There is nothing like summer in New England, if you live up here, you know what I mean. If you are a baseball fan - there is just no place like Fenway Park - the place to be - in the summer here in Boston.
Recently, I was able to score two tickets to Fenway (no easy feat in this town) and I took my BlackBerry toting 17 year old with me. Two red sox fans, two BlackBerry 8900s and two tickets to Fenway Park - what could be better.
Since my son Dan is just about as much of a techie as his old man, he affectionately has earned the title "Maximus Junior" around here. We decided to use both Berrys to the max that day.
We started with the search for tickets - Dan had fired up stubhub.com, gone on Facebook looking for tickets from his "friends" and finally came upon a local fundraising auction being held by the local Cape Cod Baseball league. He entered into the drawing - all on his BlackBerry and got an email confirmation that he had won.
Now it was time to plan the route. First, we fired up Google Maps, searched for Fenway Park and got one set of directions and found potential parking spots. We clicked on the web links and called a couple of parking garages and decided that we should probably park outside the city and take the "T" into town.
Dan was able to locate a full map of the T and download it to his pictures on his BlackBerry. We were able to do a new Google Map search for the "Quincy" station - we found out how to get there, how much it would cost and what time they stayed open until.
On the way up we alternated between listening to Pandora and Slacker (streaming via Bluetooth) but, since our 8900s were not 3G - we lost signal too often. We could cache the music on Slacker, but it was just easier to use our playlists that were already synced on our devices.
At the parking garage, I decided to give two new car parking Apps a whirl. I started up "Park" and recorded a voice note with the column number of the parking spot.
I then started Car finder, which gave me a free 30-day key that I entered and then set my location via the Bluetooth device in my car. Cool - I figured we would see which one worked.
Once on the T, we started the browsers and went to our redsox.com shortcuts We tested the speed of the BlackBerry Browser vs. Bolt and realized that since we were going through tunnels, it really didn't matter which browser we used -if we had no signal, we had no signal. We finally got out browsers loaded and saw the preview of the games, starting pitching matchups and weather conditions. As the skies looked more and more threatening, he went to accuweather and I went to weather eye to see if the forecasts were the same - they were.
Off the T, I went back to Google Maps, located Fenway and the GPS found me and guided us to the Park (not that really we really needed that with the big Green wall right in front of us!)
Our seats were in the Bleachers, right behind the dugout. We both took some great pictures with our 3.2 MP cameras.
Dan loaded his right onto his facebook page, mine was sent to two BlackBerry Messenger Contacts and via email to three other friends.
I then remembered that an old friend of mine from New Jersey had told me about the son of his secretary who was now pitching for the visiting Oakland A's. I gave him a call (after I had searched for a Wi-Fi Network at Fenway and connected via UMA) and asked him the name of the kid and what his number was. Got the information and was armed to find this kid and say..."Hey, Peter X from New Jersey told me to find you" but he never did start to warm up that day.
We were sitting in the nosebleed section of Fenway and the scoreboard was behind us and another was out of view to the side. I decided on a "closer view" so I fired up my SlingPlayer, connected to my HD box at home and watched the game simulcast on my BlackBerry.
Since we couldn't really see the board, Dan was on redsox.com following pitch by pitch as we watched the game.
When it came to the eighth inning, they began to play Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" a Fenway classic. I used the voice recorder to capture the crowd and then sent the note to my other son who was home watching the game so he could feel like he was there.
The Red Sox won, we got back on the train and headed for our car. Now time to use the parking lot tools. First, I tried "Park" - it showed me a very general map of the garage (which I already knew because I was there) and I read my note -I could have just as easily written a memo and taken a picture of the column number.
Next, I tried car finder and discovered something very important. If your Bluetooth device is hard wired in your car (like mine) it makes it pretty tough to find the car when the device is off. Maybe I should have thought of that one before - that didn't really help me. Fortunately, I did use the memo pad and I took a picture of the column to help me locate my car - that worked just as well.
Time to head home. I had five visual voicemails in YouMail to check, about 40 emails from the day and a few BlackBerry Messengers to respond to as well. After all that activity, I still had over half my battery strength and we streamed Bluetooth Stereo all the way home.
All in all, a great day at the Ball Park and a great day with our BlackBerrys. Maximus and Maximus Jr. made the most of the day, the most of our BlackBerrys and had a blast.
Until next time....Maximus - out.
Read More BlackBerrius Maximus
- Part I - How Far Can I Push This Thing >>
- Part II - The Airport >>
- Part III - Bold Edition >>
- Part IV - Bold Torture Test >>
- Part V - The Flip Edition >>
- Part VI - Storm Chasing >>
- Part VII - Eenie, Meenie, Miney Berry >>
- Part VIII - All for One and One for All >>
- Part IX - Function Over Form >>
- Part X - Our 15 Minutes >>
- Part XI - To Pre or Not to Pre >>
