There has been a #myfirstconcert hashtag going around Twitter. I tossed in my entry on Friday, and @Pete_Brown mentioned some of his favorite concerts from back in the day. Pete’s tweets got me thinking about concerts I have seen over the years. So, over the weekend I compiled a list (to the best of my recollection). I don’t think I have missed any, but I’ll update the list if I think of any others.

• 1984 George Carlin (Stabler Arena – Bethlehem, PA)
• 1985 Robin Williams (Stabler Arena – Bethlehem, PA)
• 1986 Simple Minds / The Call (Stabler Arena – Bethlehem, PA)
• 1987 Def Leppard / Queensryche (The Spectrum – Philadelphia, PA)
• 1988 Bobby McFerrin (Moravian College – Bethlehem, PA)
• 1988 George Carlin (Muhlenberg College – Allentown, PA)
• 1988 Sam Kinison (Stabler Arena – Bethlehem, PA)
• 1988 Whitesnake / Bad English (The Spectrum – Philadelphia, PA)
• 1988 Monsters of Rock (Van Halen / Metallica / Scorpions / Dokken / Kingdom Come) (JFK Stadium – Philadelphia, PA)
• 1989 .38 Special (Heiges Field House – Shippensburg, PA)
• 1989 Bon Jovi / Skid Row (The Spectrum – Philadelphia, PA)
• 1989 Ratt / Britney Fox / Kix (Stabler Arena – Bethlehem, PA)
• 1989 Cinderella / Winger / Bulletboys (The Spectrum – Philadelphia, PA)
• 1989 Howie Mandel (Stabler Arena – Bethlehem, PA)
• 1990 Howe II (Airport Music Hall – Allentown, PA)
• 1990 Tora Tora (Airport Music Hall – Allentown, PA)
• 1990 Madonna / Technotronic (Brendan Byrne Arena – East Rutherford, NJ)
• 1991 Queensryche / Warrior Soul (Stabler Arena – Bethlehem, PA)
• 1991 Guns N’ Roses / Skid Row (Hershey Park – Hershey, PA)
• 1993 Bobcat Golthwait (Stars – Allentown, PA)
• 1994 Live (Unplugged) (Lupo’s – Bethlehem, PA)
• 1994-06-04 Pink Floyd (Veteran’s Stadium – Philadelphia, PA)
• 1995 Weezer (Stars – Allentown, PA)
• 1995 Lisa Loeb (Norfolk Tides Pre-Game Show) (Harbor Park – Norfolk, VA)
• 1996 G3 (Joe Satriani / Steve Vai / Eric Johnson) (Valley Forge Music Fair – Valley Forge, PA)
• 1996 Madder Rose / Goo Goo Dolls / Bush (Stabler Arena – Bethlehem, PA)
• 1997 Kenny Wayne Shepher Band / Wide Mouth Mason (Lupo’s – Bethlehem, PA)
• 1997 Fuel (CD Release Party) (Sterling Hotel – Allentown, PA)
• 1997 No Doubt / Shelter (The Electric Factory – Philadelphia, PA)
• 1997-06-07 Dave Matthews Band / Bela Fleck & the Flecktones (Sony/Blockbuster Center – Camden, NJ)
• 1997-07-26 Lilith Fair (Jill Sobule / Once Blue / Victoria Williams / Joy Askew / Paula Cole / Julianna Hatfield / Fiona Apple / Cardigans / Tracy Chapman / Sarah McLachlan) (PNC Bank Arts Centre – Holmdel, NJ)
• 1997 G3 (Joe Satriani / Steve Vai / Kenny Wayne Shepherd / Robert Fripp) (The Electric Factory – Philadelphia, PA)
• 1997-08-13 Lilith Fair (Liz Berlin / Yungchen Lhamo / Patty Griffin / Holly McNarland / Shawn Colvin / Lisa Loeb / Indigo Girls / Jewel / Sheryl Crow / Sarah McLachlan) (Montage Mountain – Scranton, PA)
• 1998 Kiss (First Union Center – Philadelphia, PA)
• 1998 Lisa Loeb / Shawn Colvin (The Electric Factory – Philadelphia, PA)
• 1998-12-31 Rusted Root (The Electric Factory – Philadelphia, PA)
• 1999-05-25 Dave Matthews Band / Santana / The Roots (Giants Stadium – East Rutherford, NJ)
• 1999-05-28 Steve Vai / Eric Sardinas (Trocadero – Philadelphia, PA)
• 2001 Jim Breuer (Theater of Living Arts – Philadelphia, PA)
• 2001-07-12 G3 (Joe Satriani / Steve Vai / John Petrucci) (Keswick Theatre – Glenside, PA)
• 2003-07-27 Lollapalooza Tour (Jane’s Addiction / Audioslave / Incubus / Queens of the Stone Age / Jurassic 5 / The Donnas / The Distillers / Kings of Leon / boysetsfire) (Tweeter Center – Camden, NJ)
• 2003-11-05 G3 (Joe Satriani / Steve Vai / Yngwie Malmsteen) (Keswick Theatre – Glenside, PA)
• 2005-03-28 Steve Vai / Eric Sardinas (Trocadero – Philadelphia, PA)
• 2006-06-11 Zappa Plays Zappa (Tower Theater – Upper Darby, PA)
• 2007-04-07 G3 (Joe Satriani / John Petrucci / Paul Gilbert) (Tower Theater – Upper Darby, PA)
• 2008-07-30 Zappa Plays Zappa (Grand Opera House – Wilmington, DE)

Most, if not all, developers have a favorite media player. My tool of choice for audio files is MediaMonkey. I use it to listen to my MP3 music collection, Podcasts and Shoutcast streams. It is a powerful tool with advanced syncing, file organization and tagging functionality. The file formats supported out of the box include MP3, OGG, WMA, FLAC, MPC, WAV, CDA, M3U and PLS.

This is the first part of a 5-part review. Future posts will provide more detailed coverage of the following topics:

• Part 2: Podcasts
• Part 3: Streaming and Online Music Stores
• Part 4: File tagging and organization
• Part 5: Advanced Settings

The current version of MediaMonkey is v3.0.2. There Standard and Gold editions of the product. The standard edition is free, and the Gold edition costs less than $20. Here’s a breakdown of the features available in each version.

I found the extra features in the Gold edition to be worth the $19.95 price tag. Here’s a screen shot of the application with labels added for each part of the application.

One of the strengths of MediaMonkey is how well it handles large media libraries. It claims to handle libraries consisting of 50,000+ music files and playlists. I don’t have 50,000 MP3s but I do have a fairly large collection, most of which were ripped my CD collection, and MediaMonkey never breaks a sweat. I’ve tried managing my collection with other software, iTunes, Windows Media Player, WinAmp to name a few. WMP didn’t perform nearly as well, and iTunes was even worse. WinAmp did perform admirably, but it doesn’t offer as rich a feature set.

Upcoming posts will dive deeper into those features. In Part 2, I will talk about managing and listening to Podcasts in MediaMonkey. Stay tuned…

Silverlight/WPF/Popfly

• EntitySpaces and Silverlight Demo – Part 1: Propagating EntitySpaces Data (Jon Davis)
• Simplify Using 2D Graphics in WPF and Silverlight (Andrej Benedik)
• DrawingBrush and Deep Clone in Silverlight (Tamir Khason)
• Cracking Open Zip Files in Silverlight 2 Beta 1 (Josh Twist)
• Creating Music For Popfly Game Creator (Ben Anderson)
• AutoComplete for Silverlight TextBoxes (Nikhil Kothari)
• http://www.codeplex.com/sdlsdk (Jimmy Schementi)

.NET

• LINQ to XML, Namespaces and VB (Daniel Moth)
• Command-Query Separation and Immutable Builders (Matthew Podwysocki)
• What Arrays and Pointers Have in Common – or – Why Arrays Start at Zero (Karl Seguin) – Link of the Day
• Recent ADO.NET Entity Framework Provider News – Demos and Downloads (David Sceppa)
• Stream Processing XML in IronPython and Deserializing XML with IronPython (Harry Pierson)
• F# in 20 Minutes – Part I (Chris Smith)
• LINQ.Flickr 1.3 (Mehfuz)
• SharePoint as a WCF Host (Sahil Malik) - This link doesn’t appear to be working right now, but the title piqued my interest. So, I’m hoping it will be working very soon.

Visual Studio

• 11 More Visual Studio Shortcuts You Should Know (Amit Raz)
• Becoming a Jedi – Part 1 of N (James Kovacs)

Miscellaneous

• What’s Your Circle of Interest? (Paul Stovell)
• Addict-o-matic: The Newest Metasearch (Mike Gunderloy)
• 25 WYSIWYG Editors Reviewed (Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz)
• The Bookshelf (James Kovacs)
• stackoverflow Podcast #4 (Jeff Atwood)
• Measuring Programmer Job Satisfaction (Jess)
• Office Open XML Is Now an ISO Standard! (Cornelius J. van Dyk)
• Blogs From the Live Mesh Team (Mesh Team)

SQL Server

• SQL Server 2005: Get Full Information About Transaction Locks (Mladen Prajdić)

PowerShell

• PowerShell + WPF (Rob Relyea)
• Next Windows PowerShell Will Have GUI, Remote Management Support (Scott M. Fulton, III)

Link Collections

• Interesting Finds: May 6, 2008 (Jason Haley)
• Visual Studio Links #24 (Darren Stokes)
• Links Today (2008-05-06) (Matt Hinze)
• Silverlight Cream for May 06, 2008 — #268 (Dave Campbell)
• The Morning Brew #88 (Chris Alcock)
• Link Listing – May 6, 2008 (Christopher Steen)

Book of the Day

Check out the stellar review over at EverythingUSB.

Here’s the product page on iRiver America.

var addthis_pub = ‘alashcraft’;