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Many thanks to the Boston Red Sox for winning the 2007 World Series last night. Thanks might seem like an odd comment to a champion baseball team, but it's entirely appropriate here. You see, because of their winning I now get to fall asleep on our six-month-old, now-free bed.
For those of you living outside of New England and who haven't heard about Jordan's Furniture's "Monster Sale," they agreed to refund the selling price of beds, mattresses, sofas, desks, and dining tables purchased back in April, provided that the Sox win the World Series. Well, here were are. We should have bought a new mattress while we were at it.
Finally, I'd like to echo today's New York Times editorial - forget A-Rod and just sign Mike Lowell. Remember that he's World Series MVP, and (ironically) might be in consideration for AL MVP if Rodriguez didn't have the huge year that he did. Still, he can't do anything once the calendar turns from September to October, and Mike has two rings.
Jerad posted this in Baseball | Comments (2)
The only reason that Scott Boras and Alex Rodriguez could have announced now, in the 8th inning of the 4th game of the World Series, that A-Rod is going to opt-out of his contract with the Yankees would be to get the announcers to blab about it to everyone watching. Well, Tim McCarver and Joe Buck are doing just that. Alex had ten days after the end of the World Series to announce what he is going to do. There's no reason to hijack the World Series broadcast for this.
Jerad posted this in Baseball | Comments (0)
We spent a good bit of Saturday this past weekend babysitting our niece and nephew at our place. They had a great time, but Will, our nephew, really didn't want to stick around. He kept his hat and coat on the whole time and when we asked if he wanted to take his coat off he told us, "No thank you. I'm not staying." Then, when it was time to take them home, we walked down to our driveway and asked him if he wanted to get in the car to go home. This time he just said, "No, I'll take the bus," looking at the bus stopped across the street. I guess he wanted to get to the Green Line and stake out a place in line at Fenway before the game that night.
Jerad posted this in Kids | Comments (0)
The World Series is here, and Josh Beckett is already making the Rockies look like I did in little league. Of course, I'm rooting for the Sox, and not just because of the bag of money that we'll get if they win.
Maura and I got some standing room tickets to game 2 of the ALCS at Fenway Park. Yes, that was the 11-inning massacre that made Eric Gagne the most hated man in New England. We were able to stand behind home plate and get a lot of good pictures. Unfortunately, I wasn't lucky enough to get any World Series tickets. It might be time to put my name on that season ticket waiting list. By the time my name comes up, maybe I'll have the money saved to buy them.
By the way, this is post #201 on this blog. I had no idea that I was up in those numbers.
Jerad posted this in Baseball | Comments (0)
Here I am at 3 a.m. downloading the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows. I guess this is the digital equivalent of a midnight sale. I'd love for everyone to think that I'm just this hardcore of a fan, but I did NOT stay up just waiting for this email with the download link. It's been a long night and we just got home. I think I'll allow myself a listen to one or two songs, then I need to collapse into my bed.
Jerad posted this in Nuttin Much | Comments (0)
I'm sitting here at my desk at home tonight in front of my new dual-computer setup. Of course, the first is my trusty MacBook Pro. More surprisingly, the other is my 10-year old Pentium II Dell desktop. It's finally time to clean it up, do a clean install of Windows XP, and get rid of the thing. I bought this spring semester of my freshman year at Penn State. At that point, it's 300 MHz processor and 64 MB RAM was pretty smoking. Now I have a USB drive sitting here on my desk that's bigger than the 6 GB hard drive. Still, I'm going to miss it. Going through it one last time was very entertaining and nostalgic. The A: drive was still called "Jerad's Floppy," a renaming that my PSU roommate thought was just awesome, the hard drive was named Harold (for no particular reason), and I still had lots of great old software installed. There were many early music management, CD ripping, and MP3 compression tools; they weren't all integrated in something like iTunes at first. This PC evolved from when I first opened the box - a CD-RW drive (actually, two, I think), a new modem to replace the fried one, and 128 MB more RAM so that I could better do my senior thesis project. It was my everyday computer until I bought a Sony laptop in 2002. After that, it has just been used very sparingly, usually when I just need another PC turned on for some odd reason.
The hardest part of this process is going to be figuring out just where to send it. It's too old for anyone who's accepting PC donations, and I can't just trash it. I guess I'll just try to offer it for free on Craigslist and see what happens.
39 minutes to go, and it'll all be over.
Jerad posted this in Tech | Comments (0)
My January Red Sox ticket-buying experience is happening all over again. I was fortunate enough to be chosen for the chance to buy ALCS tickets for any potential games at Fenway Park. So, I've been sitting in front of my computer, missing lunch, and watching this damn virtual waiting room refresh every 30 seconds. All the tickets are probably already gone, but I'm still waiting. And waiting.
Update: Waiting over. After over an hour watching my browser auto-refresh, I finally was admitted to the login screen. I decided that I wanted to buy tickets to one of the first two games, since games six and seven aren't a sure thing. Game 1 was all gone, but I ended up with two standing room tickets for game 2 of the ALCS. Now the Sox just have to beat the Angels in the ALDS so that my tickets are actually usable.
Jerad posted this in Baseball | Comments (0)
As it usually does, news of a new Radiohead album is flooding across the internet today. There are a few differences this time, though. First, the band (specifically, guitarist Jonny Greenwood) put the information out on their message board. Second, he told us that the album will be released in just 10 days. Yep, that's right. So, they're not using a record label to do this; they're just putting it out as downloads through a new website named for the new album, In Rainbows. It gets even better - they haven't set a price for the downloads. You can go to the website, choose your own price, and place your order. I've heard of other bands doing something similar, but this is certainly the first that a band of their popularity has tried this. There's no time for the album to leak, no big billboards hyping it, no pre-release reviews to tease us. Ten days and it's just going to be out there.
There is a second option to buy the album and actually get something physical from the band. For £40.00, you can buy the "Discbox," which gets you the album plus a bonus disc (just call it a double album) on both CD and 10" vinyl, artwork, and extra digital media. This won't ship until early December, but you still can get the digital download with everyone else on October 10th. Of course, this is what I went for.
I've been hoping that they would do something without a label for this album, but I don't think I ever really believed that it would happen. This is going to be a very interesting experiment that hopefully will show the record labels what could be possible with new ways of music sales and distribution. How worried will the labels be if this album is very successful and other bands who are not under a contract realize that they might be able to do this? Radiohead certainly has a rabid internet following, so they are probably in a better position than most, but I can't help but hope that they're doing something really groundbreaking here.
Jerad posted this in Albums | Comments (0)
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