2005-10-09 06:45 UTC The Other Side
Tonight bryner, Nori, Akshay, a bunch of other people whose names I am afraid I have forgotten, and myself met up and went (not necessarily in that order) to Download Festival 2005, across the street from the office at the Shoreline Amphitheatre.
It was an all day concert but personally I only watched two of the bands, namely Arcade Fire and Modest Mouse. (Eira looked at the band list earlier and told me that the only band she recognised was HIM, but I wasn't there early enough to see them.)
This concert opened at 11am and finished at midnight. So obviously, they let you go to the concert, then leave for a while (say, to go get some real food to eat) and then come back to the concert for more music later. Er, actually nope. Sorry. They didn't. $30 tickets, no re-entry.
Yeah.
I was also quite amused by the details of what you were allowed and not allowed to bring. In particular, for our safety we were not allowed to bring weapons, fireworks, knives, stickers or alcohol into the arena.
Yes, fear the evil killer stickers.
Also I'm still trying to work out exactly in what way it helps our safety for the alcohol drunk at the event to only be the alcohol sold by the organisers rather than allowing people to bring drinks of their own. Maybe "your safety" means something else, like, say, "our profits".
Arcade Fire were pretty good. Modest Mouse less so, though they weren't helped by the unbalanced sound system at the start of their performance.
Amusingly the crowd responded to the poor balance by shouting "turn it up!" during the pauses between songs. Turning "it" up would not have made the slightest difference to the sound quality, except maybe made it worse. We figured, though, that while probably not the most helpful of requests, it may be easier to get a crowd shouting that than the more accurate "turn the bass down slightly, turn the drum kit's mic down a lot, and increase the treble gain on the lead vocal mic!", which is what they presumably eventually did.
Despite all my whining here I have to say I quite enjoyed myself, and it was good to get out of the office for once! This last week has been ridiculously hectic; it turns out (and I hope I'm not breaking my NDA by saying this) that the reason Google's products are actually good is that everyone here works really hard. And when everyone around you is working so hard it's difficult not to feel pressured into doing the same!
Some of the WHATWG work I've done includes adding a section to the Web Apps specification detailing how to determine whether the browser is in an "online" or "offline" state, getting the TCP connection section up to second-draft quality (it now requires support for connections tunneled through TLS, which makes it a lot more practical on real sites), and continuing work on the editing section (with the help of Anne's document).
I'm really looking forward to getting the "TBW" parts out of the WA1 spec so that we have a stable document to work from, so that I can finally get back to replying to the WHATWG mailing list posts. There have been hundreds of suggestions, proposals, and corrections sent to the list and I've been buffering them all up waiting to have a stable base to work from.