This year I have sponsored a lot of Kickstarter creative work, including lots of music. One that I was very excited to support was The PDX Broadsides’ latest album, Relatable Content. They started off as a pirate shanty band and have evolved into a nerd filk band whose songs range from silly to profound. I really enjoyed their last album, Trust Issues, which had some pretty timely songs like Noncompliant (superficially about the Bitch Planet comic, but actually about the Me Too era) and We Want Rey (about representation in nerd toydom). It also had some fun songs (both feature Christian as the lead) like Tiny Little Octopus and Robot vs Boy (which I want to see made into a mini-musical). Their last Kickstarter also had a dirty album called Lust Issues that continued their trend of Shakespeare music with the great Dirtbag Romeo and their dirtier songs from their pirate shanty days with It’s Just Sex.

My fourth concert of 2019 was also the first one in which I had someone else go with me as Danielle went to her first concert of 2019. It was fun to have someone to share the experience with, especially her. Anberlin was the first band I introduced her to that she also came to like. Many of their albums were bonding moments for us from dating through our married life.

If you follow the blog, you remember I’ve been working on a GUI for the donation tracker. Part of making that work involved changing the code to be object oriented. Also, it required moving the user-defined configs to be moved out of the main code. I’ve done that and finally tested that it works (I had a silly bug involving a typo that I had to correct) and merged the code into master over on the github repo. The new code required a change in the directions, so I made new instructional videos to go along with those changes:

Back in March we went to the Baltimore Zoo and I took my 120-400mm lens. I think this may be the first time I’d taken that lens to this Zoo (although I’d taken it quite a few times to the National Zoo in DC). I took lots of photos, but some didn’t come out the way I wanted and others just looked too much like they were in a zoo. I wanted (as much as I could) to have photos that could have been taken in the wild. I didn’t succeed with all the photos I chose for this post, but I was happy with the way they came out.

Back in March it was an incredibly windy day so we decided to go to the park to fly a kite. I also took my DSLR because it’d been some time since I’d used it and thought I might get some good shots. This one was my favorite one and I thought it really captured a special moment.

I had a series of almost back-to-back concerts as 2019 started up; Neon Trees and Fitz in the Tantrums at the beginning of May, The Doubleclicks and The Misbehavin’ Maidens in the middle, and then Lionize right at the beginning of June.

Oliver Brewing Company Tasting Room

This concert was at a venue that was new to me, the Oliver Brewing Company. Lots of restaurants and places call themselves a brewing company, usually to signify that they will have some of their own beer on tap. But this was literally a factory floor that had been cleared to set up a stage. I could see all the empty, unlabeled aluminum cans that would eventually hold their different brews. Perhaps because it was a factory floor and not a club or concert hall, the acoustics were pretty amplified. The venue seemed to know it was an issue because they were selling ear plugs for $1 each. (Probably from the stash they give to their factory workers during a regular day) At any rate, it was the first concert where I actually wore ear plugs because it was just too loud for me to enjoy; especially because my OSHA training kept reiterating that hearing loss is not recoverable. Surprisingly, it simply dampened the sound, but I was still able to hear the vocals everything. If anything suffered from the plugs it was a slight loss in the higher frequencies that I noticed during Lionize’s set. One other thing I noticed - of all the concerts I’ve gone to in the past few years, this is the first time I wasn’t one of the older audience members. There were a fair number of grey beards there to hear the different bands.

• Bake-Sale Berry Muffins
• banana poppy seed muffins
• gochujang chicken
• black bean soup
• boiled carrot with Cumin, Cilantro, and Lime
• chicken burritos mojados
• chicken burritos mojados
• cinnamon swirl bread
• cinnamon swirl bread
• cinnamon swirl bread
• first from easy fish and chips
• chips from easy fish and chips
• Lemon-Buttermilk Pound Cake
• Lemon-Buttermilk Pound Cake
• pull-apart garlic rolls
• pull-apart garlic rolls
• pull-apart garlic rolls
• Rosemary Focaccia bread
• Rosemary Focaccia bread
• Rosemary Focaccia bread
• Rosemary Focaccia bread
• rustic italian loaf
• rustic italian loaf
• rustic italian loaf
• skillet-roasted cauliflower
• Vietnamese Rolled Beef (bo lui)
• Vietnamese Rolled Beef (bo lui)

March was a bad time to have gluten allergies in my house. I did a lot of baking and most of it turned out great. The bake-sale muffins (used blueberries) in particular were a huge hit. I never knew blueberry muffins could taste so good. I’m kind of mad at every place I’ve ever eaten them before for making me think they couldn’t taste all that great. On the flip side, I was not a fan of the banana-poppy seed muffins. I think for now I’ll stick to banana bread and banana snack cake when I need to get rid of some ripe bananas. The lemon-buttermilk pound cake fell somewhere in the middle. It was good, but I find the loaf lemon pound cake I make to be easier and taste just as good. Then again, I have some mods I need to make to this recipe next time around to maybe get a better consistency.

self-portrait at Red Hat Summit

Red Hat Summit 2019 was my first Red Hat Summit. I heard quite a few people saying it was the largest one they’d been to yet and that it used to be a pretty small convention. That was not the case this year; it used up the entire Boston Convention Center. I’ve said before, concerning video games, that the best use of trophies and gamification of the meta-game are to get the player to take actions they wouldn’t normally take. Red Hat did a pretty good job of this during the summit. They provided points for filling out session surveys, which most wouldn’t have done otherwise. They also provided points for posting to the convention’s feed. I normally wouldn’t have, but reaching 1000 points netted the player some money towards merchandise at the RHEL store. So I posted about getting my custom t-shirt. This led others to comment on my post to find out where it was taking place and I was able to direct them there.

My second concert of 2019 was almost the exact opposite of the first one. The first one was a big outdoor concert venue (it was in Boston, but was configured like Pier VI in Baltimore) while this one was in the basement of a pizza place called Joe Squared. The first one featured pop artists that everyone has heard while this one featured niche bands that mostly nerds have heard. The first one featured full bands while the Misbehavin’ Maidens performed acapella and The Doubleclicks used an electric cello and other stringed instruments.

At the end of Red Hat Summit 2019 (post coming about that soon) there was a double-header concert with Neon Trees and Fitz & the Tantrums. Neon Trees started things off for the night. I didn’t look them up ahead of the concert, because Fitz was a huge band so I thought Neon Trees was just a local band opening for Fitz. Their section of the concert was a lot of fun even though I didn’t know any of the songs. The lead singer had lots of fun banter and seemed to really be enjoying himself.