Month: March 2010
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guestbook (in reverse): daddy
daddy came (virtually) to visit baby sparklet, tonight. obviously, i wasn’t in d.c. to take pictures, so … while not the usual guestbook entry, this is what it looked like from my end.See All the Photos on Flickr:
guestbook -
the killers @ the rail
so, I’m at a web analytics conference, and the product’s parent company rented too-famous-to-play-conferences band “the killers” to entertain the conference’s 2000 assembled web analytics geeks.words can not describe how bizzare this evening was.
when I walked into the venue, they were belting “easy lover” on the pre-concert music loop, which makes me wonder if The Killers would list Phil Collins as one of their influences.
there were geeks everywhere (not that I fall outside that definition) and the geeky-er the male, the more the women hanging aroud them.
and somehow the alpha-geeks managed somehow to get The Killers to play? it was like I was in some crazy parallel universe where geeks weren’t the ones who got stuffed in their gym lockers in high school.
and it was arguably the best concert I’ve ever seen … even factoring in the age-inappropriately dressed 45 year olds, the legions of men in oxford shirts, and the 10:1 male-to-female ratio.
we were 10 yards from the band. they opened on fire, and kept the pedal down for the full hour and a half, through 15 songs.
the band was crazy into the show, even though they admitted they “didn’t know what to expect” when they showed up.
it’s still sinking in that the best concert of my life was a paid appearance at a web analytics conference. really, how bad must the rest have been?
not sure I can lay claim to having any street cred what-so-ever after this.
SET LIST: human, somebody told me, for reasons unknown, bones, the world we live in, shadowplay, jenny was a friend of mine, smile like you mean it, spaceman, a dustland fairytale, I can’t help falling in love with you, read my mind, mr. brightside, all these things that i’ve done, when you were young.
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travel: salt lake olympics
with my well known obsession for the Olympics, I just couldn’t imagine being so close to an Olympic site and not checking it out.(although I have been to Vermont two dozen times and haven’t managed to make it to Lake Placid — a mere two hour drive west.)
i’ve been to Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park, to Melbourne’s Olympic Stadium, and had near misses with Canada Olympic Park in Calgary (drove by, but couldn’t stop) and Sydney Olympic Park (saw it from the air, but only had 18 hours on the ground).
Utah Olympic Park was home to 14 of the 28 events in the 2002 Olympics, including all the sliding events (bobsled, skeleton, luge) and the jumping events (ski jump, Nordic combined).
at the park, a multiple-sport Olympian (one of them for ballet skiing, apparently) took us around to the five venues, and Terry Kent (sliding venue announcer for the last three Olympics) talked us through what it was like in Vancouver.
great experience. stunning views.
it was mainline-ing the Olympic experience to someone who’s already an Olympic junkie … something tells me it’s only going to make things worse.
See All the Photos on Flickr:
travel: salt lake olympics, utah -
travel: salt lake city, utah
i’m in salt lake city for a web analytics conference, and the views from this place are just stunning. it’s not very hard to imagine a group of people being moved to center a religion here.I’ve got no idea how this week will go … it’s my first week way from sparklet, i dont travel for work much anyway, and hordes of socially awkward web analytics geeks make me nervous,
I’m going to try and squeeze in two quick things while I’m out here … a trip to Utah Olympic Park (site of the 2002 Winter Games) and the Great Salt Lake (seems like a good thing to see in its eponymous city).
besides that, I’ll just be missing baby … and trying to process being in a city that make Vermont look like a bastion of genetic diversity.
See All the Photos on Flickr:
travel: salt lake city, utah
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temple square, salt lake city, utah