{"id":441,"date":"2007-12-16T16:42:04","date_gmt":"2007-12-16T21:42:04","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2007-12-16T16:42:04","modified_gmt":"2007-12-16T21:42:04","slug":"music-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/?p=441","title":{"rendered":"Music Market"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Saturday (the daylight) was mostly spent dealing with one bad customer service experience that I&#8217;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 &#8211; Aero had not worked when I tried to turn it on &#8211; 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&#8217;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 &#8220;really weird.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>After all that was over I found the name of my video card &#8211; googled it with &#8220;Aero problems&#8221; and found a page from one of Microsoft&#8217;s Vista developers.  The blog pointed me to a download page for the latest Invidia Vista drivers.  I downloaded the driver and&#8230; Aero!  So after over two hours with a &#8220;support specialist&#8221; I figured it out on my own in five minutes.  It is still wonky though &#8211; turning itself off whenever I try to run the cable tv software &#8211; and then back on again when I close the software.  <\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;sexy elves.&#8221;   We agreed the dance show was a little bizarre. <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.andrewlorenzlong.com\/grovedancers.jpg\" width=450 height=252 border=0 alt=''><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.andrewlorenzlong.com\/grovemusicians.jpg\" width=500 height=433 border=0 alt=''><\/p>\n<p>After trying to maneuver through the crowd for a while and watching the trolley show we headed to the adjacent farmer&#8217;s market.  Beverly and I ate Cajun cuisine (yes, mom, <a href=\"http:\/\/andrewlorenzlong.com\/pmachine\/comments.php?id=P353_0_1_0_C\" title=\"the same place\">the same place<\/a>) while we watched three live bands.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.merlejagger.com\/\" title=\"Merle Jagger\">Merle Jagger<\/a> was a fast-finger picking country band, very authentic and very good.  A fine compliment to fried Alligator tail and Jambalaya.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.andrewlorenzlong.com\/merlejagger.jpg\" width=500 height=334 border=0 alt=''><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/saucymonky.com\/\" title=\"Saucy Monkey\">Saucy Monkey<\/a> 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.  <\/p>\n<p>The last band, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.50centhaircut.com\/\" title=\"50 cent haircut\">50 cent haircut<\/a>&#8216;s only redeeming quality was the (unintentionally) goofy expressions on their bass player&#8217;s face.  Each member of the band was desperately trying to accomplish being the &#8220;cool rock star.&#8221;  Beverly commented before they played a single note that they couldn&#8217;t be good because they were &#8220;too good looking.&#8221;  She was half right.  The music wasn&#8217;t bad, per se, just boring &#8211; and the no member of the band made any attempt to connect with the audience &#8211; always looking down or into the distance, you can&#8217;t underestimate the impact of this disconnection on the success or failure of a gig.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.andrewlorenzlong.com\/50centhaircut.jpg\" width=500 height=332 border=0 alt=''><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.andrewlorenzlong.com\/CIMG6681redeyeoutSMALL.jpg\" width=600 height=475 border=0 alt=''><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Saturday (the daylight) was mostly spent dealing with one bad customer service experience that I&#8217;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 &#8211; Aero had not worked when I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}