Word of advice: don’t drink large gulps of Sprite rapidly. You will burp massive quantities of foam. End of story.

Today was the talent show at CHS. Haha. Ha. Ha. It’s been horrible every year in recent memory. A few MCs that no one can understand, a 9:1 ratio of hip-hop acts vs. anything else, all started off by a lesson in clapping from our Assistant Principle. I’m not sure which is worse - that someone would actually have us practice clapping before a show starts, or that some people in the audience probably could use a lesson or to in it. They actually picked a good winner this year, however. Resident Senior Caroline Spence won first place, and I have to say, she is a truly excellent musician. Wonderful singer, leads the female a cappella group at CHS… She deserves recognition.

The computer beat me yesterday. I was attempting to create a “highlight tape” for a senior football players (something for college), and needed to take a bunch of tracks off of DVDs and mix them down to one. It was all going reasonably well - I’d logged all the cues, found a program that lets you import DVD footage via timestamp, was ready to import them into Adobe Premiere, WHEN — the audio format isn’t supported. I try everything: changing the bit rate, frequency, method of import, importing to Audition separately… You would think that with $3,000+ of production hardware and software sitting in front of me… But no. Only other option I had would have been to import the audio in real time through a separate source - and with 8 DVDs (148 tracks each) and a deadline of the next day… wasn’t going to happen.

Damnit, I need AVID…

Now this is what we’ve needed for years. I’ll buy a song or two on the iTunes Music Store, only to find out a few days later that I want to purchase the entire album. But darn - that means I just wasted the $2 I spent on the first songs. Well, no more. Apple just introduced today the “Complete My Album” feature. Now, if you’ve already bought three songs off an album, you can now buy the rest of the album for $2.97 off. Problem solved.

Let me add something about the iTMS, however. Remember how great it was when the music store first came out? Entire albums for just $10 - extremely cheap, compared with those found in fluorescently lit stores. But now, something like 3.5 years after iTMS came out, almost all the albums I see are something like $13-15. Maybe I shouldn’t be complaining about five more dollars. But then again, maybe none of us should have complained over $17.99 CDs…

*sigh* Today was very momentous for me. No, it was not my first kiss, nor did I get my drivers license or break a limb. Today, I got my first piece of cell phone spam. I turned on my phone, and got really quite excited when it beeped a few times. “Yay, I got a message!” I thought to myself. I open the phone, and see that I have a “secret message.” Hmm… Now, I’m still not entirely sure what this meant, but the message basically linked me to a place where I could buy a mobile phone ringer. I already get enough useless text messages from facebook - I don’t want to start getting spam, too!

I consider myself lucky - I’ve had my email address for years, and get virtually no spam on it. None! My parents can get dozens every day, and their emails can’t be as far out on the internet as mine. But at least they don’t have to pay for simply receiving them. Yeah, I’ve only gotten one so far. I hope I didn’t piss someone off to the point where they sold my cell number to a spammer… Well, maybe I’ll end up being lucky with this version of spam as well…

Well, unfortunately I have to give props to whoever designed the content-filter system on my high school’s web server. Unlike middle school, they don’t block just words like “war,” “death,” and “blood.” I can’t search for “proxy” now, and someone realized that Google had a video service they needed to block as well. All I wanted to do was show everyone the new TV ads for C-VILLE weekly, a free local general-interest paper (weekly, as the name would suggest). They’re actually kind of cool - only slightly low-budget. A friend of mine showed them to me who actually knowsf one of the actors in them; I’ll embed the videos once I get home.

Speaking of which, it really is rediculous how small Charlottesville is, in terms of who you know. I mean, I don’t even live in Charlottesville, and yet I’m connected to virtually everyone. Example: I produce the weekly talk show The Sunday Morning Wake-Up Call on WNRN every Sunday, and the one day in weeks that I need a sub, the person who sits next to me in Environmental Science’s dad was on the show. Later on, a friend on mine is on a different radio talk show I used to help out with. I’ve even spoken with people on forums online that I knew in real life, and never made the connection between. I wonder how many things I’ve worked on in Charlottesville that people I know have seen or helped out with, and neither of us have any idea.