Pages Menu
Categories Menu

Posted by on Oct 6, 2007 in Local, Real Life |

A few things that happened when I wasn’t blogging

In a recent post, I caught myself griping about my schedule. What is particularly ugly about that is one of the things I included in that list of “things I gotta do” ended up with me getting to go to an Auburn University football game. In the skyboxes.  Auburn v. New Mexico State, you say? Regardless, the first half was very exciting, more so than the final lopsided score would indicate. My friend who had tickets also had a parking pass that allowed us to park less than one city block from the door we used to get into the stadium.

Any time you can get parking that close, you should go, regardless of your interest in the event.

My friend who had the tickets is in his 80s and a lifelong Auburn man. He recalled that as a freshman, and required to wear a rat cap (my apologies to Auburn faithful for linking to Georgia Tech in a context like this, but it’s all I can find, and I’m sure it’s the same sort of tradition), one did NOT GO THROUGH THE MAIN GATE on penalty of some kind of hazing that apparently was as bad or worse as the hazing one experienced if one was caught without the rat cap in the first place.

The skybox held about 12 people. We had 10 in our box that night – all longtime Auburn alumni or current staff or professors. Really nice folks, good food, and climate control. This is the way to watch football!

Another thing I did while I wasn’t blogging was volunteer for Prattville’s LPGA Navistar golf tournament. Again my talent for finding the indoor job won through, as I got on a committee where we did transportation runs to hotels and airports, getting players and other VIPs back and forth. I got to hear half of an extensive conversation in Korean when I picked up one golfer who was on her cell phone. But she did interrupt herself to say “thanks,” and that’s fine. I also got to walk 9 holes twice and both times got to see Lorena Ochoa play. She ended up 3rd in the tournament after setting a course record (which lasted a couple of hours) on Thursday and playing into the lead on Saturday.

And I’ve been playing with Napster, after the RIAA sent me a certified letter stating that I was the last person in the United States with a computer who had not downloaded a track, either legally or illegally. I have resisted getting away from CDs, and been concerned about all this digital rights management (DRM) stuff, but a) once I bought an mp3 player (to load my CDs onto) it was a matter of time before I looked into the Dark Side and b) I changed my mind when I looked at Napster’s current subscription model. It’s more like $15 a month to have access to a radio station you can program any way you like (and download to an mp3 player). You can also buy tracks for burning to CD, and once you do that you can have them forever, but I haven’t done that, except once where I had to burn a CD of royalty-free music for my office on-hold system.

The issue is that there’s a whole bunch of music out there I like but I don’t necessarily want to own. As I type this I’m listening to Songs of Mass Destruction by Annie Lennox. Last night I listened to some Gordon Lightfoot and Jim Croce. Of those, Jim Croce is the only one that I have any CDs of (I know, I dig some really old music – comes from having a brother 7 years older than I). So I’ve grown comfortable with the fact that there’s music out there that I listen to without owning a shiny plastic disk or even having the file on my own hard drive (that’s another good thing – I can just stream it without downloading it and taking up more hard drive space).

And now, having logged in for the first time in a while, I find that WordPress has released ANOTHER new upgrade. So I guess I better look at that…