I have listened to probably too much piano already this week. The competition has been really good and it’s down to the finals. Of the three contestants selected to move to the finals, I can agree with 2 of them. The last was so much worse than a few other pianists, and I cannot understand why he made it. I’ll still go to the finals to hear their performances and see who wins.

I’ve decided that I have to stop reading news on the internet. I don’t want to find out anything about the new book before I read it. I’m getting my book at Octavia Books on Friday night and I’m reading all weekend. I’m a big nerd. But I’m a slow reader and I don’t want the book ruined by people mistakenly slipping information.

I never thought that I would have to write a follow up to my last post on WDSU, but they are so terrible. They did a story about Harry Potter leaked on the web, and then they all went on to talk about where you could go buy your book when it is released tomorrow at midnight. TOMORROW. Thursday. I actually had to go look up the date to make sure that I wasn’t crazy. Then Dan Milham started describing what the weather would be like tomorrow night when you are out buying your book. Ridiculous. I mean come on. They did a story on Harry Potter, you’d think they’d do just a little bit of research.

While I hardly ever watch TV news, tonight I was watching WDSU. It’s not the highest-brow news source to begin with, but tonight was terrible. They started with 3 separate reports on the same 5 minute speech by Vitter and his wife. While they could have just played the speech, they decided that they needed 3 different reports to try to introduce the ‘different’ parts of the speech. So, 6 minutes into the newscast, they stop everything and say “If you’re just joining us…” and proceed to summarize the entire newscast. Does that mean that most people shouldn’t switch on their newscast until 6 minutes into it? Did they notice that a lot of people suddenly started watching? Did they think that this material was difficult to understand?

Later in the show (yes, I kept watching while doing work) Dan Milham, the weather guy, was advertising the weather hotline. Almost condescendingly, he decided to explain after giving the number for the “Weather Hotline”, that you call the phone number to hear weather reports. Surprisingly, he didn’t offer any help on actually using a rotary telephone.

I don’t know what this means exactly. Maybe the station feels that the average intelligence level of our city is slowly falling. Perhaps that means that our city is growing again…

It’s impossible not to run into countless reviews of the iPhone online. So, I’m not going to do a review. I don’t have the time to remember everything I’ve done and I really don’t have that many gripes. Overall, I love my iPhone. It’s nice to have access to email and the web wherever I am. It’s come in handy at restaurants, meetings, and just walking around.

The service is a whole ‘nother issue. My reception at my house goes from 5 bars to none. I don’t know what the deal is. I don’t know how to complain to AT&T to get it fixed, nor if they’d do anything for me anyway. I’ve even thought about buying a repeater for my house, but I wonder how much that would help and I don’t want to actually do the proper installation.

I’ve come up a few tips for running.

• Running while hung-over is not fun
• Running when hungry and dehydrated is not good for you
• Attempting to do a hard run after taking a week off for blisters isn’t always the best idea
• Never start a run with a song like Phish’s Sparkle. It’s especially bad when you’ve had previous conversations about how you could never put that song on your workout playlist because its tempo gets too fast. How did it get on my playlist?

Clearly it’s best to avoid any of these things. If, by chance, all happen in the same workout, you will likely get light-headed and a little dizzy. If you are smart enough to recognize this, you will clock your shortest ever workout.