My Cosmos has been truly Rocked this Year
Well no prizes for guessing which band I went to see on Sunday - yep the legendary Queen, this time with Paul Rodgers doing the yodelling.
What a night, Queen took the stage at 8pm, with no support band and kept pumping out the music solid until 10:20pm - astounding, and even then there were so many songs unsung.
I had to say I was a little worried how it would feel seeing them without Freddie, would it feel wrong, would we feel short changed, would Mr Rodgers not be up to the task. Well worry not, it was fine on all counts. Last time I saw Queen was their tribute to Freddie with all different singers, most of whom just couldn't cut it (Seal and George Michael being the notable exceptions). This time however Paul Rodgers showed us he was Freddie's worthy apprentice. Every song they did seemed firmly in his range, and he put his own stamp and style on the vocals instead of trying to be some "tribute" singer. Opening up with Hammer to Fall and Tie Your Mother down we were treated to a non-stop assault on the Queen back catalogue.
Inevitably we got the "break down" where the pace slowed off, but not the entertainment. Brian May doing Love of Your Life entirely on his own, just a stool, a 12 string and a mic, and boy his singing voice has improved. Then a bass drum and Roger appeared for '39, followed by the entire band turning up skiffle style, all on the end of a stage pier stretching into the middle of the crowd.
Then I have to say the most unusual and entertaining drum solo I have ever seen. Roger started just playing his sticks around the surfaces of the bass drum, then moved on to playing the bass players electric double bass with his sticks. Which was impressive enough until we then got renditions of Under Pressure and Another One Bites the Dust played by drum sticks - unusual, but freakier was to follow. He then sat back down at the drum and a road turned up with a High Hat, so he then proceeds to solo on the Bass Drum and High Hat, then a Snare arrived, and some Toms, and Symbals, and more Toms and more Symbals. Each new piece of kit dropped exactly into place by the roadie with Roger incorporating into the solo without stopping, just as if it had been there all the time. Until there was an entire second kit in the middle of the audience, all fully wired - astounding. Then of course he treated us to I'm in Love with My Car, which is no surprise as he sung that one originally on the album, but then we got It's a Kind of Magic, which is a hard song for anyone to sing, but sitting down playing drums!!!
The whole night was fantastic, we had a song with Paul Rodgers singing and playing guitar on his own, another with him on Piano, Brian May had his traditional 3 day long solo, so everyone was happy.
Then of course we were rapidly approaching THAT SONG, and I did wonder how that would be without Freddie, but they did us proud. The band played all the music for the start, but Freddie was providing the vocals from the video wall. Mr Rodgers didn't get his turn till the middle eight and he dueted the final "nothing really matters" with the big man - brilliant.
Of course that wasn't enough, so we got them back for 4 more songs, the excellent Comos Rockin (one of 5 played that night from the new album), Alright Now, We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions.
What a stunning night, topping off a stunning year of music in which I've also been to see Linkin Park, KT Tunstall, Def Leppard, Whitesnake, Dio, Iron Maiden, Within Temptation and probably a few more I've forgotten about
I may yet go and see Extreme this year and I've got my ticket for Metallica in Nottingham next February.
What a night, Queen took the stage at 8pm, with no support band and kept pumping out the music solid until 10:20pm - astounding, and even then there were so many songs unsung.
I had to say I was a little worried how it would feel seeing them without Freddie, would it feel wrong, would we feel short changed, would Mr Rodgers not be up to the task. Well worry not, it was fine on all counts. Last time I saw Queen was their tribute to Freddie with all different singers, most of whom just couldn't cut it (Seal and George Michael being the notable exceptions). This time however Paul Rodgers showed us he was Freddie's worthy apprentice. Every song they did seemed firmly in his range, and he put his own stamp and style on the vocals instead of trying to be some "tribute" singer. Opening up with Hammer to Fall and Tie Your Mother down we were treated to a non-stop assault on the Queen back catalogue.
Inevitably we got the "break down" where the pace slowed off, but not the entertainment. Brian May doing Love of Your Life entirely on his own, just a stool, a 12 string and a mic, and boy his singing voice has improved. Then a bass drum and Roger appeared for '39, followed by the entire band turning up skiffle style, all on the end of a stage pier stretching into the middle of the crowd.
Then I have to say the most unusual and entertaining drum solo I have ever seen. Roger started just playing his sticks around the surfaces of the bass drum, then moved on to playing the bass players electric double bass with his sticks. Which was impressive enough until we then got renditions of Under Pressure and Another One Bites the Dust played by drum sticks - unusual, but freakier was to follow. He then sat back down at the drum and a road turned up with a High Hat, so he then proceeds to solo on the Bass Drum and High Hat, then a Snare arrived, and some Toms, and Symbals, and more Toms and more Symbals. Each new piece of kit dropped exactly into place by the roadie with Roger incorporating into the solo without stopping, just as if it had been there all the time. Until there was an entire second kit in the middle of the audience, all fully wired - astounding. Then of course he treated us to I'm in Love with My Car, which is no surprise as he sung that one originally on the album, but then we got It's a Kind of Magic, which is a hard song for anyone to sing, but sitting down playing drums!!!
The whole night was fantastic, we had a song with Paul Rodgers singing and playing guitar on his own, another with him on Piano, Brian May had his traditional 3 day long solo, so everyone was happy.
Then of course we were rapidly approaching THAT SONG, and I did wonder how that would be without Freddie, but they did us proud. The band played all the music for the start, but Freddie was providing the vocals from the video wall. Mr Rodgers didn't get his turn till the middle eight and he dueted the final "nothing really matters" with the big man - brilliant.
Of course that wasn't enough, so we got them back for 4 more songs, the excellent Comos Rockin (one of 5 played that night from the new album), Alright Now, We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions.
What a stunning night, topping off a stunning year of music in which I've also been to see Linkin Park, KT Tunstall, Def Leppard, Whitesnake, Dio, Iron Maiden, Within Temptation and probably a few more I've forgotten about
I may yet go and see Extreme this year and I've got my ticket for Metallica in Nottingham next February.
Print
Comment
Tag
Facebook
Digg thisBack from the most romantic place on Earth
Yep, I've been to Rome again with Mrs Steam, and we had a great old time. Didn't take the little kettles because 1. I'm mean and 2. It was our Wedding Anniversary 
Have to say I'm feeling thoroughly refreshed, and even this muddled goldfish of a site design isn't annoying me quite as much as it did.
Even managed time to make some posts on the Forum
It won't last though, got trips to Sheffield and Glasgow in the next two weeks, and back to Arizona and possibly California at the end of the month. So service may slip off again at the end of the month
Have to say I'm feeling thoroughly refreshed, and even this muddled goldfish of a site design isn't annoying me quite as much as it did.
Even managed time to make some posts on the Forum
It won't last though, got trips to Sheffield and Glasgow in the next two weeks, and back to Arizona and possibly California at the end of the month. So service may slip off again at the end of the month
I'm back, but who knows for how long...
Well I'm glad to say I'm back home now. I went to Dublin on the 9th, then straight to Scottsdale, home for 2 days then out to Copenhagen, finally getting back late Thursday night (thanks to the problems with UK air traffic control) and joy of joys, I'm not planned to leave the country till mid-November (well not for work anyway, me and Mrs Steam off to Rome for the weekend in October).
But the "who knows for how long" is about being here on TV.com, not here at home.
As I'm sure you've all noticed, I'm not able to spend as much time here as I did. Work's getting really busy, which is good because it means it's also really successful, which in the current climate is great news. Also because I'm away so much, means I need to spend more quality time when I'm at home.
So my patience is gradually wearing out with the design of this site. The new design is not very ergonmic, and not very easy on the eye, especially in the forums, having moved the avatar into a thick banner on the top of every post, for folks with banners in the sig as well it takes a while for your eye to be drawn to the actual content of the post. It's also now harder to scan down the side of a thread looking for a particular poster, and many more page downs before you get to the end of a thread.
To make matters worse, there has long been a problem on this site with the words s-t-y-l-e and c-l-a-s-s. Not particularly offensive words you might think, but you can't type them in any posts that include links. Why? Because there is a web browser hacker exploit that can do naughty things using the c-l-a-s-s or s-t-y-l-e keyword in a link. So it's not a bad idea to protect against the exploit. But it appears the programmers of the TV.com site took a lazy approach and appear to be simply scanning for s-t-y-l-e and c-l-a-s-s in the text (obviously without the hyphens), which of course then means words like c-l-a-s-s-i-c also get banned, which is great if the official website for your show includes that in all the URLs.
Now unless someone has rewritten the syntax of html while I was away, a keyword in html can ONLY be specified in the format "keyword=value" or "keyword = value". In otherwords the keyword, with the next non blank character being an equals sign. So come on guys, if you find one of the "bad words", is the next non blank character an equals sign? If it isn't, it's OK, let it through. But have they fixed it during the huge revamp? Of course not.
And now, whilst typing this long blog, I find another problem. Once you hit the bottom of the text box you are typing "in the dark" as the cursor goes off into no mans land, with no scroll bar appearing. You can use the arrow key to move down, which shuffles your earlier text off the top, but then if you use the arrow keys to go off the top to review what you've already typed, it doesn't shuffle back. The only way to see what's gone off the top appears to be Ctrl-A, Ctrl+C and paste it into wordpad, edit it and paste it back. Now I should point out I use Firefox and the basic TV.com editor, cos the WYSIWYG editor used to give me all sorts of grief, and I know enough html to make my posts pretty. I say this just in case folks using different browsers and editors don't see this. But if I'd released code like this in my job to millions of potential customers, I'd have been fired and deserved it. And even with the redesign you STILL cannot just search the forum you are in (which I'm sure is what people need at least 90% of the time). There's no wonder people post duplicate threads, if the thread you should post on is not near the top, unless what you need to search for has some very unique words in, you get loads of hits from other forums which are entirely pointless if you are trying to find out if someone has already covered the topic in THIS forum. It wouldn't be so bad if at least it listed the hits from the current forum first, and it gives you no clue as to which forum the hits are for (I'm sure it used to).
AND, I don't know about others on this site, but when I click on my user at the top of the page to go to my profile, I mainly do that for one of two reasons, to read comments to my blog, or to post a new one. Yet now there is no link on my profile page to paste a new one, no instead I have to now click on Blog in the menu on the left hand side and wait for the entire page to reload before I can get to a link to post a new blog. So now it costs me twice as much bandwidth to post my blog each time. Maybe I should send the invoice to TV.com
I'd love to know how many users they invited to the design meetings, how many were involved in the early usability tests, when the first cut candidate site was available how long was it made available for general try out and feedback. This is all standard practice for good software companies, I've worked on many software designs both as customer and supplier over the years and without a doubt the best results are from getting your customer involved early.
The first I heard about it was less than a week before it was dumped on us, bearing in mind most users stay on their own program guides, mostly the forums at that, and the blogs. I think I eventually saw it on the front page, but my bookmarks don't take me there.
Sorry for the long blog, but it's taking me forever to try and catch up on what used to be my favourite place on the web.
But the "who knows for how long" is about being here on TV.com, not here at home.
As I'm sure you've all noticed, I'm not able to spend as much time here as I did. Work's getting really busy, which is good because it means it's also really successful, which in the current climate is great news. Also because I'm away so much, means I need to spend more quality time when I'm at home.
So my patience is gradually wearing out with the design of this site. The new design is not very ergonmic, and not very easy on the eye, especially in the forums, having moved the avatar into a thick banner on the top of every post, for folks with banners in the sig as well it takes a while for your eye to be drawn to the actual content of the post. It's also now harder to scan down the side of a thread looking for a particular poster, and many more page downs before you get to the end of a thread.
To make matters worse, there has long been a problem on this site with the words s-t-y-l-e and c-l-a-s-s. Not particularly offensive words you might think, but you can't type them in any posts that include links. Why? Because there is a web browser hacker exploit that can do naughty things using the c-l-a-s-s or s-t-y-l-e keyword in a link. So it's not a bad idea to protect against the exploit. But it appears the programmers of the TV.com site took a lazy approach and appear to be simply scanning for s-t-y-l-e and c-l-a-s-s in the text (obviously without the hyphens), which of course then means words like c-l-a-s-s-i-c also get banned, which is great if the official website for your show includes that in all the URLs.
Now unless someone has rewritten the syntax of html while I was away, a keyword in html can ONLY be specified in the format "keyword=value" or "keyword = value". In otherwords the keyword, with the next non blank character being an equals sign. So come on guys, if you find one of the "bad words", is the next non blank character an equals sign? If it isn't, it's OK, let it through. But have they fixed it during the huge revamp? Of course not.
And now, whilst typing this long blog, I find another problem. Once you hit the bottom of the text box you are typing "in the dark" as the cursor goes off into no mans land, with no scroll bar appearing. You can use the arrow key to move down, which shuffles your earlier text off the top, but then if you use the arrow keys to go off the top to review what you've already typed, it doesn't shuffle back. The only way to see what's gone off the top appears to be Ctrl-A, Ctrl+C and paste it into wordpad, edit it and paste it back. Now I should point out I use Firefox and the basic TV.com editor, cos the WYSIWYG editor used to give me all sorts of grief, and I know enough html to make my posts pretty. I say this just in case folks using different browsers and editors don't see this. But if I'd released code like this in my job to millions of potential customers, I'd have been fired and deserved it. And even with the redesign you STILL cannot just search the forum you are in (which I'm sure is what people need at least 90% of the time). There's no wonder people post duplicate threads, if the thread you should post on is not near the top, unless what you need to search for has some very unique words in, you get loads of hits from other forums which are entirely pointless if you are trying to find out if someone has already covered the topic in THIS forum. It wouldn't be so bad if at least it listed the hits from the current forum first, and it gives you no clue as to which forum the hits are for (I'm sure it used to).
AND, I don't know about others on this site, but when I click on my user at the top of the page to go to my profile, I mainly do that for one of two reasons, to read comments to my blog, or to post a new one. Yet now there is no link on my profile page to paste a new one, no instead I have to now click on Blog in the menu on the left hand side and wait for the entire page to reload before I can get to a link to post a new blog. So now it costs me twice as much bandwidth to post my blog each time. Maybe I should send the invoice to TV.com
I'd love to know how many users they invited to the design meetings, how many were involved in the early usability tests, when the first cut candidate site was available how long was it made available for general try out and feedback. This is all standard practice for good software companies, I've worked on many software designs both as customer and supplier over the years and without a doubt the best results are from getting your customer involved early.
The first I heard about it was less than a week before it was dumped on us, bearing in mind most users stay on their own program guides, mostly the forums at that, and the blogs. I think I eventually saw it on the front page, but my bookmarks don't take me there.
Sorry for the long blog, but it's taking me forever to try and catch up on what used to be my favourite place on the web.
What are they trying to say?
Well when I was in Dallas recently I came across another of those amusing combinations of signs that really made me chuckle.
Now I do know why those two signs are combined, but I thought I'd leave it up to you guys to figure it out
Now I do know why those two signs are combined, but I thought I'd leave it up to you guys to figure it out
And then my skin turned to cling film!!!
Well I've been hiking in Arizona in 112F without the slightest hint of sore skin, but a couple of hours in Spain, lathered up in SPF 30 sun creme, and I went as crispy as an aromatic duck - ouch. And this was on the first day of the holiday too 
The a few days later it was like I'd bought my own personal supply of cling film with me. I must admit it's nice to be able to sleep without waking myself up when I roll over again
I did find a very interesting name for a diving shop whilst I was over there -
(click for zoom)
But I'm back now, went down London on Tuesday to see We Will Rock You Again (this time with the kids) and had a great day. Got two more days before I'm back at work, and September looks like I will have 6 working days at home.
The a few days later it was like I'd bought my own personal supply of cling film with me. I must admit it's nice to be able to sleep without waking myself up when I roll over again
I did find a very interesting name for a diving shop whilst I was over there -
(click for zoom)
But I'm back now, went down London on Tuesday to see We Will Rock You Again (this time with the kids) and had a great day. Got two more days before I'm back at work, and September looks like I will have 6 working days at home.
