Los Angeles Trip Highlight Photos

When I checked into my hotel room, I was very surprised to see that someone had left a full prescription bottle of pills on my night stand. I wish there had been a camera in my room for the look on my face and how fast I scurried over to check out what they were. Not that I'm even remotely into pills, but I was highly surprised. When I realized they were from the hotel and M&M's, I was disappointed but still highly amused.

My first trip to In & Out was highly surprising also. For some reason I had it in my head that this was some kind of gourmet burger joint, nothing could be farther from the truth. They call it In & Out because they only serve three things, five if you count fries and drinks. I wasn't that impressed, not only did it take 15 minutes to get a shitty burger, the fries weren't that great either. It's hard to mess up fries.

After we ate we headed over to Capital Records to meet up with Jax and get the tour. We met a lot of cool people, toured the facilities, saw the Diamond Awards, and got to go on the roof, which I guess is a very special provilage since Jax said she had to work at Capital for two years before she got to see it.

The Tenacious D movie premiere party was being held at our hotel Thursday night. Unfortunately, I did not run into Jack Black.

Before hitting the Zune Party, we had a music blogger summit meeting at Cat & Fiddle, which included Justin from Aquarium Drunkard, Dodge from My Old Kentucky Blog, Mark from Music for Robots, Chris from Gorilla vs. Bear, Matt from You Ain't No Picasso, Dave from The Rawking Refuses to Stop, Cesar from Zune Insider, my date Trent from Pink is the New Blog, amd our new friends from Cornerstone. It was fun catching up with the boys, we've all been lucky enough to hang out quite a few times this year and we're all planning to meet up again for SXSW in March.

At the party we got to check out Bitter:Sweet:

Here are the pics I talked about stealing in an earlier post:

Peeps checking out the new Zune:

Which brings me to the point where I confirm that we weren't guided by Microsoft in any way, shape, or form to write about the trip, the party or the Zune.

Did I get one? Yes.
Do I like it? Yes.

And I know that I am one of the few, but I am a Microsoft person, have always used WMP, and have never owned an Ipod, so it really wasn't a hard sell. If you've been following along closely, it's easy to see that several of my fellow bloggers didn't care for the Zune and were pretty straight forward about it on their sites. We were told to write what we wanted and that's what we all did.

If you're looking for the real deets on the Zune, check out these sites:

Zunerama

ZuneScene

Zune Sphere

I know some of the other bloggers are really hung up on looking like a sellout to Microsoft, but in my old age I have the wisdom to know that we all sell out a little bit everyday, it's called business and the only people who don't know that are teenagers and kids in college who think they can do everything their way and still progress. I'm not worried about being a sellout because I am way too lazy to sell out, just talk to all of my close friends I have forgotten to write about! If I am not kissing up to them, you better believe I'm not going out of my way for anyone else! You should see the stack of CD's on my desk that have yet to even be opened or the unopened invites to shows in my inbox, it's overwhelming at times. As soon as blogging starts feeling like a job, I usually take a break until I become inspired again, cause there is nothing worse than a jaded blogger. You know who you are.

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