Music

With the fall season in full swing, many of us are drawn back to TV to see what new shows and old favorites are in store for us.  Despite my TV cutback over the summer, I’ve been pretty excited about the upcoming fall shows.  With the new HD TV and the DVR queued up, I’ve been building up quite a repository of season premiers and new series.  However, my busy schedule hasn’t been as accommodating and I’ve found myself leaning heavily on the DVR’s hard drive.  Then tonight it happened, I checked the DVR and found that it was 97% FULL!  Oh the humanity!

This is actually quite pathetic.  When I had the Tivo things got pretty full, but never past 80%.  Granted, recording the shows in HD does take up quite a bit of hard drive space, but I’ve had the HD-DVR for 6 months now and I’ve never gone beyond 50%.  There’s a lot of TV sitting on my DVR, and we’ve reached the point where hard decisions need to be made.  The homework isn’t going to dwindle, the weekends aren’t going to clear up – I need to re-evaluate my season passes and recordings.  Thus begins the excruciating process of "to delete, or not to delete":

Old Favorites

The Office – One of the funniest shows on TV at this point, and the only "live" comedy show I have.  Keeper.

Family Guy – Favorite comedy – hands down.  It started out pretty fast out of the gate, but it turns out that they’re already in reruns.  With baseball season around the corner Fox is pretty much out to lunch for the month. Temporarily Delete.

South Park – New episodes kick off Wednesday (Oct 4th) and you have to make time for South Park.  Plus the show is 30 minutes long and not in HD = doesn’t hold much space. Keeper.

Inside the NFL – Pretty much the only reason I have HBO.  However, I’m not happy with their new highlight formats where you only end up watching highlights to 3 games when it’s said and done.  With the emergence of the NFL Network it might not be as necessary – still nothing surpasses the cinematic quality of the Inside the NFL highlights.  It bugs me that my Comcast DVR can’t figure out the "First Run Only" command with this show and essentially records it every time it airs. Keep, for now

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – Great show, but I never have time to watch it.  Keep on "the list", episodes often get deleted.

Law & Order: Criminal Intent – The show’s only worth watching when Vincent D’Onofrio is on, so basically I delete half of the episodes after the DVR records him.  I just haven’t been interested in Chris Noth, especially after watching him being "Mr. Big" in Sex and the City (I watch it with my girlfriend from time to time). Keeper, half the time.

Battlestar Galactica – The back episodes have really piled up in my DVR and I am frantically trying to finish them before the Oct 6 Season 3 premier.  This is an excellent show, one which I fell into through the DVD’s.  At the same time, I’m frustrated that Season 2.5 only came out 2 weeks ago, leaving people to try to catch once-per-week reruns on Sci-Fi.  I’ve seen the Season Finale, but I’m still 3 episodes out of the loop from last season.  Keeper, although space is accumulating.

Daily Favorites: Glen Beck, Jim Rome & Bill O’Reilly.  I catch them if I can, no heartbreak if I miss them.  I have them set to only retain one episode, so not too much damage there. Keeper.

New Experiments:

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip – I’ve been pumped the Aaron Sorkin-written series for quite a while.  I fell in love with the West Wing through the DVD’s, but watched the steady demise of the show in the 7th season.  Studio 60 is an entertaining show, with the complex dialog that is a trademark of Sorkin.  It’s not West Wing seasons 1-4, but they’re the next best thing. Keeper

Heros – It’s the most anticipated show that I’ve haven’t had time to watch.  The show looks exciting and right down my alley, but I haven’t been able to set aside the time to give it the attention it deserves.  I need to start watching it soon before I fall too far behind. Keeper

Six Degrees – The previews/commericals looked great, but I simply haven’t had the time to watch.  As intriguing as it looks, right now it’s unfortunately at the bottom of my DVR list. Likely to cut.

After mapping all of these shows out, it’s no wonder why my homework rarely gets done, especially when you put a day’s worth of football games on top of that.  Going through the DVR, I managed to bring the "full" count to 51%.  If I’m lucky that’ll last me two days.

It really did a good job of sneaking up on me, but Dave Matthews Band finally came to Denver on the last leg of their 2006 tour.  After Matt and I went to Kansas City, I remembered the anticipation that we had about waiting until September to see DMB.  Months later, these concerts really snuck up on me.  With all of the activity going on these last few weeks, the fact I was going to see my favorite band didn’t hit me until I actually saw them get on stage.  It goes to show just how out-of-it I’ve been these last few weeks.  Crazy…

So as I mentioned in my title September 12 & 13th’s shows were my 13th & 14th Dave Matthews Band concerts.  Neither number is a significant milestone, but seeing a band 14 times still seems like an accomplishment.

Tuesday’s concert touted one of the best set-lists I’ve ever heard.  The diversity and obscurity of their selections really lent to the overall flow of the concert.  There was a really good energy there, and I was extremely excited about the songs.  During the concert Matt and I were emailing back & forth on our phones, and at one point he asked me "What’s left for the encore?  He’s playing everything!"

I wrote back a two-word email: Two Step

They didn’t play it, but it was still a great show.  There was definitely a high-bar set for Wednesday night.

Show #14 was a blast.  Bethany and I had awesome seats.   We were two sections away from the stage and technically in the stands, but our second-row seats were only about 1-2 feet higher than the floor seats.  We basically had the "floor seat" experience but with the luxury of being taller than everyone.  It was an awesome view that produced some great pictures.

The set list for Wednesday had a pretty hard time meeting up to Tuesday’s stature, but the band made up for it in stage presence, solos and by playing a lot of new material.  The energy was definitely there.  However, it greatly surprises me to write what are likely my first critical words about a DMB concert.

The show simply lasted too late. On Tuesday night Carrie and I were out of there at 11pm.  However here we were at 11:15 and they had just finished the regular set, with the encore still to come.  We ended up leaving – the only time I’ve left a DMB concert before it was over (I’m not counting the times I broke out of the arena during the last song to beat the traffic home).  I was shocked!

Maybe it was due to the 3 hours of work I had waiting for me at home, or my level of fatigue, but Wednesday night’s concert went 2 songs too long. Towards the end of the regular setlist you could see the crowd around us beginning to glance at their watches and looking nervously at their friends.  Many of us were thinking the same thing, "Um, we have to work tomorrow."  It’s important to note that the show didn’t necessarily last too long, as much as it was too late into the evening.  If they actually took the stage at a decent time (as opposed to past 8:30 for a 7pm concert + 1 opening band), the show would have ended around 11 and I would have been happy.  However I felt like it was a tough position and I made the decision I needed to make in order to get to bed at a decent time.

I just hope I haven’t hit the point of diminishing returns for Dave Matthews Band concerts (WHAT AM I SAYING?!?) Don’t get me wrong, the concerts still were great and I look forward to #’s 15-20!

Camera Update – The Casio Exilim ultra-thin camera has really paid off.  I’m now 3 for 3 in sneaking the camera into the concert, and I’m starting to get pretty good with the shots.  It would be nice to have an optical zoom, but for something that fits in my wallet – this is great!  Check out all of the pictures on my Flickr account

My Statistical Top 10 DMB Songs

Curiosity combined with a bit of free time led me to compile the set lists from every show I’ve attended, the count the number of times I’ve heard each song . I dumped the results into an Excel spreadsheet, but here are the top 11 songs I’ve most-often heard at DMB concerts

Song	# of Times
Grey Street	7
Louisiana Bayou	7
When the World Ends	7
Ants Marching	6
Crash Into Me	6
Hunger for the Great Light	6
One Sweet World	6
Too Much	6
Warehouse	6
What Would You Say	6
Where Are You Going	6

(11 because that was the easiest cutoff point – #12 was 5 times)

Some meaningless, yet intriguing statistics…

Over the weekend I found this video over Digg.  This is an accoustic rendition Outkast’s "Hey Ya" done by Obadiah Parker.  I loved the original song – but this version is actually better (believe it or not).

I wish this was a remake (a recording) instead of simply a cover.  I would totally buy this if I could!  I looked at his web site and found that he does a few other covers when he performs.  I would love to see his rendition of "#41" by Dave Matthews Band.

I just returned from an evening with the Chili Peppers, in what was an amazing show!  With as much as I was looking forward to hear them – it definitely lived up to all the hype!  I’m not really sure if I can pinpoint one thing that blew me away, as much as every aspect of the concert was excellent: from the lighting, to the energy, to the stage presence, to the music selection.  The Chili Peppers had an awesome set-list.  I was almost expecting a run-down of the "Greatest Hits", but they actually had an eclectic mix of latest hits from Stadium Arcadium, some of the newer hits, but also some great features of older stuff like Funky Monks and Blood Sugar Sex Magik.  All of the songs they played were just booming, strong PHAT tunes!  It was great!

What made the concert awesome?  I think my girlfriend Bethany put it best when she said something to the effect of "When you can see that the people on stage are enjoying playing and having fun, it makes it a great concert.".  True words.

The Exilim did pretty will on it’s inagural outing.  I didn’t know if cameras were banned from the concert.  We saw no signs, and we saw quite a few.  However, I managed to sneak it in without being caught, and the shots that it took were pretty decent!  I showed some images below, check out the rest on Flickr!

This is a shot of the stage.  They had this big panels all across the back of the stage, then had them mounted on the ceiling.  This was some of the coolest stage lighting I’ve ever seen!

Bethany and I.