Oh Brian!

[Warning: This is not a Tech post!]

This past week my wife and I saw Elton John's "Red Piano" show at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas while on vacation. What follows are some thoughts and notes about this show.

- It was very expensive. We were in the first balcony in seats that cost over $200 each.
- Elton performed for barely 90 minutes. For that kind of venue you'd of thought that he could go a little longer.
- Maybe because it is Vegas Elton and company felt that the music had to be performed loud. Very loud. Elton doesn't do loud very well.
- What's with all the breasts? There were breasts in the movie clips and huge inflatable breasts hanging from the rafters at one point. They seemed out of place.
- I was dissapointed that many (at least 3 or 4) of the stage props didn't work.
- There were no dancers other than those folks invited up from the first row for one song.
- I'm not a big Celine Dion fan; but what's with all the trash talking about her during the show? The show is in the Celine Dion theatre at Caesars. Elton (who appears to have gained some considerable weight as opposed to his likeness at Madame Tassaud's down the strip) called her a "Q Tip" (amongst other things).

If you are thinking of seeing this show I'd suggest savinbg the money and buying the music on iTunes.

For what it's worth; the Blue Man Group show at the Venetian is fantastic! I also highly recommend the Penn and Teller show at the Rio.

ComputerWorld has a good article that talks about how Google build their own servers to save costs and because standard products do not exactly meet its needs. Google does no’t actually need very reliable servers because it has written its software to compensate for hardware outages.

Another reason that Google builds its own servers is equally simple: it can save costs on power consumption. The power supply is one place that energy is unnecessarily lost. One-third of the electricity running through a typical power supply leaks out as heat. That i’s a waste of energy and also creates additional costs in the cooling required because of the heat added to a building.