I am leaving on Friday night, so I was a bit short on time to get the product. So, I went to the most convenient location: the Best Buy in the Mall of America, which is close to work. Sure enough, they had the product there. But wait? Wasn’t the MSRP at $69.99? Yeah, it is, but Best Buy is charging $72.99! Well, I need it pretty quick and I don’t have time to order it online, so I went ahead and purchased it. With MN sales tax, my total expense was $78.30.

After the fact, I decided to do some online price comparison. Of course, I went to Amazon.com, where they verify that the MSRP is $69.99. But lo, they’re selling it for $46.99! Just as a comparison, I priced out overnight shipping from Amazon.com for the same product, and Amazon.com will get it to my door tomorrow for $64.97.

Why the discrepancy? First, Best Buy knows that you came to their store to get this item. The Griffin ITrip is not like the DVD, CD, or even that Nintendo DS game where you just say, “Yeah, that’s not too pricey, I’ll get this too.” You need the iTrip. Therefore, Best Buy is going to make sure they can get all the profit out of the iTrip that they can. Amazon.com, on the other hand, offers the iTrip at just a bit above their cost of getting the product, most likely. If we assume both Best Buy and Amazon.com have get these units for the same price from Griffin, Best Buy just got over 35% of my product’s price as profit. On the other hand, Amazon.com didn’t charge me the 33% and kept the couple percent as profit and operating costs.

Is this highway robbery? Not really. Best Buy has massive costs they have to cover, such as renting all that retail space and paying undereducated employees. The part I think is highway robbery is the extra $3 over the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP). I probably should have left and gone to the Apple Store, because if they have the product, I doubt they sell it for more than the MSRP.

I got this shirt, I think, the first time I saw The Elms play at Club 3 Degrees in Minneapolis, MN. That must have been sometime in 2003, I think, but I’m not sure. It’s been one of my favorite shirts ever since then and I wear it often, so it has gotten worn out pretty well. The graphic on the front (above) is faded and the edges of the shirt are getting a bit ratty.

But this summer, The Elms announced a sale on their site on old shirts. I took a look and found that this shirt was available for only $10! So, of course, I bought another one and am wearing the new hotness today:

This shirt was originally made to support their 2002 release, Truth, Soul, Rock & Roll, which is still one of my favorite albums from The Elms and where they solidified their classic rock sound. The back of the shirt, towards the top, also has one of the song titles off of that album, “All The While Having Fun!” printed on it too:

By the way, earlier this month The Elms released a brand new album, The Great American Midrange, which is easily the best album of their career. Check out my review of the album on inReview.net and visit the band’s website for more information.

The artwork has Derek Webb’s name and a bunch of black sleeves pointing to a target next to his name.  Also, in black lettering, it also says “The Ringing Bell” under his name, which is the name of his latest album.  The shirt is based on the album artwork for The Ringing Bell which was designed by Portland Studios and pictured below:

Wait, no, that’s the album cover, but the shirt is based on the cover of the graphic novel that Portland Studios made based on the lyrics of the album.  It’s a fun interpretation of the content of the album, and here’s that cover:

Derek Webb has spent many years as part of the band Caedmon’s Call, although he did not often write many of the popular songs that were on Christian radio. In the early 2000s Derek left Caedmon’s Call to start his own solo career, and he came out with guns blazing. She Must And Shall Go Free was a plea to the church to stop in-fighting and begin to be the church that Jesus called it to be. I See Things Upside Down, his second album, is probably my favorite because it is filled with big production values and lots of electric guitar licks, although many die-hard Caedmon’s fans didn’t like this style. He got back to the acoustic guitar-based songs and put in a more political bent in on Mockingbird. The Ringing Bell is one of my favorites as well, as more electric romps are included and it’s a little more whymsical at parts.

So, back to this concert. In fall 2007, Derek Webb and his wife, artist Sandra McCracken, did a short tour of the U.S. with a couple artists to fill out a band. I don’t know who booked the Varsity Theater down the street, but I knew I wanted to catch Derek with a band, because I love his sound compared to his acoustic sound. I know he doesn’t tour with a band often, so I had to catch it. Thankfully, it was on a Sunday evening with not much going on for me, so I went. It was a great time, Derek played lots of my rock ‘n’ roll favorites, and I got this T-shirt and the Sandra McCracken albums I didn’t already have. I loved how Sandra, after her opening set, had to go back to the bus to make sure their 4-month-old baby was sleeping or taken care of and then came back to play keyboards later in Derek’s set. It was great to see an artist that I enjoyed appearing at the local concert hall, and a lot of people came out to see the show. Ohh, and after that I went to the Chatterbox Pub in St. Paul with some friends for the first time, although they didn’t go to the concert.

If you’d like to check out Derek’s music, you can use this NoiseTrade widget. And by clicking through to the NoiseTrade site, you can even download the album for free, given that you tell your friends about it.

Mars Ill is my favorite hip-hop group, although fans of GRITS, 50 Cent, and the like may be less than impressed. ManChild and Dust, the emcee and the DJ, respectively, are more closer to classic hip-hop but still have a certain style that’s southern and all their own. The shirt features their logo at the bottom and a diagram of a turntable with Japanese annotations on a light brown Tee.

For more information about Mars Ill via an interview a friend and I did as well as a sampling of their independent releases, check out their episode of the inReview.net Podcast.

Plus, I got it during one of the best mini-vacations ever – a whirlwind weekend to Chicago to hang out with two of my sisters and see a bunch of my favorite bands!  In late August, my sister and I traveled to Chicago to meet my sister who goes to college in nearby South Bend, Indiana.  (We took the Megabus from Minneapolis, which is a very cost-effective way to get to Chicago from many places in the midwest.)  That evening, we caught a stop on the Music Builds Tour, which featured Jars of Clay, Robert Randolph & The Family Band, Switchfoot and Third Day, possibly one of the most amazing lineups in my rather short music history.  It was great to see the Jars guys rockin’ it onstage since the last time we’d seen them was in 2002.  Robert Randolph and hte Family Band rocked the place like only they can and brought a bit of Gospel flavor as well.  Switchfoot, of course, put on an amazing and inspiring show and all the bands came back for a synergistic encore.  Oh, and did I mention that it was outdoors on Lake Michigan on a beautiful August day?  That too!

The shirt, as you can probably tell, is gray and has the outline of the word “Jars of Clay” on it with some little bird figures.  It’s rock and roll and kinda pretty at the same time.  And now, I support one of my all-time favorite bands via my favorite art form: T-shirts.

So, as I mentioned in the blog post about the ILikeAndy.com T-shirt, I enjoy Andy Osenga and his music.  I’ve also loved reading his blog over the last couple years in addition to his music.  He’s one of my favorite bloggers.  But what I found while writing that story was that I’ve not been reading his blog for the last six months!

How does this happen?  Well, I’ve just been reading his blog via the RSS feed in my Google Reader, so I haven’t been visiting his site.  However, about six months ago, he got a new site, and the new site’s RSS feed was not the same.  Google Reader doesn’t notify me of this, so I probably at first assumed that Andy was too busy to blog and then forgot about his blog completely.

The great thing is that Google Reader keeps track of what’s new for me.  Google doesn’t usually screw up, but what happens when the webmaster forgets a little detail like that?  I miss six months of content and have to spend a couple hours on a Saturday catching up.  Should I be checking people’s actual sites more often?  I hope not – there’s way too many sites that I follow via RSS to do that.

I guess the moral of the story is to make sure that you’re not missing anything that’s important to you on the ‘net.  Unless you’re a webmaster, in which case, you should make sure you got your stuff together.  And speaking of which, I gotta go manage some sites.

Andrew Osenga is an independent singer-songwriter and is the former leader of the band The Normals, everyone’s favorite band from Normal, Illinois.  He also currently plays as a member of Christian folk super-group Caedmon’s Call, who I like to think of as the Main Street Singers of Christian music.  (I won’t keep the A Might Wind analogies rolling, because I think it’s a bit too early to call Amy Grant and Gary Chapman the genre’s Mitch and Mickey.  Just to clarify, if you get all those references, you’re too much of a Christian music geek, just like me.)

The shirt has an interesting history.  Apparently, a couple years before the shirt was made, Andrew Osenga lost a toe while mowing the lawn.  That’s hardcore!  And he had enough spirit to make an awesome-looking, random, “vintage” T-shirt out of it.

Half the reason I purchased this shirt is because I love supporting independent artists and I’ve always liked Andy’s music.  But, the other half is because I love innovative Internet marketing, and buying a domain like ILikeAndy.com and pointing it to your site is fun marketing.  Whenever someone asks what the shirt is about, I always direct them to go to the site and check out his music – there’s tons of free Andrew Osenga on there, including the free Letters To The Editor EP.  So, seriously, check it out.

To be honest, I was kinda glad this happened. A number of my coworkers had purchased iPhones in the last couple months since the iPhone 3G was released, and I was envious of the abilities of their phone. Primarily, my phone really had only close to text-only web browsing, and the ability to view things in full layouts and full graphics was something I really wanted. Plus, the Palm OS is nice, had many applications written for it, and is pretty stable, but the applications being written for the iPhone are so much cooler and are written for today’s computing world, not the world of yesteryear. Let’s just say I was ready to upgrade, and this non-working phone was my push to get it.

So, last Friday, I walked into the Mall of America Apple Store and picked up an iPhone. And, well, I definitely like it. It’s going to be great to only have one electronic device in my pocket – no PDA phone and iPod as well. Plus, on the way home from work today, I watched a number of video podcasts on it’s beautiful 3.5-inch screen. It was totally fun. Here’s a couple things I’ve enjoyed since I got ot:

• The podcast area not only keeps track of whether you’ve viewed a podcast episode, but the podcast browsing page lists how long the episode is and how much time you have left. Also, it has an icon saying it’s half-viewed.
• When I plugged it into the Mac, it didn’t sync my e-mail content (at least I don’t think so), but it did transfer my e-mail account information from Mail to my iPhone so I didn’t have to even muck around in Mail settings for the iPhone.
• I haven’t used it much yet, but Visual Voicemail may actually be the killer app of the iPhone. (In case you don’t know, this makes your voicemail act more like an e-mail Inbox, where you can select a message from a list onscreen and then it just plays that one.)
• One of my favorite apps is the Remote app that Apple is giving away for free on the App Store. I have a desktop computer set up in the study, and if I’m across the room or even in the kitchen, I can control the music and even select new music to play right on the iPhone.
• So far, I’ve not been annoyed at all by AT&T’s phone service. Almost every time I’ve looked at the phone I’ve had the full bars and the 3G data service. Well, outside of the major metro areas may not be as fun, but I’m not out there very often.

I will keep playing with it and I’m sure that more blog posts about functionality and cool apps that I find will be forthcoming. If you see me in the next couple weeks, feel free to ask me and I’ll give you a demo.

First, there’s the iPod nano. The nano is apparently thinner and more colorful than ever. The two-inch widescreen display is better than ever for viewing your music and video. The iPod nano also includes a sensor that tells if you’re holding it up straight or on its side and will react to that with its updated software. Plus, with nine different, bright color options, I think these may be a hit this fall. 8GB comes at $149 and 16GB at $199. The iPod shuffle was also updated to include half of the vibrant colors introduced on the nano as well.

The iPod classic was updated to a 120GB model for $249 and the 80GB and 160GB versions are discontinued. Unfortunately for those like me that like a lot of storage space for their library, this further signals that Apple may be considering the iPod classic to be even closer to dead. I still like to carry around all my music and the iPod classic is the only one I can do that on, so I hope they don’t discontinue it too soon. It’s also a bit odd, in my opinion, that they did not bring the features of the iPod nano software to the iPod classic, though.

The biggest deal they wanted to make, though, was the iPod touch. The touch is slightly thinner and a curved back like the iPhone 3G, plus it has a couple minor new features. There’s a speaker included inside the iPod touch’s innards, although early reports say it is not as good as the iPhone speaker. Still, it’s nice to have a speaker for casual gaming or sampling songs for your friends, although dedicated speakers would be much prefered for serious listening. Also, the Nike+iPod system, which allows you to track your workouts if you buy a sensor to put in your shoe, is included. Some persons have already taken the iPod touch apart and found what looks to be a Bluetooth chip in there, so besides a working Nike+iPod it’s possible that Apple will open usage of Bluetooth for more on this later.

The prices and storage capacities of the iPod touch have been updated, of course. There is an 8GB model for $229, a 16GB for $299 and a 32GB for $399. Apple, more than ever, touted the App Store with its hundreds and hundreds of applications for the iPod touch, and especially showed it off as a gaming device, which is a rather uncharacteristic move for Apple. It’s well-known that Steve Jobs does not play games, really, and in the past Apple has been very lackluster in promoting their products as a gaming platform, but this presentation showed a possible new effort to push the iPod touch and iPhone as a gaming platform. Only time will tell.

The only major software feature seems cool, but in my opinion it’s just snake oil. Apple’s new “Genius” feature is displayed with a little atom icon just like their in-store Genius Bars and offers recommendations of related songs. First, iTunes anonymously uploads your library’s data, and then you start getting Genius features. The Genius sidebar in the right side gives you songs, artists, or albums based on the songs or artists you currently have selected, and since it knows your library information, it does not list items already in your library. Also, select a song and press the Genius button on the bottom right of the screen and you get a playlist of songs from your library that are supposedly “similar” to that song. In my opinion, the Genius system doesn’t really seem to be that smart, but it may get smarter. This seems to be just the same as the iTunes Store’s “People who bought this also bought” database, which isn’t really anything groundbreaking, but I guess it’s cool to have that extended directly into your iTunes library. If you sync an iPod or iPhone with a library that has Genius enabled, the iPod or iPhone can also create Genius playlists on the fly as well.

These announcements were mostly what expected, and after finding out all there was to hear, I was a bit disappointed. The iPod nanos do look amazing mostly because of their bright colors. Nothing else was very exciting, and it makes me wonder why Apple was touting this as such a big thing. To be fair, Apple’s financial people were trying to tell investors that it was nothing to get excited about, but on the other hand, Apple’s PR team was saying it was going to be amazing. (I guess the investors are more the realists.)

After all these announcements, Mr. Slow and Boring himself, Jack Johnson, took the stage to lull us to sleep. After Steve Jobs woke us from our slumber to say, “Thanks for coming,” we all thought this was the coolest and most amazing new products ever. Yeah, right.

It’s a pretty nice shirt.  I don’t usually buy those shirts with all the tour dates on them, because it severely dates the shirt.  However, this one was a bit better because it just lists the cities and not the dates, plus it had the coolest front of any of their shirts.

I got this shirt at last fall’s St. Paul, MN stop of the Appetite for Construction tour.  I remember enjoying this show alot because Relient K played for a good hour or more and it was so good that I almost forgot that I still had Switchfoot left to go.  Of course, Switchfoot brought just as much excitement, variety, and rock ‘n’ roll as Relient K, if not more.  It was a great tour and a great pairing of some of my favorite bands.

Also, it became another meetup of one of my friends, Kim, who works a lot on the inReview.net website.  Kim started helping out at what was then cMusicWeb.com in 2001 by doing our first interview with Switchfoot, and she’s been doing interviews ever since.  She was in town to visit family last fall when the Appetite for Construction tour came through, so she joined me for the concert.  It was fun to hang out and enjoy some live music again, something we hadn’t done since we finally met in person in April 2006.  Without Kim’s constant help, there definitely wouldn’t be a website.

Kim also encouraged me to get a really cool book of photos taken by one of Switchfoot’s roadies, and she even introduced me to the photographer and we got it signed by them.  Then, after that, i decided to go through the signing line after I found this hilarious poster and absolutely needed to get it signed:

For those who have not seen Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, this photo is a parody of a photo of the characters from that movie.  Throughout the photo, each member of Switchfoot is represented one or more times.  It’s hilarious!