GO BREWERS GO!!

I looked outside this morning and was kind of surprised to see that there wasn't icicles hanging from the trees. That's right, hell hasn't frozen over, even though the Brewers are in the playoffs for the first time in 26 years. I might have been alive the last time it happened, but I don't remember it. I don't think they'll get to the World Series, but stranger things have happened.



I couldn't be more proud of my team. Years and years of being a fan through thick and thin is paying off. I'm in no way a bandwagon fan, but I hold no grudges to those that are now on board. Hopefully, this will help to keep the Brewers in Milwaukee.

I'm a winner!

I've really been into Guitar Hero lately. I've never really stopped playing it, but lately it's been a few hours a night. The reason is because I joined the official Guitar Hero community (www.guitarhero.com). With the XBox 360, Wii or PS3, your scores are automatically updated. It shows you your rank across all of the consoles worldwide. I'm currently ranked 900th out of about 175,000 in Guitar Hero - Aerosmith.

You can also sign up for free tournaments. Last night I won a Guitar Hero keychain and wrist band for having the highest score on 4 pre-seleted songs in GH - Aerosmith! The competition is really rough, but I'm having a lot of fun!

Pandora

In the last few months, I've become a big promoter of one of the best sites online - www.pandora.com. It's 100% free, no pop ups, and just an unobtrusive ad on the side. It lets you build online radio stations. It's not crappy music, either, it's awesome music that you will know. That's not the best part - you can tell it whether or not you like the song that it's playing. If not, you'll never hear it again, if you do, it'll find similar music to play in the future. You can set up as many stations as you want and even "quick mix" them, allowing you to randomize all of your stations at once.

If you've never checked it out, I strongly suggest you do!

Beatles trivia

If I were to play a Beatles trivia game now, I bet I'd be tough competition. I have been reading an 850-page Beatles biography for the last month now, and the amount of information provided there is astounding. I've got about 3 chapters left to go, so there's more to learn yet. It's amazing the enormous impact they had on not only music, but an entire generation of people. They were able to make the rare transition from a pop group to a progressive recording group that continuously raised the bar for music at the time.

This book has led me to explore a bit more of the Beatles music, and I am still amazed at how many songs I've never heard. Lennon/McCartney was just a powerhouse for song writing and learning how they managed to come up with this stuff is really interesting. For example, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was not actually inspired by LSD, although it helped the process along a bit, but instead by 5 year-old Julian Lennon's watercolor painting of a classmate. This seems to be how a lot of their stuff was written.

I can't think of another group since that's had quite the influence on music that they have. The closest thing that I can think of from my generation would be Nirvana, but that's not even close to the Beatles.

Football

I really like football. In fact, I do believe that football has overtaken baseball as my favorite sport to watch. It doesn't really matter the teams even, if it's on, I very well might watch it. And now that it's football season again, I'm a happy camper on Sundays. I've got my laptop open all day to my fantasy football teams and keep an eye on the games at the same time. It's a lot of fun, especially as the returning champion of the Madison Area Fantasy Football League. It's still not right seeing Green Bay without Favre, but Rogers might grow on me in time. Otherwise, I follow the Jacksonville Jaguars because they're the "local" team here in Daytona.

Back up

I'm not sure why the site went down, but I had to get my web hosting company involved. Not much is new here, I was in Maryland and DC for two days last week. I took my new employee, Damon, with me. We drove around DC for a while, had the worst GPS ever, which kept getting us lost and mis-pronounced simple abbreviations. It kept us entertained, anyway. We saw the capitol, drove around the Washington Monument about 10 times looking for a parking spot, saw the back of the Lincoln Memorial and saw some other stuff as well. I was able to tick off two more states, anyway.