iceLife The half heard mutterings of a Kiwi a long, long way from home.

The Black Crowes at Brixton Academy 9 April 2008.



A few weeks ago on a typical Wednesday night, we went along to the Black Crowes gig at Brixton Academy. They came on on the dot of nine and played the jammy blues rock set you'd expect, focussing mainly on songs from "Southern Harmony and Musical Companion" and a few tracks from the newer albums whose names I don't think I ever knew.
Brixton was sold out, and when it became obvious to the crowd the Crowes weren't interested in playing their old hits, a number of people seemed a bit disappointed, J included. No "Hard to Handle", no "Twice as Hard" and no "She Talks To Angels". Luckily, A loves the Southern Harmony album, and they played most of it really well. And fair credit to the lads, they did a long 2.5 hour set including an encore.
The highlight of the night? Either "Remedy" or the only song they did from "Shake Your Moneymaker" - "Jealous Again".
Good gig, but a lot of punters went home wishing they'd heard a song they knew.

3.5 out of 5, unless you are a BC fan, then maybe you'd go for a 4.

See all 11 photos in a slide show.

Hey all, just a quick note from my seat at Adobe's OnAIR London event.

OnAIR is a one day free conference from Adobe, showcasing their new AIR product (AIR allows you to deploy Flex and or HTML/CSS/JavaScript to the desktop, as a native application). Its cool tech and I think its going to be an emerging technology in the RIA space. These guys have been touring around Europe and there are still continental dates left - check the official site for registrations, dates, and all that.

As for this conference, its organised very well. Food's great, i'm on my third Red Bull and I already got the compulsory free T-shirt.

The compere for the day is Mike Chambers (site) who speaks well and has a good rapport. Mike's got a new book coming out on OReilley for Javascript developers.
Ryan Stewart gave a good quick Hello World for AIR using Flex, that was informative and easy. Then the morning was finished off with two gigs from Kevin Hoyt, who is doing the HTML/JavaScript side of things, not so interesting for me (I'm in this to get away from javaScrip! :-) but lots of interest from the audience. Its good to know you can do it, if you really must...

Afternoon sessions are about to kick off, some good stuff there.

The free WiFi is rock solid, the presentations have been concise, only downer so far is that I do feel like a bit of a loser with my not-Apple laptop out on display. But noone has been cruel enough to openly mock me..

Flex is going to be the next big thing, if it isn't already. Being able to compile Flex to a desktop app using AIR, then take advantage of file systems, clipboards, and run in no-network situations... all good. I'm still thinking most Flex will be in the browser - but if you need some of the preceding functionality, its great to know AIR is there.

Thanks Adobe - great gig, I really appreciate being part of it.
I'm thinking about Adobe MaxEurope 2008 in Milan now!