This is my first time trying to review a live performance. I'm going to go for more brevity than my album review. Let's give it a shot!

Summary

This is a great album. It represents significant growth for A Perfect Circle, and gets better with repeat listenings. Addiciton is a dark subject, but APC takes a refreshingly honest look that most heavy-ish rock fans can appreciate. You can find the album on Amazon in CD and MP3.

2 years ago I picked what I thought was the perfect birthday gift for my father, a conical burr coffee grinder. In his retirement he has (oddly), become very interested in drinking coffee; in particular, he had taken an interest in the careful preparation and appreciation of fine coffee. Unfortunately this great coffee grinder suffers from a strange design flaw: in addition to having a 'start' button, it also has a binary 'on/off' button. That alone would not pose a significant problem…

Things have been extremely busy since my last blog post about music; the process of applying to business schools combined with the chaos of an extremely busy work life have taken a toll on the more creative pursuits that I try to make time for, including writing.

However, now that I have finished my first semester at HBS (Harvard Business School), I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect on the MBA experience so far: the lessons, the challenges, and the great things yet to come. I will try to avoid repeating information you already know about the business school experience.

Subtitle: “Whoa, I just reprogrammed a RAM chip”

I purchased 4 GiB of RAM for my sister and brother-in-law’s old Macbook. Did you know that Apple shipped a Macbook configuration in 2008 that included only 1 GiB of RAM? Since I upgraded them to Snow Leopard (64-bit!) and they want to use vmware Fusion to run Windows 7 side-by-side, they sorely needed some more memory.

I bought two of these RAM modules for their computer and had them shipped to my parent’s address, so that they were available when I came home for the long weekend. I put both of the RAM modules in, and was dismayed by what happened when I tried to start up; instead of the gray-on-grey Apple startup screen, I got no chime and a solid white light from the power/sleep indicator. I took one of the modules out and put an old 512 MiB modules back in, and it started up and showed 2.5 GB of memory installed.

People have been asking my recently about anime I’ve been watching that I really liked. Here are some, in no particular order, that are mostly available on Netflix:

Blood+ An anime with international intrigue, corporate dealings, genetic research, references to Vietnam, opera, and vampiric creatures? Yes, please. As the name implies, it’s pretty bloody and violent, but still a little Magic-Girl-feeling. This was picked up a few years ago by Cartoon Network, but I believe the whole series is currently available on Netflix.

I’m sorting the bands in this title in order of decreasing Awesome when describing this show.

One-line summary: These guys came and rocked pretty hard in a good venue with a pretty good crowd.

Okay, now for specifics…since more than just music goes into making a concert a good concert.