The Arcade Fire are so good

I went to see the Arcade Fire last night after several years of trying to see them but tickets being completely sold out. They were amazing. So musically on top of things, and at the same time, just going crazy on stage. I was disappointed that the crazy guy and the red-haired guy didn't start head-butting each other with motorcycle helmets on this time, but even still, what a great concert. One of the biggest venues in Boston was completely sold out, and a lot of people left the seats to the sidelines to dance. Here's a vid of the encore below, not mine, but this guy had better seats:

So, who wants to drill more?

Seriously, how can anyone still want to keep on with off-shore drilling. The US Gulf wetlands are facing the prospect of being irreparably damaged for a generation, if not more. The machinery to get the oil out is ridiculously complicated and difficult to install.... It's a wonder that disasters like BP's haven't occurred more often, or been equally catastrophic.

An oil rig, the helicopters to service it, and the ships to drill and transport petroleum to the coast all together cost 100's of millions of dollars - and that's just the initial fixed cost to get the thing up... Never mind the net present value of wages, maintenance, and operational costs for the lifetime of the investment... If just a fraction of that were deferred, to say, a venture fund that focused on clean energy start-ups, we might even find a couple of real solutions. Hopefully Better Place and the Nissan Leaf will catch on in a big way, soon.

What kind of politician brings eggs and smoke bombs to Parliament?

Fist fights break out in Ukraine between lawmakers: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/04/27/ukraine.punchup/index.html?hpt=C2

It would be awesome to be in a melodic metal band

I'd have to grow my hair out a bit

Yesterday, was one of the best days of my MBA

Yesterday was one of those days where everything just seemed to click into place. If only Butler had beat frickin' Duke, the day would have been perfect. Yesterday's highlights:

• Managed to pull together a financial negotiation with another team in hours after we found out that our results were due a day earlier than what we had scheduled for, stuck to our guns based off of our financial evaluations, and walked away from a pretty good deal (that probably did go down in real life) when the other team wouldn't budge and we thought they were taking advantage of us
• Really started to understand venture capital term sheets after having written our own as an assignment this past weekend, and negotiated with a team representing the entrepreneurs based on a real life deal. On presenting our results to the class, the VC who actually made the deal cut all of us to shreds when we'd done something stupid... I started to get it, and realized how little I had actually understood this entire process - learned more from one assignment and the subsequent class than I had the entire preceding semester
  
• Started to grasp the underlying methodology for alternative investing (PE, Hedge Funds) in a mindset that had never occurred to me in the slightest before in a seminar taught by the guy that started Goldman Sachs' PE practice. As a bonus, he told us how he'd gotten to that position in what ended up being a pretty fascinating life story... Also provided a mantra for a mindset on life:

  "you never know where life will take you, so don't be afraid to go there"

• Went to a meeting with Sloan's IT division to find out that a lot of stuff I'd been pushing for for a year will get done soon, and even more cool things that I couldn't have foreseen
  
• Post-MBA plans got a lot more solid, and in a very good way
  

A Strokes song not on any records

Never heard this one before, it's called "Hawaii", and from a live recording. Pretty cool:

A simple, but awesome music vid

I love me some techno music videos, especially those done by fans.

Here's a Swiss guys' jaunt around the alps put to some Armin Van Buuren mixes. Pretty awesome. Amazingly, he never hits a stop light: