About to call it a night after hanging out with Hetesh and watching Vanderbilt whip Indiana in men's basketball here in good old Birmingham.

I'm sitting here right now listening to "The Long and Winding Road", in anticipation of getting to here the new "Let It Be...Naked", which reproduces the famous Beatles album but with several production changes, including stripping some of the songs of the "wall of sound" which was producer Phil Spector's landmark.

I love just getting some work done while listening to good music!

The cover for Maintain Radio Silence is done, as the creation of the album artwork (for its DVD-case packaging) is pushing ahead. It looks cool, and I'm excited about the project wrapping up over the next month...so I can decide what exactly I'm going to do with it!

Business school is definitely going to be ratcheting it up a notch until the end of the semester. I'm glad I've been able to get some stuff done even in the first day or two of this break. Lori flies in Wednesday, so obviously no work will be done between then and Friday, til we go back to Nashville!

Found out last week my grandmother has stage IV lung cancer, as well as colon cancer and breast cancer. Likely, the cancer developed in part of the body and has just spread everywhere. She won't live long, but hopefully this Thanksgiving will be a great time to be with her and the rest of my family. I don't even want to think about it, she's been such an incredible person in my life. I just hope I am able to visit enough from Nashville down to Birmingham while she's still here.

I am headed down to Auburn this afternoon to stay at Airport House with the guys. Mark is coming in from Atlanta, and Ben and Steven will be coming over from Tuscaloosa for the big game...THE IRON BOWL. Auburn should crush Alabama easily, if they play well. They've been back-and-forth all season, so we'll see what happens.

I'll come back to Birmingham Monday and get some schoolwork done, as well as fixing my car. Lori will fly in from Nashville Wednesday night, and will get to spend Thanksgiving with me and my family! We'll head back to Nashville together on Friday.

My trip to Auburn today has been delayed by a meeting with a lawyer over at the Vandy Law School regarding the new label venture that me and two other Owen guys (Kris and Quentin) are starting up. This will be of substantially larger scope than the label I started in college, though we may retain the Mariner Records name. The premise around which the label will operate is a killer idea and we should be able to convince some experienced music industry folks to come on board, as well as VC to lend us some help as well.

Curiously enough, the person in charge of all music retail for Best Buy was an Owen graduate...one of several contacts in the industry that the three of us have discovered in the short time we've been planning this venture.

I'm extremely excited. Although I can't go into the details here, I am beginning to see exactly how a future in music can lead the way to making some great money right out of grad school, and lead to even larger plans.

Early in the week, my grandmother entered the hospital with pneumonia and possibly cancer. After running a test that caused a massive slowdown in heart rate, doctors had to insert a pacemaker.

She's doing better now, but I'm headed home this weekend as a result to visit and check up on the situation. I'll leave immediately after attending the Owen Finance Conference at Loews Vanderbilt Hotel on Friday, an event I'm really looking forward to.

Last time I was home - two weeks ago - I took my car for its regular maintenance, and also to get the engine looked at (the "check engine" light keeps going on and off every couple days or so) and to get my left brake light replaced. Unfortunately for me, when they fixed the brake light, they miswired a variety of things, and now my blinkers don't work and the wiring of the buttons on my steering wheel have a variety of unintended functions!

Needless to say, the car dealership will be another stop in Birmingham this weekend as well.

Fire Emblem, just released for Game Boy Advance, is a killer turn-based strategy/RPG hybrid that would alone almost justify buying the system. Highly recommend it if you're looking to kill off some productivity.

Also, in other news, the Titans are turning into an unstoppable force in the AFC. McNair's brilliant passing is opening up the dormant running game, and toss in a very, very solid defense that doesn't miss a tackle, and you've got a recipe for winning a bunch of games. Titans are going to win the Super Bowl this year, I just know it!

Life is good. After a weekend of visiting Satya and Hetesh at home, and Ben and Steven in Tuscaloosa, I'm back preparing for a brutal Accounting exam coming up on Friday.

I had to get up out of bed once I remembered I hadn't sent my Operations group my part of our group assignment due Thursday...another guy is piecing all the individual parts together to make the paper cohesive, which was my job last time, and by sending it to him hours late, I hope I haven't thrown him off too much.

I discovered tonight, on my hard drive, a recording of the first song I recorded with George (in my living room!) which he wrote, and came right at the start of my interest in recording music, writing music, and all that stuff. Its a great thing about computers, the way they archive the past in incredible detail. Certainly, I had forgotten completely about the recording, and it was great to listen to it and remember how fun it was playing together at the start of undergrad at Vandy.

What, years later, eventually became of those sessions - the Jimmy B & the Fortune 500 material - will be my blueprint in recording new artists, at whatever point in the future I am operating my label full-time. I look forward to adding film and video game projects to that as well. I can't tell you how great it would be to be financially - and, to some extent, creatively - responsible for the latest, incredible new video game to hit the market. I probably wouldn't be able to stop playing it...haha.

Matrix Revolutions comes out today, but I promised Lori I wouldn't see it until I had taken my Accounting exam. She's great at keeping me in line...seeing the end of the classic trilogy will be a great reward for hard work on Saturday, instead of having it throw off the entire timing of the week by seeing it before my exam.

She did a great job of raising her LSAT score from 156 to 160, which along with Phi Beta Kappa from Vandy, ought to be able to get her into Vandy Law in early decision. We'll hear back by December 15, and obviously there's a lot riding on the line there, as she may be headed off to Baylor Law in the spring if she gets deferred or rejected. I'm optimistic - things work out like they should.

I am really looking forward to visiting Auburn for this year's Iron Bowl! I haven't seen John, Jeremy, David, and the Airport House gang in a long time. And depending on which Auburn team shows up, maybe Auburn has give us something to celebrate.

Its getting late...I have to get up at least somewhat early to review accounting ratio interpretations. Seeing the connection between b-school work and future earnings keeps this train moving, though. Time to get some sleep - its going to be a long couple of days.