Hugo’s blog

I got into the Smashing Pumpkins in 2000 (thanks to my friend Gerald), just in time to see (figuratively speaking) the band split. I then followed what Billy Corgan was doing, and actually missed a concert in Paris of Zwan which got canceled wore or less at the last minute. I basically thought that I was cursed, until Corgan announced that he was planning on putting the Smashing Pumpkins back together, and when I saw a few months ago that they were going to tour and play for 10 nights at the Fillmore in San Francisco.

I managed to get tickets from TicketMaster. Once I had a pair of tickets, I actually tried to buy tickets for a second show, but they were all sold out. Tickets must have been all sold within a couple of minutes, so I felt lucky I managed to get some. It actually was a special kind of concert, as people were waiting in line in front of The Fillmore hours before the show.

I actually almost didn’t get in: the tickets were Will Call tickets, so I needed my credit card to get them the day of the show. Unfortunately, my credit card was replaced by the credit card company a few weeks ago because it might have been compomised. At this point, I followed instructions from them destroying my card, only to realize the following day that I needed it to get my tickets. I then spent 30 minutes extracting from the trash and taping together the 50 little pieces that used to be my card (yes, I had been slightly overboard with the scissors when destroying the card), making sure that you could still read the number and see my name. So I crossed my fingers when approaching the doors, but they actually were happy to only see my ID, so I didn’t need to get into a long explanation to justify why my card in tiny pieces taped back together on a piece of paper.

The show started at 9pm sharp with a band from Portland, OR which was pretty good, but whose name I unfortunately did not catch. They played a good set for 30 minutes that did not seem like 1/2 hour (sometimes, support acts seems longer than they are, but here it was really enjoyable). One thing that I noticed though is that every support act that wants to make sure that people scream while they’re on stage tell people who’s playing next: “So the Smashing Pumpkins are here tonight!” Response from the crowd: “Yeaaaaaah!”

At 10.05pm, after the stage was prepared for the next part of the show, Billy Corgan entered the stage with an acoustic guitar and started playing some solo songs, that he referred to as “sad solo songs”. It was a gentle introduction to the show. He also said at some point: “Don’t worry, the rock ‘n’ roll party is going to begin soon”. He was soon joined by the whole band to play Today, and the show really began at this point.

They played a mix of older songs and of songs from their latest album, Zeitgeist. I find these songs really powerful on stage (United States, Tarantula, Doomsday Clock, etc.). At some point during the show, Jeff Shroeder’s amp broke down, which generated a 15 minute break. I was somewhat disapointed by the band which did not do much during this time (they joked about telling a story, but never did).

I was really impressed by the quality of the show. The sound was great. Despite my love of live shows, I often regret that the volume of certain instruments is too high and masks other ones or the singer’s voice. I felt that the sound engineers here at done a terrific job at rendering all the parts of the band. The songs and the performance of the band were really powerful, and it was really enjoyable to watch them play.

After 2h45 of intense performance (minus the 15 minutes break due to the amp), the lights came back on and people left the venue. It’s only when I got home and read a fan forum that I discovered that they actually played two more songs that we missed, which is too bad.

The playlist, courtesy of frenchy at Netphoria:

• Leaving Lament
• Rotten Apples
• Peace and Love
• 99 Floors
• No Surrender
• Today
• 1979
• United States (Jeff’s amp breaks down)
• Bleeding the Orchid
• Lucky 13
• Shame
• Hummer
• Bullet With Butterfly Wings
• God and country
• Death From Above
• By Starlight
• To Sheila (with Linda Strawberry)
• Tonight, Tonight
• Tarantula
• Starz
• Zero
• Glass and the Ghostchildren
• That’s the Way (My Love Is)
• Superchrist
• Starla
• The band leaves the stage
• Doomsday Clock
• Heavy Metal Machine
• Lights go back on
• Zeitgeist
• Muzzle

It really was an amazing show. Fortunately, there were cameras roaming around, so I can hope to see it again in DVD soon.

I have a bunch of crappy photos from the show. Great photos and videos are available from Netphoria.

I was curious about GrandCentral, so I requested an invitation and received it today.

GrandCentral gives you one meta-phone number, which you can use to make all phone lines ring: your home phone, your cell, your work line, etc. In addition, it provides voicemail that can be accessed online and can send you email when somebody leaves a message.

Activation

Activation was easy: you enter your account details (who you are, email address, your phone numbers, etc.), GrandCentral calls you, you key in the confirmation code that you’ve been given on screen, and you’re good to go.

Calls

When somebody calls your number, GrandCentral picks up, asks the person to state their name. Then, GrandCentral calls all your lines, you pickup, and they give you the option of picking up the call, sending to voicemail, etc.

That puts a couple of extra steps between the caller dialing and your really picking up the call, which may be tedious. For example, the caller hears the line ringing while your phone rings, you pick up the line and you go through the system’s choices. You have to hope that the caller is not impatient.

Also, you need to disable voicemail on your lines, otherwise GrandCentral is going to start talking to your voicemail system. Actually, GrandCentral’s recommendation is to make your voicemail message longer than 15 seconds for things to go well – i.e. is that they talk to your greeting. In both cases, that makes calling your land line or cell phone directly more painful to your friends (20 seconds before switching to voicemail + 15 seconds of interaction before getting to voicemail).

Comparison with Vonage

Being a long-time Vonage user, I already have some of the features that GrandCentral offers. Vonage does provide voicemail that I can get via the Web, by email, and I set it up to notify me by SMS on my cell phone.

What is new is that you can have all your lines ring at the same time. Well, actually, as I was looking at Vonage’s Web site, I noticed that Vonage allows you to do that as well (they call it SimulRing). People with standard phone lines may be attracted by this, though you could always use call forwarding have the call sent to your cell, that you’re likely to have with you.

So I guess that what is really new is that it’s free, and that there’s a number of cool little tricks that GrandCentral can do, like archive a conversation that you’ve had, or listen on the voicemail that the caller is recording and decide to pick up (just like with old time answering machines). Actually, those are probably premium features, and only the core of the system will still be free after the beta is over.

I’m not a heavy phone user, and Vonage already does everything I need (and more) and most of what GrandCentral does, so I haven’t fallen in love with GrandCentral yet.

I have been riding the train daily between home and work for more than 6 months already, and I am amazed by how amateurish the train transportation is in the US. I am of course glad that Caltrain exists, and I still love taking public transportation (it doesn’t take longer than sitting in traffic on the highway). However, I can’t help but notice repeating hickups:

• From time to time, something happens on the line, and the whole system slows down (trains being 30 minutes late) or simply comes to a stop for a while (and you never know how long it will take to come back on); as there’s only one line and one set of rails in each direction, it’s not surprising.
• Train drivers seem not to pay too much attention to what they’re doing: they forget to stop at a train stop or brake too late, stopping in the middle of the street (e.g. ), they stop at a station where they should not have stopped, etc.
• More worrisome: the other day, as the train was leaving the station in Menlo Park, the barriers suddenly decided to go up; so the train proceeded, slowly, across the road; the may explain why about a month ago a car was smashed by a train and dragged for about a mile, and also why trains keep honking all the time, despite all the noise that the make (if you’re on a platform, you’re not going not to notice one!).

Anyway, when you compare this to the train system in Japan, or to be less extreme, to the train system in France – as in France everything is always a little chaotic –, at times, it doesn’t look like you are in a developed country.

It’s very interesting how the US is very advanced in a lot of domains (e.g. all the high tech companies are in the Bay Area), and at the same time is lagging behind in so many areas (health care, high speed internet access, public transportation, …).

I have found a number of bookmarklets for del.icio.us, but most of them did were for old versions of the posting API, and those that I found for the v4 API were presenting slightly tweaked version of the interface.

So I very slightly tweaked the official bookmarklet to simply make it a popup window, and also enabled text selection to enter a description. Nothing really fancy, but that may be useful to others.

Here’s the bookmarklet: Post to del.icio.us (2007-11-23: updated to close the popup window after submitting).