Entertainment

Yep. Decision made. I’ll be going to the Oakenfold concert @ In The Venue on Saturday. Between that and watching The Dark Knight up at the IMAX in Sandy, my entertainment budget for this pay period is pretty much shot. Not so much because of the cost of tickets, but the cost of a tank of gas to make two trips up to Salt Lake City. Pretty sad when it costs $60 to fill up a ‘96 Honda Accord, but that’s what we get for having such a crappy energy policy. Don’t even get me started on our foreign policy — I can guarantee you that starting a war with Iran is not going to drive oil prices any lower.

Today, I ordered/purchased most of the few remaining things I need to install new solar screens on our apartment’s west- and south-facing windows. I figure it’s cost me about $450 altogether, but that’s including the half-roll of solar screen I won’t need in addition to all of the tools I’ve purchased to be able to assemble and install the screens. I think my lightbulb-replacement project was much more economical (and, truth be told, will probably have the most effect.) Oh well, it’ll at least give me plenty of experience with windows screens - hurray for that.

Lately, I’ve been organizing my music collection, which has been spread across various hard drives and computers over the past 10 years. Problem is, as I started to unify the various collections, I quickly exceed my Zune’s 30GB capacity. If I wanted to, I could manually synchronize my collection album by album, but that would be quite tedious. Fortunately, the Zune software now has a “Sync Group” feature, which allows you to specify, for example, that you want all of the albums from 2000-Present that have been added to your collection within the last 60 days automatically synchronized. So, instead of having to spend $150 to upgrade my Zune’s harddrive or $250 to upgrade to a second-generation 80GB Zune, I can just sync the music I actually want to listen to, automatically.

For those of you who are looking to organize your own music collections, I’ve been pretty happy with Tag&Rename.

Yes, I realize that this post was littered with dangling prepositions — I promise to do better next time.

So I have an important decision to make: Do I go see Ferry Corsten and Deadmau5 at the Global Dance Festival in Colorado, or do I stay closer to home and go to the Paul Oakenfold show in Salt Lake City? The dilemma arises due to the fact that both shows are on July 19th. While the Global Dance Festival will obviously be pretty darn awesome and will feature a lot of artists, including a few international DJs. And there will be a ton of people there — an instant recipe for a great show. The Oakenfold show will be at In The Venue, which will be crazy insane since the place is easy to pack. Oakenfold usually makes an appearance up at Park City during the ski season, but that’s harder to attend since I will be back in classes.