Day: May 20, 2009

Can the summer get any better? Paul McCartney is playing Halifax, NS on July 11!

Concert season is gearing up fast and I swear everything is falling into place in regards to dates, places, etc.

The biggest news is that AC/DC is coming to Ottawa on Monday August 10. The fact that this is really big news harkens back to a story about how Vero really really really wanted to go see AC/DC in Montreal on August 8. But alas, we were going to be in Windsor for a wedding on that exact date.

So then we started thinking about going to Moncton to see them on August 6. But that would require us driving 12 hours down, watching the concert, and drive 20 hours back to Windsor from Moncton on August 7th and then see the wedding the next day around noon on August 8. This was not an ideal situation, but it would have been done in the name of rock! This also reminds me of the time Mike, Danny and I trucked down to see AC/DC on a Friday night in Toronto from Kapuskasing (!!!) and Mike and Danny decided to drive home after the concert. That’s a little crazy and if memory serves me right, they made it to North Bay.

So then I checked out other tour dates and realized that they were playing in New Jersey and Google Maps helped me determine that New Jersey is quite a bit closer to Ottawa than Moncton! So plans to go to Jersey for the weekend were starting to form.

THEN they decided to play in Albany, NY last week which is only four hours away. But the thing is, I noticed that they were playing an arena show in Albany which was unlike their ‘summer stadiums’ only clause they originally had set up for the summer. Could this mean that Ottawa would have a chance? This, coupled with the fact that the Live Nation promoter indicated on Chez that we could very well hear some news about AC/DC in Ottawa in the next few weeks led to the realization that this could all happen.

And happen it did. Tuesday morning all I hear on Virgin Radio is AC/DC for the hour leading up to them announcing the tour date. Tickets go on sale this Friday and I’m quite pleased with the date they are playing as we will be back in town by then.

Other concerts I’m checking out this summer include:
– Malajube – June 11 at the Capital Music Hall. I still have yet to get tix to this. Hopefully they aren’t sold out!
– Bluesfest – 10 Days of bliss.
– Hope Volleyball – My favourite day of the year. Bands to be announced.
– AC/DC – August 10
– STOMPIN’ TOM!!! – August 13! This is incredible. I mentioned to Mom that we should go but they ended up buying tickets to see him while they are vacationing in St. John’s, NFLD. I think I’m going to get talking to Troy and see if we should send him ‘The Stomper’ song and maybe we can book an opening slot for The Stomper himself!
– PEARL JAM! Toronto, August 21!
– Metallica! October 29…I believe?

There’s also word that Kings of Leon are hitting Ottawa so I have to figure out if I want to go to that or not. I really enjoy their new album and they seem like a top notch band.

Awhile ago, I upgraded the iPhoto software on the Mac and was anxious to use the ‘Faces’ feature which supposedly is able to scan all your photos in search of a particular face. I never got it working until last week and I must say I’m quite impressed with it.

What you do is select a photo and ask iPhoto to scan for faces. It will then find my face and say “Who is this?” and I type in my name. Then I go back to the Faces dashboard and choose my face and it will say “Here are the confirmed photos of your face. Here are a few others which need confirming.” and they throw out a slew of pictures with me (hopefully) in them.

On the first round, the software may not be able to properly match my face to a picture and would throw up a picture of Eric instead but this is because I’ve only confirmed one photo of myself so it doesn’t have much to work with as a baseline. But as soon as I confirm a half dozen more, it can rescan with all that additional data and find my face in a more refined way.

I was quite impressed in how it ended up working. I scanned for Mike’s face a few times and it even found him in the background of a few shots as well as recognized him in full out zombie makeup from Hallowe’en! Impressive. Most impressive.

All in all, I find this to be a neat feature if you ever want to make a collage of someone you know. Instead of scouring the years upon years of digital photos you have, you can simply scan for the person’s face and spend a good 30 minutes weening out the photos that are not the person you’re searching for, and voila! I say 30 minutes but it depends on the person. Naturally, while scanning for my own face, I will probably spend an hour going through thousands of them. But for a distant relative, you may only have a few pictures of them.

Another neat aspect of it is the fact that they show the pictures chronologically so you can see how you have changed throughout the years. While some people probably won’t like to see this in themselves, I’ve always been intrigued with the capture of time within photographs and I’ve also thought of starting up a photo project where I take the same head shot of myself each day for a year to see the progression.

Of particular note, this feature will probably only be useful to people who use their camera to take pictures of different people. As for Maren who is expecting her first child soon, I highly suspect there will only be one person in all her photographs. 😉