Arby's Commercial

We saw a rather disturbing Arby's commercial the other day. It said something like, "Our chicken sandwiches are now made with 100% all natural chicken!"

That kind of makes you wonder. What were their chicken sandwiches made with before??

Internet jukebox

So there's this bar we like to go to in Verona called the Rivertowne Inn. We like it because it has good food, good beer (lots of micros on tap), and this cool NTN trivia game that we like to play. And they have a jukebox that's hooked up to the internet. The idea is that instead of having a standard jukebox with a fixed number of CDs, the internet jukebox can download songs from a much larger database. You'd think this would mean the music selection would be awesome. That you could just walk up to the thing, pop in your credit card (yes, it takes credit cards), and play songs from whatever artists your little heart desires. But you would be wrong.

Oddly enough, the selection of the jukebox is so limited that it takes longer to find a song to play than it does for the box to actually play the song! It's a very weird mix of stuff. A lot of the hugely overplayed mass-market artists are in there of course, but there seems to be a few key well-known artists missing (like Tool). And then there's also a whole pile of folks I'm sure no one has ever heard of before. Once you do find an artist to play, chances are the box will be missing all the best (and most well-known) albums by that artist, and will instead have some weird remix album of some song that was never really that good in the first place.

The really ironic part about it is the website for the company that makes this jukebox. The company is called BMI Gaming and on their website they have a Q&A type of thing:

Q: Why choose a eCast powered jukebox over other music competitors or CD jukeboxes?
A: Vast Music Selection

HAH!!

Actually, the company that's really responsible for the (lack of) music selection is Ecast. They supply the music that the BMI Gaming jukeboxes play. Not sure what the problem is with Ecast, but they seem to have their heads up their butts about the music thing. They're all proud of the fact that they have license agreements with the 4 major record labels. Whooptie doo. Lets hear something else for a change, eh?

Babble

I haven't posted in a while, so you'd think I would have a lot to write. I don't really. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that I have so much I could write that it's overwhelming and ridiculous to even try to talk about all of it. So I'll just babble on about inconsequensial things instead. That's what blogs are all about anyway, right?

This weekend WRCT is doing its annual Massive Music Weekend. This is where a different band or artist is featured every half hour, and only their music gets played for that half hour. We don't read any promos or public service announcements, and do only the minium required to satisfy FCC regulations. Other than that, it's just music, music, and more music. All weekend long from noon on Friday until midnight Sunday night. I'm going to be doing 2 bands: Ozric Tentacles at 5:30pm on Sunday, and Fila Brazillia at 6:00pm on Sunday. Hopefully, they'll have a link to the whole schedule up on the web site soon!

The superbowl was cool, of course. Especially since the Steelers won (though they didn't play as masterfully as they have been for the past few games, it was enough to get the job done). Afterwards we went outside and could hear people cheering and horns honking over on the parkway, and see fireworks down at the stadium. Whee! It's kind of bittersweet though since now the season is basically over (pro bowl, schmo bowl!). I was surprised at the number of totally lame commercials though. You'd think for that kind of money, you'd at least try to make it memorable. If you're interested, Google has them all up online (including some that didn't get aired for one reason or another).

Holy Bowl Games, Batman!

Some excellent bowl games this week. Penn State squeezed out a win in the Orange Bowl (it took them 3 overtime periods to do it though). The announcers made such a big deal about the coaches being 79 and 76 years old that we started calling it the Geezer Bowl! And Texas put an end to USC's dominating winning streak. Now someone else needs to come along and do the same to them. :)

I tend to watch the NFL much more than college football, unless Penn State is involved. I had several people tell me they prefer college ball because it's more exciting. After watching the bowl games (and a couple of the Penn State games this year), I think I know why. It's because nobody in college has a defense! And it's particularly obvious on special teams. Every punt return I've seen seems to go for at least 10-15 yards (and often more), which makes the field that much shorter for the offense. That, combined with wimpy-assed defenses makes for some very high scoring games that can flip back and forth numerous times.

However, one thing I do like about college ball that's missing in the NFL is the bands and the field shows. I was SO disappointed when we went to the Steelers vs. Bears game earlier this season and the halftime show was nothing more than a small high school chorus standing in the middle of the field singing some songs. No interesting costumes, no dancing or marching around to make neat-looking patterns, no twirling or waving flags... Blah. How boring.

The stupid thing about college football though is that there's no playoffs. Although I know there must be some method for picking who gets to play in what bowl game, they all end up seeming very random to me anyway. Texas can now claim to be the number 1 team in the country, but they only had to play one really hard team to do it.

But maybe I'm just bitter because football season is almost over. *sigh*

Pittsburgh Radio Will Never Be the Same...

Ever since Sunday morning (Dec 11th), WRCT has been on random schedule, which means that the regular program schedule is suspended and DJs just sign up for air time whenever they can. They do this because the university is currently having final exams (so all the regular class schedules are messed up), and after that the university will be on winter break. The good thing is that this finally gives me a chance to grab some time in the studio for myself, which I haven't been able to do since I passed my air test just before Thanksgiving. The station will be on random schedule until Jan 22, at which time there will be a new schedule for the spring semester (and I'll get to have a regular show).

So on Monday, I grabbed a 2 hour time slot from 2-4pm, and it was a blast! I was pretty nervous, and made a couple of mistakes, but overall it went quite well. I think only one of the mistakes was noticable anyway (a song came on too loud and I slid the volume down just a little too fast). A couple of times I played two songs from the same CD (due to hitting the wrong button) instead of playing the song from the next CD I had cued up. But I don't think anyone noticed. I did get some nice compliments on the show, especially from the DJ who came in after me.

My plan is to try to grab as much air time as I can handle (and have time for) over the next month while the students are gone. By the time I was done with my show on Monday I was totally exhausted. My brain felt like it had turned to jelly because it took so much concentration to handle everything! But I figure it will get easier the more I do it, and random schedule is the perfect opportunity to get lots of practice time in.

So I signed up for another 2 hour slot from 2-4pm on Friday. On Monday I played some nice mellow downtempo stuff, but friday always feels like a happy-its-almost-the-weekend kind of day. I plan to do a more rockin' upbeat danceable set as a nice lead-in to the weekend!

Go Steelers!

So late last week Eric managed to score us some tickets to the Steelers game against Chicago on Sunday. Whee! It was the first NFL game I'd ever been to, and even though it was cold and snowy, it was awesome (especially because the Steelers kicked Chicago's butt)! I thought I might have trouble figuring out where the first down line was without the helpful yellow line they have on TV, but it turned out to be no problem. It was pretty easy to tell by just looking at the marker on the sideline. I guess they need the yellow line on TV because the camera angle doesn't always give you a good view of the sideline markers. It took me a little time to be able to follow the ball, since I didn't have the camera guy to do that for me, but I was fine with that by the 3rd Q or so.

After the game we spent a little time in a local bar (Finnigan's Wake I think it was - we just picked one at random that looked good). We met a bunch of guys who drive down from Canada for one Steelers game each year. One of the first things they asked us was, "so when are you moving to Canada?" The amusing thing was that we've often talked about that jokingly since we're so disgusted with many of the things the current administration has been doing. It was interesting to get their point of view on the war in Iraq, etc. Pretty much what I expected. The rest of the world is looking at us and just kind of shaking it's head in confusion and disbelief.

But, at least the Steelers won. :)

Disaster Strikes!

So yesterday morning I came in to work to find that a large (8 inch) domestic water pipe that was in a closet behind our machine room had burst and was spewing water all over everything. It was estimated that there was about 1000 gallons of water per minute gushing out of the broken pipe! It took them about 4.5 hours to find the correct valve to shut it off, and by then there was almost a foot of water on the floor (well, under the floor, since it's all raised flooring in the machine rooms). The force of the water was strong enough to break open a metal fire door and move 3 shelves/racks full of computers! When the building manager first opened the door to the machine room, one computer came floating out on the resulting rush of water...

Here are some pictures:





This is a view of the machine room looking in from the hallway. The door to the closet where the pipe was can be seen in the back of the picture.


Here is a picture of the pipe that burst. The curved part is the section that cracked. At the bottom of the picture you can see that there's a metal rod holding up the replacement piece. I don't know about you, but it doesn't look very sound to me... From what I was told by the facilities management guys, it probably burst just because it was kind of old, and the building may have shifted slightly (as buildings tend to do over time), which put enough stress on it to make it crack.

The water in the closet where the pipe was probably got up to about 8-9 feet before the door burst open. Here you can see some cardboard and other packing materials that got floated up to the top of the cabinets that were in there.


This is a view looking from the closet out into the machine room (the opposite direction from the first picture). The force of the water was so strong that it pushed all these racks of machines over toward the corner of the room (they were in a straight line before)!