The Upstate Life

Friday, March 04, 2005

What's a Hokie?

Now that we're entering the month of March, we all know that Madness will ensue. If you thought The Upstate Life wasn't talking enough about college basketball, and more specifically about the Terps, then you probably won't be able to handle the next few weeks. Tomorrow's regular season finale at Virginia Tech is hands down the most important game of the season in relation to our postseason outlook. To basically sum it up, if we defeat the Hokies, it's generally easy to say that we're a lock for the NCAA Tournament. However, if we end up losing, not only will we have a lower seed in the ACC Tourney and be forced to play an extra day (due to the addition of Virginia Tech and Miami to the conference), but would also be officially declared a bubble team by every sports analyst out there. With a modest RPI of 39, a win is essential tomorrow night to not only secure a .500 record in the ACC, but to also avoid having to play an extra round in the conference tournament. Though infamous for their inconsistency throughout the season, the Terps showed some encouraging signs of life with their narrow, two point loss to top-ranked UNC last Saturday. Hopefully, Maryland will be able to play with that same sense of determination tomorrow so TUL will be able to see them dancing in the next couple of weeks.

I finally bought tickets to Bloc Party yesterday, albeit over Ticketmaster due to the fact that the Black Cat box office is only open at night and nowhere remotely close to my apartment. Should be an excellent show and TUL would not be surprised if this will turn out to be a sellout crowd.

I was able to find a copy of last Thursday's Wilco show, thanks in part to the fine people over at Via Chicago, so TUL could relive being right up front at the 9:30 that night. Get ready for some totally awesome dorkiness. The tracks that were downloaded were encoded in FLAC format, which is apparently superior to that of MP3 as it is not as compressed, thus it does not suffer from a substantial loss of quality during playback. Anyways, I wanted to put this on my iPod, and since the device doesn't support FLAC, I needed to convert it to MP3. First, I downloaded the FLAC encoder/decoder package which allowed me to convert the original files into WAV format. I then used dBpowerAMP to convert the WAV tracks into MP3 at 192k bitrate, and honestly, there really wasn't any difference in quality between the original file format and the final product. But it wasn't over yet readers. You see, I then had to tag everything in iTunes before ultimately transferring February 24th's performance onto my iPod. Though it took nearly an hour (mostly due to the fact I was performing a mass MP3 conversion on a craptastic 1.4Ghz Celeron), it was well worth it. If you couldn't follow all of that, you were forewarned of the nerd alert.

Posted by Brett at 2:24 PM |