One MySpace page gave the rock band Boston more than a feeling about an amateur singer. They ended up hiring the man as their new lead singer.
Tommy DeCarlo lands singer gig with Boston, thanks to MySpace page.
(Credit: BandBoston.com)For Tommy DeCarlo, a credit manager at a Home Depot in North Carolina, it was literally a dream come true. DeCarlo, 43, had been a fan of the band since his childhood, often singing along with CDs or the radio when songs came on the air.
When Boston lead singer Brad Delp committed suicide last year, DeCarlo recorded his own karaoke versions of Boston songs and uploaded the MP3s to his MySpace page as a tribute. A friend who heard the recordings later encouraged him to contact the band.
DeCarlo, who had never been in a band and whose recent singing experience consisted of performing for a couple of dozen bowlers in a bowling alley, wasn't too confident.
"I sent my MySpace page link to the Boston camp, and I also offered to sing my song at the tribute show, never thinking I'd get a reply," DeCarlo says on Boston's official Web site. "I did end up getting one about two weeks later thanking me for the offer, but at this point there were not going to be any additions to lineup."
And that was the end of DeCarlo's rock 'n' roll fantasy--for a few weeks, anyway. Boston founder Tom Scholz's wife was fiddling around on her PC when something caught her husband's ear.
"My wife was at her computer playing our tunes, and I asked whether it was us playing live," Scholz told USA Today. "She said, 'It's some guy in North Carolina singing your songs.' I said, 'I know Brad's voice, and that's Brad.'"
That was enough for Scholz. He dropped DeCarlo an e-mail and invited him to the tribute, where DeCarlo impressed the band with his covers (see a YouTube video clip of his performance below). He starts his new job on Friday when the band kicks off its summer tour in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
While it's a rather unorthodox way to replace a band member after a tragedy, the practice of a Web audition could become more common. The band Journey recently hired a new lead singer based on a video clip posted to YouTube.
Updated 1:55 p.m. PDT with DirecTV's response.
DirecTV apparently had big trouble delivering ESPN2's coverage Tuesday morning of the season opener between the Boston Red Sox and Oakland A's, who are playing the game in Tokyo.
The number of reader comments to a 6:29 a.m. blog post about the outage by Amalie Benjamin, who covers the Red Sox for The Boston Globe, soared past 120 within a couple hours after the transmission failure began. The fans, naturally, are calling for congressional hearings on the matter.
While the problem seemed to have been remedied by 10 a.m. East Coast time, we were still waiting to hear from DirecTV about what exactly might have been the problem. It's probably no small comfort to Sox fans, though, that the team won 6-5 on a Manny Ramirez two-run double in the 10th.
DirecTV's response
In an e-mail, DirecTV's director of public relations, Robert Mercer, offered the company's apologies for the inconvenience, saying it was the result of "temporary technical difficulties" that did not affect the majority of channels and that have since been corrected.
In the case of the Red Sox game, any customers who have NESN or ESPN2 in HD were able to see the entire game. For customers who watch NESN in Standard Definition (SD), we were able to bring the channel back at the top of the seventh inning. For customers who watch ESPN2 in SD the channel came back on later, after the game was over.
Replays on both ESPN2 and NESN were planned for Tuesday afternoon Eastern time.
Boston Acoustics tower speakers
(Credit: CNET Networks)Formerly priced at $425 per speaker, these speakers from a respected maker are now listed at around $250 per speaker--a pretty substantial discount. Round out your home theater or immerse yourself in games with an audio upgrade.
What: Boston Acoustics tower speaker
How much: $249.99
Shipping: Free
Where: Amazon.com
When: Through unknown date
Click here for product review.
Instructables is selling shirts with the message, 'Improvising Electric Devices is not a Crime.' Some of the proceeds go to help fund Star Simpson's legal defense fund.
(Credit: Instructables)When I heard that MIT student Star Simpson had been arrested at Boston's Logan airport for wearing an outfit that incorporated what police called a hoax bomb, but which was really nothing more than a piece of electronic art, I was outraged.
I know that times being what they are, law enforcement needs to take security threats seriously. No one will dispute that. But what we're seeing, again and again, as in the case of the two Boston men arrested for putting up devices that were part of a Cartoon Network marketing ploy, is that police, media and prosecutors have a very hard time seeing the forest for the trees in these situations.
In Simpson's case, for example, there is every bit of evidence--anecdotal, I'll admit, as I haven't seen any legal documents or even the actual outfit in question--that the shirt she was wearing when she went to the airport to pick up a friend was nothing at all like a bomb, was a shirt she wore all the time, and certainly wasn't worn with any intention of scaring anyone.
Yet, she faces serious charges, and therefore serious and escalating legal bills to defend herself against something which, it seems to me and to many, many people, should have just been written off to a misunderstanding.
That's where my wallet and that of others comes into play. Right now, points out BoingBoing, on the site Instructables, you can buy a shirt bearing the slogan, "Improvising Electric Devices is not a Crime," a reference to the device Simpson was wearing that caused her arrest. Some of the proceeds from sales of the shirt will go to her defense fund, so I bought one. And hopefully when people like myself wear the shirt around, it will raise awareness that maybe we all should be willing to take things a little less seriously around here.
This isn't to say that police shouldn't be free to stop someone they see whom they suspect might be a security risk. But they should also be willing to recognize it when that risk isn't there, and let someone like Star Simpson go. Because it seems clear to me that if her case goes to trial, she will prevail, but at significant financial cost to herself and to taxpayers. And what use is that?
BOSTON--A federal judge in a Massachusetts district court gave the founders of college-based social networking site ConnectU two weeks to revise the complaint that they have filed against Facebook, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and four other early employees of the fast-growing social network. The ConnectU founders, twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and their fellow 2004 Harvard graduating classmate Divya Narendra, have accused Zuckerberg and his company of stealing their code and business plan when Zuckerberg was casually employed as a programmer for ConnectU in the 2003-2004 academic year.
Judge Douglas P. Woodlock, during the case's dismissal hearing on Wednesday afternoon, requested that the plaintiffs revise their complaint and refile it by August 8, after which point Facebook has an additional two weeks to file for a dismissal. The reason, the judge said, was that there simply was not a factual basis to the majority of the ten claims listed by ConnectU in its original complaint.
"You're really going to have to do this with particularity," Woodlock said to ConnectU's counsel, "because this is a most evanescent of explanations."
UPDATE: Facebook has released an official statement on the matter to the press: "We are pleased with the outcome of the hearing today. We continue to disagree with the allegations that Mark Zuckerberg stole any ideas or code to build Facebook. We intend to honor the judge's request not to comment further in the media and will continue to vigorously defend this case in court."
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