Happy St. Paddy’s Day. Love, Mason.

Saturday was another volleyball tournament. After tearing through pool play with a 6-2 record, and splitting with the eventual tournament champions, Team Salvo lost in a tight quarterfinals match to Team Euchre. And let me just say, we are sick of losing to those punks. We were playing them off the court for the first 10 points, then promptly allowed them to serve us off the court with jump serves. No matter, we still gained 10 points toward our regional ranking.

So my volleyball team had another tournament yesterday. It was a small one – only 5 teams. 3 would get out of pool play and go for the championship. Unfortunately for us, 3 of the highest seeded teams in the region decided to play. We lost our first 2 matches (2 games each) to the top seeds. The sad thing is that we are capable of beating them, because we promptly went out in our next 2 matches and beat a lower seeded team, and then “Bada-Bing” which is ranked much higher than us in the region. Our mantra yesterday seemed to be get up 21-18 on a team, and then choke. We’re feeling good though since we were on a 4 game winning streak to finish the tournament. Next weekend is a much bigger tournament so hopefully we’ve got some momentum.

The 2003 Salvo Volleyball Bowl-a-thon website is now live. I’d like to thank all of those who decide to donate to my cause. I’m hoping to close out this season with a bang!

The web never ceases to amaze me. I was perusing my comments at Haloscan which I hardly ever do cause no one comments on my drivel, **sniff sniff**, when I found a very curious comment in my archive. He got a hit on “job post to multiple websites.” on ziprz.com because my resume says “All 3 applications involved complex data-driven templates and interactions to accomplish productivity tasks like distributing a job posting to multiple websites, scheduling and maintaining recruiting events, and building Powerpoint presentations online.”

Well, I sent an email tonight to Ross Grossman to see if he still had a need, and to let him know that my employer -TMP in fact does have a product that does this. I’m eagerly waiting to see if my humble little blog generates millions, ok hundreds of dollars in sales. Then I’m going to write a thesis on ‘Blogging from work as an essential revenue generating activity’. Stay tuned.

I’m just curious if online music is ever going to work. I’m sure that people were saying that when CD’s first came to market too. I was an early adopter of MyMP3.com when you could load a CD into your drive and “Beam it” to them to prove that you owned it. Then they would unlock it for you, and let you play it from anywhere. Now you’ve got services like Rhapsody and Pressplay that are testing out similar subscription services.

I think my problem with them is not their offering, it’s the state of current music devices. For someone to feel like they “own” music right now, you’ve got to physically have it on one of many different harddrives in your digital music life. I’ve got one at work, one at home, one on my MP3 player.Then I still have my car CD changer, and my home stereo components that aren’t hard drive based. I’ll get used to paying 99 cents per song when I get to the point where I can have it in my own online harddrive, that isn’t owned by any particular music service, it is owned outright by me. It is my physical hardware that is broadcasting my music collection to me only, to any of the devices in my privately purchased world. The music quality can’t be like today’s “streaming” sound either (unless it is today’s broadband variety which sounds pretty good). Anyone have a better idea?

In my quest to have a completely redundant home computer, and actually surpass my PC with a far cooler Mac, I added another component to my G4 that I got from my dead dot com. I added these bitchin’ speakers. They sound incredible! $99, and worth every penny of my Christmas money. Now I can actually hear the sound in my iMovies, and I’m going to move exclusively to iTunes from my WinAmp PC crap.

Do you ever have so much to do that rather than work you just sit there with a blank blood-shot-eyed stare and ask yourself whether your computer is a loyal friend, or the abusive, wife-beater wearing root of all of your psychological torment? Nah, me neither.

Monday night in NY with all of my homies from the NY office was great! Here’s the best recount of the events, and specifically of karaoke to too many Bon Jovi songs. I love NY. Thanks guys! And thanks Dana, for coming out. It was great to catch up!

Tuesday I came back on a 3 hour delayed plane to a mountain of crap, then yesterday my train was way late getting to Union Station because of busted brakes. So here I sit today, normal, and finally recovered.

Yes, I have almost acheived computing Nirvana. The other day I installed a DVD burner on my Mac G4. I got it mad cheap from Staples.com – only $170 after rebates. It’s the same drive as the Apple SuperDrive (Pioneer DVR-105) and even though Apple itself doesn’t allow you to buy a SuperDrive and put it into an old G4, they kindly put up the world’s greatest user forums where other kind souls helped me pick out the right drive. To find the best price, I used Dealmac.com, another lifesaver. which required an upgrade from Mac OSX 10.2 to 10.2.3.

And last night I installed iLife. Now I could care less at this point how they tweaked my iMovie, I assume it will rock, and iTunes, and iPhoto too. But I really wanted to use iDVD. So I did. And it crashed, and crashed again, and crashed again. But in the end I did get the tutorial to burn. And man, iDVD is a lot of fun.