Green for stuff you’ve done,
Blue for stuff you are planning to do,
Magenta for stuff you wish you could do one day… or would be interested in trying,
Strike-Thru for stuff you’d never want to do… or normal if you’re not interested.

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Starring:
Erick Bateman – Cashier/Barista
Evan Cunningham – Environmentally-conscious customer

Thanks to:
Salt Spring Coffee (saltspringcoffee.com & carboncool.ca)
Sean-Patrick Spriggs – Manager of Salt Spring Café (Main St. @ 27th in Vancouver, BC)

Official Opinion: “Better than the second, not as good at the first.”

WARNING: SPOILERS ARE IN THIS POST!

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I feel that putting this logo here is necessary because of how many utterly confused looks I got when I told people about the “Virgin Fest”. Virgin – Atlantic, Mobile, Megastore… “From England with love” … THAT Virgin. Trust me, there wouldn’t have been a beer garden if it was for virgins only. And there was a “live txt” screen sponsored by Motorola and Virgin Mobile — lot of pregnancy announcements on there… but if you want to get detailed, I’m sure the 8 – 13 year old Killers fans were virgins.

Anyway, so this is the first year that the VFest has come to Vancouver. Usually Toronto is the only Canadian date. It’s been occurring in the UK for something like 7 years. It consists of two days (separate admission tickets) and features multiple bands on multiple stages (one main stage). I’d describe it as a ‘more mainstream festival, about a third of the size (band-wise) as Warped Tour, yet at the same venue.

Sunday, May 20th, pouring rain, featured Muse, Rise Against, Billy Talent, and My Chemical Romance (among a lot of openers and smaller-stagers). Monday, May 21st, shining brightly, featured Metric, Hot Hot Heat, AFI, and The Killers. Yes… I went on Monday! (*does a little AFI AFI AFI dance*) I saw MCR on the Taste of Chaos Tour with The Used a couple years back. (P.S. The Used are on Warped Tour this summer.)

SIDE NOTE: Huge kudos to the organizers who promoted recycling of all materials during the festival. (Only odd thing is all the foam hands… but I suppose they biodegrate.) Flick Off had a booth there, and you could win all sorts of swag by bringing in your bottles throughout the day and keeping tally.

AFI was aaammmaazzzzing (as always). Davey is a little stage drama queen and I LOVE IT! Hahah the stage show is half the reason for actually going to concerts. The other half is the music OF COURSE… which is why I was a little disappointed with The Killers. The live show sounded exactly like the album; not necessarily a bad thing… but you don’t go to a show to hear the album. And Brandon and the boys weren’t really being very interesting. Eka (who I went with) said that she felt the same way, and wasn’t too impressed with Hot Hot Heat’s stage show either. Metric was pretty good live, I’d definitely buy their CD if I was hearing them for the first time there.

Davey’s nails were so pretty, his new hair is amusing. I’m so glad Jade’s hair is the same… and Hunter shaved his head!! Adam – same as always. I was super surprised through that Davey wasn’t wearing something glittery. I’ll never forget when I saw AFI for the first time at the Commodore Ballroom with Anna and she pointed to Davey and said, “his lips sparkle.” And she sounded sooooo dumbfounded by it. Best moment ever.

Can’t wait for AFI to head a tour of their own – then they’ll play more of their old stuff, not just Decemberunderground and Sing The Sorrow. As with most Festival/Tours… it’s always leading up to the closing band. Because The Killers are bigger right now (airtime) than AFI, even though AFI has been around longer… it felt like AFI opened for The Killers. I would have been rocking out at the front if so many little children hadn’t staked out at like 1:00pm for The Killers at 8:30. I like grabbing some security railing, not moshing; because I’m short, I can just jump and watch the band and sing along. That’s the best. I remember seeing New Found Glory open for Green Day. I was up at the very front singing along with every song and the bassist, Ian, reached over and handed me his bass pick. It was awesome. (Speaking of New Found Glory – they’ll be at Warped ’07 also…)

Anywho – go see AFI live if you ever get the chance. Once The Killers get some more CDs behind them, they should develop a more interesting show. I suppose it’s difficult only having two CDs to work from.

So I’ve just converted, as many of you know, to Mac. After working on Macs so often at school I was sold. I’ve been saving since basically after Christmas, finally broke down and bought a Macbook through Apple Online with all my birthday money and savings. Then last night, as I’m trying to solve the iPod issues (I’ll get into that in a minute) I discover that they’ve just released NEW Macbooks! For a Macbook with the specs I got, the price has been reduced $200; For the price I paid, I could have got 120GB (over 80GB) and 2.16GHz (over 2.0GHz). I’m on hold with Apple Store right now. They just tried to offer me a $50 credit.

Now the iPod issues! Oooh my. Have you ever seen a sad-pod icon? Well for your sake, I hope you never do! It means that your iPod’s hardware is screwed… and you need to replace it. Not such a big deal if you’ve got your iTunes all fine and dandy… but a HUGE deal if you were trying to use your iPod as a hard disc to transfer your songs from one computer to the other. (And your old computer is gone). I called Apple and they told me that my warranty has ended, which was weird since I swear I bought extended 2-year warranty. They also told me they could not guarantee that they could recover my songs, in fact they don’t even try.

I’m actually finding this reeeeally funny, after I got TOTALLY upset. I will have to reimport all my CDs, and get CW to send me a bunch of songs… but I suppose I did have a lot of trash on my iPod that I really didn’t listen to. The good news is that although Apple claims my warranty ended, I called Future Shop and they do have me on file for buying 2-year warranty (which ends August 2007). So I’ll head over there later today with my iPod I guess!

I’m still on hold with Apple. The Apple PhoneMan has his Supervisor looking over my situation.