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***FreePlusRating: 8/10***
Networking is a great way to meet people but even with free food and drinks it can still be work and not purely entertainment.
Last Wednesday I attended a monthly networking event for professionals in the online analytics field. It is a monthly networking event sponsored by a different company each time. Free food and drinks along with the prospect of meeting potential clients, partners or friends is a nice break from the desk in the middle of the week. This group happens to be free but most professional organizations do charge an annual membership fee.
Here are some sites to find out more about professional organizations in your industry: Tips: Make sure to bring business cards with you because you never know who you will meet. If you don't have business cards because you are unemployed or a student, you can print free business cards from VistaPrint.
***FreePlus Rating: 8/10***
Your experience will vary depending on the trivia host, the knowledge diversity of your team and the rest of the competition. The game is long, so be ready for about 2-2.5 hours of time commitment.
Trivia night at many local bars has been a tradition for a few years now. Stump Trivia is the company that holds these events. On any given night with the exception of Friday and Saturday trivia is held at nearly a dozen bars in the Boston metro area.
I went to my first trivia event a few weeks ago at Clery's accompanied by my co-workers. It's free to play trivia but food and drinks are at your own cost. We had a team of 5 which was just under the max of 6 people per team. The first step was to choose a team name which was fun in itself. Team names are usually puns on current event, so following that tradition we selected 'Heading to 6000' in reference to the falling stock market.
The game began with 4 questions per round. In the first half, teams assign odd number points (1,3,5,7) to each of the 4 questions, reflecting the confidence in their answers. In the second half, even number points (2,4,6,8) are assigned to each of the 4 answer choices per round. For example, if a team assigns 7 points to an answer and their answer turns out to be incorrect, they no longer have an option to assign 7 points to the remaining questions in the round. In general, teams have one song length to hand over their answer to the host. The correct answer is announced at the end of the song.
Questions are primarily about entertainment, sports and current news items. Here is a sample questions:
Q: What Denver based newspaper was recently shutdown after 150 years in operation?
A: The Rocky Mountain News
Bonus rounds are even more fun and it's where teams can breakaway with the lead or fall miserably behind.
Picture Bonus Round 1: The goal of this round is to name the people in the pictures. We had pictures of cheerleaders and some of them included Kirsten Dunst from Bring it On, model & wrestler Stacey Keebler and Katie Couric in her much younger cheerleading days.
Mystery Person Bonus Round 2: The goal of this round is to identify the mystery person in as few clues as possible. If you identify the person with only 1 clue, then the team gets 10 points. If it takes 2 clues, then 8 points and so forth until the 5th clue which is valued at 2 points. Our mystery person that night was Desperate Housewives star Marcia Cross who I identified after the second clue.
Bonus Round 3: Matching list of 10 items. We had a list of 10 baseball players and the books they had written. With the sports experts on our team we correctly identified all 10!
With well over a couple dozen teams present that night, we ended up somewhere in the top ten. However, it took over 2 hours to finish the game which started at 8 pm and ended around 10:15 pm. Overall trivia night is fun, especially for competitive folks like myself.
Find a Stump Trivia event in your area: www.stumptrivia.com
Tips: Make sure you have at least one person with entertainment knowledge (i.e. music, movies, celebrities) and sports expert(s), particularly on local teams.
***FreePlus Rating: 9/10***
Who can say no to new releases at a fraction of the price of movie theater tickets? However, you do forgo the blockbuster impact of a life size screen and sound effects in a movie theater.
Watching movies is probably the most common if not the largest form of entertainment. Despite the economic downturn, box office ticket sales continue to increase with revenues surpassing $1B in January which is a year-over-year growth of nearly 20%. However, why spend $12 on movie tickets when you can see the same film on DVD for a dollar per night by just waiting a few months?
Many of you may have noticed Redbox machines popping up in supermarkets and grocery stores in your neighborhood in the past few years. These red machines can hold more than 600 DVDs and any where from 70-200 titles most of which are recent releases. Redbox has actually been around since 2003 when the first kiosks were placed at 140 McDonald's in Denver. Just last month Redbox was bought for $175M by Coinstar. In 2007 it passed Blockbuster in total U.S. locations and it most recently passed Blockbuster in online site visitors according to data from Compete.
The ease of renting and returning movies at any Redbox machine plus the low cost of $1 per night for rental are the key competitive advantages for the company. So the next time you go to see a movie in a theater, remember that you can see a dozen Redbox movies for the same price by just waiting a few months for the DVD release. That's not to say that I never go to movie theaters. In fact, I'm looking forward to watching Julia Robert's Duplicity on the big screen later this month but Redbox movies are great for the waiting period in between theater outings.
Redbox: http://www.redbox.com/home.aspx
Tips: Beware of the long lines at Redbox machines as they grow in popularity. Redbox has not yet figured out a way to allow those returning DVDs to bypass the indecisive renters. Reserve your movie in advance online so that you don't have to wait in line at the store only to realize that the movie you want to see is not in the machine when it's finally your turn.
***FreePlus Rating: 10/10***
Interesting visuals plus free food and wine always g
et a 10 in my book.
This past Friday I went over to the South End for SOWA First Friday where galleries and studios are open to the public for free from 5-9 pm. SOWA, for those who don't know, is Boston's attempt at making the industrial area south of Washington Street in the South End a hip and edgy place by using an acronym similar to SOHO in New York. This area is also home to many artists and galleries and 450 Harrison Avenue is by far the largest, holding 15 galleries and 50 artist studios.
Held on the first Friday of each month, the event is completely free with the exception of $5 for parking, unless you can find street parking which is difficult in this residential permit area. Most artists even offer free food and wine to their visitors in the hopes that they are potential buyers. Surprisingly, most of the pieces are affordable with prices ranging from $30-$40 for smaller mementos to hundreds and several thousands of dollars for wall size paintings. Some artists have even implemented "recession pricing".
As I walked through the rooms, I quickly realized that each artist has a distinct style and most often they specialized in just one thing. As the saying goes, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", so you may not like everything you see. However, I suggest you go with open eyes and an open mind, and there will be enough material to leave you thinking.
Above are images of some unique pieces from among the four floors of artwork I wandered through:
SOWA First Friday Information: http://www.sowaartistsguild.com/calendar.html
All events are free unless noted otherwise. The next event is on April 3rd from 5-9 pm.
Upcoming Event: SOWA ArtWalk - Sat & Sun May 16-17
http://www.sowaartwalk.com/
Other Cities with First Friday Art Gallery Walks:
Denver - http://www.artdistrictonsantafe.com/calendar.php
Hawaii - http://www.firstfridayhawaii.com/
Las Vegas - http://www.firstfriday-lasvegas.org/
Philadelphia - http://www.phillyartgalleries.com/philadelphia-first-friday.htm
Phoenix - http://www.artlinkphoenix.com/
Raleigh - http://www.godowntownraleigh.com/firstfriday/index.htm
Tallahassee - http://www.firstfridaytallahassee.com/
Tips: Wear comfortable shoes. I went after work in not the most comfortable boots.
***FreePlus Rating: 9/10***
Quality music but hard to sit still for so long especially after a long day at work.
I have lived in Boston for nearly 20 years and found out only last week that there are free concerts at the New England Conservatory. Even though I'm not a classical music aficionado, I do appreciate musical talent of any kind and free things without gimmicks. So I ventured out to my first classical music concert at Jordan Hall last Tuesday. Not surprisingly, the crowd was made up of mostly a graying demographic but there were some younger fans in attendance as well. Seating was first come first serve. We got there about 15 minutes before the show and the place was about half full. There is almost no bad seat in the house at Jordan Hall which is an amazingly beautiful concert hall that first opened in 1903.
The concert started right on time at 8 pm sharp. The Borromeo Sting Quartet is a renowned group with many awards and critical acclaims, most recently winning the Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2007. They performed Beethoven's Opus 130, 131 and 132. While I listened with the untrained ears of a common pedestrian, I was awed by the incredible sound coming from just four instruments. You feel the sense of time passing and holding still at the same time listening to music composed by a man from over two hundred years ago. It also makes you appreciate the thousands of hours these individuals have practiced to play an instrument as expertly as they do now. I would highly encourage everyone to go and see a classical music concert at least one time if they have never been.
Events @ New England Conservatory: http://concerts.newenglandconservatory.edu/
All events are free unless noted otherwise.
Borromeo String Quartet: http://www.borromeoquartet.org/
Tips: Prepare to hold your bladder because the pieces are long and intermission might not come until nearly two hours into the concert. I went to the restroom after the first opus and I was locked out of the concert hall for the entire second piece which was about 45 minutes long.
Last Wednesday I attended a monthly networking event for professionals in the online analytics field. It is a monthly networking event sponsored by a different company each time. Free food and drinks along with the prospect of meeting potential clients, partners or friends is a nice break from the desk in the middle of the week. This group happens to be free but most professional organizations do charge an annual membership fee.
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