ATS finished up yesterday. A very successful endeavor, the class generated positive feedback that hopefully will encourage others to take it in the future.

What a show last night was the Counting Crows in Lawrence! I haven’t blown out my voice from yelling in years, but I did last night. My favorite quote was when Adam Duritz said something about getting ready to play an old song, then remarked “at this point, anything before this album is pretty fucking old.” He’s right. The last studio album was 2002’s Hard Candy. It was a great disc, but six years is a long time between fresh material. Sure, they put out a compilation, a live CD and remastered their first CD August and Everything After, but six years is just too long to wait. Maybe that’s why the moved from what is now Verizon Amphitheater, where I last saw them in 2000, to Liberty Hall.

Facebook has been experimenting with different kinds of advertising techniques with varying degrees of success and to various amounts of fanfare, ridicule and outright protest from its users. The most ire earned so far has been related to ways they’ve tracked users and based the ads delivered on the data from such tracking. I don’t really mind companies watching what I do, as I gave up on the concept of Internet privacy many years ago. I figure that if someone cares enough about what I’m doing to record it and use the data, I feel just a little bit more important and my head gets a little bit bigger.

I logged in at the suggestion of an email sent by someone at Facebook to tell me that somebody I couldn’t remember added me as his or her friend. Facebook has a view that lists the recent activities of each of your friends, and I often find myself reviewing it since it’s really the only way I can find out anything about my friends with actually talking to them directly. Removing the requirement of human interaction is one of the most staggering modern conveniences.

In any case, I’ve noticed recently that the second or third entry is usually an advertisement. I usually skip right over it, but this time it caught my eye. There, listed right along with friends adding applications and joining groups, was the news that the Counting Crows not only had a new album, but that it was already in stores.

While most of my music purchases are now from Amazon and it’s one-click access to its DRM-free selection, there are some purchases that I want to be able to display prominantly at the top of the cardboard box of CDs that I keep in my tool shed. Reminding myself that I needed to eat an extra helping of cranberries as punishment for not paying closer attention to my favorite band, I quickly left my office and left to find a copy.

After striking out at WalMart among its selection of about 12 artists, I found my prize at Hastings. I was profoundly disappointed at the lack of a jewel case, but that disappointment quickly faded as I inserted into the CD player in my truck the tracks to which I will be listening exclusively for the next six months.

We had one hell of a show last night at O’Brien’s Pit Stop in Norton, Kansas. Our good friend Rex Striggow, previously of the Mad Cows and the Blaine Younger Band and now from the relatively newly-formed Carbon Cowboys, joined Lucas, Dave and me for the show by rocking the green bass. The crowd was fantastic, making us play 45 minutes longer than we planned and yelling “one more song” very loudly in unison about thrice after we finally quit.

I’m sitting at Maddy’s house in Norton. We’re making calls to everyone in the area who might have some alcohol to put in Lucas’s brother’s new racing go-kart. Two fat, grown musicians trying to get a tiny go-kart with a small engine running on gasoline is probably a sight to see, especially when they realize after it’s finally running that the engine is tuned for pure alcohol instead of the gasoline. I don’t know if we’ll get the alcohol in time before we have to head south for Hays, but I’ll grab some pictures if we do.