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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • If anyone has the opportunity and hasn’t done so yet, I highly recommend seeing them live while you still can. They’re getting up there in years now and Bruce’s voice is starting to show its age. Still great stage shows though.

    Same with Judas Priest. Rob Halford is starting to lose his rhythm and he looks like an old man who wandered out of the nursing home.





  • I grew up downloading songs a la carte and now I use services like Spotify and YouTube Music, so I never paid much attention to albums as a whole.

    But there’s a couple of standouts for me, albums I have listened all the way through multiple times, and they’re both from Iron Maiden:

    • Rock in Rio live, 2001

    Most of my life, I thought concerts were stupid because I’d only been to ones at like, the county fair, with shitty country music from amateur cover artists on blown out speakers and surrounded by drunk and rowdy rednecks.

    This is the album that convinced me that live shows were worth seeing. In my opinion, this is the gold standard for live albums. I’ve never seen any other band with so many in their discography, and it makes me wish that other bands released more. But it makes sense: Iron Maiden has always been a show band first, and a studio band second.

    The crowd has the perfect amount of presence in the mix. Someome took the time to make sure you can always hear them, adjusting the levels so that they never drown out the band and vice versa. And you can feel how large the audience is. And they’re total putty in Bruce’s experienced hands.

    It inspires a real sense of community that I’ve come to crave from live shows, even as an introvert, and it helped kick off a life-long addiction.

    • Brave New World, 2000

    I think we can all agree that almost every album has a weak track or two. One that’s just boring or doesn’t fit with the rest, that seems just kind of thrown in.

    Not this album.

    This album heralded the triumphant return of lead vocalist Bruce Dickinson and guitarist Adrian Smith after 7 and 10 years, respectively.

    It’s the first album with the full-bodied, punchy Iron Maiden sound that I’ve come to love. Instead of firing Janick Gers to make room for Smith, they just said “fuck it, let’s have three guitarists,” and it fucking works. And they still have the same lineup almost a quarter century later.

    Not every song is iconic, but they’re all enjoyable, and several of them would end up being staples of their setlists going forward. (They also played many of them at Rock in Rio as part of the supporting tour.)

    It’s not explicitly a concept album, but it very nearly works as one. And the album art is actually really fucking cool (Iron Maiden’s album art is admittedly hit or miss cough Dance of Death cough).












  • I ran up like a $5k bill over a couple weeks by having an application log in a hot loop when it got disconnected from another service in the same cluster. When I wrote that code, I expected the warnings to eventually get hooked up to page us to let us know that something was broken.

    Turns out, disconnections happen regularly because ingress connections have like a 30 minute timeout by default. So it would time out, emit like 5 GB of logs before Kubernetes noticed the container was unhealthy and restarted it, rinse and repeat.

    I know $5k is chump change at enterprise scale, but this was at a small scale startup during the initial development phase, so it was definitely noticed. Fortunately, the only thing that happened to me was some good-natured ribbing.