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From the Division Series in Major League Baseball: If the Philadelphia Phillies (playing the Colorado Rockies) and Chicago Cubs (playing the Arizona Diamondbacks) each win one of their next two games, then we have a rare quadruple-playoff-header on Sunday.

That’s 12 solid hours of meaningful games. Rockin’.

Technorati Tags: baseball, Red Sox

One of the mainstays of a slick reception or waiting area is a television: if those years old People or U.S. News magazines get you down (“Britney: I want to be a young mom!” and “Turning the Corner in Iraq?” headlines just don’t have the appeal they once did), that TV is a godsend. You may get lucky and get to “learn” something if they’ve got CNN or even (shudder) Fox News running, but most times you’re stuck in Judge Judy-land and actually feel your brain ooze out of your ears. I’m no advocate of self-harm, but even just thirty minutes of “Live with Regis and Kelly” waiting for an oil change might be enough to dream up creative ways to end the pain.

Aaanyways, two years before my dad closed his practice, he received an offer to have a bigger TV installed, free of charge. The catch is that it’s hooked up to an ad network that played (at least when I watched it) a mix of local law office firms and national loan refinancing companies: in other words, the people who have money to throw at unproven advertising channels are exactly who you would expect. There was a minimum eyeball count: some paperwork you had to fill out to assert that you had so much foot traffic. Makes sense: the company that installs (and owns) the TVs wants to install them in the right places. There wasn’t any revenue tied back into the practice, so there’s no data on how effective it was. Given the pretty short waiting times my dad prided himself on, I would guess that it wasn’t effective at all.

The company I work for now has one and a half floors: the products division where I work takes up the half floor, and the remainder of the space is for legal, accounting, sales, etc. The rest of the half floor is taken up by a networking company and the MIT Technology Review magazine. TR’s got a pretty swanky looking office: glass entryway, nice reception/waiting area, current copies of TR, and up until yesterday, a smallish (21” or so) TV with CNN on.

I’ve been here for 5 months now, and I’ve never seen anyone visit TR. I’ve shared an elevator with some people who work there, but I’ve never seen anyone sitting in the reception area or coming in for an interview. I don’t have the masthead in front of me, but I would guess it’s not huge: on the order of 20-25 folks here if this is just the editing office, with a few more for ad sales if that’s not part of the publishing house.

Again, up until today, no big deal that there are few visits: like my dad’s office, even if someone has to wait, they probably don’t have to wait long. So it was pretty peculiar to see a HUGE (like 60”) plasma TV replacing their smaller TV. And TWO boxes, meaning another plasma is going elsewhere in their office.

MIT Technology Review is not the local newspaper or Time magazine: those places use TV as a source of information: the breaking news cycle in one medium defines it in another. Unless these giant plasmas fell off a truck, I think the magazine poorly allocated their budget: though the cost of plasmas has decreased in the last few years, we’re talking about at least the cost of a reporter covering a story in Europe or Asia. That story could bring in at least a little additional revenue, which the TVs won’t. In fact, the increased size of the TV corresponds to an increased rate of energy expenditure: it cost more to operate in the long run.

Makes me wonder how smart they are in their reporting….