Good news for you: I don’t need all the games, and I’d rather hook up friends, family and acquaintances than deal with Stubhub, Craigslist, etc.

All tickets will be sold at face value ($104/game, includes both tickets).

For each game I have 2 seats in Infield Grandstand 29, Row 3.

Disclaimer: part of the outfield (left or center, depending on the seat) is blocked by a pole from these seats. This is fairly typical for grandstands at Fenway, and these tickets are not considered “obstructed view” seats by the Red Sox, but if following outfield fly balls is mission critical for you, or if a pole in your peripheral will drive you nuts, these are not the seats for you. On the other hand if having a close view of the infield with full rain protection sounds good, these are tough to beat value-wise. The photos below describe better than words, but I wanted to add a written disclaimer just to be safe.

The following photos were taken from the seat on the right:

Please use this form to request seats to games that you’re interested in:

Cost of dividend: 932.4M shares outstanding * $2.65/quarter/share = $2.47B/quarter

Cost of a majority stake in Netflix*: $6.36B market cap / 2 = $3.18B

For two quarters’ dividends, Apple could buy 77% of Netflix.

This dividend is good PR and CNBC fodder, but as an investor I’d prefer my investment be invested.

* My intent is to illustrate what Apple could do with this much money. Even if you don’t think Netflix would provide enough strategic value to justify a buyout, the point remains that there are large, competitive, growing companies that Apple could invest in.

Look & Feel

The touchscreen and overall UX is a lot more responsive than my iPad 1 (running iOS 5.1). Apps load substantially faster; I would estimate a 4x speedup. I do not own an iPad 2 so I can’t offer a comparison there.

Screen

Like I found when upgrading to the iPhone 4, the screen resolution is amazing. The visual difference between icons that are retina display-optimized and the icons that are not is immediately striking.

My only letdown: one of my complaints about my first generation iPad is that the blacks are a bit bright. This is especially noticeable when watching movies. I was hoping that the increased color saturation on the new iPad’s retina display would address this and keep them darker, but after comparing Netflix playback on both of them, I do not see any difference.

Dictation

The dictation function is very fast. I dictated eight sentences in one take and the iPad had them transcribed in under a second – about as fast as Apple makes Siri look in its commercials. Textual accuracy was near-perfect (it mistook “is” for “in” and “the” for “a”), and could definitely be used for publishing longer form text on the go after a quick proofread.

Data Plan

I have a grandfathered AT&T unlimited data plan from my original iPad. I searched around and called AT&T to verify I could move it to the new one. They assured me I could, and I’m happy to report that transferring it to the new device was fast and straightforward. There were no gotchas or tricks intended to get me to cancel it. My existing plan was selected by default:

Update:
Thanks to @kevinebaugh for pointing out that I initially used the dictation feature incorrectly. I’ve updated the review to reflect how it works when used properly.

I don’t understand why people are so insistent on remembering Paterno in a particular light. I’m still shocked by the whole story, and I have a lot of difficulty and clashing emotions contrasting the Paterno I knew about with the Paterno I just learned about. I can’t summon a single emotion that encapsulates these two very dichotomous narratives. The bad doesn’t cancel out the good, and the good doesn’t cancel out the bad. It is what it is; he was who he was.

People are complex creatures. I honor the good he did and I loathe what he allowed to happen, all at the same time.

A few days in I got my first review. I was a wreck. I packed my backpack as if I were paying homage to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The most palatable meals I cooked were the ones that were burned beyond recognition. I might have been able to properly affix a rainfly to a tent, but I’ll never know because nobody trusted me to keep their tent dry. You know that guy who played on your middle school basketball team who had great hustle and personality but couldn’t make a layup? The guy the coach wanted to do well, but would never take chances with in the 4th quarter? That was me at the start of my first NOLS course.

My second review provided a laundry list as long as the first one. “Is there anything I’m doing right?”, I fished. The instructor looked me squarely in the eyes and told me that I’m accepting and responding to their criticisms very well – certainly better than anybody else on the trip, and maybe better than any other student he’s had. If I were young and stupid, I’d have thought this was the most condescending thing he could possibly say to me. Oh wait, I was young and stupid, and that’s exactly what I thought. Miraculously aware that acting somber or exploding would be of no value, I swallowed and said “thanks.”

I later came to understand that my instructor had actually paid me one of the most gracious compliments I’d ever receive. Over the next week, my skills improved — not hugely, but demonstrably. I continued receiving feedback and making iterative progress over the duration of the course, and it eventually became clear to me, and to others, that I had more than paid off my skills deficit.

The reason I was so offended at first is that I thought that taking criticism was the standard of a student in a student-teacher relationship. To me it was like force-praising a bad teacher by saying “you do a great job showing up to class everyday.” That’s what you’d say to a teacher who had no teaching skills. But I quickly learned that my analogy was flawed. Taking criticism was a skill in itself. There were students who did not take feedback well. To this day I feel very sorry for them, because they lost out on 75 days worth of fantastic wilderness lessons.

And here’s why: nobody was willing to criticize these people after the first week because everybody knew it would lead to conflict. And so by the mountaineering section, when I was getting advanced critiques on navigating through a whiteout (very, very difficult), the more defensive folks were just trotting along, with the same navigation skillsets they had when they started.

Eventually I returned to civilization, and a while later I got my first job. I learned that people function exactly the same way in the office. I’ve seen people at work who take criticism well and respond with a thank you. They continue to get constructive feedback because people feel safe giving it to them. I’ve also seen people who explode in the way that I miraculously avoided despite being young and stupid. I feel sad when I see people do this, because I know that when everybody else is learning the advanced techniques for navigating their corporate worlds (very, very difficult), these people will be trotting along, the same as they were when they started.

Do everything you can to be in that first group of people. No matter how harsh or personal or crushing someone’s feedback feels, take it constructively and with the best of intentions. Show them gratitude for having the courage to help you in a way that was probably uncomfortable for them. If you don’t respond positively, they’ll never be honest with you again and you’ll miss out on a lot of invaluable learning opportunities.