An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

[tag]Nintendo[/tag]Well folks it isn’t supposed to be out until Friday but apparently nobody told Best Buy that and the best girlfriend in the whole world bought it for me on her way home from work. It is so much fun playing a new Mario platformer, yes it isn’t original but who really expected something original out of it? It is just plain good fun and that is what a game is supposed to be all about! Although that isn’t to say it doesn’t have any new original gameplay as things like giant Mario are a hoot!

Anyway please excuse me while I go and play some more!

[tag]Nintendo[/tag]Funniest email subject ever!

It was from an email Nintendo sent out about why buying your mum that Brain Age aegm for Mother’s Day was a good idea, personally I find that a very hard sell even if it may be true in some cases as the last thing you want to do is insult your mum!

As I was reading the announcement I was thinking to myself that it would be kind of handy to pick one up for camping trips, but $350? No friggin way! Who cares how good the sound quality is, is there really that many people out there that care? Heck it is an iPod that you are listening to in the first place so the sound quality is already not the best.

Damn it! Where is the “oh and one more thing…” announcement? I was expecting Steve to walk back on stage to announce something big as the products announced weren’t especially exciting, the Mac Mini sounded kind of cool but again the pricepoint was wrong, what point is an iPod case without access to the screen or controls though? What is it a holster? $99 for a bit of leather? Come on now…

[tag]Vonage[/tag][tag]VOIP[/tag]Vonage, you really aren’t helping my pissy mood today, a service that you can sign up online for really should allow you to cancel the same service online as well but Vonage in their infinite wisdom force you to call them in order to cancel, how annoying! Now I remember why I haven’t cancelled it in the past as I keep putting off calling and having to deal with customer service drivel

[tag]spam[/tag]Is anyone else getting sick of all the emails that are sent from an unattended address that you can’t reply to? That is right up there with the emails sent letting you know that a new comment has been made on a post at a forum that you commented in that only gives you a link to the thread and not even a snippet of what the comment made was!

First I tried Napster, it was okay but their client sucked especially when syncing to my Treo as it would always hang up, then I tried Yahoo Music, the interface for their store was pathetic, unless you knew exactly what you were looking for then you were SOL and finally I tried Real Rhapsody.

I was happy with Rhapsody up until this morning as it offered the most iTunes like experience but this morning I went to listen to the songs I had synced to my Treo only to be told that no valid license could be located and I would need to sync again to update the licenses, WTF? I was listening to the songs fine yesterday so all I can guess is that after I synced with my Powerbook last night it invalidated all the licenses for some reason.

All in all the experience offered by the iTunes + iPod competitors is nowhere near up to par and I aI may just ahve to give up my dream of having (legal) music on my Treo and instead jerry rig something onto my iTunes to get my purchased songs over to my Treo. Why do I want to use my Treo? Well I’m being nice and letting the girlfriend use my iPod and the Treo works especially well for when I am doing my training rides as incoming calls will interrupt my music so I don’t miss any calls.

[tag]Typo[/tag]On the Typo mailing list there was a need identified to have some user support forums, this need was debated for a while and it ultimately got to the stage of someone just needing to implement such a forum so Typo User Support Forums is the result.

The only problem is that there was also another project going onto do the same thing at Typoforums.com so at the moment there are two sets of forums available, which isn’t an ideal situation by any means so I have put it to the Typo community to decide on one. In the meantime I just thought I’d put it out there, so if you are interested in an alternate blogging platform then please check out Typo and the Typo User Support Forums.

Best Buy, I am never going to you again! We made the trek out to Fry’s yesterday and they had everything we wanted and the staff for the most part left us alone, which was wonderful!

We picked up two 1GB SD cards - a high speed SanDisk for the DigiCam and a cheaper PNY one for Megan’s PDA, a USB flash drive/card reader for SD cards, a clear Skin Tight case for my Treo and a portable PDA keyboard. It was all pretty cheap too without any damn rebates! Die rebates Die!

Now if only someone would build a Fry’s inside the loop….

1. I am yet to meet a Best Buy salesperson that knows what they are talking about, yet every time I go there at least half a dozen ask me if I need assistance and if I am silly enough to ask them to help then they always feed me with some marketing drivel. Although once a Manager helped me as I asked if they had the Gameboy Micro and he went to the back to get me one, then started the drivel but cut himself of admitting that I probably know more than him so that was admirable at least!
2. They don’t have any of the consoles on the shelves nor do they have any tickets you can take to the counter so how the heck are you supposed to know if they stock consoles or not?
3. They don’t stock a single portable keyboard for PDA’s
4. The only Treo 650 cases they stock are ghetto (one was a holster, the other a body glove with cheap plastic over the whole front
5. If I see one more cheap item only to look closer and see if it is after a freakin’ rebate check I am going to scream!
6. To be in the Geek Squad should it not be a requirement that you actually be a geek?

I was in Super Target last night buying a steam cleaner as Pix’s house breaking isn’t going as well as we would like and they had a shiny new Xbox 360 on display, when I first walked past there was a single guy there but when I lost my girlfriend and got back there it was free. So I navigated through their demo disk to Kameo and WOW! Previously I was snubbing my nose at the Xbox 360 but now my mind has been changed! In Kameo your actual character is this scrawny looking girl fairy that can hover with her little wings but she can morph (well actually it is more like mecha with her being inside what she morphs into) into various things like a leaf monster that is good for some monster slapping fun, a big ice bear looking thing that can climb up ice & throw things and a spiky ball thing that lets you get your Metroid morph ball fix.

The graphics are pretty damn cool with dragons flying around the landscape and the camera following them, it seems there is a huge area that can be panned and zoomed within a level so it would be very interesting to see what the rest of the game looks like. I may just have to pick myself up an Xbox 360 now after all but it won’t be for some time though given my recent Treo purchase, all the cleaning equipment we’ve bought recently and then there is the whole christmas thing.