CurtBlog

After a busy weekend of hanging out with friends and a wedding, Kristin and I just wanted to take a bike ride yesterday afternoon. Now it was maybe a little silly to begin with because it was in the mid 90s all weekend here in Chicago. But we have really been wanting to ride up to the Botanical Gardens again. Plus I finally got a Saris bike rack for the MINI. So we loaded up the car and went partway up and parked at the forest preserve near Golf Rd. You can actually take this bike trail all the way up from just north of me. It's about 18-20 miles one way. We rode about 8 miles or so into the Botanical Gardens. It was really fun to hang out there for awhile, although there weren't as many things in bloom as last time. We did see a couple red wing blackbirds, which was pretty cool. Some of the roses were in bloom as well. After being there about an hour, the skies started looking very ominous. We hadn't checked the weather, but sure enough a big thunderstorm started rolling in. So we knew we were either going to get wet or wait it out. And since neither of us really mind getting wet in the rain (and kinda like it now and then), we took off in the middle of the thunderstorm. Have I mentioned how cool it is to have a girlfriend who will ride bikes with me in a thunderstorm? The rain was pelting so hard we could barely see for awhile. It was really cool and we got soaked pretty quickly, but after the sweat fest in the 90 degree weather it felt great. We were definitely a little chilled by the time we got back to the car and it took awhile to warm back up, but pretty fun none the less.

If you've ever wondered why I'm such a huge N.T. Wright fan, look no further than this great article talking about the problems of The DaVinci Code. It's also a great introduction to the core themes of Wright's theology, for those of you who don't have the interest or patience to read his doorstop, hundreds of page treatises on the subject like I do.

Over the last year, I've been casting an increasingly worrisome eye at my Comcast bill, which just keeps creeping up every 6 months or so. I have both cable modem and a digital package with HD, so I'm embarassed to say my bill runs over $100 a month easy. Lately this has just seemed more and more excessive, especially considering I'm often complaining about my lack of free time. Between church stuff, girlfriend, other friends and just keeping up with everything else I'm interested in, I really would be better off without so much TV as a distraction. I mean, I grew up without a tv, much less cable, but cable has gotten to the place where I think of it as another necessary utility like gas or electric. And that is obviously absurd when you think about it. Plus I have a Netflix subscription too, so it's not like I don't have other stuff to watch. I don't really watch much cable anyway, mostly it's Comedy Central and Food Network and couple other things here and there. Besides, a lot of TV programming is showing up online (legally from the networks) and you can always go the BitTorrent route anyway.

So anyway, I've been thinking about OTA (over the air) HD programming for awhile now. I bought my tv a bit too early to get a built-in tuner (and the first gen ones kinda suck anyway), but for the price of one month's cable bill I can theoretically buy an HD receiver and get free tv after that. Chicago is a great market for HD OTA programming, maybe the best in the country. The big question is whether I can pick it up with an indoor antenna or if I'll need something on the roof. So I'm going to give it a try. I haven't had a landline in ages, but DSL has gotten to the point where it is almost troublefree and cheaper than cable modem. Certainly sufficient for my needs and a stark contrast to my first Bellsouth DSL experience that involved barely supported NT 4 drivers for a PCI modem. Besides, it looks like I'll need a line for alarm monitoring if the burglary problem in our neighborhood continues.

So Monday I'm getting a phone line hooked up and DSL is supposed to be on Tuesday. At that point, I'll finish out the season (got to see the finales of Lost, Alias and 24) and then Comcast is going bye bye. I figure I don't watch much tv in the summer anyway (I hate baseball and everything else is reruns), so I should have plenty of time to figure this out. May involve getting an antenna installed on our condo roof (which I think I can get approved), but that's still cheaper longterm than paying cable every month. Everything old is new again. I remember as a kid before cable was around everybody had a big antenna on their house. That's going to start happening again as I think all new tvs have to start coming with a digital tuner built-in. And sooner or later this switch-over from analog to digital broadcasting will happen. At which point I hope to be ahead of the curve getting free HD programming to my heart's content.

So naive person that I am, I thought I might have a chance to get Radiohead tickets. As much as I hate to use Ticketmaster, I'm often left with little choice since it seems most decent shows are Ticketmaster exclusives. Plus I thought that with 2 dates in Chicago and a 2 ticket maximum purchase, there might be at least a chance of getting something. So I was logged in at 10AM with a couple of browser sessions and lost no time in submitting a couple requests as soon as the tickets showed up as available. This was of course to no avail as my pages posted back over and over for about 10 minutes each and finally told me nothing could be found. At the same time I log into Ebay and there are already tons of tickets up there from ticket brokers. Now this is ridiculous and I know a lot of bands hate this as well. Why can't Ticketmaster do something about this problem? Why do ticket brokers always get plenty of tickets that they can flip to the highest bidder while the average fan has no chance in hell most of the time to get tickets to a hot show. Radiohead doesn't see any of that extra money, nor does any other band. You would think bands would start to get a clue after awhile and start fighting back to end Ticketmaster's hold on the ticketing industry. There are plenty of bands that have enough clout to say, look, if you want us to come to your city we aren't going through Ticketmaster regardless of whether you have deals with them or not. Do you think if the top 10 touring acts all did that for a summer concert season that something wouldn't change? Of course there is no chance of that happening since the bands are still making bank regardless, in spite of their protests that they want fans to be able to get tickets and hate the ticket brokers and Ticketmaster's broken system that allows this to work. It seems like with all the ridiculous fees they charge they could build an infrastructure that works.