Okay, so it’s official. As of this morning, I actually have (surprisingly good) tickets to see Spamalot! It turns out that a group must have reduced its number of tickets reserved, so I was able to snag two seats (five from center aisle) on the mezzanine level of the theatre. About 80 feet from stage, probably 10-15 feet above stage level. Pretty much perfect if you ask me (because you can see everything from that location — I’ve been in seats near that before for other performances).

I was just really surprised it was even possible — since I’d waited so long (ticket purchases opened up sometime in February if I recall) to get tickets, I was figuring that we’d end up in some strange seats in the Gallery. Not that those are bad, but my experience over the last few days perusing the website for tickets indicated that in most cases the Gallery (highest level) would be my only option.

This goes out to my most helpful telephone rep at the Ordway — this is why I prefer calling to order tickets as opposed to doing the website thing. Especially since they operate their own box office (as opposed to a Ticketmaster sort of operation where [reps] don’t necessarily know the venue).

So I had to call Beth right away and inform her — it’s going to be amazing! I can’t wait! But I’ll have to, because the performance isn’t until August 9. 😛 I’m simply stoked. It’s going to kick some serious ass! I’ve been waiting for this to get ‘close’ to us since it first came out.

Anyway, as this will likely be my only post today, I’m going to briefly comment on an editorial/informal poll, if you will, in which the point was noted that (in theory) if a site such as Google were to convert from a white to black background, the potential may exist for a reduction of something like 8.3 Megawatt-hours of electricity required for people worldwide to simply view pages at Google.

This is due to the fact that (in the Monitor/RGB world) the color black is the (more or less) ‘all off’ state. To get white, one must mix the maximum values/intensity of each primary light color (Red, Green, Blue). Anyone familiar with manipulating RGB values in Hexadecimal format will understand this — the value 000000 is black, and the value FFFFFF is white.

By and large, the vast majority of my work and play with the electronic world (e.g. computers) is done with a white/light background and dark text. The one exception to this is any work I do in a terminal environment (e.g. logged in via SSH to a server), in which case I exclusively use a black background and white text.

This potential power savings is really only achieved with CRT monitors; LCD monitors are inherently less power-consuming. Anyway, regardless, it got me to thinking. Perhaps I may play around with desktop environments at work (where I still have CRT monitors); not necessarily because of the potential power savings, but possibly because in my previous experience, reading white on black is significantly easier than the opposite. Especially when you do it all day.

So we’ll see what happens. I think I’ll try it at work and see if I like it. Maybe it’ll make me more productive some day. 🙂

Until next time…

–MZ