Aug 29, 2005 - 18:21 | + 2 - 5 Jack Johnson @ Northerly Island

The Show:
Last night, Suzanne and I went to the Jack Johnson show at the Lakefront Pavilion in Chicago. The coolest part about the venue was that the stage was on the city side, meaning that you got a view of the Chicago Skyline and Soldier Field as a backdrop to the stage. It is an amazing sight, and I will be happy to catch more shows there. If you've never heard of it before, the site used to be Meigs Field, but is now a park run by the Chicago Park District. The two opening acts were ALO (Animal Liberation Orchestra) and Matt Costa. Both were fairly good technically, but I thought ALO was a little too jam-bandish (is that a real word?) for my taste. Matt Costa was a little bit better with a few interesting songs, but most of them sounded pretty generic. Jack came in for one of ALO's songs, so that was pretty fun to see. Suzanne and I had found a good seat by the edge of the general admission area, but the crowd's reaction to him coming on was enough to get us to stand up for a little while.

As for Jack's show, it was superb as usual. This was my 3rd Jack show (my previous 2 were at the Metro 2003? and Aragon 9/7/2004) and it was alot of fun, but it wasn't my favorite (the first Metro show was my favorite for reasons you'll see below). I'll post a setlist when I find one, but he played a nice variety of songs from his 3 albums. There were also some great covers, including a Beatles song (Two of us) that Jack played with Matt Costa. During his set, Jack had members of both opening bands come and play with him. Most notably, the keyboard player from ALO played on most of the songs. This was cool to hear at first, but the jam band style that was present in ALO's set started showing up in Jack's songs as well. I know some people like this style, but it gets a little annoying to me sometimes. I like listening and singing to lyrics while the music is going on... When the band spends most of the song just playing scales and chord progressions over and over, I start to tune out. Luckily, Jack was usually singing and playing for most of the songs, so it was ok. I like how he mixes in lyrics from other songs into his own stuff. Its fun to hear a Bob Marley or Jimmy Buffet lyric in the middle of an old favorite Jack song. In my opinion, this adds variety to the song and makes the live show distinct. Some bands play the song exactly as its heard on the radio, and that gets boring really fast (Weezer). Speaking of Buffet, he apparently made an appearance at the end of the encore on "A pirate looks at 40". Sadly, I had to miss it because Suzanne and I needed to leave early for a variety of reasons. Hopefully I'll find a recording of the show online somewhere so that I can hear the end... I did manage to grab a shot of the two playing online, so check it out below. In summary, not the best Jack show, but one that I will remember for a long time. Thanks for a great night Jack!



Why the Metro show was my favorite:
This show was my favorite because I met Jack before the show. I got there early with my friend Adam and we wanted to grab a bite to eat. We went across the street to this hot dog place and grabbed some food. Afterwards we went back to the door and ate outside since the security guards didn't let us go in. Most of the crowd had already entered, so it was pretty much just us in front of the venue. I started eating my gyro and proceeded to get sauce all over my face. I was enjoying it so much that I didn't notice that someone had come up to me. The man asked, "is that any good? Do you know of any good placed to eat around here?" I looked up and saw Jack Johnson standing infront of me along with a woman (girlfriend? wife?). I was so embarrassed that it took me a little while to get out the words "we got this stuff from across the street... yea it's pretty good." Then I told him that his new record (On and On) was pretty sweet. Jack said thanks, and ended up walking toward a chinese place in the opposite direction from the hot dog place... I guess the sauce all over my face scared him away! Too bad I didn't have a camera on me that day, because that would have been an awesome picture to have...

Aug 24, 2005 - 03:48 | + 5 - 1 Google Talk

Finally, someone does its right and starts supporting jabber. I can't wait until a good number of people start using this :) Since jabber supports server side connections to other services, maybe we can finally have some interopability between the IM worlds!



Update: There is a really good post about Google IM and how it fits into the IM world here. It also compares email interopability with the state of IM today.

Aug 22, 2005 - 22:02 | + 4 - 2 More progress

I've fixed alot of things on the site and made a new logo. Also, I took down the old site at mikester@expunk.com. Thanks again Jeff, for all those years of generous hosting!

Aug 17, 2005 - 19:58 | + 3 - 3 Labowicz.com

I have registered labowicz.com and have moved most of the content from mikester.expunk.com over here. There are still some glitches that I'm working to resolve, but hopefully I will get them fixed soon. The move to this new host/domain gives me alot more cool features, such as mysql database access, personalized email accounts and more control over everything. Now I will be able to do cool stuff like create a photo gallery and wiki if I want to... ROCK!

Aug 15, 2005 - 19:28 | + 5 - 1 Back from Cali

Last week I took my vacation to california. Suzanne and I visited Los Angeles and took a road trip to San Fransisco. We saw alot of great sights and took a bunch of pictures. You can see some of them on my flickr account. Here are my thoughts about both cities... LA: Too crowded, traffic sucks, lots to see, everything expensive; SF: Pretty scenery and architecture, lots of cultural sights, just as expensive. All in all it was a great trip, but I ended up spending ALOT of money... I guess that's why you don't go on vacation every week.

Aug 14, 2005 - 18:03 | + 2 - 4 Quake 3 Source Code

John Carmack has announced that the quake 3 source code will be released under the GPL! This means that we will be able to see a bunch of cool new things added to the engine. There is a reason why Carmack and idsoftware are loved by millions of geeks wordwide. Thanks!

Aug 03, 2005 - 17:46 | + 4 - 2 Updated Computer History Article

I finally got around to updating my simple history of the computer article that I posted a while back. While editing it, I realized that it's horribly outdated and only useful to people who know nothing about computers or the internet... and if they are reading the paper on the site, they should at least know enough about the subject matter to make it worthless to them. A true chicken or the egg conundrum!

Aug 02, 2005 - 11:09 | + 2 - 4 Flikr Favorites

Flikr has a page that shows the top photos that were selected by people to be their favorites. There alot of cool photos, and you can browse them by the day on the calender (located on the right side of the page). Check out a sample: