The Little League Coach

SL2PK1-SLH2

OK, now you are asking, how does this relate to Little League? Great question! We all host tournaments, even it if is only our district playing, we need music between the innings and games! This is the answer!

You Have to Have Music!

First, you have to have music during your tournaments. You also need to introduce your players. This is simple to accomplish. A cheap amp and speakers from any store like radio shack will suffice. We are fortunate enough to have a concert system donated from the Moose Lodge that kicks butt! Very small and concise, but very powerful.

Two cords for speakers, 1 for the mike, and and MP3 player is all you need. You simply hook up the MP3 player to the system with an 1/8" to stereo RCA jack adapter cable. Again, $2 at Radio Shack or Wal-Mart. Then let the fun begin!

How to Get the Music to Play

I was going to have to download about $100 worth of music to play! Not really my idea of a good investment. Enter the Sirius Stiletto 2 ! I already have Sirius Satellite radio, I hear songs I forgot I knew! If a song is published, they play it. Never a dull listening moment. But the Stiletto 2 takes it to a whole different level!

Is it a DAR?

Anyone familiar with a Digital Video Recorder for a television will instantly understand the power of the Stiletto 2. I guess you would call this an Digital Audio Recorder (DAR). I have never heard it called that, but that is what we will call it here. Can this be possible you are thinking? Yes, ONLY BETTER THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE!

The Secret Button!

The most kick-butt part of it? The little "heart" button. Like a song you are listening to? Hit the heart button and (go ahead smile now because you know what is coming!) YES it records the song!!! In full digital quality! Amazing!

I have spent the last 3 days recording music for the sectional we are hosting on Saturday! Man is this fun! The only problem I am experiencing is if the DJ talks over the music then it records that as well. But I have learned not to record those. For personal use, I could tolerate it, just don’t want it in my recordings for Saturday.

There’s More!

OK, so that is cool enough right? You are ready to buy right? I was as well. BUT this thing also is an MP3 player with more memory than you could ever want or use. It has 2 gig onboard and a slot for an 8 gig add on card. The best part? It plays mp3 AND wma files. My biggest problem w/ the ipod is it doesn’t play wma files. I saves about 250 CD’s as wma files about 2 years ago and the ipods won’t play them! Again, Apple kicking their own proprietary butt.

So while all day I record the latest, greatest, and oddest songs I do not already have in my library. At night I am transferring songs from my personal collection. When all is said and done I will have more than enough music for Saturday. After Saturday I will load my entire collection of songs from my PC onto this thing and continue to record as I hear songs I like. I love this thing!

It Goes Anywhere

It picks up the satellite anywhere and comes w/ headphones w/ a receiver in them (not sure if I like my head being the satellite receiver, but I guess it’s safe). It also comes with standard ear bud headphones. Obviously go buy some Bose headphones if you are really into it. It is 100% portable. If you want it in the car you will need the car kit. If you already have a car kit installed it will adapt to that. Make sure to use the power adapter that came w/ the unit though otherwise it won’t sound good and probably will damage it (learned this the hard way).

There Can’t Be More Can There?

It also has wifi capability to listen to internet radio. I haven’t used this yet and doubt I will really, but you can use it if you are in the office and want to listen to live music. Personally, I just listen to my personal and saved library while in the house. Which, btw, I can do w/ my shuffle feature. I love the shuffle feature of everything, for some reason I find it cool not to know what song is next, only now I know I will probably like the song!

Finally, you can use the recurring record function to record shows that you listen to on a daily basis.

This thing does much much more as well, but the functions above make it worth every dollar! Go buy a Sirius Stiletto 2 now!

What is your opinion of the Stiletto 2 ?

No Comments »

David Batcherlor, owner of dialmycalls.com , contacted me a few days ago because he felt his product was perfect for Little League coaches. While I agree with him, I would certainly not restrict it to Little League Coaches! I would recommend this product for ANYONE that has multiple people to call w/ the same message! This thing rocks!

Easy Set Up

As it so happened, we had rain tonight and our entire district’s all-star games were canceled. The perfect time to give dialmycalls.com a test run! First I navigated over to the site and quickly signed up. Took all of a minute. Once in I clicked on the the Setup a group call link on the right. Step one had me select my free service, step 2 had me record my message. I had the choice of recording my own message, uploading a wav file or having them convert my text to voice.

The service is free for 1 phone call a day to up to 25 people, so they drop a short ad in the front and back of your announcement, but it is really not obtrusive at all! Plus, you can select a male or female voice for the message. Anyone want to take a guess which voice I wanted to hear?

Record You Message

I selected to record my own voice message to broadcast to the board of directors of our league. I clicked, add recording, and ding-aling my phone rang! It prompted me to record my message, which I did, and then hit pound. I could listen to it, rerecord or simply hang up. Done. It took me 10 times as long to type this as it took to actually perform the task.

Add Your Names

Then I added 11 names, phone numbers , and email addresses . Yes, one of the options I selected was to backup your voice message w/ an email wav file just in case they didn’t get your voice mail . (Remember the days when you could avoid people? Those days are over!) This was actually a bit of a chore. It was frustrating because my only options were load phone numbers w/ no names (fast but I knew I would need these numbers for other lists in the future), load names/numbers/emails, or upload a data file.

The data file option would have been nice, but I would have had to have it in excel or .cvs format. Who has that? Would have been much nicer if I could have integrated my data from my outlook, or even better, directly from my cell phone ! Either way, it wasn’t all that bad, and I am sure they are working on some kind of option similar to this.

Anyway, once I had all the names in, I hit the send call now button. I could have scheduled a time to send it, but I chose instantly. It was truly instantly. Before my fingers had time to leave the keyboard my phone was ringing w/ my message and all the board members quickly called me to let me know they got it!

It was FANTASTIC! BEAUTIFUL! What a relief! I took 11 calls and turned them into 1!!!!!!

One thing I forgot to mention, I was able to put the contacts into groups. I created the group Board of Directors, directly from the form that I was inputting the names from! It could not have been more convenient.

Group Administration

Once I completed this, I went to the groups/names admin page. I clicked a check mark next to the names of the board members who also had players on my all-star team and bada-bing bada-boom, created and added them to my all-star team announcement group! I then repeated the chore of adding the additional players names to that team’s group. It was quite simple. I have people in more than one group, but only one entry. That is kind of sweet.

One more thing, the wav file is not actually emailed to your list. A link is. This is nice because there is no need for the receiver to actually open a file. The file is hosted by the dialmycalls.com server and played instantly.

They also offer premium options for larger groups and the prices are very affordable, starting at only 4 1/2 cents a call! They also have a reporting function and what appears to be a fantastic support page.

Gone forever are the days of the phone tree that always broke! Today, we have dialmycalls.com .

No Comments »

Image via Wikipedia

I will admit it. I had every ozzy album, every sabbath album, and I loved "the Ozbourne’s" TV show. Some of the greatest music ever created! No doubt about it. But the guy is nuts! Of course we all knew that.

On my way into my day job today I was listening to Mike and Mike in the morning on ESPN . They were playing the worst renditions of the song "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" at Wrigley field. I was shocked at Ozzy’s! You will be too!

Click here to watch it on Utube.

Unbelievable!

Anyone have any other great renditions of this song?

No Comments »

Image via Wikipedia

The Final Season

Just watched The Final Season and I have to admit that it wasn’t very good at all. Which is a shame because we grew up w/ Sean Astin and I really like a lot of stuff he did in the past. In fact, when I went to see Grease, starring Rosie O’Donnell , w/ my wife and son at the Ford Theatre in Washington, DC , he was there w/ a few other celebs. That was the night that President Clinton and Chelsea were there to see the show also! In addition, Don and Mike, local DJ’s were in attendance. It was a star studded event I would say!

Roanne

I also have to worship him a bit, because when he was doing teen movies back in the day when I was way way younger, he had a last scene where he woke up w/ a nekkit woman. That was Roanne, a girl that used to date Brian from Child’s play and hang out in the Baltimore/Washington club scene that we were so intricately involved in. Obviously, we were all jealous of him at that time!

Boring

Anyway, sorry about that, I know this is a family forum. The move dragged on way to much, didn’t really ever get going and the climax of winning the final championship wasn’t really even enough to keep my attention. This is a great story about a small high school in Iowa that had only 100+ students, yet won 20 straight state championships! How did they do it? Fundamentals according to the coach in the movie.

A story so great could have been told so much better. This is no Bull Durham , that’s for sure!

Anyway, if you have nothing else to do, give it a look, otherwise, skip it!

Anyone else see this movie? Let me know what you thought.

No Comments »