Tonight Megan and I went to the Winspear to see and hear the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. The audience seemed to be generally older than we were, but it was a great show! Those guys are amazing – the stuff they can do is so hardcore!

The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra (LCJO), composed of many of the finest jazz soloists and ensemble players today, has been the Jazz at Lincoln Center resident orchestra since 1998. Under the leadership of music director Wynton Marsalis, the LCJO performs a vast repertory spaning the history of jazz, from masterpieces by composers such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Fletcher Henderson, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus, to commissioned works by Benny Carter, Joe Henderson, Jimmy Heath, Chico O’Farrill, members of the LCJO, among others.

Good times 🙂

I might just be the only person you’ll ever see who will chase a bottle of V8 juice with good old Coke! Then again, maybe not, there could be many such addicts out there. This was taken today in CAB at the University of Alberta, always a party going on in that place! If you’re on campus, come to the basement of CAB.

In other news…it sounds like there is a big Xbox/computer LAN being planned for reading week, tentatively on the 24th and 25th, so block it off on your calendars. I don’t want to hear any lame excuses! Bring your Xbox, games, controllers, computers, pictures, music, porn, you name it, and we’ll either play it, watch it, or share it. I am guessing that Inge will post some more details as the event draws near, so stay tuned!

Via colin, I came across this CNN article from today on podcasting – ‘Podcasting’ takes broadcasting to the Internet. Cited is Craig Patchett of the GodCast podcast, Adam Curry, and the sidebar has links to iPodder and PodCast Alley.

It has the potential to do to the radio business what Web logs have done to print journalism. By bringing the cost of broadcasting to nearly nothing, it’s enabling more voices and messages to be heard than ever before.

The article is pretty well written I’d say, even though it still spends a lot of explaining just what podcasting is. It also makes the bold claim that “Podcasting isn’t likely to threaten traditional broadcasting any time soon”, citing the number of digital music players compared to radios. What about growth rates? Who buys a radio anymore? I don’t think I ever have – the radio comes in my alarm clock, or now, in my MP3 player.

Anyway, worth a read!

Just posted a new episode of Blogosphere News in which I did a special Super Bowl 2005 interview with none other than SportsGuru himself! That’s right, I interviewed Martin, who was fighting a bit of feedback, so some of the interview sounds a little delayed. All in all it went very well, check it out!

Listen now!

The game is tied at 7 with the second half about to start. You don’t really care about the football though do you? You want commercials, music and breasts (okay maybe not Paul McCartney’s). What a different halftime show! Not that it was bad, but I don’t think you’ll hear about this one in the “2005 year in review” shows and lists, and maybe that’s a good thing. Good music, no lack of lights, it was a good show. I love that he played Hey Jude, such a good song.

Ad-Awards has some new commercials up; my new favorite is the Bud Light airplane one. The FedEx one isn’t bad either, only because it’s so true. Check them out! I thought there was a CRTC ban on the commercials in Canada, but I have seen a couple of the Super Bowl ads on Global so far. Maybe certain commercials can be shown in both countries? Who knows.

Watch for a special Blogosphere News episode after midnight!

Starbucks and alcohol together – heaven on earth? Pretty damn close! Here’s a press release from April of last year talking about the idea.

Looking for Super Bowl commericals? Check them out here. Not all of them are up yet, but they should be soon. My favorite so far is the “banned” Bud Light parody of Nipplegate. Game time soon!

Two interesting pieces of Xbox news have appeared in the last couple days. First off, Microsoft has apparently hired Alex Garland to write a big screen adaptation of Halo 2. I am not sure whether that’s a good idea or a bad idea. It could turn out like Tomb Raider (decent), or it could turn out like Tomb Raider 2 (shitty). I can’t see a Halo movie living up to the game, though I am willing to be proven wrong.

The second bit of news relates to the name of the next Xbox. According to one of Engadget’s “trusted sources”, the name “Xbox 360” has been chosen. Not sure what the heck they are thinking with that name, but it’s not exactly what I had in mind. I suppose they didn’t want to put “Xbox 2” against “PlayStation 3” and decided they needed to change the name.

Read: Joystiq & Engadget

Yesterday afternoon I drove to Calgary to deliver a presentation at the University of Calgary. I spoke to around 60 students about “living the digital lifestyle”, otherwise known as the gadget talk. As it was a Microsoft event, all of the gadgets were MS-related, like my Zen Touch, XBOX, etc. I think the event went really well, and the initial feedback was quite positive!

I left Calgary around 8:00 PM and headed towards Lacombe, where I had plans to meet with Violet for coffee. The roads were clear until I got to Red Deer, where it was very lightly snowing. Not too much farther and I reached Lacombe, where it was snowing pretty good. Violet and I went for Tim Horton’s and chatted for a bit, and I left at 10:30 PM.

Almost immediately after leaving Lacombe, the roads were ugly. Lots of snow, windy, and lots of snow still falling. Visibility was just about zero, and I simply followed the guy in front of me who followed the big truck in front of him. Going only about 50 km/h it was slow going. Eventually the truck decided to pull over, and the guy in front of me and I went around. We must have passed about 20 big semi’s before we had to stop. It looked like there was an accident, both lanes of the highway at a dead stop. We sat there for about 30 minutes before we finally got going again.

As I had done a presentation on gadgets, I brought my video camera to demo. I didn’t realize I had it with me until right when we started moving again, but I managed to get it out and record a quick little video. It’s kind of Blair-Witch like, and doesn’t show the snow as well as I’d have liked, but if you’re bored, check it out here. You’ll need Windows Media Player to watch the video.

Anyway, it was an interesting drive – took way longer than it should have. I’d never seen Highway 2 at a dead stop before, so it seemed kind of surreal. In any case, I had enough gas, and as soon as we got going again it wasn’t too bad. Fortunately I don’t have to go to Calgary again for a while 🙂

Looks like my MSN Messenger Display Pictures have been featured in a UK magazine called PC Basics! They are running an article on MSN Messenger 7, and the freeware installer from mess.be got featured as a tool for customizing Messenger. I think the picture they chose is an odd choice, but after all, it is the UK!

Magazine Scan 1
Magazine Scan 2

(NOTE: You must copy the link location and paste it into your address bar – hyperlinking will not load the images!)