Road Trip

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I am back from my most recent roadtrip. I loaded up the Tesla and started letting the hands-off Full Self Drive (FSD) supervised take me to points North. First stopping in a campground in Tennesee and up to Pittsburgh for the CIDM Convex Conference (which was the best conference in years). There was a celebration of the 20 years of DITA XML. I was an earlier adopter. My presentation went well and I semi-stealth launched wisdomino. I demo'd some extra cool software we developed and will be selling in weeks to come. It's truely game changing. Of course, there will be much more than that to come. After that it was on to Franklin, PA. to meet with some colleagues in the mining division and onto the farm stopping in Olean NY for the night. I am pretty sure it was the first time I had driven across the entire Allegany National Forest. I ended up driving through the very dark forest expanse during a night time thunderstorm. Although I normally trust the Tesla FSD on the Interstat...
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Angie and I went to a rock concert Tuesday night at the Fonda Theater on Hollywood Blvd in LA. I hate traffic, so we took the Metrolink train to Union station in LA (we ate our dinner on the train) then 10 metro stops to Hollywood/Vine. It took about about an hour an 45 minutes.

It was a Мумий Тролль (Mumiy Troll) concert. He is from Angie's home city - a 9 hour flight from Moscow (Vladivostock). He is very popular in Russia. He has a unique whimsical style that is a cross between Russian folk Balalaika, and David Bowie. He uses decent poetry placed on top of simple -sometimes mocking melodies for popular effect.

He has been called "Russias biggest rock band, Mumiy Troll began as one of the most socially dangerous bands in the world as noted by a local Communist party chief in the former Soviet Union; yet, was hailed as Best Band of the Millennium by leading Russian music critics after the fall of communism. Mumiy Troll are the most influential and successful independent artists in Russia today. Part of Mumiy Troll's success can be attributed to their multi-genre sound, a hybrid of rock and pop which songwriter Lagutenko calls "rockapops". The Los Angeles Times has described the band "a nuclear meltdown of The Bravery, Tom Petty and The Afghan Whigs."

Angie interprets the poetry for me.

Russian

English



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