Saturday (the daylight) was mostly spent dealing with one bad customer service experience that I’m not at liberty to mention just yet. In the midst of waiting for returned phone calls I decided to do a Dell chat to fix my issue with Vista Aero. For whatever reason – Aero had not worked when I tried to turn it on – and then dissappeared from the appearance options altogether after that. After two chat sessions and a rather lengthy (almost 90 minutes) remote desktop session the problem couldn’t be figured out. The best the Dell could do was tell me to roll back my system to the purchase date and that my problem was “really weird.”
After all that was over I found the name of my video card – googled it with “Aero problems” and found a page from one of Microsoft’s Vista developers. The blog pointed me to a download page for the latest Invidia Vista drivers. I downloaded the driver and… Aero! So after over two hours with a “support specialist” I figured it out on my own in five minutes. It is still wonky though – turning itself off whenever I try to run the cable tv software – and then back on again when I close the software.
Saturday night I went to The Grove with Beverly and her father. Around Christmas The Grove goes all-out with a holiday theme complete with old-timey street musicians, snow blowers from the rooftops, a 110 foot Christmas tree, Santa (okay, so every mall has a Santa) and a trolley featuring a music and dance show by “sexy elves.” We agreed the dance show was a little bizarre.
After trying to maneuver through the crowd for a while and watching the trolley show we headed to the adjacent farmer’s market. Beverly and I ate Cajun cuisine (yes, mom, the same place) while we watched three live bands. Merle Jagger was a fast-finger picking country band, very authentic and very good. A fine compliment to fried Alligator tail and Jambalaya.
Saucy Monkey was next and despite naming themselves after what sounds like a line from Austin Powers was only mildly disappointing. At times doing their best impression Kim Deal leading Verruca Salt and others Stretch Princess with more distortion.
The last band, 50 cent haircut‘s only redeeming quality was the (unintentionally) goofy expressions on their bass player’s face. Each member of the band was desperately trying to accomplish being the “cool rock star.” Beverly commented before they played a single note that they couldn’t be good because they were “too good looking.” She was half right. The music wasn’t bad, per se, just boring – and the no member of the band made any attempt to connect with the audience – always looking down or into the distance, you can’t underestimate the impact of this disconnection on the success or failure of a gig.
