August 18th, 2008
The Presidents and Amazon MP3
Despite my regular use of iTunes for playing and sometimes purchasing music, I’m not necessarily an iTunes-lover. I think iTunes is a nice music organizer/player. It certainly has its issues and I can’t say I’ve been 100% happy with it, but it does the trick. But then there’s the music, by far the biggest wrinkle [...]
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August 16th, 2008
A reason to keep your CDs
Our walls are pretty bare. Shy of a few of my old college paintings and a couple prints, we don’t have much hanging around. We don’t like cluttered, busy walls anyway, but you have to have something on the walls otherwise it looks too…well, too migrant. Bare walls work if you have some sort of [...]
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August 16th, 2008
Don’t bust a Nutsie
I’ve been using FineTune.com for on-line music for a long time now. I’ve found it to be be all I need to get through my day. At FineTune you pick songs to add to your pool (playlist) and then it plays back those songs in random order. You never know what song is going to [...]
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August 13th, 2008
The Wii redeems itself with the Homebrew Channel
I wrote a bit back about my increasing loss of faith in the Wii. The games slated to come out through the rest of the year and into 2009 are quite, shall we say, “weak” and include many uber-family friendly games. I have nothing against family friendly, but you can only have so many pet [...]
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August 9th, 2008
Seventeen pounds of Hot Wheels
I’ve been “collecting” Hot Wheels for probably close to eight years by now. I collect but I don’t invest in Hot Wheels. A recent trip to the Ohio State Fair’s and its famed Junk Barn (where every Harry, Dick, and Tom can attempt to sell their junk) had me face-to-face with a ton of “collectible” [...]
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August 5th, 2008
Tesla, still comin’ atcha live…again
You go to a concert early for one reason: to get good seats. And even though we saw Tesla in concert just six months ago, we still showed up early to make sure we got the spot we wanted. Last time we saw Tesla it was bare nuts cold outside and the line to get [...]
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August 4th, 2008
It’s a good time to bring back blimps
I love blimps. Blimps just make sense to me. They’re elegant, classy, efficient, and it many ways, quite practical. Just by chance I happened to come across an article in the NYT Europe section about Zeppelin blimps. I didn’t read the entire article but just the first few paragraphs were enough to have me thinking [...]
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August 4th, 2008
Work will be watching
A recent article in the NY Times talks about new network monitoring software that will “learn” about employee’s web behaviour and give the company finite control over restrictions and settings. I won’t repost the whole article, but this pretty much sums it up:
…one company might say that marketing folks can only visit YouTube during lunch [...]
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July 30th, 2008
My new analog PDA
At the start of July I challenged myself to use a Nintendo DS as a PDA organizer. The DS has almost all the capabilities of a PDA for basic organizing. It seemed logical to me to combine two of my favorite things: games and organizing, and I honestly put forth effort, taking myDS to work [...]
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July 30th, 2008
Photos galore
I’ve found Flickr to be a great service for sharing photos. I’ve been using it for years now under the free account service, which limits you to 200 active photos. At first I thought that’d be more than enough but I quickly found it just isn’t, so I bit the bullet and forked over the [...]
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July 27th, 2008
Bringing video games to work
My passion for video games will probably never be in question. And like anyone else, I like to share my passions with other people. It doesn’t really matter if that person doesn’t care about video games…I’ll still talk about them and I’ll still sound excited when I do talk about them. It’s never boring to [...]
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July 26th, 2008
The best yard sale sign ever
A long time ago I wrote about effective garage sale signs and just this week I found the best yard sale sign I’ve ever seen strapped the street sign on my corner. It made me happy. It makes me happy to see successful design for unimportant things like a yard sale sign. You wouldn’t think [...]
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July 19th, 2008
It’s that time again
Time for something new. While working on this new theme I found that about this same time last year was when I switched the theme before, into the Big Blue version. It seems I can only tolerate my selected designs for a year. Oh well, keeps things interesting and (sometimes) re-motivates me to write. Your [...]
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July 16th, 2008
More tales from Counselor’s Corner
As if finding one of the former Nintendo Game Counselors that helped me back in the day wasn’t treat enough, this time they found me! If you missed the first article about my lost Nintendo Power letters, go check it out, and then continue on with my interview with Kirk Starr, the ex-GPC that I [...]
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July 15th, 2008
My Wii regret builds
I made my choice to go with the Nintendo Wii because I had reached a point in my gaming “career” where I was looking for something different. I wanted more than the same old sit-and-mash games. And some games delivered on that promise and are actually fun to play - Wii Sports, Guitar Hero, Olympics. [...]
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July 4th, 2008
My DS PDA challenge
After I got my wife a Nintendo DS for her birthday and experienced first hand how nicely it plays and works, I needed one of my own. With the DS’ touch screen and flash cart tools, I saw that it was entirely possible to use the DS as a PDA as well as a gaming [...]
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June 25th, 2008
Design beyond the home page
I found an article in the New York Times about how Google is not improving their Google News service. You can think of Google News is a giant link list of news topics. Google News harvests news from sites around the world and lists them. But the one aspect of the article that caught my [...]
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June 22nd, 2008
Being unmobile with Nintendo DS
I’ve said before that I’m not a mobile person. I find it hard to justify mobile devices like iPods, PDAs, etc…although I do have an iPod, but who doesn’t these days? All that being said, I’ve never been a mobile gamer. The only mobile gaming device I had was a Gameboy, but that was a [...]
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June 9th, 2008
Interactive TV contests that work
I’m watching Monday night wrestling, which is not unusual, but this is the first time I’ve watched in a few weeks due to alternate programming. And it seems wrestling is reaching for viewers (for some reason) because I’m watching a cash giveaway game on the show. It’s a simple concept: you sign-up on the web [...]
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May 30th, 2008
My life in commercials
The saying goes “you otta be in pictures.” Well, I guess for me it’s, “you otta be in commercials.” Having been in the media business for the best of seven years now, I’ve seen all the “magic” that goes into TV and radio…at least on the local level. At first it is pretty neat to [...]
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May 20th, 2008
Star Soldier R, WiiWare’s first gem
I was happy when I heard about Nintendo’s WiiWare service because it told me Nintendo was finally hopping on the download bandwagon. So far, while Nintendo’s on-line play has been wonderful, it’s offerings for downloadable content (DLC) has been less than stellar. While Xbox and Playstation players happily download new songs, new games, and other [...]
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May 15th, 2008
Pinball needs to make a comeback
Growing up I always loved playing pinball. Whether it was at the arcade or the movie theatre, or even at the back of Max & Erma’s…pinball is one of those games that anyone can play and be reasonably good, but it takes a lot of time and patience to be great - at a lot [...]
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May 5th, 2008
My Chemical Romance and those damn teenagers
My Chemical Romance came to town just about a year ago, on tour for their The Black Parade album. They were scheduled to perform two days before we were to leave for Seattle for summer vacation. But that night the band got food poisoning so they rescheduled…for the next night. Had they played the next [...]
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May 3rd, 2008
Mario Kart Wii, this one is worth it
My trip through video game history maybe somewhat different. My first console was a classic NES, as it was for many. However, my next console after the NES was the Playstation. I didn’t have a Super NES, a Genesis, or anything in between. After the NES I got into PC games and didn’t stray from [...]
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April 29th, 2008
I stepped in some Woopra
The world of statistics is not a popular one. I hated statistics in college and did poorly at it - it’s just abstract numbers. But when statistics actually help you, it’s entirely different. As a “web guy” for many years now, the number of visitors (traffic) has been of interest for a long time. Traffic [...]