‘Til Tuesday

I was having a hard time with a title for this post, so I went with ‘Til Tuesday because I can’t wait for Tuesday. A few things are going happen on Tuesday. It’s the start of August and I’ll be going to the Sox game with Joe, but most importantly, I am going to have me some coffee.

Yup, I’m done with my coffee *boycott* and will be back on the wagon after a five week layoff. I am going to celebrate with a large iced coffee from Dunkin Donuts in the afternoon. I think I am going to continue to not drink it in the morning though. I don’t know why either. What do you think?

So, you all remember ‘Til Tuesday right? A band out of Boston that hit in the late 80’s with “Voices Carry” and fronted by the beautiful and talented Aimee Mann? Well, my Uncle Chris likes to recount the tale that I once held the back door open for her and the band at the In-Square Men’s Bar which used to be in Cambridge. I was most likely in the back playing Star Wars (vector graphics one, remember?) and/or Zaxxon when they arrived to set-up for a show. I was most likely 12 at the time.

Anyway, I was going to post about the past week and I thought of Tuesday, so there you go. I already posted about the HDTV earlier in the week, so that’s already out there, and I just posted something about Harold Reynolds being fired because it was long enough to stand on its own. But, a few other things have happened that I wanted to note, so this is a little compilation of the week’s other events.

Joe shared some Juliana Hatfield tunes that he downloaded from her web site on an “honor system” where you could donate for downloading the songs. There’s no requirement to donate, but it is encouraged so that she might release more in the future depending on how it works out. So, Joe shared them with me because I thought they were no longer available. I happened to check out the site to confirm a song title and noticed the songs were available again, so after reading about the system, I decided to donate as well (Joe told me he donated a while ago). I went with the standard iTunes 99¢ for a total of $30.69 for 31 songs. Of course, that’s pretty expensive for even a double-album purchased at Newbury Comics or even off iTunes, but to me it is worth supporting Juliana and what she is doing. She’s been one of my favorite artists for a very long time now, plus she’s a local girl and super cute. Joe smartly coined the collection of songs as the Honor System album. Good work Joe.

I picked up the new Some Girls (Juliana’s sometimes band) album last Sunday and ended up sharing the ripped tunes with Joe via Windows Live Messenger (which has a nifty folder sharing feature just ripe for abuse). The disc was hard for me to find, even at my local Newbury Comics, as I luckily happened on it out of place on an end-cap. They didn’t have any the week it came out. Anyway, I shared with Joe so he could check it out now and I’m sure he’ll purchase a copy when he finds it or he could always download it from iTunes. Both the disc and the downloaded tunes are excellent. Some of her best work in years (even though a lot of the DL tunes are older, which might explain it too).

I also mentioned in my HDTV post that I had the premium channels for free on my new HD box. Well, this worked out well as I was finally able to watch Wedding Crashers and The 40 Year Old Virgin. Everyone claims to love these films, and I had wanted to see them, so I was glad to finally see them for free. I’m certainly not going to review them, but I thought they both delivered pretty well. I probably enjoyed Crashers more, but Virgin was good too. I liked the Will Ferrell cameo in Crashers and having Kelly (Mindy Kaling) from The Office cameo as Dave’s (Paul Rudd) ex-girlfriend Amy was funny. I’m sure one of my readers knows whether or not she got The Office gig from that or the other way around. I’m looking at you Ed.

Another thing I mentioned in the HDTV post was finally being able to fire up Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (GRAW) on the Xbox 360. I have to tell you, the graphics are pretty amazing. Definitely comparable to a high-end gaming PC, if not superior. The thing about it though, and it could just be a product of running at HD on a “smaller” set; I couldn’t really see a lot of the detail elements I thought I should be able to (like enemies!) or read things I should have because the text was too small. I was even wearing my glasses! The small text thing has already been complained about with respect to a standard TV, but I found that because they could use such small text with the high resolutions of HDTV, they maybe went too small.

Well, I only went thru the Training mission in the GRAW campaign, so I haven’t done much. I sort of realized right after I started playing that I am totally not in a gaming mood. Kind of funny considering I should be excited to play, especially with the new TV and all. Part of that could also be not being able to play co-op with Ed since he has forsaken his 360. Maybe if I get a bigger one I will be more into it. It’ll either be that or football season starting. After watching baseball in HD, I can only imagine how awesome football is going to be and I want a bigger screen for that. If I do take that plunge, you are invited over for the first Pat’s game.

Finally, I thought I’d share a poll that was posted on my company’s intranet home page this past week. The poll was simply “Do you blog?” and as of tonight, 4,369 people responded, or a little over 11% of the people employed by my (just around) Fortune 100 company. More than 75% of the respondents either “don’t read any” or question “what’s a blog?” The rest “read them sometimes” or “read a couple.” Four percent, including yours truly (obviously), “write my own.” Doing the overall math on that has less than 0.5% of the company blogging. Is 11% a good sample size? I don’t know. I’m surprised I even noticed the poll to even vote on it as I don’t have my home page set to the intranet. I’m not surprised by the numbers though. Do you think they are the same at your company?