Christopher Monks and a bevy of other funny folks are doing another one of their humor readings tonight at the Plough and Stars in Cambridge.

The perfect pre-Pats game chucklefest!

We’ve been holding out on getting DVR as I was waiting to see when Comcast was going to roll out their Tivo service. But we finally caved in and got the standard Comcast DVR service a couple of weeks ago. Everything worked fine (great, in fact) until the actual DVR unit started to… uh… crap out. It seemed it had a problem with one of its tuners, so any time we wanted to record something while watching something else it would be a no go.

Now my trusty VCR technology never let me down this way!

So I exchanged the unit for a new one which seemed to have problems with both tuners. So now we have our third one and the “Comcast guy” is coming this afternoon to see if there’s any issues with our lines, as opposed to the unit, even though the guy at the Comcast office basically told me these PACE DVR units are… uh… crap.

On top of all of this, Comcast has actually set up their own Tivo page, so maybe someday soon we will all get to the promised land?

The house was spectacular. Clean and modern. The second floor looked out into the main room which opened up to the rear outdoors which offered a stunning view of LA below. Small metallic inked booklets laid out the different themed rooms of the party. At each focal point in the mansion, young folks with Nokia shirts were on hand to provide assistance (not always succesfully.)

One room showcased video games that you could play on Nokia NSeries phones. I tried my hand at a fishing game. Well versed in fishing video games from the Wii Play title (which has caused me to gleefully kick up both legs in the air as I reel in “the big one.”), I asked my young Nokia lad, “Do I pull the phone back like with the Wii?” He replied, “No, but that would be cool!” He did say they were “working on that” and a quick google search reveals that the Nokia 5500 does indeed have a motion sensor which offers all sorts of cardiomobile stylings. That being said, the fishing game was enjoyable.

My first haul was an old bottle, but I eventually pulled in a big carp or mackeral or something. The phones were all connected to nice full size monitors, so you didn’t have to rely on the cell phone screen. At one point the Nokia lad was trying to restart the game for me and he stepped back to the main game menu which offered me a quick look at some of the other games on the phone including… Sudoku! Now *that* got me excited!

The main room was classified as “the heart of the party” and that’s where a DJ operated an assortment of gadgets — Nokia phones, Apple laptops and I believe even turntables — to produce music and visuals. There were some Nokia gals that were showcasing the N800 but everytime I drifted over to them they drifted away from me to someone else, just like the game fish that eluded me!

I did manage to find friend and neighbor Steve Garfield who was in town for the Podcast and New Media Expo. Steve and I live about a five minute walk from each other, but we haven’t been able to connect for a while due to our usual busyness. Alas, it takes flying across the country to have some quality time together. Steve introduced me to Steve from Jet Set and Kenyatta of Rocketboom — friendly fellows, both of them!

The main room also served as a gathering for a viewing of a Nokia video followed by a talk by Nokia’s VP of Multimedia in North America Bill Plummer. I gathered from my compatriots (who in general are much more on top of all of this stuff) that they were expecting/hoping for some sort of new product announcement, but Plummer seemed to only reiterate the strengths of the existing Nokia Nseries line.

With that official business out of the way, the party moved into second gear.

(To be continued…)

So very early this past Thursday morning, I flew to Los Angeles on behalf of the fine folks at womworld for a Nokia NSeries party in the Hollywood Hills that night. I was part of a group of twentysome odd bloggers from all parts — mostly the U.S., but a few from England. The trip out was blissfully uneventful and I even got in about half an hour early into LAX. I took a shuttle bus to the Crown Plaza Beverly Hills and was in my room by 12:30 p.m.

Donna from womworld gave me a ring soon after and we met up in the lobby to have a drink. One by one, various other guests arrived and soon enough we had pushed four tables together to have lunch. All sorts of high-tech wireless gadgets were whipped out in a frenzy: Nokia N95s, iPhones, bluetooth keyboards, temporal displacement phasers (well maybe not that). Alas, I seemed to be the only Nokialess one in the group, with my coy Motorola Pebl (“It’s smooth and green!”, would be a good motto).

We “broke” at about 4:30 for a couple of hours of quiet time. I closed my eyes for a bit, but mostly flipped through the channels of the TV before showering for the evening’s main event.

At 6:30 we all assembled into a bus (or “coach” as Donna called it) and made our way up Beverly Drive. Shops soon gave way to well manicured bungalows and chic properties. At some point we turned onto Mulholland Drive and began snaking up through the hills. Our collective ears were popping. The lush hills, fading daylight and winding roads reminded me of similar precarious bus adventures in Greece a few summers ago.

After not too long, we pulled over to the side of the road at what appeared to be a long private road. There was a gaggle of people standing around and some semi-official looking folks brandishing clipboards. We stepped out of the bus and noticed a small fleet of electric buggies emblazoned with Nokia NSeries logos. The buggies ferried us up the small road in small groups for what must have been about a 90 second ride to a very attractive home at the end of the road. Two smiling folks invited us into “their home” as we stepped into the big party.

(Continued…)

I’m teaching again this semester — over in Northeastern’s new SPCS graduate program. My course is titled Time-Based Media and is an existing course, though I did have a fairly blank slate to begin with in developing the syllabus.

I’ve structured the course into four concept driven blocks (as opposed to technology or tools driven blocks): Composition, Time, Narrative and Experience. The class blog is at http://dm3225-fall2007.blogspot.com/ though so far I’m the only one posting (come on kids!)

So I’m heading to LA next week for some sort of Nokia soiree at an LA mansion thanks to the kind folks at womworld. Others have speculated about what could be the big event.

Of course, I have no idea what the hell is going on, but maybe it will spur me to blog a bit more beyond the semi-weekly episodic posts of DriveTime.

I first started blogging a few years back with blogger and like the fact that I could direct my blogger account to a subdomain of my own domain. I kept using blogger when I started my videoblog DriveTime two years ago. They added all sorts of whiz bang features in a transformation from “old blogger” to “new blogger”, though I was hesitant to switch for fear of falling into the “New Coke” kind of debacle.

So I’ll try this out for now and then figure out if this becomes the new blog.ravijain.org or just the same old ravipress.wordpress.com