After being a fan for many years - since their first album - I finally saw the Black Crowes last night at the Madison Theatre in Kentucky.  It's a smallish theatre and only holds maybe a few hundred people.  I was very surprised that they were playing there since they usually play much larger places.

The show was general admission and normally - given that I'm 6' 3" - I tend to hang back as I try not to block people behind me.  Not this show. I was about 5 or 6 rows back the whole time. About 20 feet from Chris Robinson and 25 from Rich.  I hate being packed into crowds, but it didn't matter.

The show... best show I've ever seen. They started out playing 3 or 4 songs acoustically (Rich and Chris) and then after a few numbers the whole band kicked in.  They played for a little over 2 hours and did a great variety of material from their second album to their current one, with a few covers thrown in.  There were some great jams as well.  The jam they did at the end of Wiser Time made the hair on my arms stand up. 

I was really stoked that they played Thorn in My Pride, Remedy, Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution and so many other great songs.  I'm really excited to get the recording.  The Crowes tape every show and put them up for sale on Crowesbase.com.

One of the reasons that I'm so enamored with them is that they're a band that really plays. They interact with each other musically and really seem to enjoy it.  When another band member would take a solo, the other band members would pay close attention and play off of them. They're just a great group.

I'm definitely not going to miss them again.  I know that I probably won't ever be that close to the stage again or that I'll see a night like that again, but I'm definitely looking forward to seeing them again.

If you're a web designer or work on web-based applications, you should really take the A List Apart Survey for people who make websites. 

I've been spending a lot of time with jQuery lately and have been really digging it. In fact, I'm doing a short grok talk on it for the Dayton .NET Developers Group at the end of this month.

Here's a short snippet I came up with to resize text boxes so that the width of the textbox would be proportional to the maximum number of characters allowed by the maxlength property on the textbox. It's not exact - through trial and error I figured out that 7.3 and 8 work as ratios for maxlength value to the corresponding width. That's based on the font I'm using and the size of the textboxes (smaller ones seem to have a slightly different ratio than larger ones). You'll probably have to tweak those values to get what you need, but it's a start.

$('input[type=text]').each(function() {
    var max_length = $(this).attr('maxlength');
    var multiplier = (max_length > 10) ? 7.3 : 8;
    var w = (max_length * multiplier) + "px";
    $(this).width(w);
});