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Waking up in Meaford was pretty killer and there was a little storm brewing in my head. After saying goodbye to everyone, I hightailed it out of Meaford along a very scenic route recommended by Carol (thanks Carol!). I dropped by Tim Horton’s for a bowl of soup which hit the spot and I continued down the roads to Ajax.

I must admit that once I hit Highway 400, I was feeling like I could use a good nap. I wasn’t passing out, but I just felt like a zombie going through the motions of passing people, staying in my lane, watching the trees go by.

FINALLY, I made it into Ajax, strolled into Aunt Dinah’s house, said hello to everyone and immediately hit the sack. Everyone had a good laugh. After managing to rest my weary soul for a bit, I awoke, jammed a bit with Troy with my new guitar (it’s a beaut), learned a few new songs and then went to mingle with the crowd. It was good to see everyone, especially Aunt Lana and company as I haven’t seen them in awhile. Everyone was looking great (especially my cousin Rocky. It was like looking at a new man!) and we had a great spread of food, watched the hockey game and then proceeded to rock our socks off with the lovely sounds of guitar, voices and Palmer, Palmer and Sullivan.

Let it be noted that Uncle Richard is once again ‘the man’ for making up a good pot of chili for us. While one must wonder why he brings this deadly concoction into the Palmer household, but Troy and I aren’t complaining.

I then went to Burlington with Mom and Dad to visit Nanny and Tom which was fun. I haven’t been to their house in awhile. We had a great lunch, I showed off my new guitar which I bought with some money Nanny gave me for my birthday, played them a tune, looked at some old records (hey, I found an old James Bond album!) and then we headed out to Melanie’s place for a few hours before heading back into Ajax.

Let it be known that Aunt Dinah has officially won the best aunt ever award this year as she wasn’t serving Thanksgiving dinner until Monday and I would have been gone so she made up a plate for myself and Vero to munch on upon my return to Ottawa. While I feel bad that I inadvertently guilt tripped her into this, Vero and I thought the meal was fabulous and we send some great thank you’s to Aunt Dinah.

All in all, a decent Thanksgiving weekend was had and the weather was fabulous. We are talking about 30 degrees in the shade!

As I grow older, I must look younger. My proof is that many people card me nowadays versus the low number who carded me in yesteryears.

I headed up to Meaford Ontario with Mike to visit his brother and Carol on Friday. I figured a jaunt over there wouldn’t hurt me too much considering I was heading to Ajax the next day to see the family.

Mike ended up finding the craziest route to Meaford that there ever was…I believe it intersected 14 different highways. In the end, it only was 500 kms long (excellent), but still took us 7 hours (not so excellent). I didn’t mind it though. I was cruising through some beautiful vistas along with some good tunes.

We showed up in Meaford around 1:30 and proceeded to hang out with Danny, tour Meaford for a bit and returned home to have a few beer. We ended up picking up the new version of a Bubba, but in a Heineken form. Unfortunately for us, the beer was flat inside (whereas, the whole concept of this new-age mini-keg is that it keeps itself pressurized for awhile). Dinner was had, guitar was played and we headed out to the Legion for the night.

All I know is that upon entering the building, some woman grabs me by the shoulder and loudly proclaims:

“I am the female bouncer here! You don’t look to be of the age of 25 so I’ll have to see some ID.”

Of course, I didn’t say a word, showed her my ID and we all had a good laugh at the ludicrous statements. Such as:

1. “I am the female bouncer here.” – Well, that’s fine and all, but we can all very well see that you are female, why bother announcing the fact?
2. “…the age of 25…” – Last time I checked, you have to be 19 to enter a drinking establishment in the province of Ontario.

Anyhow, I’m nitpicking here…I really didn’t care if she carded me, but we did have a good laugh at the way she was presenting herself.

The Legion was in full force that night during karoke night. I played some games of pool with some guys from Trinidad and listened to the awful, AWFUL karaoke from some guy. He didn’t even know where he was in the song half the time!

We then headed for a midnight snack and called it a night. I must say that I had a little headache in the morning and was in some dire need of some extra sleep.

I had a good laugh when Carol mentioned in the morning where she got up and checked to see if my car had a sunroof open (as there was a nasty thunderstorm) and I pointed out that while I appreciated her efforts, she should have checked out her own car also! Unfortunately, the car was soaked inside.

Thanks to Danny and Carol for the lovely hospitality and the good times.

Mark this day down as the first day I went for a physical at the doctor’s. I didn’t really know what to expect other than the horror stories about some guy’s finger in my ass. Hey, that’s the truth people, they do that here in Canada!

Anyhow, I guess it went well. Although when the nurse threw me into an empty room with the instructions to put on a hospital gown, I must admit that I was perplexed by this paper mache gown that I had to figure out. After looking at every nook and cranny, I figured out where my head went in and realized that it’s better for my ass to be hanging out rather than my twig and berries.

That room was pretty cold while I was waiting around for the Doc. In the end, he came in, went through the motions (hey, no fingers entered any orifices! Beauty!) and the only thing that was wrong with me was my cholesterol was very high. Oh oh. What the heck? How did that happen?

In the end, the only thing he suggested to me was to start eating fish three times a week. I must admit I was a little perplexed that the ONLY way to bring my cholesterol down was to eat more fish. So I’m hoping that this will do the trick, otherwise, the doctor’s fears will be confirmed and the high cholesterol will be due to a little thing we like to call genetics. Gak.

Matt comments in my Radiohead post: “Also, If anyone can find a place to purchase a DRM free download of Jen Militia’s “Berlin boot camp” please let me know. Otherwise I am going to have to buy a CD that I am only going to use to rip the music.”

This brings up the reason why I like to buy CDs instead of downloading music.

I have this fear that one day, my diligent backing up of my hard drives will fall to the wayside and I shall suffer a catastrophic event – both my hard drive AND my iPod will bite the dust on the same day. Therefore, I will need to go back and digitize my CDs.

Let’s be honest here…rarely do I pull out an album and look at the artwork anymore. It’s like Matt says – it’s just used to rip the music.

I like to think of it as my backup copy in case something goes wrong. Although, if I do end up starting to buy digital music (hey, they are starting to remove DRM! Awesome!), I’ll have to be diligent in making a backup.

Oh yeah, and if anyone can help Matt out with his search, let him know.

Not the band, but the object which has been bestowed with nirvana-like qualities.

That’s right, I got to try out the new iPod Touch! Benoit had his at work the other day and let me fiddle with it.

It is pretty slick I must say. I don’t know if I would use the cover flow feature that much, but I do love the feature where you can select the letter of the artist you are looking for and it pops down to that section of the menu. Beauty! Saves me some thumb scrolling.

Also, the video feature is amazing. I could definitely see me enjoying it if I was on a long trip somewhere and wished to check out the newest episode of Heroes.

The interface is killer…that’s what won me over. It’s so sleek. It’s so…intuitive.

Sigh…it is a pretty cool product. I’ve never personally played with something like it so I have nothing to compare it to.

Sure, it only has 16 GB, but I equate it back to the days where we only had our discmans with us and a few CDs in our pocket. Sure, you can’t load ALL your music onto it, but you can load a lot of it.

Two thumbs up for the iPod touch.

I write this entry 24 hours after I received an email in my inbox stating that I had been one of the lucky few to purchase tickets to the Ahmet Tribute Concert which is home to Led Zeppelin in a reunion concert.

While I had no real plans to attend (heck, it’s in LONDON ENGLAND!!!), I knew that Mike was excited to go so I said “What the heck.” and put my name in.

To be one of the chosen few in an all out rock ballot is a shock to the system and I am honoured to have been a part of this event.

The scoop is, they sent me a password that would allow you to go into the Ticketmaster website and use it to purchase tickets in the O2 Arena. So I started wondering if I could sell the password.

So I logged onto Ebay and noticed that someone just sold one for $10,000. I have no way of confirming this but it did say it sold for that price. After some deliberation, we put the tickets on ebay and after a slew of problems (like not being able to see the listing), I awoke this morning and saw a cool $300 in the running to get the password.

Meanwhile, the morning drags on and I start scanning the message boards for any notice on whether or not people will get screwed by purchasing this password. You see, they had a notice saying that they would be checking the IDs of the purchaser. So here I am thinking that this means that they aren’t checking the passcodes!

Early in the morning, I had a slew of people inquiring about the tickets and one great fellow actually got in touch with the office and let me know that the passcodes, in fact, would be checked also at the ticket gates.

Not wanting to screw over anyone, and allow the tickets to go back into a pool of randomly drawn participants, I went to cancel the ebay listing but could not as there was less than 12 hours left in the bidding.

During the day, I was talking to a rep from Ebay about this and my situation and he said they do that so sellers can’t go in two minutes before an auction and change it to…oh…a rubber band for example. It makes sense but at the same time, it made my predicament harder as the bidding had peaked at $2,000.

I had a backup plan in mind, but the rep at Ebay said I can go ahead and cancel bids on my own item (which I thought was odd…) but lo and behold, that’s what I’ve been doing for the past hour now. I keep cancelling and telling people that the password won’t work, but because I am unable to edit my own listing if there is 12 hours left, I can’t get the word out before people bid on it! Argh. The countdown is on – 20 minutes left in the bidding. I must admit I am pretty pumped to remind myself that it got up to $2,000. In the end, I would have offered the buyer a refund if it came to that as I couldn’t (in good conscience) sell him a passcode that may screw them over as soon as they trekked out to London England to pick up their tickets.

In the end, I’ll have to spend some money for putting the listing up on Ebay, but I must admit it’s been a fun ride and I can have a story to tell about how we got the chance to go see Led Zeppelin (in perhaps, their final performance).

On a sidenote, if someone would like to start a collection to send me to London England on November 26 (flight is around $1000), by all means, do so. I still have 48 hours to use the password and order the tickets. Would I be appreciative of your grand gesture?

YES! THIS IS LED ZEPPELIN WE ARE TALKING ABOUT HERE! THE GREATEST ROCK N ROLL BAND THAT HAS EVER LIVED!!!

In fact, if someone wants to pay my way, they can have the other ticket and we can go together. Fair enough?

Who cares that Led Zeppelin tickets are being announced today…let’s focus on a bigger music element, Radiohead has a new album ready and it’s out in ten days.

WHAT THE HECK?

While every other band and their mother releases an album months after announcement, they’ve decided to go a different route (which is zany) and release it in ten days.

Here’s the scoop:

– Essentially, in ten days, you have access to a digital copy (read: download) of the new album. You buy it for any price you want to pay. It can be zero dollars. It can be ten dollars. It can be $100. Whatever you want to pay, you pay.

– There is also an $80 box set which includes the album on CD, the album on double vinyl, a bonus CD full of other songs, artwork, other things, plus some artwork. While $80 seems a little steep to me, I do know that there are manic Radiohead fans out there that would pay this in a heartbeat.

– Later in 2008, there will be a regular CD released.

So, let’s look at this immensity of this announcement – mainly, a ‘pay whatever you want’ download.

Now, there have been programs set up in the past which allows you to give money to an artist if you’ve downloaded their work. So if I downloaded the new Spice Girls album and thought it was amazing, I would go to a certain site and this business would send the money I feel they deserve for the album to the band to divvy up amongst themselves. Pretty good idea, don’t know if it ever really worked.

There are some interesting marketing experiments coming from the ‘pay whatever you want’ Radiohead album. It would be interesting to see how many people pay money for it, and what the average price point comes out to. I’m going to be honest here, if I knew I would never buy the physical CD, or the box set in the future, I could definitely see me forking out $10 for the album. It’s the least I can do. Others will just grab it because it’s free because that’s just what they want to do, which is fine. I think Radiohead is in a position in life where they realize that they have tons of money, they have enough fans that will still make them tons of money (so let’s make a super awesome box set that the fans want) and just think about the music in the end. Someone brought up an excellent point that a band starting out couldn’t really pull this off. While I agree that they probably couldn’t pull it off and MAKE MONEY, anyone can release their own music to the public.

It would also be interesting to see how many people downloaded it and THEN bought the album, but I think that’s a hard correlation to make unless someone orders it directly from the website when the regular CD becomes available. When the music spread out on the Internet, there are some good arguments that state that MORE music has been sold because MORE people get access to MORE bands. Instead of relying on my buddy telling me about a great album to listen to, I find out for myself if it’s worthy of a purchase. I still fall into the habit of buying first, listening later, but there have been some choices which have shocked me into regretting the purchase (Spider-Man 3 and Rob Thomas solo album, I’m looking at you!).

In the end, Radiohead can do no wrong with this strategy. They’ve essentially given us a free download preview of their album (or if you want to send some money their way, awesome), they’ve given their super-fans a really great box set with the album (as opposed to the horrid special edition of Zeitgeist that the Smashing Pumpkins released. Even I, a devout Pumpkins fan, could not bring himself to buy that load of crap…let’s not even get into the whole seven different versions at different stores with different tracks on each album. COME ON!) and they won’t be screwing over the common fan (like me) because they’ll eventually release an actual CD someday in the future.

I don’t know if I’m going to buy the $80 box set. I can’t say I’m a uber-fan…but I think I’ll download the album for free and follow up with an actual album purchase in the new year.

Random Updates

Friday Night’s Ice Cream/Birthday Party for Vero was a success! Although there was WAY too much ice cream left over, but that isn’t a measure of failure! Everyone had a great time, I tried out an ice cream beer float (not bad), Trish got me some nice AC/DC sandals for my birthday, I gave her the 2 minute hot dog cooker I found at a garage sale a few weeks before (read about it here) and everyone had a great time!

Saturday had Vero and I lazing around her place. It was unfortunate that I had brought a book with me that only had two chapters left in it! I surfed the Internet for a few hours while Vero still slept to find out more about the referendum happening in Ontario next week. It’s good to read about both sides of the story to formulate your own view. After speaking with Krista on my findings, I have decided to vote against MMP.

Saturday night brought us to Larisa and Jason’s new house which is a pretty swell pad. They have a huge backyard and their house is nice also. I ended up starting to play Settlers of Cataan which I was excited about as I have heard it is the #1 board game in the world. I tried learning it once with Carrie’s family but I don’t anyone was really putting much effort into actually teaching me so it wasn’t a fun game at all. But Matt and James really helped me out on Friday night and before we shut the game down, I was having a great time.

We then played Scene It: Squabble edition which was a guys vs. girls edition of the game Scene It. We all had a great time even though the girls really had to push the limits on the rules to catch up to us. But we were victorious (once again!)

Can I just say that I think Vero hit a skunk while driving back as the car smells like skunk right now. Thank you.

Sunday had me catching up on painting my front door. I don’t mind painting when I get a roller in my hand…I hate painting when I have a brush and I have to meticulously attack every little nook and cranny. That’s what the front door was all about. In the end, it wasn’t a hot day so I had to wait forever for the paint to dry for a second coat. I would say that I only have to apply a bit more paint in a few areas for it to be completely done. I’m pretty happy with the paint job on both the garage and front door. I like the colour better than the green that was there. All I have left on my things to do before the winter hits is to apply some roof tar over the tin shingle I put down, and try and replace a section of the eaves trough that is leaking. Silicon has been of no help in the past years. Time to really put some effort into this.

Last night was the last night that Mike’s parents were up. They left this morning with their new plane in tow. It was good having them up and I look forward to seeing them at Christmas time. Mike’s dad also gave me a few pointers on the structure of songs so I’m excited to start writing some stuff.