I found this review on the official Snow Patrol fan site and am posting it here for posterity and searchability by search engines. If anyone knows Shannon Tillar (or you are Shannon Tillar), please drop me an e-mail so I can properly ask for your permission (I was unable to find a valid e-mail address despite an hour of Googling). Shannon’s review and photos were excellent and made me feel as if I were right back at the show.

Moore Theatre , SEATTLE , WA - Sep 20th 2006
by Shannon Tillar

It’s another typically dark and drizzly Seattle night, which Gary Lightbody tells the crowd gathered for the show feels like coming home to Glasgow. Despite the weather the crowd is excited, and quickly fills the Moore Theater, where Pearl Jam’s Even Flow video was filmed many years ago. Steeped in this alternative music legacy, from Nirvana to Death Cab for Cutie, Snow Patrol took the stage and played a show full of energy, spirit and passion.

The show opened with Augustana, a band with a great mix of passionate mellow and rocking ruckus. They were able to pack lots of feeling into each song, which helped warm the crowd. The stage of the Moore is so close to the stage that the fans were able to talk back and forth with the band! Dan Layus, the lead singer, told the crowd that it was a special night. “It is Gary Lightbody’s birthday, and if they give you a chance, any sort of pause they play Chasing Cars, sing “Happy Birthday” for him.” The crowd cheered in a hushed conspiracy, waiting and ready for Snow Patrol to take the stage and surprise one of their favorite singers. Augustana then played an emotionally charged song, Love Me, which got the crowd dancing and energized. Any fan of Snow Patrol should defiantly check out Augustana if they haven’t already.

A dizzying red lights show starts in the dark and quiet auditorium. The red lights flash and sparkle in time with an instrumental track as everyone waits in anxious anticipation; slowly we all can see show shadowy figures move on stage, and the house lights flash up. As the crowd roars (you can make you a few screams of “We love you!” over the din), the band launched into a loud and spirited version of Spitting Games and then Headlights on Dark Roads. Snow Patrol plays three songs without even a pause, hitting favorites for each of the recent albums.

There was small break after that which allowed Gary to talk with the crowd in the small space. After a bit of joking banter between the band and the crowd, Gary told the crowd that all of Augustana’s gear had been stolen from the back of the theater while they were on stage, and in tribute they launched into Steal. (No one was able to confirm if this was true, or just a bit of concert fun.)

After a few more songs, where the band was bathed in blue and green lights with a smoky haze which made the whole experience seem more dream like than reality, Gary thanked the crowd and mentioned that Seattle had produced some of their most inspirational bands like Nirvana. Everyone seemed to pause for a moment as Gary spoke about the tragic beauty of Kurt Cobain’s music and poetic soul. Snow Patrol began again playing Chasing Cars, and the entire crowd began to sing along.

After a passionate singing of Chocolate, the crowd screamed “Happy Birthday.” “What was that? Happy Birthday?” Gary asked looking slightly confused. Suddenly, the three floors of the theater launched into a spirited impromptu “Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you…”

As the song finally died down, Gary thanked the crowd. “Ah, twenty-one yet again,” he mumbled. He told the crowd that he had heard that Augustana had told the crowd it was his birthday, and he’d hold on to that till next June. He smiled indulgently as he told the crowed that “anyone who was curious could find my real birthday on-line somewhere.” (It’s June 14th.)

During Run, the crowd and the band seemed to become one entity. As the second verse came up, Gary stopped singing and the crowd took over. Suddenly, hundreds of people were signing together in perfect harmony and timing with the band on stage. As the song continued, the crowd kept singing as Gary’s voice blended back in with the hundreds from the crowd.

The band played a great mix of familiar songs from both Eyes Open and Final Straw. Any fan would have been sure to hear at least one of their favorite SP songs, if not all of them. (I know I did.) At the end of the final encore, they closed out the show with a soulful and passionate version of Open Your Eyes.

For fans only familiar with the band from their albums, the show can be a bit of a surprise. Snow Patrol is loud, energetic, and engaged when on stage. The soft mellow tones of the albums become boisterous anthems when played live. The band is a different entity in concert; high energy and higher volume. With each song the band seemed to pick up excitement from the crowd. During some songs, Gary and the guys were jumping around and climbing on to the drums before launching into the heart of it.

Of course, Run was the most memorable song in the show for me but I have never before enjoyed every single song in a concert and was blown away by how much they rocked. Also, I didn’t know that the video for Pearl Jam’s Evenflow was filmed at The Moore but it’s definitely a great venue to see a concert.

And here is the set list from my memory:

Splitting Games
Wow
Chocolate
Beginning To Get To Me
Headlights
Grazed Knees
Chasing Cars
Shut Your Eyes
How To Be Dead
Somewhere A Clock Is Ticking
Set Fire to the Third Bar
Make This Go On Forever
Ways And Means
Run
You’re All I Have
—encore—
Open Your Eyes
Tiny Little Fractures

Former Enron Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow was sentenced to 6 years in Federal prison today after initially agreeing to serve 10. Fastow sought and received leniency after his supporters, including the Federal Prosecutors said he was a transformed man and was invlauable to the investigation.

the judge said he deserved a lighter sentence because Fastow has been persecuted after Enron’s failure and because his family has suffered enough. Fastow’s wife already has served a year for her role in the scandal.

“Prosecution is necessary, but persecution was not,” U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt said. “These factors call for mercy.”

This is a timely story because I just finished reading Kurt Eichenwald’s The Conspiracy of Fools which was one of the best stories I have ever read, fiction or non-fiction. The story was written incredibly well with amazing attention to detail. It’s a fascinating, fascinating story that you will be glued to for days (it’s a bit long).

After reading Conspiracy of Fools and seeing Alex Gibney’s Enron, The Smartest Guys In The Room, I truly believe that these guys didn’t set out to explicity break the law. They started out with small mistakes initiated by incredibly incompetent executive management and then were tempted to add to their fortunes and cover up their past sins. If you enjoyed Barbarians at the Gate (the true story of the RJR Nabisco LBO) or has an interest in how large corporations function at the top, I highly recommend this. There’s also an audio version which is narrated very well but if you go that route, spring for the unabridged version.

Guess I won’t be sitting on the couch tonight…

It’s that time of the year again, the KJH (Kirkland Jr. High) magazine fundraising drive. Amy’s school does this the first month of every year to raise money for… well, something. It says it’s for the kids so it must be good. I always load up on these because I love the kids. Ok, well, I love magazines. They really are perfect for me since I have the attention span of a Brazilian Tapir…

Wait, what was I writing about? …

Oh, yeah, my attention span isn’t that great and the normal magazine article is about all I can handle. If my insomnia should strike (pretty rare, maybe 364 days per year), I can flick the light on, read a good article and hopefully think about something that will bore my brain enough to shut itself off.

Here’s what I ordered:

1) Backpacker
2) Fast Company
3) Forbes
4) Fortune
5) Mac Addict
6) Maximum PC
7) National Geogrpahic Adventure
8) Smithsonian
9) Wired
10) Teen People

Ok, just kidding about #10, they were sold out :(

Most if not all are renewals but off the list this year is Discover. Though I’m a science fiend, that magazine just bores the hell outta me for some reason.

If you’re using the Bourne Again Shell (bash), type:

history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -r -n

This will print them commands you used most often to your terminal. Why is this handy? Well if you see a command that you use often and it’s fairly long, it might be time to make an alias or perhaps you see a group of commands that you can concatenate the output using pipes and a single alias. You don’t need to be root to do this obviously but I happened to have a root terminal open on one of my webhosting machines to make this example.

In my example, you can see that I hit vnstat (a simple yet incredibly accurate bandwith monitor) a lot in addition to a custom perl script I wrote to graph it’s output using rrdtool. I had some serious bandwidth concerns a few months ago due to a few of my customers’ sites that had become incredibly popular in a very short period of time.