Vienna Teng performed in front of a huge crowd at Cowell Theater last night, accompanied by musicians Jim Batcho (drums), ??? (bass), Eric Cheng (cello), Marika Hughes (cello), and Alan Lin (violin). Marika and Alan will be touring with Vienna for part of the year. Having toured with Vienna in the past, I wonder what kind of van or truck they are going to rent; there’s a lot of equipment to be transporting this time around!

Hearing her music with a full band is quite an experience. The sounds have more depth and are much richer. It’s neither better nor worse than just her and the piano, just different. A good kind of different! The opening act, Noe Venable was pretty good too, hitting my soft-spot for female vocalists.

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I had lunch the other day with Dardy and Mr. Syndromes at Los Charros in Mountain View. As usual, Dardy and I ordered the scrumptious wet burritos with fried carnitas. Being a vegetarian, Syndromes got the the veggie burrito. I hope that Los Charros doesn’t go out of business, because they make some really good burritos! There are a number of places that have closed recently on or near Castro Street, including Global Village Cafe, Maharaja (to be replaced by Chef Liu’s, which was a few doors down), and the Lime Light.

It’s always an experience meeting an online personality for the first time. We have the familiarity from reading each other’s blogs and comments or from knowing what they look like in photos. Still, that familiarity might quickly disappear once you meet in person. Fortunately, syndromes was as cool as he is honest on his web site. I admire the two of them for being so honest and upfront on their blogs. I’ve kept things relatively innocuous on my site, never straying too far into controversial or taboo subjects. That may change ever so slightly once I switch over to a better blogging system than the custom one I’m using now. The system I use now doesn’t lend itself well to posting random thoughts.

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I was on assignment this evening for the Stanford Daily, charged with photographing Gene Washington, the current NFL Director of Football Operations. He was at Stanford to give a talk on making Black America better. The seminar was part of the annual Black Liberation Month. When Washington was an undergraduate at Stanford, he was one of 25 black students out of 10,000 students. One of the reasons he attended Stanford, as opposed to an Ivy League school, was its concerted effort to integrate minority students into the college community. He followed up his collegiate career with a nice NFL career with the 49ers and the Lions, making 4 consecutive Pro Bowls from 1969-1972. Today, as Director of Football Operations for the NFL, Washington’s most visible responsibility is that of doling out those weekly fines we’ve seeing more of in recent seasons. From Terrell Owen’s Sharpie incident to Joe Horn’s cell phone stunt, these actions have made Washington a busy man, someone NFL players dread to hear from.

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The recent storm in the Bay Area has been pretty bad. No, it’s not as bad as the one I drove through with Vienna and Jim on tour in Tennessee last year, but it’s close. The image you see is an overturned pickup truck on Highway 101. What you don’t see behind it is a green sports car whose front is caved in and which is facing the opposite direction. The two cars must have clipped each other, letting nature and physics take over.

When I arrived on campus, I parked in the lot across the street from our office. I felt fortunate to grab one of the last spots in the lot. Hours later when I came to the car to leave, I realized why that spot was open. It was a fricking A spot! Due to the recent construction on our side of campus, Stanford parking changed some C parking spots in A parking spots. Sitting on my dashboard, still dry from the lack of rain in the afternoon, was a nice parking ticket. Damn! I hate parking tickets! And, I hate the fact that I could have prevented all of this by looking up at the fricking A permit sign!

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Warm Strangers, the second album from singer-songwriter Vienna Teng was released today. Vienna performed in front of a huge crowd at the Borders Bookstore in Palo Alto. Two years ago, only a handful of people might have attended one of her in-store performances. Now, the line goes up and down the stairwell and around the second floor aisles! It has been quite the treat to see her fan base grow over the years.

For many, this was the first opportunity to hear new tracks such as Homecoming, Shasta, Mission Street, Atheist Christmas Carol, and the Green Island Serenade. As Letterman said of Waking Hour, “I’ve heard the entire CD and there’s not a dud on this.”

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Following Vienna’s performance at Borders, I went to my monthly SNUG meeting. The usual crowd was there, including Kevin Smith, who was having some problems getting his Newton to connect to his Mac. We tried a number of techniques to no avail, including using a Keyspan USB-to-Serial adapter and Kevin’s Ethernet card. We could not get Newton Connection Utilities to see Kevin’s Newton in Classic mode on his PowerBook.

I was about to give up when I thought about using a wireless card. Fortunately, Greg had brought his dLink 802.11 PC Card. We created an ad-hoc wireless network with his laptop, configured Hiroshi Noguchi’s excellent 802.11b Newton driver, and fired up the NCU. Lo and behold, the Newton saw Kevin’s PowerBook and we were good to go!

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This just in! Copies of Vienna Teng’s new album Warm Strangers were spied on the shelves at Santana Row Best Buy! The second full-length album from Vienna Teng was supposed to be released on Tuesday, February 24, 2004. It is likely that some over-zealous employee gave the go-ahead to put it up. Warm Strangers was also seen on Apple’s iTunes Music Store a few weeks ago, but a return trip to the ITMS reveals that the album is now offline.

Vienna will be performing at the Borders bookstore in Downtown Palo Alto tomorrow evening. On Sunday, she’ll be on stage at Cowell Theater in the Fort Mason complex in San Francisco. Rumor has it that cellist Eric Cheng will be joining her on stage for a few songs! It’s a not to be missed event, with tickets still available!

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Larry Lessig is a modern day Don Quixote. He’s the perserver of the integrity of copyright and the champion of Creative Commons! I just hope that he has more success at jousting the legal windmills than he has been having lately.

Lessig spoke Thursday afternoon in a joint seminar with the Reuters and Knight Fellows at Stanford. His talk was similar to the one that Creative Commons’ CEO Glen Brown gave a few months ago, but Lessig jazzed it up a bit with an snazzy PowerPoint/Keynote presentation. I do think he should go slow on the slide jumping… it felt like I was watching an MTV video… too many quick cuts!

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Stanford University hosted the 8th Annual Collegiate Wushu Championship Saturday in Burnham Pavilion.

If this was the 8th year of the tournament, how come I never heard of it when I was studying Tai-Chi as an undergrad? I was surprised by the relative lack of competitors at the tourney. It seemed like there were less than a dozen schools represented at collegiates! I also noticed that there were only a few competitors for the Yang Tai-Chi form. I joked to Rae that I should have jumped (ala Andy Lau in Running on Karma) onto the floor and competed!

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Here are some photos that I took over the weekend. On Saturday, Rae and I went up to Vista Point along Highway 280. We’ve both driven by the exit (actually, there are two of them in between Edgewood and Highway 92), but we’ve never stopped to see what it’s all about. The view isn’t earth-shattering, but it is nice. I had forgotten my allen wrench, so I had to hold my breath when I mounted the 70-200 and 1D combo on my tripod using the 1D’s tripod mount. What I don’t get is why tripod mounts are so expensive; after all, they’re just pieces of machined-metal!

We saw Touching the Void, the docudrama about Joe Simpson and Simon Yates famous climb up… and down Siula Grande in Peru. This movie blows away every climbing movie I’ve seen in the theaters thus far (though it’s not hard to beat things like K2, Cliffhanger, and Vertical Limit). As other reviewers have mentioned, even though you know that Simpson and Yates survive, the movie keeps you in suspense because you don’t know how they survive. I highly recommend seeing Touching the Void!

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