kenny's space

The Brotherz Band and I was invited to perform for the Benefit Concert For Haiti (or Viet Love 4 Haiti) on Sunday, February 21, 2010. It was a great experience and it probably changed some of our band (certainly me) perspective on our music "career".

We didn't have much time to practice and rehearse for the show as we have the music list on Friday, and on Saturday, we have a show with Cát Tuyền at the Déja Vu club. The band and I got out of the club at almost 3 AM, and we need to be at the airport by 7 AM so we didn't have much sleep, probably less than 2 hours.

The band arrived at John Wayne Airport around 10 AM local time, then head straight to the event location. We ate at the nearby restaurant (Mì Á Đông), then went to do sound check. We jam'ed with Luân Vũ (violinist) for 2 songs, then get ready for the main concert.

We got to meet some of the "legends" in the Vietnamese music community, such as anh Trung Nghĩa (he is really friendly, open, and fun to hang around with!!!), Sỹ Dự, Peter, etc... It was a great experience playing with them (and a nerve-breaking experience as well, since they are really "giants" and we are so small, at least that's how I feel!).

The concert went fine, I think we did okay, wasn't great, but wasn't bad either. We then went back to the hotel, took a shower, and then went out to eat. Our band drummer have a friend that also play drums, who also play at the mini-bar right inside the hotel we stayed, so we went down to jam along and meet some new friends. This is where I've met some of the best Vietnamese musicians, and changed the way I'll practice & play in the future!

The drummer' name is Doanh (or Danh!), and he is a real giant! I've never seen a Vietnamese drummer this good in my life, technically, feeling, tone, everything is just GREAT! And he was willing to show us his experiences, his guidance, and some very encouraging words about the band! I wish that I could have spend more time with him, even though I don't play drums! We went to his house the next day, and spend most of the time there before getting back to the airport and head back home. I hope that we can go back there sometime, play for some event, and get more chances to meet other musicians.

Some of the pix here are from anh Việt Anh, I'll upload some more pix from my camera as well as from anh Trung Nghĩa camera and others soon.

This week links list will be pretty short, as I'm exhausted from the California trip for the Benefit Concert for Haiti (btw, it was fun, and a very, VERY educational trip! Will talk about it later, if I remember!!! :))

ASP.NET MVC 2 Model Validation

WPF in Visual Studio 2010 - Part 1 : Introduction

Dynamic Master Pages in MVC

XBMC Integration Integrates XBMC with Windows 7 Media Center

Integrating Twitter Into An ASP.NET Website

C#: Causing myself pain with LINQ's delayed evaluation

Avoiding Uninstall/Reinstall when Debugging Out-of-Browser Apps

Silverlight Lessons Learned Materials

Partial Validation in ASP.NET MVC 2

Intro To jQuery Materials

Simple pager for ASP.NET MVC

Making your ASP.NET application work as a service

Inversion of Control (IOC) with XAML

Linq to SQL Profiler 1.0 Released!

Just some cool geek product, this table equipped with camera that see the notes and play them back :)

http://vimeo.com/8308494

“Nested Containers” in StructureMap 2.6.1

Manually Upgrading an ASP.NET MVC 1.0 application to ASP.NET MVC 2 (RC2)

SQL Heartbeat – my favorite free tool

Autofac 2.1 goes RC (the “me too!” release)

Silverlight Tools

A First Look at Unity 2.0

Sketchflow: Exploring Ideas

Combine, Minify, And Compress Your JavaScript

Ajax Control Toolkit (Now part of the ASP.NET Ajax Library) – Accordion Control CLOSED Startup State

jQuery 1.4.1 Intellisense with Visual Studio

Entlib 5.0 and Unity 2.0 – Beta 1 release

Silverlight Test Driven Development – Part II

New Expression Blend screencast series

Getting Started with WPF : Hello World in Multiple Flavors

Writing Efficient String Functions in C#

Sqlite on the iPhone - Retrieving the last inserted row id with MonoTouch

Site Authentication Required, Except Default.aspx

WCF and JQuery Exception Handling

ASP.NET MVC 2 Optional URL Parameters

Back to Basics: C# 4 method overloading and dynamic types

A New Way To Do Column Generation in Dynamic Data 4

XAML Power Toys and XAML Power Toys for Cider – New Versions Released

I came across this problem again today while working on my new laptop at my new job (NotionONE, as a software consultant.) I've seen this dialog before, where SQL 2008 prevent user from saving changes that involve recreation of table - which is a good thing on production environment.

If you DONT' want to see this dialog, especially in test/dev situations, follow these steps to disable it:

1. Click on Tools > Options
2. Select Designers and uncheck "Prevent saving changes that require table re-creation"