There are two respectable film festivals that take place in Boulder County, Colorado. In no particular order, there's the Boulder Internation Film Festival as well as the Moondance International Film Festival.

What ever happened to the drive-in theater? Will it be replaced? Here's a site that reflects what a lot of people are doing to bring back drive-ins. Check out these back yard theaters. It's fascinating how resourceful or extravagent people can get with their back yard theaters. Some of these guys (and gals) are waaaaay over the top with their setups.

On this page, CNET Editors pick what they claim to be the best artists in Rock 'n Roll. Now we all know that MP3s don't offer the best sound quality. Still, it's a good way to sample out new bands and then look for better sources of their products as well as ways to catch their performances. Look at this site to check out some of the new artists.

Planet Bluegrass in Lyons, Colorado offers a little Woodstock sort of venue for world class artists from bluegrass, folk, and derived music genres. They're also slightly better known for putting on the Telluride Bluegrass festival every year. No matter where you choose to go, if you haven't experienced one of their festivals, you should.

When shopping for instrumental music items from amplifiers to guitars to recording equipment, I tend to start with Sweetwater, Musician's Friend, and American Musical Supply. These places have treated me fairly well throughout the years.

I'm a huge fan of DVD-Audio. It provides an incredible high resolution and surround sound audio playback format. In fact, it absolutely blows away any CD copies of the same recording. They're hard to find and I am soooooo tired of salespeople who try to direct me to the DVD-Video concert performances section! I also like SACDs (aka Super Audio CDs) but my luck has not been as good picking up truly jaw-dropping, rich, surround audio recordings--partly because there is such variability allowed in SACD channel usage that it's hard to tell whether I'm getting 2.0, 5.1, or some other combination. And it's my personal observation that as I shop for brand new, unheard of surround sound music, I've gotten far fewer DVD-Audio dogs from a production quality standpoint. This is highly subjective of course and I'd certainly be amenable to pointers & sources regarding any jaw dropping hi res surround sound music.

Here are some tips from our friends at Sweetwater to help with PC optimization of your XP computer for audio recording purposes. Please note that this information is already a bit dated because of the advent of newer and better SATA & eSATA drive busses. You also can't assume this optimization will work equally for video usage as that usage is a different animal.