Memos: Gord Downie Crazy? Edition

• Had a fun time at j.pants' place today, I brought over a bunch of dvd-rs of bootleg concert recordings and we listened to a bunch of shows. There's a Hole show where they play "Paradise City" and after it Courtney says "Yeah, we do a much better version than the .. band that normally does it". Hee.
  
  Most of the recordings are soundboard boots, so you have the advantage of not hearing the retarded guy who is standing next to the dude doing the recording and trying to sing along to every second song and yelling way too loud. The weird part about that, though, was the Tragically Hip concert from the Fully Completely era, Gord was ranting and ranting away, talking about how Whales moved more fluidly than anything man-made ("Gord used to smoke a lot of pot back then" - j.pants) and you couldn't hear the crowd cheering at all. So he sounded even more crazy than usual.
  
  Other good shows were the Nine Inch Nails Woodstock '94 session, basically pure noise and chaos, and the Nirvana Trick or Treat '91 show, back when they still played with some enthusiasm and Kurt didn't hate his own fame quite yet.
  
  
• We also watched the Pearl Jam Show Box DVD today. Apparently you can only buy this if you're a Ten Club member (PS. See you all in Halifax & St. John's, suckers.) Pearl Jam fans are notoriously anal about following the band's wishes and it's well-nigh impossible to find a copy of this on any bittorrent site. Matt Cameron's talents are hinted at on this show (in '02, first date of the Riot Act tour), but they only played the one song that he wrote (which you can instantly tell is a Matt song because of the crazy time signature changes). There was of course the share of political satire, with Eddie wearing a Bush mask and then singing a song about Bill Gates on a Ukelele.
  
  
• I was having a discussion with someone who does Apple tech support today and we wondered if you have a job like that, where you are intimately familiar with all of the problems of a certain product, would you actually be less inclined to buy one? My reasons for not buying a Mac for home are that 1) taking work home is for chumps and 2) my Toshiba laptop still has a nicer screen and better speakers than the most expensive PowerBook. Even if it also has many missing plastic bits and a finicky DVD drive, I have a personal policy of using computers into the ground before I upgrade.
  
  But on the question of whether doing support makes you less interested in owning a product, I asked the turnaround question "would you rather work for dell?" and the answer was, of course "oh hell no" and "I'm not qualified, I can speak English."
  
  
• On another Mac note, apparently the flat panel iMac is now a very capable gaming machine. They've got a 128MB graphics card in them and aren't crippled for gaming like they had been. (Apple's taking away the wrong features in their cheaper computers if they want more games to be made for the platform. Hopefully this is a wider trend in their product configurations.) While any game looks amazing on a Power Mac you have to remember that that's a $5000 computer it's probably running on, and the people who buy computers for non-Photoshop pro purposes don't buy those kinds of machines. Even software developers, unless they're idiots, prefer the laptops because an IDE is really just a glorified text editor and that's all you need.
  
  
• Finally picked up my ticket to the Shoreline Music Festival yesterday. You're coming. Yes you are. You can't miss 3 days of music, no sleep and instantly becoming best friends with 3000 strangers.