Just got tickets to the Beastie Boy’s Summerstage show!  Tickets were $50, which is a little steep, but the Ticketmaster fees are outrageous!  Consider:

You can watch a movie in NYC for that much!  For 2 tickets, over 20% of the total cost is in fees!

However, its not the fee itself that bothers me.  Items like the “facility charge” aren’t even from Ticketmaster.  The frustration comes from thinking you are going to pay one price, and then watching the cost steadily rise with each additional checkout step.  The Summerstage website makes it clear that you are paying $50 plus and extra dollar.  I wish Ticketmaster was more upfront with how much you will actually pay.

EDIT: Hypebot has a post today that also addresses Ticketmaster’s fees, with some interesting information

Sonic Youth’s classic album Daydream Nation is remastered and rereleased this week.  I was never into Sonic Youth, which probably sounds blasphemous to some.  They are one of the seminal indie bands, but I think I was just too young to get them.  Now seems like a good time to discover this album.  Does anyone have any thoughts on it?

A while back Sean wrote a great post about Google Reader, which I was supposed to then followup in defense of Bloglines.  I never did get around to that post, but it doesn’t matter: I am loving Google Reader!  Sean, I should have listened to you from the beginning. 

I always picked RSS readers for the little things.  I started out on Bloglines, then moved to Newsgator because they only showed only updated feeds.  I moved back to Bloglines when they added that feature as well as Playlists.  In between I flirted with Rojo and Google Reader but the performance issues bogged me down. 

And now I’m giving Google Reader another try, for the simple reason that they let you mass delete feeds.  When Google Reader first came out, I loaded all my feeds into it and found Reader to be too sloooooow.  The second revision of Google Reader promised performance improvements, but I couldn’t mass delete my old feeds and start fresh.  So I ignored it. 

Yesterday, after Google announced Google Gears, I decided to give Reader another chance, and guess what: you can delete multiple feeds at once!  I deleted my old feeds, reimported my Bloglines feeds into Reader, and discovered a bunch of great features, such as “List View” and keyboard navigation.  But most importantly (and I know I’m late to the party on this one) Google Reader is FAST!  Much faster than any other online reader I’ve used.  Its a HUGE productivity improvement.  The proof?  I worked through more posts yesterday than I ever have with any other rss reader.

I’m not unhappy with Bloglines; Bloglines is great, but Google Reader is a better experience.  Is Google reader the only RSS Reader I’ll ever need?  I doubt it.  I believe there’s still a lot of room for productivity improvements when reading feeds.  But I’m always appreciative of how the little details can make a big difference.