The Bridge School Benefit Concert and GOOGLE!!

Yesterday was soooooo sweet. I got a tour of Google (yes, it rocked) and went to an awesome concert for 9 hours. Fantastic.

Last night I went to the Bridge School Benefit Concert (http://www.bridgeschool.org), a charity concert organized by Neil Young and his wife for The Bridge School.

It was ammmmmmmmmmaaaaaaazing. It started at 4pm and went until 1am!! Amazing 9 hr concert for only $43?!!

• Neil Young
• Pearl Jam
• Dave Matthews Band
• Brian Wilson
• Foo Fighters
• Trent Reznor
• Death Cab for Cutie
• Gillian Welch
• Devendra Banhart

For those of you who don't know, Trent Reznor is from Nine Inch Nails and Brian Wilson was the lead singer and author of most of the Beach Boys' songs. It was a really awesome concert and everyone was super talented. It was a totally acoustic show so seeing bands like Foo Fighters and Trent Reznor aka Nine Inch Nails acoustic was pretty awesome.

Death Cab For Cutie was awesome as expected, they are kindof in that new Pop-Indie crowd, The O.C. soundtrack vibe, totally fantastic. They were really good in concert too.

Foo Fighters were nuts. "There goes my hero" was the best one they played.

Trent Reznor played a lot of funky and weird music but also he played his song "Hurt" which is really really intense and he did a great job.

I am not specifically a Pearl Jam fan but maaaan they were good. The singer rocks and they were rockin' out pretty fierce!!

Brian Wilson was one of the best acts of the night. He sung a whole bunch of the Beach Boys songs that he wrote in 1960, it was sooooooooo cool. It was pretty legendary to see him perform and the sound was awesome.

And for the best show of the night... Dave Matthews OF COURSE, ohhhhhhhhhh man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It was great. The best rendition of Ants Marching I've heard in a live concert so far. It was nuuuuuuuts. They just went crazy. They played 5 or 6 songs and each one was over 10 minutes I think. They started with Loving Wings which was really cool and I haven't heard in concert yet. They also played The Warehouse and Grace is Gone. They ended with a 15 minute jam session of Neil Young's "Cortez The Killer" with Neil Young playing with them!! It was soooooooo nuts. Amazing and not quite the same electric guitar jam that is on the Central Park Concert's version of "Cortez The Killer" but it was still totally amazing. So crazy to see Dave Matthews jammin' so fierce with Neil Young!!

So the concert totally rocked and we had a great time. Matt Parrott showed up and were were rockin' out for the Dave Matthews set. I also ran into a bunch of buddies from Waterloo. They are all working out here in California or in Seattle, I saw my friend Travis who loves Dave Matthews Band and he came all the way from Seattle for the concert!! Haha it rocked.

Ok so if that wasn't enough excitement for the day, guess what I did before the concert?!??!?! Well since most of my Waterloo friends that I went with to the concert are working at Google this term, and since the Shoreline Amphitheatre is like 3 min walk from Google... I got A TOUR OF GOOGLE in Mountain View, California!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It was awesome.

In a sentence: Glorious amounts of free food. Free super fancy fresh juice, coffee, cereal, fruit, yoghurt, and tons and tons of snacks and M&Ms and Reese's Pieces and Orangina and Jones Soda and those good Starbucks Frappucino things and more and more and more. It was insane. Also, the toilets have heated seats. Haha so all of these insane extras and stuff, and cool whiteboards everywhere in case you have an idea and need to write it down. It was a very cool, open workspace, a lot like the other really awesome Bay Area computer companies. Nice, big area which looked like it would be a very comfortable work environment. I heard that the two CEOs have regular desks too, that's pretty interesting. So lots of the guys from Waterloo work there and they sound like they are enjoying it. They are living in San Francisco so they have something like a 1.5 hour commute every day which kinda sucks but they said they wanted to try living in San Francisco. There was a really cool globe image that showed the frequency of web queries coming from different parts of the world. That rocked. Also there were some hilarious and cool projectors that were showing actual search queries that people were making. Amazing stuff and what a nice place. Insanely huge workout room with like 50 ellipticals and treadmills with TV screens on them. Yaron said that actually the workout room fills up and gets pretty busy a lot of the time, which is pretty crazy!

So yeah, yesterday was pretty awesome. Seeing Google was suuuuuuuuuper cool and it was crazy to see how many free snacks were around, it would certainly be easy to get carried away. It's like you've won a food shopping spree, and it's all FREE and it's FREE EVERYDAY?!?!?! Whoa that is crazy. Other than the obvious awesomeness of free food and heated toilet seats it sure was cool over there and looked like an interesting and very cool and comfortable place to work. The food was good too. :) haha. The concert also totally rocked and it was sweet to see Dave Matthews for the 8th time!!

We stayed over in the South Bay and then caught the CalTrain this morning and then I transferred onto the BART to get back to Emeryville. We went out for breakfast and then Matt Parrott came in and we went to Ikea. I got some silly plush toys for my desk at work, a big blue shark and a small blue shark and some rats which are pretty cool.

I prepared my presentation for tomorrow, I am showing some software I wrote so that will be really fun. Tonight we watched Curious George and just chilled out a bit which was good. I am still listening to Brett Dennen and Joe Purdy who I heard at that concert a few weeks ago, they are reeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaally good.