari's size so it ended up just being a visual distraction. The katamari also seems a bit bouncier. It doesn't make quite the same thunk when landing after falling a large distance. The last change to the katamari physics is that it is much easier to roll up hills. Sure this makes the game a bit less "realistic", but it makes dealing with hills a lot less of a chore.

I'm guessing the reason for making hills easier is the new ability to roll your katamari underwater. The cheap way for them to add this new feature would be to have levels that were strictly underwater. But sticking with "the whole game is one large level" concept, you can go from being underwater to being on solid ground all within the same level. Of course getting out of the water normally involves rolling up a large hill, but there are other clever ways to get back above ground.

Another great part of the original game was the incredibly amusing dialog with phrases like "Royal Rainbow" and "It's not your fault. It's our fault for believing in you". We Love Katamari has had plenty of amusing dialog thus far. And if you can't tell from the title, it really plays on the fact that so many people loved the original game. The menu system for choosing levels involve talking to people that want to meet the King of All Cosmos for one reason or another.

The last thing I'll mention is the music. The sequel contains a lot of the same songs as the original, remixes of those songs, and new versions. I was cracking up in the tutorial level which had the theme song being sung by what almost sounded like William Hung. We Love Katamari also lets you choose from a selection of different background tracks for each level which is a nice touch.

Impromptu Concert

My friend Mike called me at this afternoon and said he had an extra ticket to the Bloc Party show tonight. I've been listening to their CD off an on at work the last few months. It never made it into heavy rotation, but it is a good CD, so I took him up on the offer.

We left work around 6 and headed up to The City. We parked at the Metreon where we met another of Mike's friends and then grabbed some food before heading to The Warfield. The first band was The Noisettes, and they sounded much as their name implies. They were pretty good for an opening band. The drummer was pretty crazy with a full head of curly hair and fully beard. He totally looked like Animal from the muppets. The lead singer, this black British chick that could kick your ass had some pretty over the top dance moves.

The next band was a duo (male guitarist, female singer/bass player) called The Kills. The singer had the whole goth look going with long black hair, pale skin, black pants, black and white striped shirt. The music was similarly dark/industrial. They were alright, but not really my thing. The worst part about their set were these two big guys in front of us, who apparently thought this was the greatest band of all time. They were jumping and flailing around and being generally obnoxious to everyone around them. Fortunately they left after The Kills set. On their way out they said they were yelling to no one in particular, "thank you, Bloc Party sucks, up next shitty corporate rock". Uhh, Bloc Party hardly counts as corporate rock. But whatever, we were just glad they were gone.

Finally Bloc Party was up. They played a good set. The two crowd favorites where Banquet and Like Eating Glass. They played a handful of new songs, but for the most part the new songs didn't have that good dance beat a lot of their other songs have. Towards the end of the set (pre-encore) someone crowd surfed to the stage and then jumped back into the crowd. Apparently some young girl got kicked in the face when he did this, and the band stopped playing and got her up on stage and she went off with on of the stagehands. Then they of course scolded the guy that did it. When they came back for the first encore they said the girl was fine, which is good. Unfortunately, the show never got to the same energy level it had before the crowd surfing incident.

Overall the show wasn't anything super spectacular, but it was definitely a fun time and worth the $20.

They're Back

The Eagles started the 2005 NFL season with a rough loss (14-10) to the Atlanta Falcons last Monday Night. McNabb took a hard hit to his chest in the first quarter and didn't seem himself the rest of the game. The team as a whole just didn't seem to be clicking, and my confidence in a repeat trip to the Super Bowl dropped.

Fortunately, that loss on Monday night seems to have brought the team together and the Eagles routed the 49ers 42-3 today. McNabb was on fire today and threw 5 touchdown passes to 4 different players. The two TDs to Owens were 68 and 42 yards. The other three TD throws were all under 10 yards. McNabb didn't look at all bothered by his bruised sternum and threw a number of very difficult passes incredibly accurately.

Other highlights of the game included linebacker Mark Simoneau successfully kicking an extra point after David Akers injured his hamstring, tightend LJ Smith having 9 receptions for 119 yards and 11 Eagles players catching passes. The Eagles defense was also quite solid with 3 interceptions and only giving up 3 points.

Obviously routing the young 49ers team isn't something you can read too much into, but regardless the Eagles looked extremely sharp. Also of note is Owens did not show boat at all. He really didn't do any kind of crazy celebration on either of his touchdown catches. This is especially surprising given the 49ers are his former team, and some of the 49ers players tried stirring things up with various comments about Owens throughout the week. Clearly, Owens' various on-field antics and off-field dramas can be distracting for the, but you have to respect his shear abilities and the fact of the matter is the Eagles need a stand out receiver such as Owens if they're going to be successful.

Upcoming.org

Buzz recently told me about Upcoming.org, a social software site for keeping track of concerts and other live performances. There's over a thousand people registered for the San Francisco "metro", so it's got a decent user base. You can see my personal page here. I added all the shows mentioned in the previous post to my events.

The site has some cool features including RSS feeds, subscriptions for iCal, and "badges". I've added a Upcoming Concerts RSS feed for the site. You can subscribe here and I also put a link to it in the sidebar. I updated my concerts page to use their badge to generate my list of upcoming shows. I'm not taking advantage of the iCal subscription yet. The events are all listed as "all day events" rather than listing the event start time and they also don't show the venue. I'm not sure if that's a limitation in the webcal format or if they just didn't set it up to use those pieces of information.

I was hoping Upcoming.org would also be a good place to find out about new shows. There have been far too many times that I've found out about a show either after it's already sold out or after it already occurred. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how useful it's going to be in that respect though as the only event of the four I'm currently attending that I didn't have to create was Death Cab for Cutie. If anyone knows of a good central site (or better yet RSS freed) that gives listings of concerts (especially for indie shows) in the Bay Area, please let me know.

Update:
Buzz hooked me up with an invite to Sonic Living. It's a site similar to Upcoming.org, but seems to have fixed a lot of the problems I listed with Upcoming. First, they populate their show database on their own in addition to relying on users to add shows. All 4 shows I have tickets for in November were already listed on the site, so that bodes well. In addition the iCal subscription includes the show's start time and the venue so I should be able to use that as my concert calendar rather than keeping my own manual one. The site is currently in an invite only beta. I don't have any invite codes yet, but I imagine some will appear in my account soon, eventually so if you're interested let me know.

Also thanks to Jeff for pointing me to EVDB, I'll have to give that a look too. And thanks to Chris for reminding me of Pollstar. I wasn't aware of Pollstar's abilities to track up to 10 bands for you.

Rockvember

November is shaping up to be the single best concert month, ever. I've already got 4 shows scheduled: Nintendo Fusion Tour with Fall Out Boy, The Starting Line, and Motion City Soundtrack (which I blogged about here) the recently mentioned Video Games Live show, Death Cab for Cutie, and The Drive Thru Records Tour with Allister and Fenix*TX.

Death Cab for Cutie is touring in support of their brand new album, Plans. I can't wait to hear the new stuff live.

The Allister and Fenix*TX show should be lots of fun. I've seen Allister quite a few times before and they always put on an excellent show. They have a new album coming out in October, which is their followup to 2002's Last Stop Suburbia. They actually played a few new songs when I saw them in May 2004 at the Grog Shop in Cleveland and they sounded pretty good. Needless to say I'm anxious to hear the new album. Fenix*TX actually broke up a couple years ago, but they are getting back together for a farewell tour. Mike first introduced me to them during our freshman year of college. It will be cool to finally get to see them live.

Video Games Live

I found out about the Video Games Live concert in one of my weekly concert emails. I'm ordering tickets tomorrow for the San Jose show on Saturday November 5th. It looks like it's going to be a really cool show. If anyone else wants me to order them a ticket, let me know.

Now on DreamHost

If you're reading this, then you're DNS servers are hip to the fact that I've switched this domain over to DreamHost as my hosting provider.

My free hosting with 1and1 runs out in January, and while I haven't had any problem with them I decided I'd start seeing what other hosting companies offered. Quite a number of people I know are using DreamHost and have been quite happy with it. They also started supporting Ruby on Rails with FastCGI a few months ago, which I definitely plan to take advantage of. Lastly, their hosting plans are really cheap and have insane (one might even say Crazy Insane) amounts of storage space and monthly bandwidth.


I think everything is up and running smoothly, but if you notice any oddities, please let me know.

Update: Corey let me know that comments and email aren't working. I'll try to fix the comments after work. Email still seems to be trying to go through the 1and1 servers. Hopefully that will sort itself out in the next day or two.

Update2: Comments are fixed. Had to update my the Scode module to point to the correct tmp directory. Email also seems to now be working correctly.

The Decemberists

After a nearly three month stint without going to any concerts, I finally made it to a show last Sunday and caught The Decemberists at The Fillmore.

Nick introduced me to The Decemberists a few months ago when he put On the Bus Mall up as a Song of the Week. They use a good number of instruments in their music including a violin, accordian, piano, and upright bass which makes for a fairly unique sound. Even though Nick had been pimping them several months ago, it was only within the few weeks that I started listening to them with any frequency. Fortunately, this was just in time that I was still able to grab a ticket before the show sold out (They actually played both Sunday and Monday and both shows sold out!). And boy am I glad I went as they put on an excellent show.

I found out on Friday that Buzz was also going to the show and he invited me to meet him and some of his friends at Pizza Inferno to grab some dinner before the show. We planned to meet at 6:30, so I left Cupertino just before 5:30 and got to the edge of The City just after 6. Unfortunately, there was apparently a Giants game that night which I was unaware of, so the last 3 miles of 101 before I got into the city itself took me just over an hour to get through. Ugh. After getting through that mess, I got to the fillmore area shortly after 7. Thankfully, there was a cheap parking garage nearby since I didn't see any street parking on my quick pass around the area. I finally made it to the restaurant and got some pizza shortly after 7:15. Buzz and friends were kind enough to wait while I ate my food and then we headed over to the venue and got there just as the opening band was started playing.

The first band was Sons and Daughters from Glasgow, Scotland. They're a four piece band (2 male, 2 female) with guitarist Scott and gutiarist/pianist Adele sharing vocal duties. I quite enjoyed their set. Their songs had excellent driving basslines and catchy choruses (Check them out on iTunes). They also broke out a mandolin for at least one song. I definitely plan to listen to more of their stuff.

Next up was Petra Haden and The Sellouts, an all female (10 singers total) group that did a cappella versions of songs from The Who Sellout. Sound crazy? It was, but it actually worked pretty well. I wasn't terribly familiar with the original album, but I definitely enjoyed their set. Our Love Was and Tattoo were my favorite songs they sang.

Petra also happens to be the violinist (and backup vocalist) for the headliners, The Decemberists. They took the stage to some pretty spiffy intro music and then immediately broke into 16 Military Wives. They had good energy all night and played a nice long set. The craziest part of the set was the jam session that occurred during the encore. They broke into a jam and then Colin (lead singer/guitarist) pulled this lady out of the crowd and gave her his guitar. She didn't seem to know how to play, but that didn't stop her from jumping around and strumming like mad. The bass player similarly brought up a young guy to take over bass duty. Over the next few minutes all the band members switched up instruments. The best switch was the bass player taking over for the drummer without a missed beat.

Songs I can remember they played:

• 16 Military Wives
• Odalisque
• Grace Cathedral Hall
• The Legionnaire's Lament
• Billy Liar
• The Chimbley Sweep
• We Both Go Down Together
• Eli, The Barrow Boy
• The Sporting Life

It was a great show, all three bands played excellent sets and was definitely worth the trip despite the whole getting stuck in traffic suckage.

Other notes from the evening:
Peter and the Wolf was played during one of the intermissions. Cool!

The Fillmore is a great place to see a show, because they often give out free posters after shows, so I now have a spiffy Decemberists poster to hang in my office.

I highly recommend you check out The Decemberists on iTunes.

It seems like as I was watching the show there were more things I wanted to be sure and mention in this blog post, but I can't remember what they are now. Oh well.

TV Shows

Erik recently linked to a couple Fall 2005 TV grids (here and here) and posted a list of the TV shows he plans to watch this fall. I figured I'd also share what my ReplayTV is set up to record.

Sunday
Family Guy (9:00 on Fox)
Curb Your Enthusiasm (10:00 on HBO)

Monday
Arrested Development (8:00 on Fox)

Tuesday
Bones (8:00 on on Fox)

Wednesday
That 70s Show (8:00 on Fox)

Thursday aka Reality TV Night
Survivor (8:00 on CBS)
The Apprentice (9:00 on NBC)

Friday
Numb3rs (10:00 on CBS)

Saturday
Naruto (9:00 on Cartoon Network)

Bones is the only newly added show to my regular lineup and I have no idea if it will actually be good. The important thing I'll need to remember is that David Boreanez is not in fact a kick ass vampire in this show.

There are a couple shows that don't start up again until 2006 that I'll definitely be watching including Scrubs and The Shield.

The only cancelled show that I'll miss is The Inside which only aired a handful of episodes on Fox this past summer. Bones might fill the FBI show void in my schedule, but I'm not sure if it will be as dark as the The Inside was. The Inside was definitely my favorite dark crime/drama show since The X-Files.

Are there any other shows I ought to be checking out this Fall?