Year: 2003

Canyon Club – Getting There?

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I’m going to a concert this evening (Sunday) at The Canyon Club, part of the Bronco Bowl Entertainment Center. Their site offers these directions from Dallas:

  1. Take I-30 west to Hampton Road exit
  2. Exit Hampton Road South
  3. Turn Right (west) on to Fort Worth Avenue at the first stop light
  4. Bronco Bowl Entertainment is located half a mile from Hampton Road on the left (south) side of the street.

For those that have been to The Canyon Club before, do those directions make sense? Or, is there anything else I should know about getting there?

Oh, the bands — almost forgot about that part ;). The headliners are Nile and Napalm Death, but my main interest is in Dark Tranquillity.

I don’t have any Napalm Death albums, but that's primarily because other albums have taken purchasing precedence. My non-deceased friend Brian Wagner quite liked them and I don’t recall disliking the band when he played them for me. Well, I’ll just have to give them a listen and try to form an opinion.

Before reading about them on the show annoucement page, I hadn’t even heard of Nile (which is a bit surprising, since they’re the headliners). However, a quick search of the reviews at Metal-Rules.com turns up some positive results:

While hard-core death fans, particularly those into complex pay-attention, you�ll-be-tested-on-this kind of metal, will probably take to this CD immediately, the album will probably grow on just about everybody given enough listens. The intricate secrets locked within the music will take a good number of listens to unlock. […]

— Metal-Rules.com review of Nile’s Black Seeds of Vengeance with rating 4.5/5.0

Hmm, so I don’t quite know how to take that. I enjoy some death metal, though there are metal subgenres that I prefer even more (such power metal, in particular). Well, since Dark Tranquillity are not the headliners, at least they won’t be playing last. So, if any of the post-DT bands aren’t good, I can just go home without guilt.

DFWBlogs Cocktail Event – January

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This month’s DFWBlogs Cocktail Event was held at Lakewood Landing:

This upscale dive is roomy enough so patrons can be seen, but cozy enough to remain discreet. You'll find a totally swank jukebox, pool table and random live acts during the week. To keep you sober, the kitchen serves chicken fried steaks, burgers, fries, and amazingly enough — veggie burgers. […]

I was encouraged by the mention of hamburgers, as a good hamburger is still one of my favorties. This user-review at Digital City confirmed that:

Extremely tasty burgers (I highly recomend adding blue cheese to this item) and wings so hot, I blame them for my first stomach ulcer. Irresistable nonetheless. […]

As toppings go, blue cheese is my favorite for burgers. So, upon arriving, I was sure to order a burger with blue cheese (and a Bass). When taking my order, the server gave me the option of mayo and/or mustard, and I opted for “a little mayo”.

The burger arrived shortly, and it was good. The meat was hot and loosely packed (just how I like it). The crumbled blue cheese was sprinkled across the patty; it added a pleasant blue-cheese nature to the burger, though the burger may have been even better with just a touch more blue cheese ;).

The only disappointment in the burger was the bun — it was very McDonald’s-like, as it was just a fluffy white-flour bun. The bun was like a week ending to an otherwise-exciting movie — had they put some more effort into a whole-wheat (or even rye) bun, the burger as a whole could have been elevated to the next level. (Though the bun was a bit of a disappointment, the burger a whole was still very recommendable.)

Lakewood Landing, as a cocktail-event location, worked well. As it was just a Wednesday (as always), the place wasn’t that crowded. And, with the sheer number of bloggers present, it seemed like half the customers were bloggers. So, it was very easy to have conversations, as you could run into another blogger with another step in any direction.

Ed K warned earlier me that Lakewood Landing was quite a smokers-hangout. However, the ambient smoke wasn’t much of a problem that evening (though it may be on weekends). All the same, my clothes still had the aroma of cigarettes by the end of the evening.

I had a good time, and I’d certainly come back to the Lakewood Landing if the Cocktail Event were held there again sometime. All the same, it’s not-quite-a-sports-bar and not-quite-a-restaurant so I’d probably elect to go somewhere else if I were looking for either of those genres (err, do restaurants have gentres?). Best of all, it came up in conversation that Peter may have some front-end web coding available (woo!).

VHS – EOL?

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

From the Dallas Movie Geeks mailing list, USA Today reports that VHS may be coming to an end:

As a new generation of consumers is lured to the digital format by games and other interactive features, some Hollywood studios are gearing up for the death knell of the VHS cassette. They want to avoid the fate that befell the record industry in the early 1980s, when one popular mail-order house reportedly dumped 2 million eight-track tapes in a landfill because the market had evaporated almost overnight. […]

MGM Home Entertainment has slashed its VHS library, which at one point numbered 1,800 films, to 200. “We didn't want to have a lot of inventory in the marketplace when the bottom dropped out,” says David Bishop, president and chief operating officer. […]

I never collected much in the way of VHS tapes in the first place, though I enjoy buying some movies on DVD. These days, I try to avoid VHS entirely (much of it isn't widescren, for one thing).

When I was back in Pittsburgh over Christmas, my family went to Giant Eagle (a local supermarket chain) to rent some movies. Pittsburgh isn’t exactly a city of early-adopters, but there was still a sizable DVD section there. I suppose I'll have to convince my parents to buy a DVD player someday ;).

Igby Goes Down

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I watched Igby Goes Down last night, but I didn’t enjoy it all that much. Over the years, I’e seen some lists of black comedies and I had liked some of the movies on the list, so I concluded that I liked “black comedies”. But, as I see more and more movies in this genre, I think I may have been mistaken in that original assessment (I didn't even like Brazil all that much, sorry).

MetaCritic gave it a 72, so maybe it’s just me. Interestingly enough, both the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle describe the movie as striving for archness. I didn’t know what that word meant, either, until about a minute ago, but I can say that I now agree with that sentiment. It’s as if the movie is making an effort to stay just this side of being a parody.

The movie wasn’t horrible and I did enjoy a few scenes here and there. In particular, the “Baltimore” scene was rather humorous :).

No More Graffiti for Palm

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Due to a lawsuit from Xerox, Palm is abandoning Graffiti (its handwriting-recognition system).

PalmSource, the operating system subsidiary of Palm, Inc., announced today that future versions of Palm OS will not contain Graffiti. Rather, they will incorporate a modified version of Communication Intelligence Corporation's Jot handwriting recognition software, something it’s calling Graffiti 2 powered by Jot.

The impetus for the switch appears to be legal rather than technical. In April 1997, Xerox sued Palm, claiming that Graffiti was essentially derived from its patented Unistrokes technology. Unistrokes, or “Unistrokes for Computerized Interpretation of Handwriting”, as it is referred to in Xerox’s 1997 patent, is a system of text-entry using single-stroke symbols for computerized recognition of handwritten text. […]

So, presumably, the next Palms will have Jot. And, looking over the character guide, it doesn’t seem that bad. Most of it is actually very similar to Graffiti already, and probably only a few characters would be tough for me to un-learn (such as q/u/v, along with all the brand-new editing commands).

I’m pleased, though, that Jot supports writing on top of the main desktop area, as Palm always seemed confined to writing within its own little Graffiti-only area.

(Link from Slashdot)