This last week I had the great pleasure of making my way to the Allstate Arena to see Metallica perform live…twice. On Monday night I headed over with Andy, Iman, and Scott. Scott hadn’t been to a Metallica show in 15 years and Andy had never been to a show so it was nice to treat the “old” guys to some fun. We were seated right in the players bench from when the Allstate hosts the Wolves hockey games. Sitting in the 3rd row was great. The first two rows had to look up and around the people on the floor. We were able to look right over everyone and as Iman put it so eloquently - “Right at crotch level” - What can I say…We’re classy!

As for fun, Metallica didn’t disappoint. The 2 hours and 6 minute show spanned the catalog of music from the past 3 decades including 7 songs off the new album. These guys still know how to bring the house down. The show starts out with a great laser light show as they break into “That Was Just Your Life” and they don’t slow down from there blistering through “The End of the Line”, “Creeping Death”, and “Ride the Lightning.” 20 Minutes into the show there are no signs of age, lost aggression or slowing up. Metallica looks like they’re having fun! The quick and heavy vibe of the new album mixes extremely well with their down stoke heavy early albums.

One thing Iman and I both noted about the sound when the concert first started it seems “rattled” and “fuzzy” something you’d expect out of an opening band or the United Center :-), but not from a headlining band like Metallica. This was not noticeable by the end for the first batch of songs. My assumption is it was a soundboard fix or guitar pickup that was fixed by the constant changing of axes throughout by both James and Kirk.

The energy for night was was electric. It had been 5 years since Metallica had made its way to Chicago which is way too long. The set list was blistering and of the three shows I’ve been to this tour (Phoenix, Chicago x2) it was my favorite.

Here are some great videos from the two shows (more review after the videos):

Tuesday night was just Iman and myself rocking out general adminsion style on the floor. (You’ll notice the upward angle and occasional arms in the recordings from night two.)

Metallica setup stage in the round complete with 8 mic locations and a rotating drum setup for Lars. While the opening bands struggled to occupy the entire stage it couldn’t be less true for Metallica. They made what was a gigantic stage seem as close to a local club stage as you can in a 20k+ capasity building. Their stage presence and ever growing personalities shined through and captured the audience song after song. I even noticed during a guitar doodle Lars hopped off stage and saw a young kid at the end of the stage taking a picture. Lars asked him for the camera, handed it to a stage hand posed for a once in a lifetime shot with the young boy before returning to the stage. I know there have been many jabs at Metallica since the Napster situation a decade ago, but these guys really care about their fans and they get it!

Further example of this care for the fans is their encore ritual of Seek and Destroy, but this time there was a slight twist. The house lights were brought up and as the first guitar riff echoed through the arena, dozens of large Metallica beach balls were launched from the rafters into the masses. They also stayed around on stage kicking any left over beach balls and throwing out every pick and drum stick into the stands for suvinirs. I saw multiple guitar picks get 15-20 rows up into the stands not to mention the 100s fo pics tossed into the pit. I was lucky enough to grab a 20 years edition Master of Puppets pick to add to my collection. It looks like it will be framed up with my Master of Puppets picture LP and added to Erin and my’s newly finished basement aka man-cave.

It was a great two nights and I can’t wait to be able to see them again. For those of you who didn’t have a chance to see the show, Metallica has made the MP3 and FLAC versions of the shows available for purchase at www.livemetallica.com

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Download the high resolution version of the pictures here

It’s been a long time coming. After over a year of research, development, sweat and tears the new site at trainsignal.com is live. This site is much different from the previous site that existed on Monster Commerce. With the completion of the Train Signal website I had a moment to spare and refocus on gary.eimerman.com a little and hence the new theme.

MC was a good choice for our shopping cart 3 years ago, but with the growth that we’ve experienced and customization that desire at Train Signal combine with the poor support and treatment we received from Network Solutions (bought Monster Commerce while we were on the platform) it was time for a change. A great deal has changed with the site…where to start???

The biggest change was our platform. We’ve moved from MC to AbleCommerce e-commerce platform. We also have a fully dedicated server which we have full control over and can customize for anything we plan on for the future. Customization was a big feature we looked at when we were shopping around for platforms. We don’t sell 1000s of products so we don’t require a cookie cutter store with the ability to quickly deploy 100s of products – which I might note that Able does do very well. Instead we needed a platform we could mold to fit our newly designed sales pages. This is where the new platform really sets itself apart from many of the others we looked at. While sitting on top of Able we’ve been able to code our pages to look unlike the majority e-stores out there.

There are many other changes on the site including the unveiling of our new inclusion of Transcender Quiz Applications with our training and a new and improved training lineup which now includes Windows Server 2008 training courses and newly organized Windows Server 2003/2000 training. This site will be treated differently than our site has ever been treated in the past. It is an living organism that will continue to grow and improve. I look forward to working with our customers and training audience to deliver the best computer training site available.

Now onto gary.eimerman.com – as you’ve probably noticed, I flipped over to a new theme. The old one was too dark and cluttered. I still need to do some improvements to this theme, but I’m already a fan of it…What do you think? If anyone wants to design a new header for the site I’d be more than happy to promote your services or barter with you for some network administration, computer consulting work. Art has never been my forte. I hope that I improved the usability of the site as well. The embedded wmv files are gone and have been replaced with a Silverlight based media player that should prevent the videos from automatically loading no matter what browser you’re using. I’ve noticed a couple of times where the pages have displayed funky or the videos wouldn’t necessarily display correctly. If you are consistently having this issue please let me know it’s not just a fluke and I’ll see what improvements I can make.

Overall, just keep your eyes open for ever improvements on both this site and www.trainsignal.com and give me feedback.

Dad Catches a Tuna in Costa Rica from Gary Eimerman on Vimeo.

As mentioned in the video blog, on our first day of fishing we came across a school of dolphin who were feeding on bait below. After catching a yellow fin tuna captain asked me if I wanted to go swimming with them and see if I could capture some underwater shots with my camcorder. Well, you don’t have to ask me twice so I tossed on a snorkel and fins and when captain said go I went. Sure enough after I turned around and faced the boat the dolphins were there as interested in me as I was in them. Here is some footage: