On Sunday I made the trip to Missouri’s red-headed step-child, Kansas City, to see Conan O’Brien on his Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television tour. In case you didn’t hear, a while back I transferred the domain teamcoco.com to Conan which ultimately resulted in two free tickets to his show in Kansas City. I took my friend Matt, who lives outside of KC. If you are a fan of Conan’s humor you would definitely enjoy this show. The type of show that Conan is doing on tour is not something I’ve seen before (or not seen in a long while) and the whole idea of this tour might solidify the idea that Conan is a genius. Warning, if you are planning to see this show don’t continue reading as you will get some spoilers.
The show isn’t groundbreaking in and of itself. It’s equal parts comedy and music, a formula that has been done before. What makes it Conan (and his staff) a genius is that this 30-plus city tour came about because of the devotion of his fans. He has capitalized brilliantly over a terrible situation. Instead of fading into the shadows after leaving the Tonight Show, Conan turned himself into a complete brand. He is Coco. He is the underdog. He is the people’s champ. But enough about him, let me tell you about the show.
First off, the seats were quite nice. I got the tickets through Conan’s people so we were in row 18. His opening act, Reggie Watts, was really good. The only issue I had with his performance is that sometimes it was hard to make out the lyrics to his comedic songs because of the way the sound was set up at the venue. His set didn’t last as long as I thought it would either. After about 15 minutes or so of Watts, the Legally Prohibited band came out. The only way I can describe this opening act is the movie Blues Brothers. You know the scene at the end when the band starts playing the introduction song. You had some good old rhythm and blues with loud trombones, saxes, and trumpets? That’s what it was like. I half expected to see Donald “Duck” Dunn and Matt “Guitar” Murphy to come out. It was fantastic. The band was lively, ran through the crowd, and got the crowd pumped for Conan’s entrance onto the stage.
Conan came out and talked about his situation, the tour, etc. He did his typical self-deprecating jokes, which were a hit with the crowd. His old pal Andy Richter came out and joined in on the fun. There were appearances by the masturbating bear self-pleasuring panda, a very funny video featuring Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and the appearance of the Walker Texas Ranger Lever Chuck Norris Handle. KC’s own Jason Sudeikis even came out to pull the handle. In between the skits Conan strapped on his guitar and played some tunes. The show really was awesome.
The only downside to the show was the length. Conan was only on for a little over an hour making the entire show last less than 2 hours. If I paid for the really expensive seats I would have been a bit disappointed, not at the quality of the entertainment, but the length. I know that they are hitting a lot of cities in a short amount of time, but I think they could have easily fit another 15-20 minutes into the show. Other than that, the show was fantastic. It made me look forward to his upcoming show on TBS even more, which in the end, is really what this tour is about.
Conan O’Brien Might Be a Genius
On Sunday I made the trip to Missouri’s red-headed step-child, Kansas City, to see Conan O’Brien on his Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television tour. In case you didn’t hear, a while back I transferred the domain teamcoco.com to Conan which ultimately resulted in two free tickets to his show in Kansas City. I took my friend Matt, who lives outside of KC. If you are a fan of Conan’s humor you would definitely enjoy this show. The type of show that Conan is doing on tour is not something I’ve seen before (or not seen in a long while) and the whole idea of this tour might solidify the idea that Conan is a genius. Warning, if you are planning to see this show don’t continue reading as you will get some spoilers.
The show isn’t groundbreaking in and of itself. It’s equal parts comedy and music, a formula that has been done before. What makes it Conan (and his staff) a genius is that this 30-plus city tour came about because of the devotion of his fans. He has capitalized brilliantly over a terrible situation. Instead of fading into the shadows after leaving the Tonight Show, Conan turned himself into a complete brand. He is Coco. He is the underdog. He is the people’s champ. But enough about him, let me tell you about the show.
First off, the seats were quite nice. I got the tickets through Conan’s people so we were in row 18. His opening act, Reggie Watts, was really good. The only issue I had with his performance is that sometimes it was hard to make out the lyrics to his comedic songs because of the way the sound was set up at the venue. His set didn’t last as long as I thought it would either. After about 15 minutes or so of Watts, the Legally Prohibited band came out. The only way I can describe this opening act is the movie Blues Brothers. You know the scene at the end when the band starts playing the introduction song. You had some good old rhythm and blues with loud trombones, saxes, and trumpets? That’s what it was like. I half expected to see Donald “Duck” Dunn and Matt “Guitar” Murphy to come out. It was fantastic. The band was lively, ran through the crowd, and got the crowd pumped for Conan’s entrance onto the stage.
Conan came out and talked about his situation, the tour, etc. He did his typical self-deprecating jokes, which were a hit with the crowd. His old pal Andy Richter came out and joined in on the fun. There were appearances by the
masturbating bearself-pleasuring panda, a very funny video featuring Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and the appearance of theWalker Texas Ranger LeverChuck Norris Handle. KC’s own Jason Sudeikis even came out to pull the handle. In between the skits Conan strapped on his guitar and played some tunes. The show really was awesome.The only downside to the show was the length. Conan was only on for a little over an hour making the entire show last less than 2 hours. If I paid for the really expensive seats I would have been a bit disappointed, not at the quality of the entertainment, but the length. I know that they are hitting a lot of cities in a short amount of time, but I think they could have easily fit another 15-20 minutes into the show. Other than that, the show was fantastic. It made me look forward to his upcoming show on TBS even more, which in the end, is really what this tour is about.
Website Backups are Essential
Now that my database is safe, on the web and available to download anytime I want, how do I backup my files? The actual website files I download less frequently. I host several sites on my hosting account so a full backup is actually quite large, several gigabytes. Because of this, I only backup the actual files once every month. Using my host’s control panel I generate a full backup then download it to my iMac and then it is backed up to an external hard drive using Time Machine. I also have the full backups backed up over the net using Mozy. Because they are quite large in size, I only keep an archive of two or three of the latest snapshots. Since databases are typically small, (200-600 KB) I keep a much larger archive of those.
So that’s how I backup my sites. What about you? Have you ever lost an entire site and years worth of work? Do you have a backup plan in place? If so, how often do you backup? My motto with web hosting is always plan for the worst because when you don’t, that’s when the worst happens.
Diablo Cody Writes Horrible Movies
There, I said it. She’s a bad writer. The writing in Juno was bad. Jennifer’s Body was the equivalent to your 50 year old dad using slang to sound cool. Just awful. Her columns in Entertainment Weekly are just as bad, which is why I’m baffled as to why people pay her to write.
I know many of you may like the movie Juno. It wasn’t a horrible movie, but the dialogue was. The thing that saved the movie was excellent performances by JK Simmons, Michael Cera and Ellen Page, not the writing that threw in more clichéd phrases than a spoof of teen movies (“What’s your damage?” “Honest to blog” “This is one doodle that can’t be un-did, Homeskillet.”). The story wasn’t all that great but it was something that Hollywood hadn’t overproduced yet. Jennifer’s Body was even worse.
I finally got around to watching it over the weekend and I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece. I was expecting a B movie horror story. Instead what I got was horrible acting by Megan Fox (big surprise there) and laughable dialogue from Diablo Cody. I thought Juno was over the top with the slang, but JB blew Juno away. Cody cannot reasonably believe that normal teenagers talk like that, can she? Seriously, in what world do teenagers say jell-o for jealous or tell someone to move on dot org? When is the last time you heard a teenager say the phrase lesbi-gay? I really think Cody is a mixture of the old dad trying to stay cool using slang that no one uses and the mom who dresses like her daughter to seem young.
I know I shouldn’t come down too hard on her. I’m not a good writer either, but I also don’t get paid to do it. I’m pretty sure I could bang out a script using every slang phrase in the book and make a movie that is just as good, if not better, than Juno or Jennifer’s Body. The only difference between Cody and me is that I’m not a stripper-turned-screenwriter and I think that explains Hollywood’s fascination with her. Hollywood loves success stories and what’s better than a down-and-out stripper hitting it big with a screenplay? Remember, Ben Affleck has an Oscar for writing as well.
Facebook and Privacy
I remember when Facebook was a small startup targeted to students on college campuses. It was called The Facebook then, making reference to the freshmen facebook that many universities put out. It was a great and useful tool to keep in touch with your classmates, share lecture notes, and plan study groups. Then it began to grow and the creators saw opportunity. Next they opened it up to high school kids. Everyone knows once something is in the hands of high school kids it is forever ruined (slightly kidding). Then they opened it up to everyone. Not only that, they opened it up to businesses and application developers and that began the era of myspace-ification; making Facebook ugly and annoying. That hasn’t stopped their growth though. No, in fact, they are still growing by leaps and bounds and doing so they have made some really questionable decisions regarding your privacy. The latest round of decisions sold out the average user to big companies in order to make a quick buck. Not only that, but they’ve decided that once private information is now public.
Say you’re like me and have been a Facebook member for a long time. There were certain parts of your profile that you could keep private. It seems that the company no longer thinks those things should remain private, even though they explicitly said they would in the past.
That’s pretty troubling if you ask me, especially the part about them not even notifying users. How would you like to do a Google search of yourself and find information that was only available to your friends be made public without any sort of notification? I wouldn’t like it, that’s for sure. Not only is some information public now, but applications can now access your personal information. Read more
Baseball Diversity
While reading an article about the lack of black players in baseball I posed a question to my coworker. The exchange went as follows:
For those who might not understand why that is funny, pictured below is Brendan Ryan.
