I was talking to a buddy of mine about the best concerts we have seen. Thought it would make for an interesting blog post. Here is my list, after some careful deliberation...
#5. Dave Matthews Band at the Gorge. I'm not singling out a particular show. Any one from 2001 - 2003 is on my list here. But one of them for sure makes my top 5. The music, venue and the whole camping experience during my college years is a great memory.
#4. Paul Simon at the Paramount, Seattle WA in 2000. Sat in the front row...of the orchestra pit. Literally leaning on the front of the stage, and shook Paul's hand after the encore. Seeing those songs performed that close was great.
#3. John Mayer at Richards on Richards in Vancouver, BC in 2001. It was awesome to see him before he made it big in a pretty small club/bar, just after Room For Squares was released. There were probably 500 people there or so, and you could walk right up to the front of the stage.
#2. Dave Matthews performing solo acoustic at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, WA in 2002. It was a 2 hour set of just Dave by himself in a very private setting. Acoustics are amazing in there. Dave played a 5 song encore with a 15 minute story mixed in there as well.
#1. U2 during their Elevation Tour in Vancouver, BC in 2001. Could have swapped in their Vertigo Tour show in Seattle, WA here as well but the 2001 show was my first time seeing them live and is deserving of the top spot. U2 may be the best live show of all time.
Honorable mentions (great artists/shows I have also seen):
Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Jason Mraz, Counting Crows, Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds, Jack Johnson, Ben Harper, Maroon 5, Mat Kearney, Glen Phillips, Ben Folds, Ben Lee, Death Cab for Cutie, Green Day, Matt Nathanson, James Morrison.
I am headed to Coldplay at the Gorge in July and have a feeling that might crack the top 5. We will see...
Monday, May 18, 2009
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Site Review
Paul, a buddy of mine getting his MBA, recently completed his first website as part of a homework assignment. When I recently saw him, he asked me for my humble opinion...
While I absolutely love the My Way page, I have to say I was not overly impressed with the home page, even with my expectations going in. Here are my thoughts:
1. Looks like Paul was going for the simple approach of completing this assigment. And thats great. So many sites have done simple well. Take Google or Craigslist. Problem with Paul's site is that it doesn't do simple well. It looks like a first website. Borrowing a simple look and feel from someone else would have worked well, and been maybe even faster.
2. We are in business school now, not elementary school. We need some originality. Where is the catchy name? Where is the logo? "Paul's home page"? How long did it take to come up with that one? A little branding would go a long way.
3. Again, back to business school. The internet is a place where money can be made. Even though this is just a first website, lets get some advertising on there, some sponsorships, to bring in some money. Who is opposed to making a few bucks while doing your homework?
I always try to let my actions do the talking, not my words. So I took my own advice here and applied it to Paul's site.
I give you ... www.pauggle.com
While I absolutely love the My Way page, I have to say I was not overly impressed with the home page, even with my expectations going in. Here are my thoughts:
1. Looks like Paul was going for the simple approach of completing this assigment. And thats great. So many sites have done simple well. Take Google or Craigslist. Problem with Paul's site is that it doesn't do simple well. It looks like a first website. Borrowing a simple look and feel from someone else would have worked well, and been maybe even faster.
2. We are in business school now, not elementary school. We need some originality. Where is the catchy name? Where is the logo? "Paul's home page"? How long did it take to come up with that one? A little branding would go a long way.
3. Again, back to business school. The internet is a place where money can be made. Even though this is just a first website, lets get some advertising on there, some sponsorships, to bring in some money. Who is opposed to making a few bucks while doing your homework?
I always try to let my actions do the talking, not my words. So I took my own advice here and applied it to Paul's site.
I give you ... www.pauggle.com
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Rule of 3
I have been consulting for Microsoft for the past several months in the Windows Azure space. Recently I have been meeting with some folks to help define some best practices for building applications on Windows Azure. One of the people I have been working with is J.D. Meier. He has a couple of great blogs: a MSDN blog and one called Sources of Insight.
I read a recent post on http://www.sourcesofinsight.com/ that I thought was really good. It was about the Rule of 3, and how to apply it to short term and long term goals. Check it out if you get a chance.
On a different note, a friend of mine was asking me to blog about his new website. The creative juices are flowing. Stay tuned...
I read a recent post on http://www.sourcesofinsight.com/ that I thought was really good. It was about the Rule of 3, and how to apply it to short term and long term goals. Check it out if you get a chance.
On a different note, a friend of mine was asking me to blog about his new website. The creative juices are flowing. Stay tuned...
Friday, April 3, 2009
March Web Traffic Statistics
We'll, another great month of March has come and gone. It definately was one of my busiest, with managing http://www.wearmybracket.com in addition to http://www.finalforman.net. I thought I would post some traffic numbers, for those of you interested besides myself.
The traffic numbers in 2009 for FinalForman saw another increase. Its always nice to see them keep going up, even if its just slightly. Here is a table breaking down the numbers compared to the last two years:
March 2007
Unique Visitors: 635
Total Visits: 2906
Pages Viewed: 64904
March 2008
Unique Visitors: 971
Total Visits: 3316
Pages Viewed: 31434
March 2009
Unique Visitors: 1321
Total Visits: 3706
Pages Viewed: 77550
The single highest traffic day came on the first Friday of the tournament, March 20th. We saw 431 unique visitors on that day. The day prior and the day after also saw unique visitors in the 400s.
WearMyBracket.com had its first March, and its numbers were not nearly as impressive. There were slightly over 200 unique visitors for the month of March, with a single day high of 47 on the day I spammed people with my lovely email.
Looking forward to continuing the upward trends next year.
The traffic numbers in 2009 for FinalForman saw another increase. Its always nice to see them keep going up, even if its just slightly. Here is a table breaking down the numbers compared to the last two years:
March 2007
Unique Visitors: 635
Total Visits: 2906
Pages Viewed: 64904
March 2008
Unique Visitors: 971
Total Visits: 3316
Pages Viewed: 31434
March 2009
Unique Visitors: 1321
Total Visits: 3706
Pages Viewed: 77550
The single highest traffic day came on the first Friday of the tournament, March 20th. We saw 431 unique visitors on that day. The day prior and the day after also saw unique visitors in the 400s.
WearMyBracket.com had its first March, and its numbers were not nearly as impressive. There were slightly over 200 unique visitors for the month of March, with a single day high of 47 on the day I spammed people with my lovely email.
Looking forward to continuing the upward trends next year.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Silverlight, ADO.NET Data Services, and WCF Services
I knew immediately that I wanted to use Silverlight for the user interface for my new WearMyBracket.com website. I wanted a simple, slick UI that would be straight to the point, but still leave folks a little impressed. And I felt that I had just enough UI skills to get this done.
I decided on a "flip" effect to take users through a simple order process. As the user proceeded though my order process, I would flip their canvas over for each step. This provided me an opportunity to save their progress to a database on each transition. As far as I know, there are two good ways to do this in Silverlight: an ADO.NET Data Service or a WCF Service. Either of these can run in your web application hosting your Silverlight application.
I started down the path of adding an ADO.NET Data Service to my web application. I liked the flexibiliy that this presented me. I would not have to write any custom WCF services, as any data operations I wanted to do within my Silverlight application would be possible via the REST-based data service. In addtion, my data model consisted of only a few tables, so I felt things would not be overly complex and were a good candidate for using a data service. Creating the data service is made super simple these days in Visual Studio. After I created my database schema in SQL Server, I went to my web application project, selected "Add New Item", and added an ADO.NET Entity Data Model to my project. After that model is generated from my database schema, I then added the ADO.NET Data Service. A few tweaks in code to relate the two, and I was good to go.
Back in my Silverlight project, I added a service reference to my data service, and started playing around with reading and writing to the data service. I quickly saw that this was not going to be quite as easy as I thought. Because of some of the relationships in my schema, and the way the data service needs to be tracking objects, I would have to make multiple calls to the data service from my Silverlight client in order to do some of my operations. And I also realized that maybe my scenario isn't quite right for a ADO.NET Data Service anyway. After all, my simple application would only need a couple of WCF services that could do all my work, providing simple and streamlined calls from my Silverlight app. I went back and removed my data service, added a Silverlight-enabled WCF service and was on my way. Writing the implemenation within my couple WCF services took less than an hour.
ADO.NET Data Services are flexible, in that you do not have to write any custom services for data operations. However, the I think application needs to have the neccessity for that flexibility. I didn't have that neccessity. I only had one client calling application. My data operations were few, and were not going to change. In my case, writing a couple simple WCF services was the way to go.
I decided on a "flip" effect to take users through a simple order process. As the user proceeded though my order process, I would flip their canvas over for each step. This provided me an opportunity to save their progress to a database on each transition. As far as I know, there are two good ways to do this in Silverlight: an ADO.NET Data Service or a WCF Service. Either of these can run in your web application hosting your Silverlight application.
I started down the path of adding an ADO.NET Data Service to my web application. I liked the flexibiliy that this presented me. I would not have to write any custom WCF services, as any data operations I wanted to do within my Silverlight application would be possible via the REST-based data service. In addtion, my data model consisted of only a few tables, so I felt things would not be overly complex and were a good candidate for using a data service. Creating the data service is made super simple these days in Visual Studio. After I created my database schema in SQL Server, I went to my web application project, selected "Add New Item", and added an ADO.NET Entity Data Model to my project. After that model is generated from my database schema, I then added the ADO.NET Data Service. A few tweaks in code to relate the two, and I was good to go.
Back in my Silverlight project, I added a service reference to my data service, and started playing around with reading and writing to the data service. I quickly saw that this was not going to be quite as easy as I thought. Because of some of the relationships in my schema, and the way the data service needs to be tracking objects, I would have to make multiple calls to the data service from my Silverlight client in order to do some of my operations. And I also realized that maybe my scenario isn't quite right for a ADO.NET Data Service anyway. After all, my simple application would only need a couple of WCF services that could do all my work, providing simple and streamlined calls from my Silverlight app. I went back and removed my data service, added a Silverlight-enabled WCF service and was on my way. Writing the implemenation within my couple WCF services took less than an hour.
ADO.NET Data Services are flexible, in that you do not have to write any custom services for data operations. However, the I think application needs to have the neccessity for that flexibility. I didn't have that neccessity. I only had one client calling application. My data operations were few, and were not going to change. In my case, writing a couple simple WCF services was the way to go.
Monday, February 23, 2009
WearMyBracket.com
If you know me, then you probably have participated in, or at least about http://www.finalforman.net. The site started out as a way to expand a college March Madness pool back in 2001. Today it is a fun way to keep in touch with a lot of people, and enjoy the month of March.
After getting denied for tickets for the opening rounds in Boise this year, a large group of us decided to head to Las Vegas instead. Blessing in disguise, maybe? While musing about the fun we will have, an idea emerged about wearing our picks on a t-shirt. People seemed to like the idea. So I am now introducing....WearMyBracket.com. Anyone can purchase one of our custom designed shirts. I'll give a shout out to Jake, for his help on the shirt and graphics, and Hans, for their help on getting this off the ground. Place your orders!
With two sites to manage during the month of March, I am going to be a busy man. I am already working on a few improvements to FinalForman.net for this year.
Stay tuned for another post, where I will discuss some of the technical choices I made for this simple site.
After getting denied for tickets for the opening rounds in Boise this year, a large group of us decided to head to Las Vegas instead. Blessing in disguise, maybe? While musing about the fun we will have, an idea emerged about wearing our picks on a t-shirt. People seemed to like the idea. So I am now introducing....WearMyBracket.com. Anyone can purchase one of our custom designed shirts. I'll give a shout out to Jake, for his help on the shirt and graphics, and Hans, for their help on getting this off the ground. Place your orders!
With two sites to manage during the month of March, I am going to be a busy man. I am already working on a few improvements to FinalForman.net for this year.
Stay tuned for another post, where I will discuss some of the technical choices I made for this simple site.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
I'm back!
It has been a long time since my last post. There are a variety of reasons for this. Some of those are good, like the following:
- Spending lots of time with my one-year old.
- Being healthier and more active.
- Pursuing other hobbies in my free time, such as music.
- Found other outlets for communication, such as Facebook.
But all of those doesn't mean I can find time to share a post or two. After all, I am still not a 5:01 developer. So I am back, with some motivation from Greg. Stay tuned for my February post, coming soon...
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