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Join sisters NinJaSistah and Pandalicious and the rest of the ESH Crew each day as they discuss video games, tech gadgets, anime, manga... pretty much everything within the geek chic lifestyle.

From Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, and PC game reviews, previews, news, and gushings to audience questions and rumor mill seeding galore you'll find it here at ESH!
First Nerdgasm of 2010: ESH@CES Las Vegas!
 

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    We less than three manga as well, so peep the manga reviews.

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    I Couldn't Have Said It Better Myself

    posted @ 1/26/2010 02:50:00 PM by evermore
    If you're anything like me, my spare time in these last few weeks has been spent in keeping up with the rumors surrounding Wednesday's announcement of new products by Apple. What is going to become the New Word of 2010? Will it be iSlate, iTablet, iPad, iOhWhatever?

    I was going to write my own pre-announcement story about the iToBeNamedLater, but it has already been written for me -- and it's a gem:

    Some personal thoughts about the Apple Tablet by Mel Martin for The Unofficial Apple Weblog says pretty much what I was going to write -- and it's written better than what I would have done.

    FULL DISCLOSURE: My wife owns Apple stock, currently valued at the price of about 8,000 iTunes songs.

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    A Robot's Letters to God, No. 36

    posted @ 1/20/2010 08:00:00 AM by evermore

    Here's one more installment of A Robot's Letters to God.



    Do you have an idea for a funny Robot's Letters to God? Just send them to evermore@electricsistahood.com. If we use it, we'll be glad to give you credit!

    In case you missed 'em, click here to check out the previous Robot's Letters to God.

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    A Robot's Letters to God, No. 35

    posted @ 1/13/2010 08:00:00 AM by evermore

    We're continuing A Robot's Letters to God with this new installment.



    Do you have an idea for a funny Robot's Letters to God? Just send them to evermore@electricsistahood.com. If we use it, we'll be glad to give you credit!

    In case you missed 'em, click here to check out the previous Robot's Letters to God.

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    You Don't Want to Hear My Choice

    posted @ 1/13/2010 12:56:00 AM by evermore


    My biggest WTF moment at CES came when I encountered this little guy on Sunday afternoon. I have a funny caption for it, but NinjaSistah is sure it will offend her sister, so I'm withholding it for now. Perhaps you can come up with a better one.

    If you have a good idea for a caption, please send it along to questions@esh.mobi. If we think it is as funny as you do, we'll publish it here.

    What exactly is this little guy? Well, he is supposed to help teach little kids a foreign language. Just looks scary to me.

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    And We Thought Wii Was a Funny Name

    posted @ 1/10/2010 02:30:00 AM by evermore


    The most unfortunately named thing at CES this year is a made-for-TV gaming console called the iGUGU. But the unfortunate part doesn't end there.

    In fact, the sorry name is only one of the iGUGU's problems. Look at the product's slogan to the right of the iGUGU logo in this picture. They didn't hire anyone who could spell?

    And that's not all. A reviewer from Joystiq actually tried the thing out this week and gives this biting observation.

    Obviously, the iGUGU is something that would make any self-respecting gamer iGagGag.

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    The 21st Century Equivalent of a Tin Can and String

    posted @ 1/10/2010 02:22:00 AM by evermore


    It's not the sound of the ocean that this woman is listening to at CES -- no, it's her iPod! The ice bucket she is holding is one she borrowed from her Las Vegas hotel room. That little thing stuck on the end is the Rock-It, a device that creates vibrations to amplify the sound from an MP3 player so that almost any such object can be used as a makeshift amplifier.

    She and another woman demonstrated the device at the OrigAudio booth, sticking the business-end of the Rock-It to plastic water bottles and cardboard boxes, demonstrating the ability to pump up the volume of their little music player.

    At that point, I saw the opportunity to take a funny photo, with her holding up the bucket to her ear like a tin can on a string, and she gladly complied. That's the fun thing about being a photojournalist -- you can get almost anybody to do almost anything you want them to do.

    But now that I think about it, I feel a little bad. She was friendly and helpful, and I took advantage of her like that.

    But look at it like this -- if I hadn't seen a funny photo opportunity, I wouldn't have taken the picture. And I wouldn't have posted it to this website. And you wouldn't have read about this otherwise useful product. So perhaps I'm doing them a little good. In fact, I urge you to check out the Rock-It at the OrigAudio website. If you decide to buy, enter the promo code Plugtouchrock to get 20 percent off your order.

    Now I don't feel so bad.

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    Madden 1.9K82

    posted @ 1/09/2010 02:57:00 AM by evermore


    Believe it or not, this is one of the "new" games introduced this year at CES in Las Vegas.

    It's part of Microsoft's soon-to-come Gameroom for Xbox 360, in which you are a visitor in a giant three-story mall arcade with some of the favorite games from the 1970s and '80s, including Centipede, Pitfall and Lunar Lander.

    You'll hear more about this and more modern games like the forthcoming Mass Effect 2 on the next couple of ESH podcasts.

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    Hello Kitty -- Putting Fun Back in Child Labor

    posted @ 1/09/2010 02:30:00 AM by evermore


    Although this Hello Kitty looks like it wants to walk like an Egyptian, it's designed to be an MPG -- that's short for "Man-Powered Generator." To be honest with you, I don't know any men who would be caught dead cranking on a Hello Kitty ride.

    It's hard to envision the dimensions of the unit by this picture, but it seems to be designed for a small child, perhaps 60 or 70 pounds at most, to ride and turn the handlebars round and round to generate power.

    According to the literature provided by the manufacturer, Porng Da Electronic Co., Ltd, of Guangdong Province in China, it would take 30 minutes of cranking on Hello Kitty to provide 25 minutes of power for a notebook computer. Just leave it to the Chinese to make child labor seem fun.

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    Another Elvis Sighting

    posted @ 1/09/2010 01:04:00 AM by evermore
    Well, it wouldn't be Las Vegas without Elvis, and during CES, Elvises sprout up like Santa Clauses at Christmas.



    This particular Elvis was helping the company Tiffen to demonstrate a holder for the iPhone that acted as a Steadicam, keeping the picture from being jumpy when the camera was being moved around.

    As it turned out, Ninjasistah was in the same area just a little earlier, and Faux Elvis sang Barry White's "You're My First, My Last, My Everything" to her.

    I wish I had gotten a picture of that.

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    How Much Is That Singing Doggie In the Window?

    posted @ 1/08/2010 02:15:00 AM by evermore
    Although Ninjasistah has nightmares of Teddy Ruxpin when she sees something like this, I couldn't resist taking a picture of this animatronic dog singing along with an iPod Nano at the CES convention Wednesday afternoon.

    Of course, once Miley Cyrus started singing "Party in the U.S.A.," the dog stopped singing, glared at me and walked indignantly from the room.

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    If You Can't Say Anything Good...

    posted @ 1/07/2010 12:11:00 PM by evermore
    For about the 325th consecutive year, Microsoft delivered a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Wednesday night. Billionaire Steve Ballmer might as well have phoned the thing in.

    It is a guarantee at these things that some major glitch or computer crash will occur during Microsoft keynotes. YouTube is filled with such fun clips. Wednesday's keynote was no exception as the major problem occurred just 10 minutes before the thing was supposed to start.

    I sat in the press section -- the best seats in the house, in the first seven rows right in the middle of the Las Vegas Hilton Center -- as all the lights in the house suddenly shut down, leaving us in darkness for a few moments before the emergency power kicked in. When we saw that the dozen Microsoft monitors were still dark, we knew we were in for an unwanted adventure.

    It was interesting to watch the world's largest Black Screen of Death.

    About the time the keynote was scheduled to start, an announcement came over the loudspeaker: A "small power problem" has occurred and we would be starting in "about five minutes." Then technicians rushed the stage frantically trying to bring life back to the still powerless PCs on the stage.

    "About five minutes" turned into 30, and it was obvious that some of the PCs were still having difficulty being restored to their former health. Microsoft finally gave in and started the show anyway.

    What followed could only be adequately described as "Amateur Hour." I'm sure it resembled the old Homebrew Computer Club demonstrations of the mid-1970s more than what passes for modern keynote deliveries of the 21st Century.

    Steve Jobs of Apple has set the standard on the modern keynote address, with his simple graphics and well-rehearsed deliveries. It's rare that a glitch occurs in his keynotes, and when they do, he always manages to pass it off with a funny line and gets on with it.

    Steve Ballmer's keynote couldn't have been more different. He fumbled over his words during some rocky moments and when it came time for humor, it was obvious that it was scripted. You coud tell he was about to make a joke because he would raise the volume of his voice in order to let all of us know that he was about to make a joke.

    Ballmer's hit the road during 2009 making a lot of speeches about just how crappy Microsoft's products have been. He's apologized on different occasions about the Xbox red rings problem, the worthlessness of Windows Mobile 6.5 and just how much everybody hated Windows Vista. He offered no such apologies in Wednesday's keynote. In fact, he acted as if Microsoft didn't have any problems at all.

    For example, as the media was being seated before the show, we were all instructed to turn off "our cell phones and Windows Mobile devices." Well, practically anybody in the press corps who might have owned a Windows Mobile device had turned it off a long time ago. It was probably sitting in a shoebox at home.

    But Ballmer, talking about Windows Mobile 6.5, acted as if it was the industry's leading mobile phone OS, with marketshare expected to be growing into the next year (and probably throughout the millenium to come). The media folks rolled their collective eyes.

    It was a rambling presentation, with a lot of empty words being spoken about a lot of equally empty products. Ballmer didn't offer anything new. After talking about Windows Mobile, Windows 7 and a new cellphone designed to run WiMo, he finally got the media excited when he revealed some examples of some new "slate" computers that were being developed. Ahhh, here's the Apple-killer everyone wanted to see. But when he admitted that it was just a concept, everyone slumped down in their seats again. Alas, Microsoft's patened FUD (fear-uncertainty-doubt) struck again.

    Finally, Ballmer relinquished the stage to Microsoft's Entertainment head, who presented some genuinely interesting -- and actual -- products, such as the next version of Halo and some more details about the gamer-is-the-controller concept they call Project Natal. He even promised that Project Natal would actualy be available during 2010.

    But by that time, Steve Ballmer was already gone, not to return to the stage. With the keynote being at the Las Vegas Hilton, Elvis Presley's old hangout, I expected an announcement along the lines of "Steve Ballmer has left the building," but it didn't happen.

    Instead, he rode out in the same silence that will undoubtedly surround most of Microsoft's big ventures of 2010.

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    A Robot's Letters to God, No. 34

    posted @ 1/06/2010 08:00:00 AM by evermore

    This installment of A Robot's Letters to God is from long-time ESH fan Richard Shaddox. Enjoy!



    Do you have an idea for a funny Robot's Letters to God? Just send them to evermore@electricsistahood.com. If we use it, we'll be glad to give you credit!

    In case you missed 'em, click here to check out the previous Robot's Letters to God.

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    A Robot's Letters to God, No. 33

    posted @ 12/30/2009 08:00:00 AM by evermore

    Yet another installment of A Robot's Letters to God...



    Do you have an idea for a funny Robot's Letters to God? Just send them to evermore@electricsistahood.com. If we use it, we'll be glad to give you credit!

    In case you missed 'em, click here to check out the previous Robot's Letters to God.

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    A Robot's Letters to God, No. 32

    posted @ 12/23/2009 08:00:00 AM by evermore


    Here's this week's newest installment of A Robot's Letters to God. Enjoy!



    Do you have an idea for a funny Robot's Letters to God? Just send them to evermore@electricsistahood.com. If we use it, we'll be glad to give you credit!

    In case you missed 'em, click here to check out the previous Robot's Letters to God.

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    A Robot's Letters to God, No. 31

    posted @ 12/16/2009 08:00:00 AM by evermore


    Every Wednesday throughout December you can enjoy a new installment of A Robot's Letters to God continues. Here's this week's entry.



    Do you have an idea for a funny Robot's Letters to God? Just send them to evermore@electricsistahood.com. If we use it, we'll be glad to give you credit!

    In case you missed 'em, click here to check out the previous Robot's Letters to God.

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    A Robot's Letters to God, No. 30

    posted @ 12/09/2009 08:00:00 AM by evermore


    The return of A Robot's Letters to God continues. Be sure to tune in every Wednesday throughout December.



    Do you have an idea for a funny Robot's Letters to God? Just send them to evermore@electricsistahood.com. If we use it, we'll be glad to give you credit!

    In case you missed 'em, click here to check out the previous Robot's Letters to God.

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    A Robot's Letters to God Returns!

    posted @ 12/02/2009 08:00:00 AM by evermore


    After a three-year hiatus, A Robot's Letters to God returns. Every Wednesday in December, you'll get to read the inner thoughts of some of the best-known robots as they try to understand the workings of the universe.

    Or something like that.



    Do you have an idea for a funny Robot's Letters to God? Just send them to evermore@electricsistahood.com. If we use it, we'll be glad to give you credit!

    In case you missed 'em, click here to check out the previous 28 Robot's Letters to God.

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    Don't Tase Me-ow

    posted @ 11/27/2009 05:15:00 PM by evermore


    On this day, the national day of public consumption (also known as Black Friday), we present something that will not only mollify the Hello Kitty fan in your family, but could also quiet them entirely.

    No, it's not real. But maybe like the Tauntaun Sleeping Bag, which was originally an April Fool's Day joke that was so acclaimed that it became real (see it here), maybe someone will be interested in producing a Hello Kitty Taser gun for real.

    We can only hope.

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    M... Math Again? I Knew It!

    posted @ 11/18/2009 08:00:00 AM by evermore
    If you're the type of person who wants to look like one of the cool kids in school and hide your Calculus textbook deep inside an open Manga, you can now come out in the open about your love for Calculus and Manga.

    In much the same way that the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup combined chocolate and peanut butter, No Starch Press has brought out an English translation of Mangu de Wakura Bibun Sekibun, or The Manga Guide to Calculus.

    The story revolves around Noriko Hikima, a petite aspiring journalist who is starting her first job at a satellite office of the Asagake Times in the small town of Sanda-Cho. Imagine her surprised when she discovers just how small small-town newspapering can get. Instead of a hustling, bustling newsroom, like the one in the movie All the President's Men, the Sanda-Cho office is in a dinky prefab building.

    And, instead of the sound of typewriters and teletype machines clacking away in the background, she enters to the snores of Futoshi Masu, the deputy of Kakeru Seki, the editor of the little paper.

    You know, I've been a newspaper reporter and editor at publications big and small for many years, but Kakeru is unlike any newspaper editor I've ever known. All he wants to talk about are calculus functions. At one point, he asks Noriko, "Did you know a function is often expressed as y=f(x)?" The closest I ever got to a conversation like that in a real newspaper was when we would discuss the point spread of a pro football game.

    Don't get me wrong. I don't want to get off on the wrong foot by inferring that this isn't a good book about calculus. It just makes a lousy journalism primer. I can just imagine that the result would be about the same if it were a Manga about teaching math graduates how to write.

    Actually, the closest thing to a real journalist in the story is Futoshi, a fat, slovenly guy who sleeps on the couch and rises only to ask if his lunch delivery has arrived. That, and he keeps a bottle of liquor hidden away in the office. Now, that's a real newspaper guy.

    The story is interupted every few pages by some actual calculus instruction, describing the points made by Kakeru to Noriko in the previous few pages. It seems to make learning about calculus as enjoyable as humanly possible.

    Along the way, we learn why roller coasters are fast, why bubbles rise to the top of the beer glass, how greenhouse gases cause global warming -- all with the help of calculus!

    They don't seem to do much actual reporting, or writing, editing or page layout, for that matter. And where is the online website? Instead, there's a lot of dining at places like one described as "a posh Italian restaurant." I never could afford posh Italian restaurants on my newspaper salary.

    The trip to the Italian eatery becomes an adventure as Kakeru has an accident while trying to explain how to calculate the road curves he's trying to maneuver. They're unhurt, but still quite a distance away from the Italian restaurant, so Kakeru uses calculus to show why it would be more adventageous to eat at a Ramen shop instead -- it's closer (It doesn't really take calculus to figure that one out).

    The local stories they run in the paper are pretty ordinary -- just like a real small-town paper. But some of the headlines leave a little to be desired. You'd never see a headline like "The Reputation of Sanda-Cho Watermelons Improves in the Prefecture" in a real newspaper.

    At one point, Kakeru reduces fashion, drumming and dancing to mere trigonometric functions, which leads Noriku to complain about Futoshi's ambivalence toward the whole thing, saying, "Futoshi! Why does he get to eat Chow Mein while I have to learn about integrals?"

    Then Noriku does something called the "Calculus Dance Song," which looks suspiciously like the "Time Warp" -- it's just a jump to the left...

    As with most any Manga, Kakeru is hiding a secret that Noriko slowly becomes aware of. Whenever she becomes a little too inquisitive, he changes the subject -- usually by bringing up polynomials.

    Then, going through the paper's archives, Noriku discovers the secret. Kakeru had written an expose on the parent newspaper's biggest advertiser, Burnham Chemical Products, explaining why he was shipped off to a tiny satellite paper in the hinterlands.

    But when Kakeru's research is proven to be true, Burnham Chemical relents and Kakeru is reinstated at the main paper. The Sanda-Cho office is closed and both Futoshi and Noriku are reassigned to other papers in the chain.

    I'm not going to spoil the ending, but you've probably read much more Manga than me, so you can undoubtedly guess.

    As a Calculus textbook, it's very entertaining. But it'll never be confused for a journalism text. Never once do they mention writing in "inverted pyramid" style. Pyramid? I guess that would be geometry.

    Maybe that'll be the sequel.

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    You Haven't Heard the Half of It

    posted @ 11/11/2009 12:23:00 AM by evermore
    With the popularity of The Beatles Rock Band and the release of re-mastered stereo and mono versions of The Beatles' songs, it's no wonder there's a recurrence of interest in the Fab Four. I've been waiting for years for this to happen.

    I was a month away from my eighth birthday when The Beatles conquered America with their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, and I had a copy -- one of a mere 4 million -- of the single "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." From that moment, I would always be a big Beatles fan.

    As I grew older, I collected Beatles singles and albums, both rare and ordinary. And anyone who thinks that by having the new collection of CDs that they have everything, that's far from the truth. There's quite a bit of stuff -- and I'm not talking about bootlegs, but actual EMI/Capitol Records releases -- that have been long out of print.

    One example of this is their 1970 album release "The Beatles Again." What, you never heard of The Beatles Again? It wasn't actually released by Capitol, but by Allen Klein, who managed The Beatles for a brief time (and was one of the reasons for the group's breakup). Klein's company was disappointed with Capitol's album release schedule and put together a compilation of all the songs that had never been on a Beatles album in the United States. Just before the record was released, it was retitled "Hey Jude," but it was too late to changed the title on the first pressing of the record. Once Klein was fired, the album fell out of print.

    By this time, the band had broken up as well, and the members of the group were more interested in their own solo careers to pay much attention to what EMI was doing with their records.

    When their first true greatest hits album was finally released, EMI/Capitol did it in style by putting out two 2-disk sets, one covering the early years through Revolver and the other one covering the later years, starting with Sgt. Pepper's. The most interesting part of the albums was the cover art. The 1962-1966 album shows the photo from the cover of the first British Beatles album from 1962. The 1967-1970 album shows a photo taken in 1969 of the four men standing in the same position on the same balcony of EMI headquarters -- true bookends.

    The next "new" Beatles record to come from Capitol was a compilation of Beatles songs performed at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964 and 1965. George Martin, The Beatles' producer, was brought in to clean up the tapes and put the whole thing together like a real Beatles concert, and did a very nice job of capturing the experience of thousands of girls screaming at the top of their lungs. The world, unfortunately, had moved on to disco and the album quickly fell off the charts and was forgotten.

    Next came the picture disc. Capitol Records took a gamble on the expensive process of producing disks with the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album on one side and a close-up of the Sgt. Pepper's drum face on the B-side. The gamble paid off and they sold out of every printing. Personally, I have three copies of the album, which sold for $16 apiece at a time when regular albums sold for $5. I opened one of them (so I could look at both sides) and the other two are still unopened to this day. With the success of Sgt. Pepper's picture disk, Capitol tried a few other albums -- releasing the White Album in white vinyl, and the greatest hits albums in red and blue vinyl, respectively. But picture discs were a novelty that soon wore off, and Capitol never produced any more.

    Next, Capitol turned to its vaults and started dredging up oddities. They released "Rarities," an album with alternative takes of some songs. In Britain, EMI produced their own "Rarities" record and another called "Casualties," with an alternate set of rare alternate versions of Beatles songs.

    With the death of John Lennon in 1980 and the resultant reduction of visibility by the rest of the members of the band for several years, everything was quiet on the Beatles front for many years. Capitol was reduced to repackaging greatest hits albums in various forms, and raised the ire of Beatles fans when, one one such album (20 Greatest Hits), they reduced the song "Hey Jude" to 5 minutes and 30 seconds long from its original 7:11 run time.

    It wasn't until 1994 that Beatles activity picked up again. That year Capitol released "Live at the BBC," a compilation of songs The Beatles had performed on the radio in Britain during the years 1963-1965. Of greatest interest were 30 songs they had never released on record before -- those influential cover songs that made them form a band in the first place.

    The songs included Roy Orbison's "Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream)", The Coasters' arrangement of "Bésame Mucho" and Slim Whitman's "Beautiful Dreamer." Think about that for a moment -- The Beatles covered a Slim Whitman song. The album, again, was produced by George Martin.

    The most ambitious project was released two years later: the 6-disk set called Anthology, which was packaged in three sections and was part of the release of an 8-DVD set and accompanying book. Anthology was primarily rare tracks and outtakes, many of which already existed on bootleg albums, but were now part of The Beatles' canon for the first time.

    The latest greatest hits album to be released was "1" in 2000, a compilation of the 27 songs that had gone to No. 1 in the U.S., Great Britain or both. The overwhelming success of 1 (selling more than 11 million albums in the U.S. alone) and the ensuing success of the Love mash-up album virtually assured the success of this year's Beatles box sets and Rock Band game.

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    Puttin' On the Ritz

    posted @ 10/13/2009 09:34:00 AM by evermore


    What is it about a top hat, cane and monocle? Surely in the 21st Century we've gotten past those arcane things to sell products. But no, as evidenced by JVC's announcement for its new Picsio pocket camera, they believe people can still be attracted to a low-end movie camera with high-end features by dressing the thing up and making it dance.

    According to JVC, the Picsio shoots 8-megapixel stills and 1080p HD video (not really, according to Engadget), yet looks like Mr. Peanut and dances like Fred Astaire. It's available in three colors with a finish reminiscent of the Spirit of St. Louis. It's got something for everybody -- everybody born before 1925, that is.

    And if you weren't already sold on that, there's the video:



    All this and for only $200 (not counting the required SD card that's not included). How could you possibly resist? It can dance!

    (By the way, click the photo at the top of this story for a BIGGER version of the picture!)

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    Who Left This Panda Here?

    posted @ 8/03/2009 08:00:00 AM by Ninjasistah
    Helmed by a solitary host this week, a new ESH podcast episode is born...

    The Ninja girl came down with an abominable case of laryngitis that she just could not shake, so it was left to Pandalicious and Evermore to put together a great show. Would they be able to pull it off? What kind of show would they produce? First of all, of course they would pull it off, they are awesome and "B" it would almost have to be a clip show ya silly.

    It's a cutting room floor show ladies and gents, featuring all previously un-aired ESH bits like an audience question from Jerel Smith, some Portal and Portal 2 talk from Episode 107 and even Ultimate Quest podcast host Xenocore's top 5 anime series to learn by. There is a bunch of fun tid-bits, extra tangents, and as always cursing and laughter.

    Oh yeah, shameless plugs for our sibling podcast The Boston Bastard Brigade. So grab your favorite frosty and/or heated beverage of choice and enjoy Electric Sista Hood Podcast Episode 157: On Our Hands and Knees On the Cutting Room Floor

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    Michael Jackson Wasn't An Influence -- He Was More

    posted @ 6/25/2009 10:56:00 PM by evermore



    It's been a long time since anyone revered Michael Jackson. All the success of his Thriller album were followed too soon by the depths of the sexual allegations against him. Was there anyone who wanted to be like Mike?

    It's my contention that the answer is a resounding yes. And there are examples all over.

    News of Jackson's death Thursday brought to mind a story I read a while back. It was written by my friend Thomas Conner, now the online entertainment editor at the Chicago Sun-Times.

    The very title of the story, "King of Pap," telegraphs the tone of the story he wrote back in 2001 when he was an entertainment writer at the Tulsa World. In the story, Conner asserts that despite his fabulous record sales, Jackson had not become much of an influence in music:

    "To wear the crown of King of Pop, though, an artist would be expected to be omnipresent in all the fifedoms of popular music. The force of his rule should be felt in provinces as far away as jazz and indie-rock," he wrote. "But they aren't. Musicians don't cite Jackson's indomitable influence when discussing their own albums in interviews. They're not covering his songs."

    But I have to disagree with my good friend on this one. It's a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. Michael Jackson was not simply an "influence" in popular music -- he had created an entire genre of music.

    It has happened before. The genre of rock 'n' roll was spawned directly from Bill Haley and the Comets' "Rock Around the Clock." Heavy Metal music came directly from The Beatles' "Helter Skelter." And the night Michael Jackson sung "Billie Jean" and performed the Moonwalk on the Motown 25th Anniversary TV special, he launched the careers of dozens of today's hottest artists.

    Conner writes, "Musicians don't cite Jackson's indomitable influence," but they don't have to say it. With every song that Usher and Justin Timberlake do, it proves that they are aping both Jackson's music and dancing.

    If it weren't for Michael Jackson, Usher would be be the title of his profession instead of his stage name. Justin Timberlake would be just another aging former Mousketeer. And would actor Chris Tucker have a career at all, if it hadn't been for Michael Jackson?

    But the genre doesn't stop there. With the help of the great NinjaSistah, we put together a list of all the artists whose careers exist solely because of the ground that was broken by one guy:

    Chris Brown, Neyo, Tevin Cambell, N'Sync, TLC, 112, Diddy, Cassie, Britney Spears, Ludacris, Jamie Foxx, Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, Black Eyed Peas, Bobby Valentino, Ciara, Robin Thicke, Sisqo, Al B. Sure, Floetry, Due, Start, Aaliyah, R. Kelly, Amerie, Beyonce, Brandy, Ginuwine, Wyclef Jean, Mario, New Edition, Omarion, SWV, Fall Out Boy, Snoop, Alien Ant Farm and the pop songs of Will Smith. Oh, and most of the artists who have ever appeared on American Idol.

    Personally, I never was a big fan, but I always admired him. I was in eighth grade when he and his brothers took the song "ABC" to No. 1. Years later, I was glued to the set the night MTV debuted that amazing "Thriller" video.

    I was equally aghast the night I saw him try to explain his way around his affection for small boys. I can't speak to his actual guilt in the matter, but it was obvious that he was certainly out of touch with reality.

    A lot of words are going to be written and said about Michael Jackson in the next few days. And a lot of people are going to debate about his talent and his personal life. And, while his music might not last forever, it is certain that we're going to be listening to the musical genre he created for a very long time to come.


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    The Return of DJ Petite

    posted @ 10/09/2008 01:22:00 PM by evermore
    The autumn of 2008 is going to be all about the new Rock Band and Guitar Hero games around the household of Ninjasistah -- anyone who has ever listened to a few ESH podcasts already knows that. But while she's banging away at her drums or shredding guitar, her mind is going to be on something else entirely.

    It's called "Scratch: The Ultimate DJ."

    Before she became an adult, the Ninja dreamed of the day she would become a real DJ, complete with turntables and stacks of vinyl. She often went to sleep at night imagining herself in a club scratching out hip-hop tunes for the masses.

    But the music industry went a different direction. The music suddenly became about spending money on golden neck apparel and fake teeth. It became all about champagne and Courvoisier. Artists from Atlanta took over and threw out all the DJ's.

    Even with these changes, she tried her hand at putting together some beats of her own using some new-fangled electronic tunes. Click here for a sample of a song she did under one of her other pseudonyms, DJ Petite.

    Now it looks like DJ Petite might be on the comeback trail with the announcement of Scratch: The Ultimate DJ, which is a DJ game in the realm of all of Ninjasistah's favorite music games, like Amplitude, Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

    Quincy Jones III is the musical consultant for the game, being produced by Genius Products, 7 Digital, QD3 and GenCo Media, and set for release next June. It will feature a DJ turntable-style controller and will be available for the Xbox 360 and the PS3.

    Need more info? Check out any of your favorite gaming sites out there. It's all over the place.

    It's going to be a long nine months.


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    Return to the Days of Yesteryear With T-Mobile's G1

    posted @ 9/23/2008 02:44:00 PM by evermore
    The marketing for T-Mobile's alleged iPhone killer should include the following motto: "G1 -- It's Not Just A Phone -- It's a Time Machine."

    Unfortunately, that's not a good thing.

    You see, while the G1 is able to get and send information on Wi-Fi, 3G and the Edge networks, just like Apple/AT&T's iPhone, all that networking capability comes with a big caveat:

    "If your total data usage in any billing cycle is more than 1GB, your data throughput for the remainder of that cycle may be reduced to 50 kbps or less."

    That's what it says in small, but bold text on this page on the T-Mobile website.

    That's right. Use too much bandwidth and your web-hopping world suddenly transforms you back to 1999 -- the magical land of blink tags and framed pages, a world of screaming 56K modems that would eventually update a web page in a minute, or maybe five minutes.

    Back in The World of 1999, you didn't have any use for games or music or movies. It took 10 minutes to download an MP3 song at 56K. Those were the days when an animated GIF was plenty of entertainment.

    The opening of the TV show The Lone Ranger said it all: "Return to the Days of Yesteryear! The 50K Download Rides Again!"


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    An Open Letter to the Folks at Bungie

    posted @ 7/22/2008 02:16:00 PM by evermore
    Dear Bungie,

    I read in Variety this week that you have had some disagreements with your previous owner Microsoft and that was why there was no Halo announcement at E3 this year.

    I know it must be difficult after so many years kowtowing to the likes of Steve Ballmer, and if you think that maybe it's time for a little payback, I've got an idea on how to have a little vengeance against the Evil Empire.

    Give Steve Jobs a call. I understand that it may be a little difficult to get in. Between drinking macrobiotic shakes and counting all that money coming in from WALL-E and emailing to pals on the next version of the iPhone, he's a little busy these days. Tell him you've got an idea.

    First, tell him you've mended your ways. You're sorry you sold out to Microsoft all those years ago and took all those fun games away from the Mac. Then tell him you've got a way to kick the likes of Microsoft, HP, Dell and all those Asian computer makers right in the tail.

    The Halo Mac.

    The Halo Mac is not just a Macintosh with a bunch of decals on it. It's a Mac designed to play Halo. Take a MacBook Air and give it a multi-touch screen, like an iPhone. Just throw the controller away. You have everything you need, between the multi-touch screen and the keyboard.

    Inside, put a processor capable of bringing out the best in Halo, along with a solid-state drive and the maximum amount of RAM possible.

    And keep all the great capabilities of the MacBook intact. The 802.11n network is superior to anything on a console. Voice and video chat is built in -- not an add-on. In fact, you could share your screen with other players. You could even capture your screen play and turn it into Machinima with the free iMovie program on the Mac.

    Imagine the possibilities of a Halo-player that is as light as a MacBook Air and just as useful. The Xbox 360 is OK, but you only move that hot plate when it Red-Rings-Of-Death.

    [MacBook Air photo credit: Tim Malabuyo]


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    This Baloney Has a Name, All Right

    posted @ 7/01/2008 10:08:00 AM by evermore
    As soon as I read the press release, the following song went off in my head: "My customer service has a first name, it's V-I-E-R-A. My customer service has a second name, it's C-O-N-C-I-E-R-G-E...." Not too snappy, is it?

    What in the world am I talking about? It's Panasonic's free customer support for the new owners of the company's plasma and LCD HDTV's. I make a big deal about this because almost everyone has free customer support for their electronic products. Panasonic has given theirs a name: VIERA Concierge.

    I guess it's like if you own a chicken. As long as you don't give the chicken a name, the kids won't mind it if you slaughter it and eat it. But give it a name and it become a pet. And the kids will never eat a pet.

    By giving their free customer support a name, Panasonic probably thinks you'll adopt it as a pet. You'll feel all warm and toasty about your HDTV. You'll come home at night and pat it on its little head.

    Here's an interesting line from the press release: "One unique privilege is access to Panasonic’s HDTV loaner program, which makes HDTV loaners available at no charge to customers who have a Plasma or LCD undergoing repair."

    Now think about that a second. We're not talking about an old-fashioned 19-inch tube television here. We're talking about a 42- or 50-inch behemoth that weighs a ton and is extremely unwieldy. How are we going to get the broken set out of the house to get fixed? And how are we going to get a loaner in the house?

    Oh, here's the answer to my questions: "The VIERA Concierge service also includes priority scheduling for in-home service visits, if necessary, with most repairs completed in two days." A little guy is going to show up at the door with your loaner and camp out until the set is fixed. Sounds a little farfetched to me.

    What else does this service provide? The release says, "a Concierge Benefits Card providing a customer ID and dedicated toll-free telephone number which entitles them to a range of valuable privileges within the United States."

    That's right: a card with a phone number. An exclusive phone number. Imagine that. Panasonic customer service has a phone number. I would bet that every company that makes TV's around the world has an exclusive customer service phone number.

    And those "valuable privileges" the release talks about? It's probably the "privilege" of being able to call that customer service phone number.

    But thank god that Panasonic has given its customer service a name. Now I'll know what to curse under my breath when the TV breaks down.


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    Like a Soap Opera without the sex

    posted @ 6/26/2008 11:17:00 AM by evermore
    Way back in the early 1970s when I was a college student, I remember seeing a one-panel comic in the newspaper. A Martian explorer was reporting back to his commander, "They worship Beatles and want them to get back together."

    That accurately reflected the times. Hardly a week passed when you didn't see some story about rumors of a Beatles reunion. The media ate this stuff up. Every interview with one of the Fab Four contained the inevitable question, "When will you get back together?"

    Those questions ended when John Lennon was gunned down on Dec. 8, 1980, but it seems that today there is a new will-they-get-together fanaticism among the media: Microsoft and Yahoo.

    Just as in the 1970s with The Beatles, the media can't seem to let go of any half-baked rumor regarding the possible takeover of Yahoo by Microsoft. Jerry Yang was seen golfing with Steve Ballmer... This insider told that insider... I think it's true, so it must be true...

    It's like a Soap Opera without the sex. The tech websites are full of this meaningless chatter. Every new little rumor spawns innumerable stories and blogs and Twitters. And then, a few days later, some official at one of the companies dismisses the entire thing, which spawns even more stories, blogs and Twitters.

    The tale they all tell is pretty much the same: Microsoft must buy Yahoo or Google will take over websearch permanently and for all time. Microsoft must be crazy to not buy Yahoo. Yahoo must be insane for not giving in to Microsoft.

    And what if it all comes true? What if Microsoft swallows up Yahoo? Well then the media will really have a field day: Microsoft is insane for wasting all that money on Yahoo. Yahoo made a huge mistake to give in so easily to Microsoft.

    In either case, Google's laughing all the way to the bank.


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    The Music Industry's Dirty Little Secret

    posted @ 6/23/2008 01:58:00 PM by evermore
    I became incensed earlier today when I read a headline from a music industry analyst that proclaimed that digital downloads have "killed music." Believe me, nothing could be farther from the truth.

    Just look at all those people carrying music players around. Ten years ago, before the first MP3 players hit, the only people carrying music around were kids with boomboxes -- and it wasn't likely anything you wanted to listen to.

    There's more music than ever before. But there is something that digital downloads did kill -- and it was the music industry's real cash cow.

    Digital downloads have killed the Greatest Hits album. That's where the music industry made a huge percentage of its money.

    To see this in action, just look at the career of The Doors. During lead singer Jim Morrison's lifetime, the group recorded solely for Elektra Records and created the following albums:

    The Doors

    Strange Days

    Waiting for the Sun

    The Soft Parade

    Morrison Hotel

    Absolutely Live

    L.A. Woman


    Seven albums. That, plus their first Greatest Hits album "13," released in 1970, were it. However, since Jim Morrison's death in 1971, Elektra and its decendents (now Warner Music) have released the following compilations:

    Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine (1972)

    The Best of The Doors (1973)

    The Doors Greatest Hits (1980)

    The Best of The Doors (1985)

    The Doors: Original Soundtrack Recording (1991)

    The Doors Greatest Hits (1996)

    Essential Rarities (1999)

    The Best of the Doors (2000)

    The Very Best of the Doors (2001)

    Legacy: The Absolute Best (2003)

    The Very Best of the Doors (2007)

    The Future Starts Here: The Essential Doors (2008)


    The Doors released only six studio albums, but their label has put out a whopping 13 compilations, repackaging the same songs that were on the original six. Note that they put out so many Greatest Hits sets that they ran out of names for them, repeating "The Doors Greatest Hits" and "The Very Best of The Doors" twice and "The Best of The Doors" three times.

    Now, mind you, that's 13 albums created and distributed after The Doors stopped recording with Jim Morrison in 1971.

    And that total doesn't even count the five box sets that have been released, including 1999's "The Complete Studio Recordings," which simply contains the six studio albums in one package.

    Every Greatest Hits album and set mentioned here has sold at least 100,000 copies. The 1980 version of "The Doors Greatest Hits" album alone sold 3 million copies.

    Why was the Greatest Hits album so important to the label? It costs them virtually nothing and brings in money by the truckloads.

    They don't pay the artist anything. The contracts of recording artists and groups usually contain a clause allowing the label to issue unlimited compilation albums of songs the artist did under contract. In fact, if you think you're doing the artist a favor by buying a Greatest Hits album, you're wrong. The artists usually doesn't get credit from the label for the Greatest Hits album sale. Their remuneration is based solely on the original album.

    It's "pre-sold." They don't have to try to get the band on Leno, Letterman or Conan. The songs are already a hit. Everyone knows them already.

    It's a perfect Christmas gift. Don't know what to get Johnny or Julie for a gift? You've seen them wear a Jim Morrison T-shirt -- get them a Doors album. This attitude has paid off like a slot machine for the labels since the LP album was first introduced.

    It's in a new format. The first greatest hits albums came out on vinyl, cassette, 8-track and open reel (you gotta be really old to know what "open reel" was). You needed a vinyl version for home, the 8-track version for your car and the cassette version for your Walkman. Then you threw all that away and got the Compact Disc version.

    The digital download kills all of these cash cows for the music industry. By being able to buy only the tracks you want, you don't need to buy a whole compilation to get the one or two songs you actually like. In fact, there's really no marketing per se for a single track at a label -- they already give away songs on the radio and videos on TV. The marketing department at a music label is there only to sell albums.

    Heck, before The Beatles came along, the only people who bought albums were fans of classical music and Broadway musical soundtracks. Then came the day in March 1964 when The Beatles had all the top 5 songs on the Hot 100 Singles list. It was on that day when it was actually cheaper to buy the top 5 on one album, rather than getting them on separate singles. Three years later, the album became an event with the release of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" by The Beatles.

    But in the last decade, the album has fallen on hard times. In the 1960s, bands put out two albums a year -- now it's hard to get an album every two years from a band like Coldplay. And sales have plummeted drastically. When it's easier for Neil Diamond to get a No. 1 album in the 21st Century than back in the 1960's, you know something is wrong with the whole system.

    To be honest with you, the best thing you, as a music consumer, could do would be to boycott the purchase of all music produced by the four major record labels. You would be doing the artist a favor. The way their contracts are written, they make virtually nothing from record sales. They make absolutely nothing from digital sales. The few artists who make decent coin from sales of recordings are already rich (Paul McCartney, Metallica, Madonna) or dead (Elvis, John Lennon) or both (Michael Jackson).

    You should feel sorry for those performers on American Idol -- especially the winners. They're locked into the Last Days of the Record Industry Empire, an empire that steals money from almost everybody and tries to throw the rest of us in jail.

    If you want to support musical artists, purchase a ticket to a concert, and buy a T-shirt and a couple of CD's while you're there. All of that money goes to the artist. Encourage your favorite band to write songs for commercials -- don't villify them for it. It's the only way to make money in the music business these days.

    Because the only thing deader than the Greatest Hits album is Jim Morrison.


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    Oh No He Didn't (Oh Yes He Did)

    posted @ 6/16/2008 09:48:00 AM by evermore
    The man in the photo here is a guy named Laurent Fischer. He's not remarkably unlike you or me. But when he puts his foot in his mouth, he manages to jam it as far in as he can.

    You see, Fischer is the director of marketing for Nintendo's European division. And, as a director of marketing, he really ought to know better than to do what he did last week.

    Nintendo users have been clamoring for more memory for the Wii -- an external hard drive would be awfully nice, especially as games take up more space. But, in a story for Edge, a gaming magazine, the editor's asked Fischer about the demand for more space:

    As is always the case with Nintendo’s press events nowadays, the dirty word ‘casual’ was raised at its WiiWare preview, only to be dismissed in favor of a distinction between gamers and non-gamers. Playing these semantic games is fine, but when a pertinent question about the limited Wii system memory was raised, Laurent Fischer, managing director of marketing at NOE, easily slipped into talking about how “geeks and otaku” were the only people who would want this issue addressed.

    Otaku, if you're not hip to the Japanese language, is a slang term that characterizes gamers as pimply, fat guys who spend all their time playing videogames in the basement of their parents' house. It's like inferring that Ninjasistah eats only watermelon and fried chicken. It's not a very nice word.

    The story was posted on the Next Generation gaming website on Wednesday and the blogosphere has had a field day with Fischer's comment. On his blog, God of War creator David Jaffe said, "Ok, so if this is true, it's really, really sad. And not so much because Nintendo seems to be telling a chunk of its loyal fanbase to go fuck itself, but because it's just reeks of junior high school vibe immaturity bullshit."

    In the meantime, Fischer has retracted his comment, with the following missive on the Videogaming247 website:

    "I have huge respect for those who, like me, share a common passion for Nintendo and want to make it clear that I would never use and I didn't use this terminology in such a context or way to cause offence. I regret that this misunderstanding has created such offence and disappointment within the community."

    Oh, I see. He was using the word "otaku" in the nicest way.

    The upside of the whole thing? The geeks and otaku apparently are the winners, according to Wired:

    Immediately following Fischer's statement, geeks and otaku around the world turned on their Wiis to find that the on-board storage had been magically quadrupled through the power of apology.


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    Didja see?

    posted @ 6/12/2008 07:26:00 PM by evermore
    The videogame industry is packed with news these days, but I'm sure you must have read about some of this stuff:

    Didja see? There's a new Blackberry case from Otterbox.

    It protects the Blackberry from the iPhone!

    Didja see? Square Enix says Final Fantasy XIII is still intended to be exclusive for the PS3.

    I guess if no one plays it, no one will know how badly it sucks.

    Didja see? In order to save tens of millions of dollars on the Xbox 360, Microsoft designed its own chip for the thing. Then when the chip red-ringed everyone's Xbox 360, the recall cost Microsft a billion dollars.

    As the politicians say, a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money.

    Didja see? An analyst says that the reason we can't get Wii Fit here is because Nintendo is sending them all to Europe because of the strong Euro.

    That, and that the only people who want to become fit are already fit.

    Didja see? Lucas Arts laid off 100 people last week.

    It means Ninjasistah won't see her Wii lightsaber game for a while longer.

    Didja see? Take Two has announced BioShock 3 -- even though BioShock 2 isn't even out yet.

    What's next, BioShock: The Musical?

    Didja see? Scientists have discovered an algorithm that solves the Rubik's Cube in only 23 moves.

    Or, just one move if you have 46 hands.

    Didja see? They're coming out with a Metallica version of Guitar Hero.

    Unfortunately, while on your network it checks your computers for copyright-infringing music.

    Didja see? Sony has quit development on two games for the PS3 and one for the PSP.

    They're taking their football and going Home. Oh, that's right, Home is still vapor, too.

    Didja see? Game developers are taking advantage of the accelerometer in the iPhone to make some really great games.

    How much is that Nintendog in the window?


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    Gee, PSP, Too Little, Too Late?

    posted @ 6/01/2008 12:02:00 AM by evermore
    Did you ever wonder if there was a reason to own a PSP? Well, they might have actually found one.

    I found this information when doing one of those web surveys. It's identical to the GPS add-on promoted by Sony for the Japanese market at CES this year, shown in the color photo here from Joystiq, except for that little thing sticking out of the top of the PSP.

    A Global Positioning System for the PSP would be just what the doctor ordered for the long-failing portable gaming system. There still aren't any decent games for the thing, and that UMD movie fiasco has been a bust for everyone concerned.



    The survey I filled out was mainly concerned about pricing the thing. At what price point would I consider it too cheap? What price point would I consider it just right? What price point would I consider too much? Basically, the Three Bears school of surveys.

    Well, apparently the Japanese currently pay the equivalent of $51 U.S. for the thing -- which I think is probably too cheap for the American market. Anything under $89 on this side of the continent is considered a toy. And more than $139 is probably too much.

    And I would probably have hopped on this thing last year -- until the iPhone came out. I've found the pseudo-GPS in the iPhone fits my needs very well. The iPhone triangulates the positions of multiple cell phone towers and WiFi base stations to determine the current location. On a recent trip halfway across the country, along I-40 through Arkansas and Tennessee and then up I-81 through Virginia, I was able to determine my approximate position most anytime I wanted (except when I was in the most mountainous regions of Virginia).

    Sure, true GPS is better than faux-GPS, but I wasn't hunting for lost treasure -- I was just trying to get a fix on my current position along a major interstate so I could find the next Jack-in-the-Box restaurant down the road. In concert with Google Maps, my iPhone directed me to the fast food joint just fine.

    According to the survey, the PSP unit has most of the features you'd expect in a GPS: turn-by-turn navigation, 3D clity maps, voice prompts, detour recalculation and route redirection. It even has a pedestrian/bike mode for those who aren't necessarily restricted by off-ramps. In addition, it has a holder you can install in your car.

    But that satellite receiver plug-in unit will probably be prone to problems of being lost or destroyed, and without the receiver, there will be no way to use the GPS software loaded into the PSP. They're going to need a more solid connector/holder/sleeve for the thing. And just how much juice is it going to take to keep the GPS operational? It might be OK in a car, connected to power via the cigarette lighter, but it's just not going to cut it on foot.

    It would have been a great idea 18 months ago -- or a pretty good idea a year ago. But in 2008, it's the same old story of Sony being too little, too late.


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    GTA IV Beats Iron Man 5-1 (Or Did Iron Man Win 10-6?)

    posted @ 5/07/2008 01:13:00 PM by evermore

    As a follow-up to the topic of ElectricSistaHood podcast Episode 95, the results are in for that battle between Grand Theft Auto IV and Iron Man. And who's the winner? It depends on how you count the score.

    If dollars are your bottom line, the winner is clear: GTA IV sold $500 million worth of games in its first week, compared with Iron Man's take of just more than $100 million. Reduce that down to its lowest common denominator and GTA IV wins the game by a score of 5-1.

    But hold on there. As some bloggers have pointed out, money isn't everything. At a price point of about $60 per game, video games don't reach as many people as motion pictures. So let's look at those figures.

    Sure enough, Iron Man was viewed by 10 million people in its first weekend, compared with only 6 million owners of GTA IV. Reduce that down and Iron Man wins the contest by a score of 10-6.

    Still, there's one statistic almost nobody's talking about: Time invested. A motion picture like Iron Man lasts about two hours, meaning that the 10 million people cooped up in a dark movie theater spent a combined 20 million hours watching the film.

    Meanwhile, the 6 million owners of GTA IV spent much more than two hours apiece traipsing through the streets of Liberty City last week. They would have had to spend only a little more than three hours apiece to beat Iron Man's mark of 20 million hours of combined play. And based on what I've seen Ninjasistah alone play on the game, I'm betting most GTA IV players will spend many more hours -- even days or weeks -- playing it.

    So I'm calling this one for GTA IV. Not only did they beat Iron Man in money earned, they also beat Iron Man in the only thing that's more valuable than money:

    Time.


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    ESH Exclusive: Miley Cyrus Suffering from Rare Malady

    posted @ 4/29/2008 03:46:00 PM by evermore
    While the tabloids are having a field day about the recent travails of actress Miley Cyrus (aka Hannah Montana), a renowned scientist has revealed that Miss Cyrus is suffering from a rare, misunderstood malady.

    The condition Cyrus suffers from is called Diladexsilo (pronounced duh-lad-EX-suh-low), which comes from the Latin phrase dilectoris ad existere similis lohanum, and is generally acknowledged to be mediated by T cell responses to proteins contained in clothing which differ from those found in the human wearing the clothing. Unlike antibody-mediated hyperacute rejection found in organ transplant patients, development of T-cell responses occurs when the patient is in the presence of camera equipment. Acute rejection episodes can destroy the reputation of the patient, as recorded in the scholarly pages of People Magazine and TMZ.com, if it is not recognized and treated appropriately.

    Mr. P. Body, chief scientist of the Kansas-Longfellow Maternal and Natal Organization (KLMNO) and a well-known expert on Diladexsilo, said, "It is obvious in examining Miss Cyrus' condition that her body is literally rejecting her clothing when in the presence of camera equipment. From the photos I have examined very closely, it is evident that Miss Cyrus' condition is very acute indeed."

    Mr. P. Body's boy Sherman offered a solution. "Gee, Mr. P. Body, couldn't she just use staples to help hold her clothes together?" Sherman inquired. Although Sherman's questions are normally answered with a witty pun, under the grave situation of Cyrus' fate, the question went unanswered.

    It is unknown what kind of treatment Cyrus might be getting to cope with her illness, although it is all but certain that management at her employer, the Walt Disney Company, will most assuredly try to keep her away from unsupervised users of camera equipment in the near future.


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    Is This the Future of Blockbuster/Circuit City?

    posted @ 4/15/2008 01:01:00 PM by evermore

    Blockbuster is putting out a cool billion for Circuit City -- and they say they want to turn the whole shebang into an Apple Store-like concept. Just in case you can't imagine what that might look like, we present our vision here.

    Of course, having been a customer of both stores, I have my doubts that they really appreciate what the Apple Store concept really is. I mean, you can't just tart up your store with some blonde wood and expect people to flock to it as they do the Apple Store.

    Here's a list of stuff you see in a typical Blockbuster or a Circuit City that you never see in an Apple Store.

    • Anything used
    • Dell computers
    • Microwave popcorn
    • Grey cash registers
    • Monster cables
    • King-Size Snickers bars
    • Vinyl banners
    • Electronic security sniffers
    • Jujy Fruits
    • Going-Out-of-Business sales
    And what do you see in an Apple Store that you don't see in Blockbuster or Circuit City? Customers.


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    Microsoft Copiers Strike Again

    posted @ 4/09/2008 09:09:00 AM by evermore
    It's bad enough that Microsoft copies everything that Apple does and calls it its own, but now it appears that the company is trying to strike gold by Wii-ifying the Xbox.

    Normally, I wouldn't consider MTV News to be a venerable source of hard-hitting journalism, but they did manage quite a scoop this week -- a sketch of a new Xbox controller that looks remarkably like a Wiimote.

    I don't want to hear all that guff about Microsoft being the great innovators. They had a decent marketing department, but the real innovation was from companies like Apple and Sun. I could go on all day about Microsoft innovations that were either bought or stolen, like DOS (bought), Windows Media Player (stolen) and the Aero Glass interface (stolen).

    In fact, I defy you to point out a Microsoft innovation that didn't appear earlier in Unix, Linux, the Amiga or the Macintosh. If you don't believe me, just Google the phrase "Microsoft steals."

    Oh, and if you haven't seen it for a while, here's a representative scene from Pirates of Silicon Valley.

    And now here's something that's gotta be really embarassing. It's from the January 2007 launch of Vista Office. Mike Sievert, the corporate vice president of Microsoft, shows off the online gaming capabilities of Vista, as he challenges his son, who is at home on his Xbox 360, playing (wait for it) UNO!

    "And, of course, this is my Games Explorer. This is what Windows Vista does to make my gaming experience easier than it's ever been, because all of my games are here in one place where I can manage them the same way.

    "I'm going to step into an upcoming release of Uno for Windows Vista, and I'm going to use my Xbox 360 controller plugged right into my Windows Vista machine, and I'm going to pull up a multiplayer game. Because what Uno for Windows Vista can do is something that games before have never been able to do, and that's cross-platform play. You're going to see the familiar Xbox 360 set of settings, and I'm going to use the Microsoft Live gaming platform to see if I can find my 10-year old son Jonathan at home in Seattle, Washington on his Xbox.

    "Now, he goes by the alias, Ice Monkey, and you can see that he's online. That's good because I'm on stage, and this would be important at this point. (Laughter.) And I'm going to go ahead and select him and invite him to play this game of Uno with me.

    "Now, you know, I travel quite a bit, and maybe I'm in a hotel room in Tokyo with my Windows Vista laptop, and it's really important that I'm able to have connections with my family when I'm gone. And this scenario is fantastic because it allows me to steal away a few minutes to play a game with Jonathan across thousands of miles, eight time zones, and two gaming platforms.

    "Take a look at this as I press Start. We launch into a game together and in just a moment across all those times we'll be playing cross-platform game play.

    "There it is. Now you need to applaud that, because I had to wait a minute. All right. (Applause.) And there it is, we're all in this game playing across the thousands of miles, me on my Windows Vista machine, and Jonathan on his Xbox."

    The guy even has to beg for applause.

    Sievert left Microsoft in February of this year. I guess you can take only so much UNO.


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    Dreadlines

    posted @ 4/08/2008 09:03:00 AM by evermore
    If you've read my stuff for very long, you know just how much I hate public relations people. So when I bumped into some particularly inane headlines recently, I just couldn't resist adding my own editorial comments. Like these:

    Headline: Callers to National Runaway Switchboard are Getting Younger

    Translators were necessary to understand the goo-goos and gaa-gaas.

    Headline: Amazon.com Intros Service Allowing Purchases Via Text Message

    Next they'll be hooking us up to electrodes and we'll be purchasing just by thinking.

    Headline: USA TODAY Hollywood Hero Award Honors Earvin 'Magic' Johnson for His Work With the Magic Johnson Foundation

    Imagine that. Magic Johnson being feted for working with his own foundation.

    Headline: Wendy's Blames Snow, Easter For Poor Q1 Performance

    Didn't it snow and easter on McDonalds and Burger King, too?

    Headline: Electrolux Taps Kelly Ripa For Line Launch

    What's their tag line? "Nothing Sucks Like Kelly Ripa"?

    Headline: RBC Centura Bank Celebrates Name Change to RBC Bank

    And if that doesn't work, they're changing it to just "Bank."

    Headline: Werner Ladder Co. Becomes Official Ladder of the NCAA Basketball Championships

    Because you gotta change the net somehow.

    Headline: BP Announces Gulf of Mexico Discovery

    I understand Christopher Columbus discovered the Gulf of Mexico way back in 1492.

    Headline: Movie Gallery/Hollywood Video Closing Another 160 Stores

    The only thing moving at Movie Gallery is its employees -- to the unemployment office.

    Headline: America's Favorite Celebrity Siblings, Donny & Marie, to Host Teleflora's Mother's Day NBC Special

    What, they couldn't get the Menendez brothers?

    Headline: Dunkin' Donuts Makes Tax Day a Little Sweeter With Free Donuts

    Nothin' funny about this headline. You deserve it. Go getcha some coffee and a donut on Monday.

    Headline: La-Z-Boy Announces Moves to Strengthen Its North American Operations

    Aw, why be in a hurry? Just sit down in that easy chair. Lean back. Relax. Now isn't that zzzzzzzzzzzzz.


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    Record Stores Going Away? Good Riddance

    posted @ 4/03/2008 11:16:00 AM by evermore
    Word came out yesterday that the Apple Store has passed Wal-Mart as the top music retailer in the U.S. And it wasn't even close. In January, the Apple Store sold 19 percent, compared with Wal-Mart's 15 percent.

    As I see it, this ends the dominance of the physical music format. From Edison's cylinders to 78 RPM wax platters to vinyl to 8 tracks to cassettes to compact discs, music got successively more portable until the physical media went away. Now the physical stores are going away as well.

    And I couldn't be happier.

    Sure, I used to love record stores. As a kid, I had always shopped the record bins in supermarkets, drug stores and dime stores. But when I went to college in the mid-1970s, I discovered standalone record stores. My favorite was a place called Discount Records, a narrow store that had long aisles of U.S. and import records, along with free copies of music and humor magazines they couldn't sell.

    The great part about Discount Records was, of course, the discounts. At the time, vinyl albums went for $5.99 apiece, but at Discount Records, new releases went for only $3.99. It was like hitting a treasure trove.

    A few years later, the megastore came along. The first one in my city was Peaches, an Atlanta-based retailer. They opened an unbelievably large place, with giant hand-painted album covers displayed on the walls outside (if you've ever seen the movie Xanadu, you'll know what I mean).

    Peaches had everything -- in huge quantity. The classical music room was separate, with its own door to keep rock from mixing with Rachmaninoff. One day they installed a big-screen projection TV and I saw my first music video: Meatloaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." Unfortunately, Peaches put the little guys at Discount Records out of business.

    The mall stores hung on by moving quickly to CDs after the format was introduced in the early '80s. Since they didn't have much space (certainly not as much as Peaches), the CD format was a godsend.

    I wasn't a big fan of the CD, however. I stuck with vinyl until it gave out in 1989, and after that, moved to cassettes until the artists I was interested in moved completely to CD.

    The record companies cleaned up on CDs. They were perceived as a "superior" format and priced accordingly. The problem was that the prices never really went down. Music that I purchased at Discount Records for $3.99 in 1975 was getting $19.99 in CD format. That's a 5X increase within about 15 years. I no longer had the cash reserves necessary to replenish my vinyl/cassette collection with the new-fangled CDs, so, as did most people of my generation, I just gave up on buying music.

    The record stores didn't notice I was MIA. In fact, they seemed glad to get rid of me. Buying music at a record store was a terrible experience. The joke at the time was that the record store employees thought they were the rock stars.

    I learned not to ask questions in a record store. They always seemed miffed that someone my age could actually require assistance. I wasn't someone they could try to impress. And they didn't have a clue as to why I could be interested in someone named Jethro Tull.

    Actual conversation:

    Salesboy: "I don't know who he is."

    Me: "Who?"

    Salesboy: "Jethro Tull."

    Me: "He's not a he, he's an it."

    Salesboy: "Who?"

    Me: "Jethro Tull. It's a band, not a person."

    Salesboy: "Like Van Halen?"

    Me: "No. Van Halen's a he and an it."

    Salesboy: "Huh?"

    Me: "Van Halen's the last name of a couple of guys in the band and the name of the band."

    Salesboy: "Like Camper Van Beethoven?"

    Me: "Oh, forget it."

    They were too busy selling CDs to the kiddies. So when the kids got on their computers and discovered Napster, the record labels lost them, too.

    Now the record stores in the malls -- if you can still find an FYE, that is -- are all empty. Maybe there's someone looking at a DVD in the bargain rack, but nobody's there poring over the music. The CD aisles at Best Buy are barren. Same at Target and Borders and Barnes & Noble. At Circuit City... well, does anybody shop at Circuit City anymore?

    At Wal-Mart, people still go in, finding sanitized versions of music they heard on a commercial or something. And even Wal-Mart's tiring of that business. For years Wal-Mart has directed the record labels to reduce the price of their CDs. And if the labels don't comply? Well, Wal-Mart infers that one of these days it just might go out of the CD-selling business entirely.

    And if Wal-Mart goes, there goes the whole business of selling physical discs. The music labels surely can see the writing on the wall. It would be in their best interests to convert to companies similar in nature to BMI and ASCAP. Those companies control the publishing rights to music. The four music labels should convert to companies that control the performance rights to recorded music.

    When that happens, there will be no need to keep the RIAA in business, so the lawsuits against stay-at-home-moms and college students will end. The giant corporations will spin off the record labels into tiny holding companies who will likely make deals with content amalgamators like Apple, the phone companies, the cable companies and the networks to distribute large chunks of their music catalogs for a fee.

    And in 20 years, some kid will be asking why you have a closet full of little silver Frisbees.


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    Touching Stories

    posted @ 3/23/2008 01:02:00 AM by evermore
    Here are some little bits of news that you might have missed:

    Headline: Panasonic Unveils Touch-Screen Camera

    Just don't touch the wrong side.

    Headline: Japanese Influenced TV@ART Kabé Hits the Market

    These are decorative flat panels designed to hide large screen TVs. Hold it a second. One reason anyone buys a large flat screen TV is to show it off -- not hide it! Bad timing.

    Headline: Aleratec Launches USB Flash Drive Duplicator

    With recordable CDs costing about a penny apiece and DVDs costing maybe a nickel in bulk, why would anyone want a mass Flash Drive duplicator?

    Headline: Razer Lachesis Gaming Mouse Features 4,000 DPI Sensitivity

    A 4,000 dpi computer pointing device might make a difference if it were a pen, but as a mouse? It's like drawing with a bar of fresh, new Ivory soap.

    Headline: Power Supply Purchasing Guide Published

    Look at it this way, it's cheaper than buying sleeping pills.

    Headline: Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards Debuts On Wii

    Sixty-four? I didn't know Kirby was so old! But as demonstrated in the graphic here, the popular character is showing his age.

    Headline: Two New Distribution Amplifiers from Gefen Deliver Component Video to 1080P with Audio up to 300 Meters in Distance

    Ideal for those apartment buildings filled with deaf (or soon-to-be deaf) people.

    Headline: Share the Love This Valentines Day With Romeo And Juliet On Your Mobile Phone

    Excerpt: "Launched in time for Valentines Day, Romeo & Juliet will test your gaming skills at every level. You control Romeo in his quest to save Juliet, who has been imprisoned by her disapproving father in his castle."

    I bet William Shakespeare is rolling over in his grave about now.


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    One-Legged Woman Kicks Paul McCartney's Ass

    posted @ 3/18/2008 12:27:00 AM by evermore
    So here's the high point of the story: The Beatle wants to give her $30 million, but the court awards her $50 million for the divorce. What would you call the story?

    Here are some more observations...

    How will the EA vs. Take-Two battle turn out?

    EA drags Take-Two into their car, royally screwing the company. Then after paying an exhorbitant amount of money to Take-Two, EA shoots 'em in the head, steals back all the money, then takes off in the car.

    Who really won the HD disc format wars?

    Toshiba, for getting out of the business before the bottom really fell out.

    Why do you say that?

    It'll take years before a significant number of Blu-Ray movies can be available. There are few Blu-Ray disc manufacturing plants and the mastering process itself is much more difficult than HD-DVD. No computer manufacturer wants to put a Blu-Ray player into a computer unless it can also (a) play and record regular DVD discs and (b) also record Blu-Ray discs. And no one can make the dual-laser machines small enough for a laptop computer.

    Is that all?

    Why, no. There's one more big impediment for Blu-Ray. It's owned by Sony, which owns movie studios and audio recording companies. Why should Universal, EMI, Disney or Paramount put their wares on Blu-Ray when they also have to compete in the marketplace with Sony. And when push comes to shove in a typical Blu-Ray manufacturing plant, who do you think is going to get preferential treatment? Why, Sony, of course. Microsoft has already said it's not going to put Blu-Ray on the XBox 360.

    What's your last word on the subject?

    Have you noticed that the price of Blu-Ray players has gone up since Toshiba announced the demise of HD-DVD. For Sony, that's like shooting yourself in the foot with a Super Soaker filled with acid.

    Ziff-Davis filed for bankruptcy. Are they going out of business?

    Chapter 11 bankruptcy affords a business the ability to restructure their finances, potentially making the company stronger than before. This, of course, does not apply to Ziff-Davis. They print stuff on expensive, UV-coated paper, where the addition of colored inks adds thousands of dollars to the process. They send out their tomes via the ultra-expensive U.S. mail to people who hesitate paying outlandish subscription prices, most of whom have to be fooled into thinking their subscription is about to run out, when they actually have nine more months of magazines coming to them. And all this in order to deliver stories, most of which were written and edited months ago. Magazines have been deforesting the Western Hemisphere for 100 years -- the "green" hue and cry is only beginning. Ziff -- and all other magazine publishers -- are about to die.

    Which Pokemon would you eat?

    Being a vegetarian, I never have to worry about answering that question, but you can see what others have chosen here.


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    Stupid Is As Stupid Does

    posted @ 3/03/2008 09:27:00 AM by evermore
    There's an old adage that researchers at the University of Iowa say is just as appropriate today as it's ever been: Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant. Not only can this adage apply to teenage girls who live in trailer parks, it also describes the buying public at large.

    Iowa marketing professor Dhananjay Nayakankuppa says that the less you know about something you just bought, the happier you are with it. In other words, stupid is as stupid does.

    "The less you know about a product, the easier it is to engage in wishful thinking," Nayakankuppa said. "But the more information you have, the harder it is to kid yourself."

    It's called the Blissful Ignorance Effect and Nayakankuppa said it demonstrates that people have a need to be happy with their choices in order to justify them.

    Perhaps this is why so many people buy Dell computers and vote Republican.


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    Sims Love Their New Kitchen

    posted @ 2/07/2008 09:59:00 PM by evermore

    Sure, I'm a big fan of the Food Network and HGTV, but I don't know if the world is really ready for The Sims 2 Kitchen & Bath Design Stuff, which was released this month. I mean, I've never seen any Sim do anything in the bathroom or kitchen except have sex.

    And if you're having Sims sex in the kitchen, there's just one thing to remember:

    Everyone's gotta eat at that table!



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    Want to sell more Zunes? Put an iPod Dock in it

    posted @ 2/01/2008 02:49:00 PM by evermore
    This is getting ridiculous. It seems that if you want to improve sales of a product, all you have to do is put an iPod Dock in it. The latest example is the Razer Pro|Type keyboard, shown here. But that's not what would get me to buy a new keyboard, so I mocked up a picture of what would sell me on a new keyboard.

    What are we likely to see in 2008? Well, one answer is certainly more products with iPod Docks in them. Here are some products I expect to see an iPod Dock added to this year:

    Microwave oven
    Lawnmower
    Microsoft Zune
    Electric toothbrush
    Cuisinart food processor
    Playstation 3
    4GB thumb drive
    Glade Plugin air freshener
    Wii Nunchuck



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    Bébés de Cabine

    posted @ 1/22/2008 10:20:00 PM by evermore
    That's "Booth Babes" in French. Jason Jacobs of TechwareLabs appeared to spend most of CES taking pics of the wide variety of Booth Babes at the event. What some people will do for a paycheck.

    Just click on these orange-attired ladies here to see our own selection of Jason's photos, presented in our own special slideshow format. Of course, if you feel you've got to see all the photos, just click here.


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    Now We Know Why She's Smiling

    posted @ 1/20/2008 02:39:00 PM by evermore
    I saw the press release for Ubisoft's press get-together in Paris and I just couldn't resist. The company's Ubidays 2008 -- a press/vendor event -- will be held at the end of May at Paris' Louvre museum (which is the home of DaVinci's Mona Lisa).

    Ubisoft will be announcing new titles at the event. The company, makers of the Rayman Raving Rabbids series, announced its "My Coach" line and expanded its "Petz" line at last year's event.

    Click the photo to see a bigger version (hey, I spent a lot of time on this thing).


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    Rock Out With Your Ewok Out

    posted @ 1/19/2008 03:28:00 PM by evermore
    Games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band are so popular they can turn the heads of virtually anybody -- even if that anybody is Darth Vader.

    Want to see a bigger version of the photo? Just click on it. To see more photos, click here.


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    Gadgets You Just Don't Need

    posted @ 1/18/2008 12:03:00 AM by evermore
    NinjaSistah always comes back from CES with tschotkes of dubious need. One of the favorite giveaways these days is the now-ubiquitous thumb drive, which are about as useful as floppy disks.

    Truth is, most of the stuff that was shown off at CES are as worthless as the credit-card sized thumb drive she brought back. Sure, it looks all cool and thin, but you've got to clear so much space off your desk to use it that it's simply not worth the trouble.

    There are a lot of other worthless things that were shown at CES. Here are some of the stuff you should just avoid:

    Razer Destructor Gaming Mouse Pad: I don't mean to pick on Razer specifically, but the mouse pad is a whole class of products that you should completely avoid. Back when the computer mouse first became popular -- on the original circa 1984 Macintosh -- mouse pads were necessary if your desk had a slick surface. The little roller ball on the bottom would slip and slide, making mousing around difficult. But those roller ball mouse controllers are all gone now. The optical sensor of the new units don't need traction. They have difficulty only on a mirrored surface. So throw those mouse pads overboard -- they're just a waste of money.

    Adesso WKB-3000UB Trackball Keyboard: A computer keyboard with a trackball! How 1991! Who in his right mind would want to go back to that decrepit technology? I had a trackball in an ancient Powerbook that needed constant cleaning. Once trackpads came out, I never looked back. And the newest trackpads from Apple have multi-touch technology. The only thing trackballs were good for was Millipede and Missle Command.

    Mustek Wireless 15-Inch Digital Photo Frame: It's got Bluetooth and it plays MP3s and it's wireless and it's just stupid. You can get a nice, old picture frame at a garage sale for about 50 cents. You can print a nice, large image on an inkjet printer. And if you gotta have music, just unearth one of the old iPods you have hanging around the house and hide it with a tiny speaker behind the frame. You'll save a whole bunch of money.

    Nyko Wireless Nunchuk: I like Nyko as a company, but to me this is a worthless product. Since I'm using both the Wii controller and nunchuk at the same time, they're never more than an arm's length away from each other. A wireless nunchuk requires that it contain batteries as well, something the wired nunchuk doesn't have. It's gotta be heavier, and it's gotta make your arms wearier faster.

    XIAS USB Pen Drive: Don't let them fool you -- it's not a pen. It doesn't look like a pen. It doesn't contain ink, gel, charcoal or graphite. You can't use it to draw anything. Oh, sure, it's a USB drive. But if you're looking for a pen, don't fall for their lies. You can't ever use it as a pen.


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    Matsushita Gets the Shit Out

    posted @ 1/17/2008 06:38:00 PM by evermore
    To paraphrase a jelly ad, with a name like Matsushita, it's got to be good. You probably don't know what Matshushita is -- it's the Japanese company that created the VHS video format and makes Panasonic products. Ah! You know Panasonic!

    In a move that is probably at least 40 years too late, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., is changing its name -- to Panasonic Corporation. Duh.

    It's not bad enough that the company name has always had the word "shit" in the big middle of it, but the abbreviation the company used was "Matshit." Yummy.

    Originally, I thought the company name was pronounced "Mat-sue-she-tah," but I was wrong. The actual pronunciation is "Mot-shoosh-tuh."

    It's funny that Panasonic's slogan in the 1970s was "Panasonic: Slightly ahead of their time" -- except when giving their company a better name, of course.


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    Who Did Xerox Copy? Everyone, It Seems

    posted @ 1/07/2008 02:33:00 PM by evermore
    One of the big announcements from CES today was that Xerox was going to do a wholesale overhaul of its branding effort -- and that includes changing its venerable logo. In addition to changing the typeface of the logo from all caps to lower case, Xerox is adding a graphical logo (seen here). But it looks mighty familiar doesn't it?


    That's because it is too familiar. Just look at the Xbox 360 logo shown here. Other than color and angle differences, it would be difficult to tell it from the new Xerox logo, now wouldn't it?


    But the copying doesn't end there. It seems that the Xbox 360 logo is, itself, a copy -- a copy of the Phillips screw.


    Of course, it's not surprising to see Xerox borrow the design for its new logo. Xerox is, after all, a copier company.


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    Bad News/Good News

    posted @ 1/02/2008 06:00:00 PM by evermore
    Time for another segment of Good News/Bad News, but in the spirit of the new year, we thought we'd give you the Bad News first, followed by the Good News.

    Xbox Dead

    Bad News: Xbox Live players experienced dozens of hours of downtime this past weekend, believed to be due to thousands of new post-Christmas players on the system.

    Good News: The shut-out players returned to the holiday activities that they led in their days before video games took over their lives: football and that Futurama marathon they ran on Cartoon Network.

    Jack Thompson Hates Army Men

    Bad News: Videogame opponent Jack Thompson claims there is an "unholy alliance" between the gaming industry and the U.S. Department of Defense, teaching "an entire generation of kids that war is glamorous, cool, desirable and consequence-free."

    Good News: The IRS is hoping that computer programs like TurboTax will make an entire generation of kids think that paying taxes is glamorous, cool, desirable and consequence-free.

    Retailer Becomes Scalper

    Bad News: One videogame retailer took their allotment of Wii consoles and scalped them on eBay, rather than offering them at regular retail prices to their customers.

    Good News: At least they didn't make their female employees model the units in skimpy clothes. Remember this from last year?

    That Love Letter You Wrote In 1996 Is Going Away...

    Bad News: Microsoft is modifying Microsoft Office 2003 so Service Pack 3 can no longer open Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Access files created in a format earlier than Office 97.

    Good News: You finally have the justification to stop using Microsoft Office. Instead use the FREE OpenOffice, which will gladly read all your ancient Office files now and in the future.

    ...And So Is Netscape

    Bad News: Development is being halted on the Netscape browser Feb. 1, AOL announced last week.

    Good News: Netscape hasn't been on the cutting edge of browser development since about 1997. In fact the latest version was just a reskinned version of Firefox.

    Now Everyone's a Crook

    Bad News: In a supplemental brief responding to questions from the judge in an Arizona music piracy case, RIAA lawyer Ira M. Schwartz says that the simple act of moving your music from CD to a computer is also an "unauthorized copy" that incurs legal liability.

    Good News: "By claiming that reasonable, legal behavior is theft, the RIAA trivializes piracy," writes Wired blogger Rob Beschizza. "This is a fatal act of self-destruction. This will result in more law-abiding people thinking 'screw it' and doing it themselves. After all, when everyone is already a pirate because they 'stole' music from their own CD collections, why not add a few more counts on top?"


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    You Alert, Wii Alert

    posted @ 12/18/2007 01:46:00 PM by evermore
    I don't need to tell you that finding a Wii is nearly impossible. But it is only nearly impossible. I was able to get a Wii for Christmas -- and there may be time for you to get one, too.

    When I was faced with a similar dilemma last Christmas, to get both a Wii and a PS3, I took the path of least resistance: I shelled out for the game bundles offered by GameStop. It was the coward's way out, really. In order to get the boxes I wanted, I was willing to shell out a premium for a bunch of games and magazine subscriptions I didn't really want.

    I was determined to avoid that this year when trying to buy a Wii for my sister and her three grandchildren. I didn't want a bunch of leftover games and magazines when all I really wanted was a Wii for the suggested retail price of $249.

    Prospects were not good. Obtaining the game at a big box store like Best Buy meant developing a friend at UPS. I had no such friend. I wasn't the kind of person to mindlessly drive from store to store, and I sure wasn't the kind of person to stand in line overnight for a Saturday Morning Special.

    That left the internet. A quick search at the popular stores resulted in a big zero. Ebay was even more disappointing, with prices topping double what I would want to pay and no guarantee that the seller was legitimate.

    And then I found wiialerts.com. It was designed for a guy like me. You pick the websites you want it to shop and when a Wii shows up, they alert you by text message on your phone. Next, you go to wiialerts.com (or open an email they send you) and you get bounced directly to the purchasing page.

    Only it seemed I was always out of place when I got the text messages. I was just seconds too late on the first Wii alert I received. I was in the doctor's office on the second alert. I was in a cab on the third alert. I was asleep on the fourth and didn't see it until the next morning.

    But the planets aligned on the sixth alert -- I was directed to an Amazon.com page, where I could have purchased up to three Wii's. I got only one, though. I'm no Ebay speculator. One was all I needed. Ordered on a Friday, it arrived on Monday and I shipped it out to my sister and her grandkids a couple of days ago (I included a full complement of controllers and nunchuks).

    And the wiialerts.com site is good for more than just Wii's. The Rock Band special edition for the Xbox 360 (the one with guitar, mic and drums) is apparently rare. They track those, too. As well as Guitar Hero 3 with guitar for the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360.

    They've even added custom alerts for whatever product you're looking for. And it's all absolutely free. Just sign up your email and cellphone for text messages. When you find what you want, buy it and come back to wiialerts.com to unsubscribe.

    I sure could have used wiialerts.com last year -- they could have saved me from reading all those dreadful issues of Game Informer magazine.


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    Gaming the Gamer

    posted @ 12/03/2007 03:11:00 PM by evermore
    There's a big new controversy on the videogaming scene, and I feel I am uniquely qualified to comment on this. After all, I have been an editor of several consumer magazines (if you ever fished for bass in the 1980s, you have probably read my stuff).

    Here's the background: Jeff Gerstmann was recently fired from his position as editorial director at GameSpot, a gaming website that is owned by CNET. The reason for the firing is rumored to be because of his Nov. 13 review of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men for the Xbox 360.

    In the review, Gerstmann, who had worked for GameSpot for 10 years, gave the game a 6.0 out of 10. According to Penny Arcade, game publisher Eidos withdrew "hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of future advertising from the site" because of the bad review.

    Kane & Lynch ads no longer appear on GameSpot's front page, which gives weight to the story. Gerstmann's video review was also taken down, although the text review was "updated [...] based on [GameSpot's] editorial standards," according to a CNET spokesperson.

    (Gerstmann's video rendition of his review also no longer exists on GameSpot's site, but is available to view here. As for Penny Arcade's take, it's available here.)

    Gerstmann had often been criticized on GameSpot's message boards, many disagreeing with his low reviews of popular games, and some even accusing him of playing only a small portion of the game before writing his review.

    Gerstmann told Joystiq, "I stand behind my work, regardless of where I do it."

    Some of Game|Life's own readers pointed to the fact that Gerstmann's gamertag only showed one Kane & Lynch achievement, but he cautions using that as any kind of completion metric, saying "For the record, I saw both endings in Kane & Lynch before writing about it."

    GameSpot says that they "do not terminate employees based on external pressure from advertisers" but doesn't comment on whether any pressure was given on Eidos' part.

    Despite his position at the center of such intense drama, Gerstmann still feels fairly positive about game journalism in general, saying "Despite the number of people who are taking these rumors... to mean that game writing is ethically bankrupt, I don't feel that's the case."

    So here are the answers to some of the questions you might have about this:

    Is this a matter of Eidos, the game publisher, trying to take away someone's constitutional right of free speech?

    No. Eidos could exert a tremendous amount of influence on a publisher by taking away advertising, but since it is not a publisher, it is not taking away anyone's constitutional rights.

    Is CNET (owner of GameSpot) trying to take away anyone's constitutional rights of free speech?

    No. CNET is fully within its rights to allow and disallow what is printed on its pages. As newspaperman A.J. Liebling once said, "The person who has freedom of the press is the person who owns one." Gerstmann is free to publish his words in any form in any publication that cares to carry them, and CNET cannot and will not prevent that.

    So now that we have established that this is not about censorship, what is the problem here?

    The problem is with the ethics. If an advertiser can exert pressure on a publisher like this, can we ever really trust a review on a website or in a magazine? The answer is no. Why is that? Because for most consumer magazines, particularly those that are not news-based, the publisher makes its profit almost exclusively on advertising.

    What about subscription fees? Doesn't the publisher make money on that, too?

    No. In fact, the subscription fees barely pay for the actual mailing and other distribution of the publication. For example, if you've ever bought a magazine from Publisher's Clearing House, the magazine publisher gets NONE of that money. The publisher is just hoping the subscriber will re-subscribe directly from the publisher the next year.

    Is withholding advertising the only way the advertiser can hurt the publisher?

    No. In the magazine business, the advertiser typically is not charged for the ad until AFTER the issue has been distributed. The publisher must wait up to four months after the issue has been distributed to be paid for the ad. If the advertiser is upset with a story or review, it could withhold even longer. If the publisher can't get paid, they will often sell the note to a collection agency, which will itself take most of the money.

    As a consumer, how can I know if the review I'm reading is honest?

    You can't ever know for sure, but here is something to look for. When you see a review, see if there is also an ad for that item in that issue or on that website. The advertising department of a publication will often screen stories and reviews in order to help them sell advertising. As a result, the advertiser will often read a review before it is actually published. Under such scrutiny, it is less likely that the review will be truly honest.

    So should I only trust publications with no advertising?

    No. Even publications like Consumer Reports, which carries no advertising, are suspect. After all, if it has an asshole, it has an opinion. And vice-versa.

    ElectricSistaHood accepts advertising. Does this mean that we can't completely trust the Sistahs?

    That's right. As much as they try to be as honest as possible, even the Sistahs are influenced by the advertising the site gets and the freebies they receive from CES and game and Anime conventions. And you would be, too.

    So don't ever rely on just one review. Read many reviews. Ask your friends. Stare into a crystal ball. Google it. Rely on your own instincts. And if someone hands you a lemon, figure out a way to squirt them in the eye with it.


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    Just Shut Up Already

    posted @ 12/02/2007 03:12:00 PM by evermore
    Once upon a time, I was a public relations director. The first thing you learn as a PR director is that when the boss wants his comments in a press release, you put his comments in a press release. Of course, the stupidest-sounding thing in a press release is the boss' comments. Here are some examples from press releases we've recently received:

    "The game’s vibrant design, challenging nature and action element give it universal appeal. Players will find it completely compelling as they go back to the roots of what LEGO play is all about and build to their heart’s content." -- Electronic Arts Mobile Producer James Dillon, talking about LEGO Escape, which has just been released in Europe.

    Get over it, James. It's just another Tetris ripoff.

    "We believe that the future of digitally-distributed games promises to be more diverse than ever in respect to the scale and genre of development and with respect to the business models." -- James Brooksby of new British gamemaker Doublesix, a company that purports to focus on addictive gameplay.

    If you've got to explain how your company adheres to business models, you don't know much about addiction.

    "Poker is a game that everyone should be able to enjoy whenever and wherever they are, so launching a mobile game is a dream come true. I hope that poker players everywhere will be able to share my passion, get more from their experience of poker from my hot tips on the poker mobile video, as well as improve their game on the poker mobile game." -- Daniel Negreanu, all-time leading money earner on the WPT, who is promoting Negreanu Poker Pro, a mobile poker game.

    Daniel's lying (er, uh, bluffing?) here. Nobody plays poker because it's such a great, fun game. Chess is all about brains, Risk is all about war and poker, my friends, is all about money.

    "There’s a natural affinity between music and gaming which We7 allows us to explore in a unique and effective way using a mix of traditional display ads alongside the new audio grafting techniques. We'll primarily use this campaign to target our key demographic -- 16-25 year old males -- but as We7 has a varied user base we plan to broaden our focus to a wider family audience too." -- Stephen McGill, head of Gaming and Entertainment, Microsoft UK, commenting about his company's involvement with a new ad-funded free music download service called We7, which will be used to promote the Xbox 360 in Britain this Christmas.

    McGill mentions "audio grafting techniques." Exactly who's being "grafted" here?

    "The competition in the gaming industry is getting stiff. But with our experienced team of game professionals and quickly expanding distribution network we will continue to provide our audience with new outstanding games and work with even more passion and dedication. Here at Playrix Entertainment we are happy to offer you the perfect mix of talent and creativity, fun and technology." -- Dmitri Bukhman, CEO and founder of Playrix, formerly Terminal Studio, makers of "a few famous titles:" Atlantis Quest, The Rise of Atlantis and Brickshooter Egypt.

    Whoooooo! Sounds real fun!


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    Giving Good Phone

    posted @ 11/07/2007 11:25:00 PM by evermore
    It's always been my belief that the best public relations people give good phone. And here at ESH Grand Central Station, we get inundated with press releases about stuff. Of course, there are times when people just don't know when to shut up. Here are some examples...

    "Red photobooks will be popular for Christmas albums and blue photobooks will work nicely to capture Hanukah celebrations." -- Denise Thomas, Vice President of Consumer Products, Peleman Industries, Inc., about PhotoBook Creator.

    Of course, the color this company is worried about the most is green.

    "We plan on doing multiple closed beta tests, which is quite unheard of for Korean games entering the global market. Korean games usually run one or two closed beta tests before going live with an open beta, but we are taking a radically different approach by offering the game in stages. This allows our players to greatly contribute to the shaping of the final product, and have a say in what our game will turn out to be." -- Mary Min of South Korean developer NCONY Enterprise, makers of Pi Story.

    That explanation probably gives Microsoft a good idea to explain the slow adoption of Vista: It's a closed beta! That's the ticket!

    "...having the standard PC case sitting next to or inside the home entertainment stand has always been an eyesore. GMC, a company based in Korea sent TWL their AVC M-1 case to review and with no exaggeration, this case and its features belong in the 'GOT TO HAVE' category. -- Matthew Homan, Techware Labs, about the AVC M-1 Media PC Case.

    I don't know about you, but put woodgrain veneer on the front and this would look exactly like a 1980s-era VCR machine -- not exactly modern or high-tech.

    "The emerging new market for robotics must be fueled by opening up development to a wider audience." -- Tandy Trower, general manager at Microsoft Corp., about the RoboDevelopment Conference and Exposition a couple of weeks ago in San Jose.

    That reminds me that a friend of mine recently showed off his Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner to me. He flicked it on, it went about three feet in one direction, then stopped dead in its tracks. It didn't work anymore after that. I guess I'll stick with the ol' Electrolux.

    "The most exciting advancement in Plasma TVs is occurring in luminous efficacy. As luminous efficacy improves, higher brightness can be achieved at the same power levels and lower power can be achieved at the same brightness levels. But the effects of higher luminous efficacy are not just limited to brightness and power. Improvements in luminous efficacy will have far reaching effects in areas including power consumption, brightroom contrast, heat, reliability/lifetimes and total costs. As a result, increases in luminous efficacy should dramatically boost the competitiveness of plasma TVs vs. competing TV technologies." -- Ross Young, founder and President of DisplaySearch, a display industry research firm.

    Luminous efficacy. Luminous efficacy. Luminous efficacy. LOOM-in-nuss EFF-uh-kuh-see. When I was a kid, we just called this "purty pitchers."

    "The passion and excitement our fans exuded throughout this collaborative process is just what Doritos empowerment is all about." -- Ann Mukherjee, group vice president, marketing, Frito-Lay, regarding the Doritos-branded game demos on Xbox Live.

    Doritos empowerment? I've eaten enough Nacho Cheese-flavored Doritos to turn my fingers orange, but I've never been empowered by the little triangles.

    "Kids are consuming technology as fast as we can produce it. We have a responsibility to learn what it’s like to participate in our youngsters’ digital world and to help these kids to become critical and creative consumers of technology." -- Claire Green, president, Parents’ Choice Foundation, regarding the Sandbox Summit at next year's Consumer Electronics Show.

    You know, when I was a kid, we were given toys in order to experience a concept called "fun." I was never asked once if I was interested in becoming a critical and creative consumer. Tinkertoys were fun. Legos were never any fun.

    “The media and communications industries are in chaos. Traditional operators are fighting disintermediation with convergence, while traditional media companies search for profitable and relevant business models in this new, mobile medium. Meanwhile a completely new generation of services and end-user applications are emerging." -- Eliot Weinman, president of the events division of Yankee Group, in a release promoting Mobile Internet World, Nov. 13-15, in Boston's Hynes Convention Center.

    Sounds like this quote should have begun with, "It was a dark and stormy night..."


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    MMO Is (Animal) Crossing the Line

    posted @ 10/24/2007 04:39:00 PM by evermore
    British gaming magazine Edge has a cryptic line in its latest issue: "A Japanese source has confirmed to Edge that the upcoming Wii iteration of Animal Crossing is set to be a social networking MMO." If true, it means that we might not see hide nor hair of NinjaSistah for years to come.

    She spent a good six months in 2003 playing the original GameCube version of Animal Crossing. Break it out of its single-player mode on the Wii and it could cause avid players like NinjaSistah to quit their jobs and make a career of fishing and feng shui-ing their houses.

    With a rumored massively multiplayer online version of the game, the options for Animal Crossing addicts would grow exponentially. NinjaSistah would end up playing the game as she records her podcast, just like her sister Pandalicious has done with World of Warcraft.

    Now, don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against Animal Crossing. I still prefer its graphics to the over-the-top 3D effects of the similar but newer Viva Pinata.

    In fact, I've always wanted to create a Machinima version of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" using Animal Crossing. Unfortuately, there's no way the Kerouac estate would ever license those rights. But it's a dream of mine.


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    Pumpkin Scissors for Halloween?

    posted @ 10/23/2007 08:55:00 PM by evermore
    Just in time for Halloween, Volume 1 of the anime Pumpkin Scissors is hitting stores. What's that you say? It's not a Halloween story? But with the name Pumpkin Scissors...

    OK, OK, I'm always getting this stuff wrong, but I know for sure that Pumpkin Scissors is available in the U.S. starting today, and we're presenting some exclusive wallpapers for your viewing pleasure. Just click any of the images to find the giant wallpaper version.

    Here's a synopsis of the story:

    In a country ravaged by war…the aftermath can be even more devastating. Yet for some of noble birth, the spoils can be sweet. But the corruption of a post-war time can leave the masses with a bitter taste in their mouths. After the Great War, Lt. Alice Malvin takes command of the Imperial Army’s Intelligence Section Three. Code name: Pumpkin Scissors. Under her leadership, she sharpens them into an instrument of justice to expose the corrupt, power-mad nobility who prey on the weak. And the newest member of the unit is a hulking giant of a man who hunts down tanks… with a handgun!

    So, if you haven't carved your pumpkin for Halloween, go get you some Pumpkin Scissors.




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    Bully II: When You Lose, You Really Lose

    posted @ 10/10/2007 09:56:00 AM by evermore
    Rockstar Games has announced its follow-up to last year's Bully, called Bully II: RIAA Edition. Unlike the original, the new game has a single bad guy: the Record Industry Association of America.

    In the game, the player portrays one of many real-life victims of the RIAA: a single mother, an 83-year-old grandmother and an 11-year-old grade school student, among others.

    The player must fight against self-serving politicians, befuddled judges and vicious lawyers as they travel from level to level up the chain, until they face the most devasting adversary of all, the mammoth, snarling, four-headed RIAA Monster.

    The Deluxe version of the game comes with a first-generation Microsoft Zune with 24 tracks of low bitrate versions of songs obtained from Kazaa and other music sharing websites.

    The game itself is free, but you will be charged $222,000 if you lose the final battle with the RIAA.


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    Nintendo's Got a Brand New Airbag

    posted @ 10/02/2007 12:18:00 PM by evermore
    As reports keep pouring in (and YouTube videos keep pouring out) about windows, walls and televisions being destroyed by flying Wii remotes, Nintendo has introduced a new solution guaranteed to keep personal property safe. Voila! The Nintendo Wii-mote with Airbags! (An artist's rendition can be seen on the left.)

    An accelerometer located inside the Wii-mote senses the speed at which the device is being waved. This action is compared with a heat sensor, which senses the loss of heat as the player loses his grip on the device. If the two actions occur simultaneously, the airbag action is triggered, causing more than a cubic meter of air to rapidly fill balloons on both sides of the device, allowing it to harmlessly bounce off most any household object it comes into contact with.

    Analysts see some drawbacks to the device, of course. The need for indestructible balloons and compressed air cause the device to weigh about 16 pounds, making it virtually impossible for anyone to hold and wave around for more than a few seconds without tiring. In addition, the new accelleration and heat sensors cause the unit to cost more than the Wii itself. Unfortunately, once exploded, the remote control cannot be used again, forcing customers to have to buy replacement units.

    And, even though the product has just been announced today, Nintendo says it already has a four-month backlog of orders. In the meantime, according to a Nintendo spokesman, Wii players using the original remote controls should "watch out."


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    Sony Announces $399 McKinley

    posted @ 9/27/2007 12:33:00 PM by evermore


    As the rumor mills continue to churn for the possibility of Sony's repricing of the PlayStation 3 to $399 for the holiday season, analysts were shocked today when Sony representatives announced that they instead would be selling U.S. $500 bills for the unprecedented price of $399.

    "We know people are going to be calling us crazy," said Kazuo Hirai, President and Group CEO, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI), "but, hey, we're Sony. In the past year we brought out an HD DVD player that nobody wants, some batteries that spectacularly set some computers on fire and a game system for which there are no games to play on it. We know we're crazy."

    The $500 bills, which display the picture of former U.S. President William McKinley, who was shot at the 1901 Buffalo World's Fair and later died, were last printed in 1945 and withdrawn from circulation in 1969.

    When asked why anyone would want to own a $500 bill that they cannot use as legal currency, Hirai said, "Hey, they already own a PS3 that they can't use. A worthless $500 bill is a conversation piece, just like that PS3. And it isn't half the fire hazard the PS3 is.

    "Sure, a $500 bill can catch on fire, but it won't explode in the middle of the night and kill your whole family like a PS3 might."

    Hirai added that the $500 bill costs much less to ship. "Just pop it in an envelope and stick on a 41 cent stamp," Hirai said. That compares with the PS3, which weighs approximately 38 pounds (288 pounds when you add the weight of the postman who hauls it reluctantly to your front porch).

    Although selling a $500 bill would mean a $101 loss for Sony on each bill sold, Hirai said the price is much less than Sony would lose on selling the PS3 at the same $399 price point. "Think of all the money we're saving just on marketing," he added. "Heck, $500 bills practically sell themselves.

    "Nothing says Christmas more than a crisp $500 bill. It's even green on the back."


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    Good News/Bad News

    posted @ 9/20/2007 01:30:00 PM by evermore

    For those of you who are tired of reading bad news about everything, today we present the first in a series of Good News/Bad News stories. For those of you who just like good news, pay attention to the left side. For bad news junkies, enjoy the right side of the page.

    News item: You can't go Home -- at least not until next year. Sony announced that it's Home virtual world for the PS3 will not be available until Spring 2008. "We want this to be a worldwide service," said Sony CEO Kaz Hirai. "We want to make sure that we have a range of services which can be satisfactory to our users throughout the world... so we decided to delay the service’s launch date... Please be patient in this regard."

    GOOD NEWS BAD NEWS

    It leaves more time to design Mii's on your Nintendo Wii.

    It leaves more time for Sony to develop add-ons to Home, such as in-game ads, email and other things gamers don't really want.


    News item: Nintendo has announced that starting with the December issue, Nintendo Power Magazine will be published by Future US, the folks behind the Official Xbox Magazine, PC Gamer, and Mac|Life.

    GOOD NEWS BAD NEWS
    Future already publishes a Nintendo magazine in Britain. Chopping down treees, turning the wood into pulp, painting the pages and shipping the results by snail mail is so 1929. Wake up, people. Magazines are dead.

    News item: Kaz Hirai, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, told the assembled audience at the Tokyo Game Show that he considers the PlayStation 3 to be "a game machine."

    GOOD NEWS BAD NEWS

    After a year touting the wide and varied uses of the PS3, it was refreshing to hear someone at Sony admit that the primary purpose of the PS3 should be to play games.

    From Wired: But outside of announcing the DualShock 3 controller, Hirai made no announcements of new products -- certainly nothing that would by itself represent a change in PlayStation 3's fortunes in Japan, where it is being outsold about three-to-one by the Wii.


    News item: It doesn't look any different, but reports say it feels heavier. What is it? Why, the new DualShock 3, a new controller for the PS3 that brings back the force-feedback "rumble" functionality left out of the original controller.

    GOOD NEWS BAD NEWS

    It'll be available in the U.S. in Spring 2008, and will replace the Sixaxis controller in new PS3 boxes. The list of games that will take advantage of the new rumble features is a long one.

    Ya gotta buy a new %&*$@#! controller!


    News item: LucasArts has announced Krome Studios will release a Wii version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed that will let you use the Wii-mote as a lightsaber.

    GOOD NEWS BAD NEWS

    Although some bloggers originally announced that the lightsaber action was available only in duel mode, in actuality you can use the Wii-mote as a lightsaber throughout the game.

    You're going to have to push buttons to work the lightsaber in the Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, PSP and Nintendo DS versions. May the Thumb Doctor Be With You.


    News item: More anime is coming to Xbox Live. From Joystiq: "Beginning today (and continuing over the coming weeks) you'll be able to find titles from the Starz anime library like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (Seasons 1 & 2), Street Fighter II V, Noein, Tokko, Virus and Astro Boy on the service."

    GOOD NEWS BAD NEWS

    Starz has a tremendous catalog of anime titles.

    I'm trying to code this item in a way that NinjaSistah doesn't see it. Between Xbox Live and iTunes, she won't even have to walk the three blocks to the local anime store to get her fill.


    News item: The E for All Show shoots itself in the foot by moving its 2008 date from October to the same weekend in August at the very popular Penny Arcade Expo.

    GOOD NEWS BAD NEWS

    This should put the final nail in the coffin of the badly managed spin-off of the old E3 Expo. It is a fitting end for E for All show host IDG, which killed the summer Mac Expo a few years ago by moving it from New York to Boston.

    This is all everyone is going to want to talk about in the run-up to the 2007 E for All event in October (which Sony and Microsoft have already vacated).


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    .hack Your Way Into Harvard

    posted @ 9/13/2007 01:15:00 PM by evermore

    Click to enlarge

    Anyone who has ever studied for the SAT exams is well aware of the dreadful texts they must trudge through in order to expand their vocabulary. Well, now high-schoolers don't have to hide their manga inside their SAT preparation books -- the manga is the SAT preparation book!

    Kaplan, the folks who in recent years have converted popular works of literature such as Wuthering Heights into SAT preparation books, have gotten together with manga publisher TOKYOPOP to create SAT prep books based on some of the most popular manga works.

    From a recent BusinessWeek story, "Alien Planets, Princesses, And PSATs":

    "To beef up the books' SAT quotient, the companies upgraded some of the dialogue. But all the original art and story lines are preserved, says TOKYOPOP CEO Stu Levy. Designed for 14- to 16-year-olds, the books, says Kaplan's McMahon, may also appeal to another expanding market: English-language learners."

    The Kaplan manga titles currently available on Amazon.com (the listings include excerpts of each book):

    Van Von Hunter

    Warcraft: Dragon Hunt

    Psy-Comm

    .hack: Legend of the Twilight

    If they had had that for Archie back when I was a kid, I might have gotten into Harvard...


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    Stupid Gadget of the Year: First Candidate

    posted @ 9/13/2007 09:28:00 AM by evermore
    I hereby open the nominations for Stupid Gadget of the Year, and it should come to no surprise that the first candidate is from a company that has littered the world with plenty of stupid gadgets: Microsoft.

    Microsoft, as you may remember, has brought you such Instant Junk as last year's Zune audio device, for example. It had built-in WiFi, which could have been used to wirelessly connect to a music download service. But nooooooo. The WiFi was put in there to (in Steve Ballmer's own words) "squirt" a temporary music download to someone else with a Zune. (Just try to find two people in the same room outside Redmond, Wash., with Zunes.)

    Not satisfied with 2006's undisputed Stupid Gadget of the Year, Microsoft has followed up with a candidate easily worthy of repeating last year's accomplishment: the Mobile Memory Mouse 8000 (I must have missed the previous 7,999 versions of the thing).

    You're going to see some stories about this thing in the media in the next few days (after which, the talk about the thing will all dry up), and most of the stories are going to be dead wrong about the thing. Most media outlets are going to say that it's the first computer mouse with a built-in Flash drive.

    But they're wrong.

    The mouse doesn't have a Flash drive at all. The mouse is a wirless mouse -- with a 1GB Flash drive in the transceiver of the mouse. You see, you plug in the transceiver into a USB slot on your computer, and it acts as the bridge to relay information from the mouse to the computer. And it also can store about 1GB of information.

    But it's much more complicated than that -- and that's where the problems lie:

    -- It's also a Bluetooth mouse. Flip a switch on the mouse and it can operate via Bluetooth, without the need for the transceiver, unless you are also using it as a Flash drive, which means you must have it plugged in anyway.

    -- You can carry the transceiver around to transfer data from the Flash drive to other computers, but if you leave it in another computer, you won't be able to use the transceiver for your mouse. If the computer's not Bluetooth, it's back to a wired mouse until you get the two parts back in the same room together.

    -- The batteries in the mouse hold only a three-week charge, according to Microsoft. To recharge the batteries, you have to connect a cord between the transceiver and the mouse, and that doesn't exactly make it a wireless mouse anymore, does it?

    -- A whole 1GB? Really? I'm sure that was a lot of space at some point in the 20th Century, but a quick look at the CompUSA website shows a couple of different 1GB USB Flash drives for only $11.99. Microsoft is charging $100 for its Flash drive/mouse combo -- quite a premium for such a misguided product. For that amount of money you could get one of three different 8GB USB Flash drives from CompUSA and use the free, wired (No batteries!) mouse you got with your computer.

    Yes, the Microsoft Mobile Memory Mouse 8000 (I'll bet the guy who named this thing is getting a bonus this year!) is the first candidate for Stupid Gadget of 2007. Why not just go ahead and give Microsoft the award already? Why, there are more than three months left in the year. That gives Microsoft more than 100 days to come up with something even stupider (I'm betting on a new Zune that also dispenses three flavors of wine coolers).


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    Why Did Sony Fanboys Censor Themselves?

    posted @ 8/12/2007 05:56:00 PM by evermore
    At the end of September last year, ElectricSistaHood published a post asking the big question of the day: Will the PS3 cause Sony to go broke?

    The story was a massive hit. More than 55,000 people read the story the first day. That's more people than read a front page story of many mid-market daily newspapers. Since publishing the story, it's received 87,595 page views through yesterday.

    Last week the story started getting attention from a new source: the forums at eu.playstation.com, the European Playstation site. Then, suddenly, the attention stopped. After a little investigation, we discovered the horrid truth: The Sony fanboys are censoring themselves!

    Before I continue, a few caveats are in order. First, the folks at ElectricSistaHood aren't Microsoft fanboys. I personally own five machines with Apple computers inside (three Powerbooks, an Intel iMac and an AppleTV). We have two iPhones. We're not Microsoft haters, either. We have one Vista laptop, but we didn't have to pay for that. We own a couple of copies of Microsoft Office for the Mac. We own a copy of Windows XP that we run on the Mac in Parallels. We own an Xbox and an Xbox 360 -- and the 360 recently spent about a month or so in the shop. We have a Nintendo Wii with four controllers and a DS Lite.

    And we own our good share of Sony stuff -- a couple of PS2's, a 20-gig PS3 and a PSP. The only trouble we've had with any of them is that the first PS2 had difficulty playing some CD's when it was standing on its side. We use the PS3 mostly for its Blu-Ray movie-playing capability, but we find it a good, solid platform for playing games.

    When I wrote the story last September about Sony going broke, it was well researched and fully documented. And I wasn't the only one having severe questions about the company. The very same day I wrote about Sony, the Wall Street Journal published a similar article.

    In the story, I posited that under the circumstances, if the stars fell into a certain alignment, there could be the possibility that (a) Sony could find itself in a position to ditch the gaming division and (b) Microsoft could find itself in a position to purchase the Sony gaming division. It's not an impossible notion. Who would have thought a few years ago that Daimler would suddenly toss Chrysler into the dust bin?

    Besides, at the time ElectricSistaHood was barely attracting 300 people a day to the site.

    How did a little blog like ElectricSistaHood get such a big response? We were Slashdotted. If you're unaware of what that means, we were mentioned in a blog post on the website Slashdot.org. In addition, we were Dugg -- mentioned in a post on the website digg.com.

    As a result of those two mentions, blogs and websites all over the world found out about the story and linked to our post. That post single-handedly put ElectricSistaHood on the map. Today we attract more than 60,000 unique visitors a month and we're aiming for 100,000 by the end of the year.

    My story got kudos from some and flames from others. My head didn't swell from the kudos and I didn't cry myself to sleep from the flames. I just liked being able to get so many people involved in that important topic.

    Since September, interest in the story has continued. We generally get a few dozen pageviews of the story every day, and people still comment on occasion -- usually with harsh opinions on one side or another.

    Then on Friday, the page got hit with a few hundred readers. Comments heavily weighed toward Sony's side of things. What had suddenly made people so excited about a story that was written almost a year ago?

    To find the answer to that question, I searched through the server logs of electricsistahood.com and discovered hundreds of people coming to the site from a forum at eu.playstation.com -- the European Playstation website. I tried clicking into the page from which they came, but the page -- http://community.eu.playstation.com/showthread.php?t=124977 (Click here to try it yourself) -- was no longer there.

    Someone had removed the page. Was Sony censoring its fanboys? What could they have been saying on the forum?

    I did some more digging. I knew that the words "Sony" and "broke" would have to be on the page, so I did a Google search on "site:eu.playstation.com" and "sony" and "broke". The search found the pages, but clicking on them resulted in the same error page -- the comments were simply gone.

    Of course, the nice part about looking up stuff on Google is that it also caches the pages as it crawls them. All the original forum pages were still there and available by clicking the "Cached" link on Google.

    So I read through the postings. It was the usual mix of Sony fanboys and Microsoft fanboys trading shots with each other. There wasn't anything controversial there. Nobody threatened to do bodily harm to anyone. No reason for Sony to pull down the pages.

    Then, near the end of the posts, the Sony fanboys started getting cold feet about the whole thing. There just weren't very many people coming to the defense of the topic, which was called "Microsoft to buy Sony? ha".

    About a day after making his first post on the topic at the eu.playstation.com forums, MPower wrote, "Ok, I only posted this to show how absurd the article was. So if anyone thinks I took it seriously hence the 'has anyone got a gun' [comment]. Anyway, this topic is really irrelevant and ANOTHER bloody flamewar is starting so lets move on shall we ladies and gents?"

    The next poster, Rider2006, agreed, writing, "This thread should be deleted as it's off topic." After a couple of more posts, the topic was deleted from the website in the early hours today (Sunday, Aug. 12).

    I think this is what happened:

    MPower learned of a story proclaiming the possibility that Microsoft was going to grab Sony's gaming division. He saw that the story was on a girl-gaming website, which he must have thought was particularly funny. He probably thought, what could girls possibly know about gaming?

    After a few congratulatory posts from his Sony fanboy friends, others started making disturbing comments about the realities of PS3 sales vs. the sales of the 360 and the Wii. Then the discussion degenerated into unrelated asides about sales of Sony TVs and Walkmans.

    I think the Sony fanboys started realizing that it wasn't the year 2003 anymore. The Playstation 3 is not the PS2. There aren't any substantial games for it yet, and with the absence of Grand Theft Auto IV this Christmas, it will be mid-2008 before a marquee game arrives for the platform. Even then, they will have to share the stage with Microsoft, which will have the game for the Xbox 360 at the same time.

    The discussion got irrelevant all right. But it was the Sony fanboys who made the discussion irrelevant. Nintendo sells every Wii it makes and PS3 boxes are stacked to the rafters at Best Buy -- even after a $100 price break. There's no defense to that little argument, and the Sony fanboys know it.

    That's why they halted the discussion and made it unavailable for anyone else to read it. They simply couldn't face the truth anymore.

    Want to read the posts the Sony fanboys don't want you to read? Click here for a PDF version of the entire banned forum topic!


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    Hello Kitty, Goodbye Respect

    posted @ 8/07/2007 11:17:00 PM by evermore
    How do you punish a bad cop? In Thailand, it's simple. They slap a Hello Kitty armband around the bad cop's bicep.

    "This new twist is expected to make them feel guilt and shame and prevent them from repeating the offense, no matter how minor," said Pongpat Chayaphan, acting chief of the Crime Suppression Division in Bangkok, in an interview with the New York Times. "Kitty is a cute icon for young girls. It’s not something macho police officers want covering their biceps."

    Chayapan instituted the new humiliation this week, although no one had actually worn the offensive icon yet.

    "After this policy came out, the police are scared," the officer said. "It will be very embarrassing to walk around with Hello Kitty on your arm."


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    How Harry Potter Ends

    posted @ 7/20/2007 10:41:00 AM by evermore
    Through the exclusive channels only ElectricSistaHood can be a part of, we have learned the ending of the Harry Potter series. Please continue on, if you dare!

    You see, Harry and Ron are in a booth at a cheeseburger joint eating onion rings. Hermione is outside, trying and failing to park her car correctly. Someone who suspiciously looks like Lord Voldemort sits at the bar eyeing Harry and Ron, and then excuses himself to the bathroom. Harry flips through the selection of music on the jukebox and chooses an old song by Journey. Hermione enters the joint and takes her place in the booth as we hear Steve Perry sing.

    "Don't stop..."

    Cut to black.

    Run the credits.

    Well, there it is. I just saved you a few dollars on that one.

    And I'm sure NinhjaSistah will be disappointed with the ending, just as she was when she found out how The Sopranos ended -- with J.K. Rowling murdering the evil Tony Soprano when it was discovered that Soprano's mafia henchmen broke the Harry Potter book embargo by selling the book a few days early, causing it to be distributed widely on the internet. "I did it for the children!" she screamed as she lowered the shotgun and the scene faded to black.

    Or something like that.


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    Spice Up Your Life With a Little... Email?

    posted @ 7/20/2007 09:12:00 AM by evermore
    You read email, doncha? Sure you do. And you really like 3D video games. Right? Now a company is offering the best of, uh, both worlds.

    I can just see you scratching your heads now. They've combined email with 3D graphics? That's right. It's two... two... two mints in one.

    And if you think 3D graphical email sounds funny, you haven't heard anything yet. At least, not until you've watched this (genuine) promotional video for the thing. There hasn't been anything this bombastic (and hollow) since last week's Microsoft presentation at E3.




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    Ya Otter Box That iPhone

    posted @ 7/19/2007 10:26:00 PM by evermore
    I've seen people drop them and try to scratch them. I've even seen a guy put it in an industrial blender and turn it into dust, but I want to make sure my iPhone doesn't meet that sorry fate.

    I don't have my iPhone yet -- it should be just a few more days. But that hasn't kept me from investigating my options for protecting it from myself. I've been very fortunate with my previous cell phones and iPods. I've had a few minor mishaps over the years, but nothing that has ever resulted in real injury.

    When I heard that Otterbox was releasing a case for the iPhone, I was relieved. Their stuff has always been top notch, so I expect their case for the iPhone won't be any different. You can see photos of the cases on this page, but don't expect to see them in the field for "several months," according to the press release that we got here at ElectricSistaHoodquarters.

    Remember what the Sistahs say: Always bring protection.


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    SunRocket's Dead, That's What I Said

    posted @ 7/17/2007 06:04:00 PM by evermore
    I've always been one to live life on the bleeding edge. I had a Macintosh in 1984. I was the first one on my block with a personal computer, a CD player, cable TV, a color monitor, a cable modem, a laptop computer and a cell phone. But they call it the bleeding edge for a reason. A company named SunRocket died today and now I find myself with a phone that is, in essence, a brick.

    I've known all along that SunRocket was going to die. I first learned about SunRocket in December 2005 when I was desperately trying to find a new job. I had just been laid off from a government agency two weeks before Christmas and got a call from a recruiter about a job at SunRocket.

    What's SunRocket? They were a VoIP company -- that's Voice over Internet Protocol. Rather than hooking phones up to the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line in your house, they give you a device to connect your internet service with your phone. Since they don't use the POTS line, they don't incur POTS charges from the local telephone company. Companies like SunRocket and Vonage passed along the savings to the consumer.

    The day I interviewed for the SunRocket position, they were just moving from tiny little offices down the street to a new offices two stories above an actual Tiffany & Co. store in the posh Tyson's Corner neighborhood in Northern Virginia.

    It was three days before Christmas and the SunRocket offices were in a shambles. The receptionist was an aging, ditzy, airhead who obviously hadn't been with the company very long. She didn't really know any of the employees, so her attempts to discern the whereabouts of the head of technology had her all befuddled. Finally, Greg Dupertuis, the director of application development, wandered into the receptionist area looking for me.

    Greg apologized for the state of disarray in the office and took me on a tour of the company's new digs. Wires were strung loosely from the ceiling to the floor in areas that were marked "Accounting" and "Marketing", but there were no desks or partitions -- just boxes of equipment.

    The most activity was coming from a meeting room that was packed with people and computers at every desk. Greg explained that they were working in the room temporarily, waiting for their cubicles to arrive in a few days. We passed more rooms, alternately full or empty, depending upon whether they had desks or not.

    Finally he ushered me into his office and was in the middle of asking his first question of me when he was called away with a problem. It seems that problems were the order of the day at SunRocket. A few minutes later, two younger fellas walked into the room and introduced themselves to me as the people I'd be working with, if I were hired.

    It was as if I had walked into the tent where Hawkeye and Trapper John slept in M*A*S*H. They explained that last-minute problems were always popping up at SunRocket, and that the head of technology was always putting out proverbial fires of one kind or another.

    In between the caustic barbs and bitterly sarcastic jokes about the VoIP biz, Hawkeye and Trapper John asked a couple of vague questions about Unix and Java, which I tried to answer between all the yelling they were doing on short phone calls during the proceedings. I've been on a lot of job interviews in my life, but I never felt so... avoided.

    It wasn't long before I was escorted to the elevators, without even seeing Greg again. The whirlwind interview had taken all of 25 minutes or so, and I doubt I spoke more than 100 words in all that time.

    As I rode down the elevator, I thought to myself, "Well, it wasn't the worst interview I had ever had. That had happened just a month or so earlier when I interviewed with a company that advertised for a web developer, but it was certain from the start of the interview that they wanted a database administrator -- something I just couldn't do for them.

    Still, it was certain that I was not a viable candidate for the job at SunRocket. They hadn't even asked me any real questions.

    The week after Christmas was quiet and I got to spend New Year's weekend in Memphis, Tenn., watching my alma mater win the Liberty Bowl. When I got back to town, I got an email from the recruiter stating, "Just wanted to let you know that they are going to be coming with offer..."

    I shook my head in disbelief. Maybe he who says the least gets the most.

    There was just one nagging thing on my mind: the state of VoIP. Vonage was the pioneer in the VoIP space. I had known about them since 2003 and had suggested that we get Vonage service when we were running our own little videography service back then. In the meantime, Vonage had grown to a couple of million subscribers and several other little companies were popping up as well. SunRocket was one of those companies and had grown to the second largest VoIP company by being a low-cost alternative to Vonage.

    I started doing research on VoIP and found that there were too many companies willing to give VoIP service away in exchange for something else. Microsoft gave it away with their XBox Live service. Skype gave it away to promote its SkypeOut service. Apple gave it away in iChat to promote the sales of its computers. Of course, these services were more limited than Vonage or SunRocket, but free is free.

    I tentatively took the SunRocket offer, but kept pounding the pavement for a better gig. I got a couple of more interviews -- one at Sprint/Nextel and the other for the Department of Defense. The folks at SunRocket wanted me to start the day after Martin Luther King Day, but I managed to put them off for another week in order to see if I could get something better.

    But the other companies interested in me were dragging their feet. Sprint/Nextel went with a different candidate and the Department of Defense changed contracting companies for the job I was vying for there. So on a cold, rainy Monday morning I trudged on the bus to go a few miles down the road to Tyson's Corner.

    I got off the elevator on the third floor and reached for the glass door to the receptionist's office at SunRocket.

    Locked.

    I could see people mingling around inside. The place was still a shambles -- boxes and wires strewn every where. I pulled on the door again and was just about to knock when my cell phone went off.

    It was the new contractor for the Department of Defense job. I backed away from the SunRocket door and stood in the corner of the elevator lobby. The contractor offered me the job and I accepted immediately. I pushed the down arrow of the elevator and disappeared from SunRocket a few moments later.

    I emailed the SunRocket folks my apologies and received two responses. The one from the manager of human relations, who I had never met, was kind, but probing. She wrote, "It would be helpful for our recruiting efforts to know why SunRocket is no longer attractive to you. Is it location, size of the company, the fact we're venture capital-backed, etc.?"

    My SunRocket recruiter was a bit angry. He wrote, "We had turned three other folks away and were excited for your start. Now we have lost them all including
    you. This hurts."

    Well, as it turns out, I probably did those other three candidates a favor. According to press accounts, SunRocket fired most of its Virginia-based employees on July 3 -- without severance. I sure would have hated to be one of those guys.

    The bad blood between me and my SunRocket recruiter didn't last either. Six or eight months after I turned him down, he was calling me to see if I had changed my mind about the SunRocket job. I told him I was perfectly happy in my current job. He made me promise to call him if I changed my mind.

    Even though I didn't become a SunRocket employee, I became a customer. About a month after turning down the job there, I started using their phone service. And I was a happy customer until it all shut down today.

    But that's life on the bleeding edge.


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    New Podcast Day (The Sistahs Will Play)

    posted @ 7/16/2007 07:19:00 AM by evermore
    When the Ninja's away, the Sistahs will play. That's pretty much what's happening in this week's new podcast as Pandalicious and MagicMysticGrl take the mic while NinjaSistah returns from the E3 convention.

    Pandalicious, who's finally begun her search for a job, researches the anime series Desert Punk by watching its trailers. Magic, on the other hand, checks out a magic, red walnut and falls in love with the movie The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

    It's an episode that's certainly worth your time. And if you don't agree, you can take your magic, red walnut and return back in time to where you were before you listened. We've got the answer to everything! So please enjoy this week's Episode 58: Living in the Slums of ESHland.


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    Exclusive First Look: Nano iPhone with TouchDial™

    posted @ 7/11/2007 02:35:00 PM by evermore
    ElectricSistaHood gives you the exclusive first look at the future of digital interfaces -- the new TouchDial™ that will be part of Apple's next iPhone model.

    The TouchDial™, seen here, is a revolutionary new interface that expands on Apple's legendary ClickWheel interface, giving you a tactile feel for operating a telephone that is beyond compare!


    Note the round interface with 10 smaller round openings that allow for easy operation. This GlideAround™ motion allows your finger to simply glide around the center of the interface, giving your finger the sensation of flying. And the rugged StopGlide™ mechanism gives your finger a positive place to discontinue the glide-around motion.

    Note that the TouchDial™ not only includes numbers, but letters as well, making it easier than ever to keep those SMS messages as short as possible. You'll never want to use an "T" or a "Y" in your messages again! (Note also that some letters are no longer represented -- you didn't really want to use a "Q" or a "Z" in your messages, did you?)

    The TouchDial™ will be used on the Nano-sized iPhone, to be announced at some point between tomorrow and January 2012.

    Also rumored is a voice-activated interface for the Shuffle-sized iPhone that will utilize a unique human-based system that is similar to the one used by Barney Fife when he calls "Sarah" at the "Phone Company" to connect him to another party on The Andy Griffith Show, to be trademarked under the name LadyOperator™.


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    When $500 Is Better Than $600

    posted @ 7/10/2007 01:19:00 PM by evermore
    Here is the horrible, horrible truth: Stay away from the new PS3. The old PS3 out there, the one languishing on the shelves of Wal-Mart and Circuit City, the one you don't have to stand in line for, the one you don't have to wait by your mailbox for, well, it's, uh, better.

    That's right. The 60-gig PS3, the one that's been around since November, the one that they just reduced in price by $100, the one that... oh, stop it. The word from E3 is that the older, 60-gig PS3 is better than the new 80-gig model. In fact, if you still play some PS2 games, you should positively stay away from the 80-gig PS3 model.

    Why? Emulation. The original PS3 also contains the PS2 Emotion chip to help it play PS2 games. Now that the Sony folks have come up with a way to emulate PS2 capability in software on the PS3, they have dropped the Emotion chip from the new machine.

    And we all know what happens when you emulate a chip in software, don't we? Incompatibilities. That game you've been playing for years suddenly doesn't work anymore. The disc spins and spins, but doesn't go anywhere. You're left with unexpected crashes -- or eerie silence.

    So here's the warning: If you've got several PS2 games you intend on playing on the 80-gig PS3, test them out on the machine before buying one. Better yet, stick with the original PS3. We suspect the 60-gig model isn't even being built anymore (they've got a few million on hand gathering dust at places like Amazon.com and GameStop), so when they're gone, they're gone.


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    UMG Cuts Off Nose, Face Feels Spited

    posted @ 7/09/2007 12:40:00 PM by evermore
    What are the three most important things in retail sales? Location, location, location. That is, unless you're Universal Music Group.

    UMG announced this week that some artists it currently promotes will be denied availability on iTunes. Supposedly, this is to punish Apple for making iTunes the overwhelming No. 1 way to buy music online.

    So who will it be, Universal? Will you ban the Black Eyed Peas from iTunes? I saw Diana Krall perform in Vegas last month. Will her records be stricken from the iTunes library? Or how about the Pussycat Dolls? Maybe you should forget about putting those girls on your iPod.

    Will George Strait find himself straight out of the iTunes library? Or Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Eminem? Could be Eve or Gwen Stefani or Melissa Etheridge or Mariah Carey or Sheryl Crow or Shania Twain or Reba McEntire? I'd suggest Universal refrain from keeping Reba off of iTunes. She's from a rodeo family. She could beat them up.

    I saw Erykah Badu in 2004 at Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Surely they wouldn't strike her from iTunes. Or bands like blink-182, Bon Jovi, Fall Out Boy, Godsmack, Hoobastank, The Killers, 3 Doors Down and Weezer. No iPod access for you while you're available only in Windows format.

    Ashlee Simpson! She's a UMG act! Please say it's Ashlee Simpson that you're keeping out of iTunes!

    But as for Stevie Wonder, Sting, Elton John, The Cardigans and Wolfmother, UMG could seriously damage their careers by keeping them out of an iPhone.

    UMG might as well go and tell Best Buy to shove it. Or maybe they should start making music discs that are playable only in a Sony PSP.

    That angry noise you hear in the background is UMG's face as the company takes a knife to its own nose.


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    Sony Reintroduces $499 PS3

    posted @ 7/09/2007 08:24:00 AM by evermore
    Sony would like you to think that they have reduced the price of the PS3 today. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    Remember when the PS3 first came out in November? They brought out a lame version for $499 and a better version for $599. Today's announcement simply reinstates that pricing model.

    Sony dropped its $499 version a few months ago because nobody was buying it. Now the $599 version has been repriced at $499, but it's all window dressing because Sony has already announced a premium-ier version packaged with an 80-gigabyte hard drive and a racing game called "MotorStorm." Guess how much it costs. That's right -- $599.

    To reiterate today's announcement: Sony has a lame version of the PS3 that sells for $499 and a better version for $599. Just like in November 2006.

    And the PS3 forts grow higher and higher at Best Buy.


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    I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want

    posted @ 6/22/2007 11:33:00 AM by evermore
    There is was, staring me in the face this morning. It was all over the internet. I'm sure you saw it, too. The Spice Girls will be announcing their "future plans". Next week. Thursday, June 28, to be exact.

    Of course, the other news is that the iPhone will be released next week as well. Friday, June 29.

    A Spice Girls reunion and the iPhone release in the same 24-hour period. Could this just be... coincidence?

    I think not. We at ElectricSistaHood, in a Top Secret communique, are releasing a fragment of lyrics from the Spice Girls' next sure-to-be top-selling hit, tentatively called, "Wanna-iPhone":

    I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want,
    So tell me what you want, what you really really want,
    Want iPhone, want iPhone, want iPhone, want iPhone, want iPhone
    Really really really want iPhone.

    If you wanna be my iPod, you also gotta be my phone,
    Make it last forever. Phoneship never ends.


    Number 1. With a bullet.


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    Popes, Devils and Porn

    posted @ 6/20/2007 11:36:00 AM by evermore
    One fun game people like to play when listening to the ElectricSistaHood podcasts is figuring out why a specific podcast derived its name. Since episode 26, all podcasts have been named AFTER the podcast was recorded, and the name has usually come from a comment during the podcast.

    But what about the rejected titles? We've compiled a list of rejected titles from a selection of our recent podcasts and found that many of them have something to do with Popes, devils and porn. Those crazy sistahs.

    An alien, a god and a Prime Minister walk into a bar

    You said meth, I said crack

    I wanna be a guitar hero, too

    It's kind of half true

    A midget and a sumo wrestler? I'd pay to see that

    Nothing at all to do with Bleach

    It's socially acceptable porn

    Worms aren't kosher -- Oy Vey

    Satan is a big, red, throbbing hard thing

    Panda holds her liquor -- in the bottle

    Watching porm with Mom

    Penguins are the devil's minions

    The makers of Bullet Witch aren't so bright

    Let's stop talking about penises, you guys

    How to get rich with toast

    I love being called a bitch

    Ducks are badass

    Happy belated spoiler alert

    They repo'd the squirrel's house

    The Popemobile is pimp

    The undead should keep hitting us up

    I like girl biscuits

    The sound of a thousand birds chirping

    Disease manga of the week

    I was a teenage immortal prince of darkness

    Is my insanity showing?

    He's a werewolf, so he IS an SOB

    The incredible, edible podcast

    DOA: It's not just the kit, it's the kaboodle

    Not a happy funtime in Panda's pants

    Did you make the stinky on the rug?

    The men have no necks and the mother's packing

    Pop your manga cherry with us

    Teen Pope

    Fun with cattle prods

    You open it, then you're in it

    Never confuse a yamika with a yakada

    How to fall in love in seven pages or less

    Too many Peaches

    Not fairly old

    Microsoft Max hung up on me

    Resident Wii-vil

    XBox 360 -- It's fried, not baked



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    Cereal Killers

    posted @ 6/19/2007 08:40:00 AM by evermore
    Imagine a world where there are no Rice Krispies, Froot Loops and Pop Tarts. Now shake yourself vigorously -- it's only a bad dream.

    The head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a guy named Michael Jacobson, says that in a few years it could all come to pass. You see, the CSPI had threatened Kellogg's with a lawsuit in Massachusetts over the unhealthiness of key kid-targeted brands. They say Rice Krispies has too much sodium and Froot Loops and Pop Tarts contain way too much sugar.

    Well, duh. That's why we like them!

    Kelloggs responded by promising to move to self-regulation in children's advertising of the offending products. No more Snap, Crackle and Pop? No more Toucan Sam? Say it ain't so!

    Kellogg says its under-12 advertising will be limited to foods that have no more than 200 calories per serving, no trans fats and no more than 2 grams of saturated fat.

    I'm old enough to remember all the cereals that had the word "Sugar" prominently in the name. Sugar Smacks, Sugar Crisp, Sugar Pops and Sugar Frosted Flakes. When the cereal companies wiped "Sugar" off the names, they added vitamins and renamed them Smacks, Super Golden Crisp, Corn Pops and Frosted Flakes.

    With all the money spent branding Rice Krispies, Froot Loops and Pop Tarts over the years, I suspect Kellogg's will just reformulate them. After all, nothing says childhood (or adulthood for that matter) like Rice Krispies Treats.


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    Firmware Update Means Nothing for Gamers

    posted @ 5/23/2007 04:00:00 PM by evermore
    Sony Playstation 3 owners are going to have their hands full in the next few days, downloading software and updating their systems. What will it mean for gamers? Pretty much nothing.

    The updates aren't for gamers. You can see that right here. They're for people who want to watch a slightly better picture when they're using the PS3 to show DVD movies. They're for people who want to see bigger renditions of pictures they've got saved to their Playstation Portables. They're for people who... uh... well, that's about it.

    If you're a gamer waiting for a reason to use the PS3, you'll just have to keep waiting. Sure, it can upscale PSOne and PS2 games, but from what I've seen thus far, those games simply play better on their original systems -- and the PS2 is still beating the PS3 in sales, six months after the introduction of the PS3.

    Of course, you could treat the installation of the new PS3 firmware as a game itself. Score 10 points for yourself when you get the thing downloaded. Subtract a point for every hour it takes to download it properly. Score 10 points for yourself when the firmware update is installed and running. Subtract a point for every hour it takes to get the thing working right. If you're lucky, your score will still be a positive number in the end.

    Then add it to your gamerscore and... oh, yeah, the PS3 doesn't have a gamerscore.

    Do ya think Sony cares about gamers anymore?


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    NinjaSistah's Not Gonna Like This

    posted @ 5/09/2007 12:38:00 PM by evermore
    See this mean lookin' dude in the graphic at the left? That must be what NinjaSistah looks like right about now. She's gotta be hoppin' mad because EA has delayed shipment of Spore for another year.

    That's right. Spore, the game where you literally build a civilization starting with single-celled amoeba, has been delayed until April 2008, according to a story from Reuters.

    Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) announced the delay would cause the company to fall to a net loss for fiscal 2008. Why does Spore singlehandedly bring down such a big company? Mainly because EA owns all rights to the game, unlike games like Madden, on which EA has to pay big royalties to the NFL and its players.

    According to Reuters, "profit margins on the game (Spore) should be 80 percent or higher, compared with around 30 percent for other upcoming titles like 'Crysis' and 'Mercenaries 2: World in Flames,' which EA is publishing with partners, Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter said."

    So NinjaSistah's gonna be disappointed. Perhaps she can create a world in The Sims in which EA puts out Spore this year. She could then reward the Spore developers with a hot tub party.


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    Alienware's Not for Killing Only Aliens Anymore

    posted @ 5/03/2007 10:26:00 PM by evermore
    See the Alienware ad pictured here? It must be advertising a game with a bomb ass helicopter gunship, right? Wrong. This Alienware computer is not for games with bomb ass helicopter gunships. It's for the people who build and operate bomb ass helicopter gunships.

    Click the picture to see it in extreme close-up. The ad is designed to entice the U.S. military to purchase the ultra-high-end gaming machine for purposes other than gaming.

    When you think about it, it's a perfect way to get skittish teens to join military service. Join the Army and play your favorite video games on a machine with quad-core Intel Xeon processors with an Nvidia Quadro FX 3500 PCI Express 256MB graphics card. Oh, yeah, and build stuff to kill people who don't look like you.

    And everyone wondered why Dell bought out Alienware. Here's your answer.


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    The Knights of E(on)

    posted @ 4/21/2007 11:11:00 PM by evermore
    One of NinjaSistah's favorite new anime adventures is Le Chevalier D'Eon, from the same folks who made Ghost in the Shell. Well, now there's more, as the second volume of the series has just been released this week, subtitled "Agent Provocateur". And once again, ElectricSistaHood is proud to present some exclusive wallpapers for all the Le Chevalier D'Eon fans out there.

    As with most anime adventures, everything is either all too beautiful or all too ugly, but the series does seem to capture the rich look of the days when Louis XV ruled France.

    Here's the official synopsis of the second volume:

    Searching for clues to her murder, D'Eon discovers his sister's life in the King's court was more than jeweled gowns and priceless perfumes. It involved dark sorcerers, manipulative royals, and a violet-eyed vixen whose dangerous power turns innocent mongrels into slobbering, rabid monsters. D'Eon and his comrades slip from Versailles to Russia, seeking an emperor who appears to control magic-wielding followers. And serving a queen who seems far too pleased to have Lia's spirit possess her brother's body. A tormented beauty's soul that is not resting in peace, but is alive and well'and looking for vengeance.

    The special collector's edition, available seperately, contains the second volume of Le Chevalier D'Eon in a custom series art box with full color artwork sized to hold the entire six volume series.

    Click any thumbnail here to get a large wallpaper size version for your computer.




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    I Was Right About the PS3

    posted @ 4/19/2007 01:09:00 PM by evermore
    I don't mind taking credit for it. I made the prediction in May 2006, and now it's all coming to pass.

    Last May I wrote the following post about the pricing of the XBox 360 and the two forthcoming game consoles, the PS3 and the Nintendo Wii. According to this story, it seems that I may have been on target after all...

    An executive from Sega, one of Nintendo's largest publishers, told Forbes.com last week that he expects the Wii to sell for less than $200. With a $200 price point, the Wii might not only be a video game system, but the new currency exchange unit for video game system sales. Consider this:

    Nintendo Wii: 1 Wii
    Microsoft XBox 360 Base: 1.5 Wii
    Microsoft XBox 360 Deluxe: 2 Wii
    Sony Playstation 3 Premium (retail in November): 3 Wii
    Sony Playstation 3 Premium (on eBay in December): 6-8 Wii
    Sony Playstation 3 Premium (retail, next May): 1.5 Wii


    Sure, I got the Wii price point wrong (it was $250, not $200), but I was otherwise close to the target.

    And to all those Sony fanboys who have been berating me for my disparaging comments regarding the PS3, I'd like to point out that they sold a whopping 167,000 PS3's in February. At that rate, they'll clean out the entire initial 6 million PS3 run... by, uh, June 2010.


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    Belldandy to the Rescue

    posted @ 4/18/2007 10:55:00 PM by evermore
    For those of you who haven't had your Ah! My Goddess fix in a while, they're releasing the latest season on DVD in the U.S. on May 8. And to celebrate the release, we're presenting some exclusive wallpapers from the series right here.

    The second season of Ah! My Goddess: Flights of Fancy picks up where season 1 left off, telling the stories of hapless college student Keiichi Morisato and his personal goddess Belldandy. The season contains the original cast of English voice actors (or the original Japanese soundtrack with English subtitles for you anime purists out there). Episode 1 will be shown on Anime Network May 3.


    The thumbnail wallpapers are clickable for easy access to the large version images. Here's the official synopsis:

    It's been almost a year since the Goddess Belldandy came to live with college student Keiichi Morisato, and he's almost gotten up the nerve to kiss her. Unfortunately, the encounter with the Lord of Terror damaged some of Yggdrasil's systems, and the contract binding Belldandy and Keiichi is among the lost data. The lovebirds can only hope the information can be retrieved before the Almighty One orders Belldandy back to Heaven.


    Naturally Skuld and Urd try to help, but it might be better if they didn't. Then, with Christmas at hand, Keiichi works himself to the bone to buy a present, and the rivalry with Sayoko may have driven Belldandy to drink. What happens when a Goddess is literally drunk with power?





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    The Game Goes On

    posted @ 4/13/2007 11:31:00 AM by evermore
    Those gamer guys from the movie The 40 Year Old Virgin are back, with their own unique take on the video game news of the day.




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    It's Dead (NinjaSistah Killed It), But Lives On in Britain

    posted @ 4/11/2007 12:10:00 PM by evermore
    I'd like to blame it on NinjaSistah. After all, she's the one who damned it in her very first post on this site. She killed it, but like Frankenstein's monster, it lives on.

    The Official U.S. Playstation Magazine (that was always a tough name to swallow) died with the January 2007 issue -- killed by lack of advertising sales, the introduction of the lame PlayStation 3 and, I think, by NinjaSistah's devastating post about it almost a year ago, which you can read here.*

    You can read about its death here.

    But OPM lives on -- in Britain. And they're even putting Blu-Ray demo discs inside. How well they will survive the trip from Europe to America is anybody's guess, though. Read more about it here.

    * -- A little postscript on NinjaSistah's experience with OPM demo discs: She cancelled her subscription to OPM last year after having been a subscriber for several years. A few months later she started receiving the magazine free through a different distributor. The discs were packed perfectly and she never received another bad or broken disc. And then OPM stopped publishing entirely. C'est la vie!


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    Computer Games Magazine is Dead -- Does Anybody Care?

    posted @ 3/16/2007 05:18:00 PM by evermore
    Computer Games Magazine, the second oldest gaming magazine, has discontinued publishing, according to a story on Gamasutra.

    While it is sad to see such a venerable magazine go by the wayside, the big question is this: Do you really care?

    With the immediacy of the internet, you have to wonder if a gaming magazine even makes sense these days.

    I spent years in the magazine industry as an editor, and I know first-hand the pros and cons of magazine publishing. The pros? Beautiful, rich color advertising promoting exciting new games. The ability to include discs with betas, demos and other things gamers can try for themselves.

    The cons? In a word: time. Remember all those stories you read in the November issues about the impending release of the new consoles? They were all written in July. That's right. July.

    Every review you read in a magazine about a hot, new game? It was written four months before you received that issue in your hot little hands. The review was probably based on a beta version that didn't completely work. Most magazine-based game reviewers are little more than beta testers of those games. If something doesn't work, they rely on the media relations people to fill in the gaps. Is this really what you want to base a $50-$70 purchase on?

    And you'll never see a bad review of a product from a company that has put multi-page ads in the magazine. The subscription fee you pay barely pays for the postage it costs the magazine companies to send those things to you. With only a few exceptions, magazine companies make all their profit on the advertising in the publication. (Of course, there are exceptions to this, such as ad-free magazines like Consumer Reports.)

    So Computer Games Magazine is gone -- and it won't be alone. The parent company also shuttered the new Massive magazine, which covered MMORPG games, such as World of Warcraft. It is likely we will see more magazines closed over the next few years -- they just can't keep up with the speed of the internet news and blog sites.

    What do you think of computer game-oriented magazines? Do you currently subscribe to any? Have you recently quit any? Please share your views on this important subject.


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    Mac and PC, 1 Million Years B.C.

    posted @ 3/14/2007 04:24:00 PM by evermore
    The fight between the Macintosh and the PC has gone on for years -- about a million of them, by our count. Our comic shows one early battle...




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    Six Million Reasons

    posted @ 3/12/2007 05:47:00 PM by evermore
    Sony has once again recommitted itself to its claim that it will ship 6 million Playstation 3 boxes by March 31. But just where are those boxes all going? We think we might have the answer in this comic...




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    When PS3 Met Mii

    posted @ 3/11/2007 07:22:00 PM by evermore
    With Sony's announcement of PS3 Home last week, the company's got some work to do in order for their avatars to catch up to Nintendo's avatars, as you can see in this comic...






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    The Miracle of HD Comes to South Park

    posted @ 3/08/2007 12:41:00 PM by evermore
    You can stop holding those picket signs in front of Viacom headquarters. The thing you've always wanted has arrived. That's right. Very soon you'll be able to watch South Park in High Definition format!

    And ElectricSistaHood has exclusive pictures of the changes you'll see!

    Viacom and Microsoft announced Tuesday that South Park will be available in HD only for Xbox Live customers. Thus, those grainy, cardboard-cutout characters you're used to seeing will be transformed into exciting 3-dimensional entities that will seem almost alive.

    And here on ElectricSistaHood, we have the only pictures of some of the changes you will see with the new HD version. Tell all your friends to come look:



    Well, maybe Mr. Hankey the Christmas poo in HD is going a little too far. I guess not everything deserves to be in High Definition.


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    20-Gig Model

    posted @ 3/05/2007 04:11:00 PM by evermore
    There's a big rumor going around that Sony has discontinued the 20-gigabyte version of the Playstation 3. So we present a comic that shows just how quickly things change...




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    The Making of ESH: The Musical

    posted @ 2/26/2007 09:19:00 AM by evermore
    What starts out as a normal episode of ElectricSistaHood becomes something completely different just a few minutes into the podcast.

    With classic overtones inspired by Orson Welles' broadcast of War of the Worlds, this week's episode morphs into a history of modern music. We think you'll enjoy it.

    For those of you interested in learning how this week's episode was created, please read on...

    THE MAKING OF EPISODE 41

    When Ninjasisth and Pandalicious' father died a week ago, there was a question about how the next episode would be handled. It was debated whether we should have MagicMysticGrl do her long-awaited Top 5 show, a clip show of past episodes or take a week or two in hiatus.

    The hiatus was ruled out almost immediately -- the Sistahs' fans needed their weekly fix of the electronic goodness. MagicMysticGrl wasn't finished with her notes on the Top 5 episode (it will air next week instead), so fashioning together a clip show was the order of the day.

    As the producer of the shows since Episode 32, I was assigned the task of putting together a clip show. I have been planning to put together a clip show to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the show in May, but didn't have anything prepared at such short notice.

    So I took a different direction on a clip show. With the Sistahs' proclivity toward singing on the show, I thought I should put together a musical clip show, featuring the Sistahs' singing along with samples of the original songs.

    I collected various clips of the Sistahs' singing songs ranging from Eric Carmen's classic "All By Myself" to one of many Ethel Merman renditions of "Everything's Coming Up Roses" to the Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop title theme from their 1990s PBS show. To tie the songs together, I collected a variety of those cheesy Ktel music album commercials -- pop, rock, disco, country, soul and even a collection of Jim Nabors cover songs.

    All that remained was to include never-before-heard clips at the beginning of the podcast. Luckily, there were a few to be had. The intro of the episode was taken from an out-take from last week's episode. Ninjasistah had recorded three intros for Episode 40. If you listen closely, we changed the word "forty" to "forty-one" in the episode number by carefully cutting the syllables "ty one" from episode 31 and pasting them in place of the last syllable of "forty". This was the kind of stuff I learned all those years ago in college.

    For the opening sequence itself, I stole an out-take from Episode 32. The Sistahs had originally recorded it 10 weeks ago, but an errant cell phone went off in the opening minutes, so they decided to record it again from scratch. We ended up using the second take in the Episode 32 podcast.

    The rest of it was just cutting and pasting. Basically, interspersed between a bunch of old Ktel promos for record albums of the past was clips of the Sistahs singing. When possible, I added sequences of the actual song they were (trying) to sing.

    I had a lot of success finding these songs. The newer ones were the easiest to locate. There were just a couple that posed some problems finding. The hardest to find was the opening of "Lamb Chop's Playalong," which I finally found on a website devoted to theme songs of kids shows.

    There are a couple of corrections that have to be made about the Sistahs' comments on this show. First, Ninjasistah is incorrect about the copyright nature of the song "Everything's Coming Up Roses." Although Ethel Merman is, indeed, dead, that doesn't affect the copyright nature of the song. The song is still under copyright protection -- it has not fallen into the public domain. Heck, it's not even that old. It comes from the musical Gypsy, which was first produced on Broadway in 1959.

    The second correction has to do with the song Return to Innocence. On the podcast, Pandalicious says it was done by Enya, but she is mistaken. It was actually done by Enigma (an easy mistake to make).

    Please enjoy this week's podcast and please come back for a special Top 5 episode on Bleach, presented by MagicMysticGrl. We hope you enjoy them.


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    A Death in the Sistahood

    posted @ 2/24/2007 11:01:00 PM by evermore
    If you've noticed that NinjaSistah and Pandalicious haven't contributed to ElectricSistaHood for the past week, there is a good reason. Their father died a week ago and they've been dealing with family issues.

    Their father, Elijah Britton of Mass., died suddenly Saturday, Feb. 17, of cardiac arrest. The funeral was held Saturday, Feb. 24. In lieu of flowers, the family is asking for contributions toward the college fund of Pandalicious. If you would like to contribute, please click the "Hit Us Up" link and ask for more information.

    The Sistahs will take a couple of weeks off from their regular podcasts to deal with their loss. In the meantime, we will feature a special musical "clip show" Monday that we think you'll really like. The next Monday, MagicMysticGrl will present a Top 5 special on Bleach. Hopefully, the sistahs will resume regular podcasts by Monday, March 12.

    Anyone familiar with the ElectricSistaHood podcasts knows the influence their father -- known by his friends as "E.J." -- had on their lives. He influenced me as well in the eight years since I first met him.

    One story is particularly telling. In the summer of 2004, I was between jobs and was working very hard to get a new gig. I got a couple of job interviews in the Boston area, so I asked if I could crash a few nights at the Britton home while I interviewed in town.

    I traveled to Boston on Amtrak, but couldn't go into the city because the Democratic National Convention was being held there the same week. Amtrak trains to Boston ended at the Route 128 station outside of town, so I asked E.J. to pick me up there.

    Rather than waiting for me at the station, he told me to go outside and look for a building next to the station. He would be waiting in the parking lot under a big GM sign. But when I arrived at the station, it had just been remodeled. The station exited to a giant parking garage. There was no building or GM sign in sight.

    After walking around a little, I finally wandered out of the parking garage and saw him waiting patiently in his car in a big driveway.

    "Where's the building?" I asked him as I got close to the car.

    "I guess they tore it down," he said.

    "Where's the GM sign?" I asked.

    "It's over there," he said as he pointed. The sign was completely hidden by a giant tree.

    He was exactly where he said he would be. Everything else had changed around him.

    Tomorrow when we look for E.J., we know exactly where his body will be -- on the side of a hill in a quiet little cemetary where his daughters learned how to drive.

    But that's just his body. Finding E.J. will be a lot harder. I know I'll be spending a long time looking for E.J. The only thing I know is that he'll be waiting in a driveway next to a GM sign hidden by a big tree and a building that's no longer there.


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    Anime Arrives at iTunes

    posted @ 2/19/2007 07:14:00 PM by evermore
    Owners of the video iPod and the upcoming appleTV can now look forward to $1.99 anime episodes from FUNimation. Complete seasons from the series Desert Punk, Speed Grapher and Samurai 7 are now available.

    FUNimation anime series available for immediate purchase and download on iTunes include:

    Desert Punk: This series is a fresh take on traditional anime. It is a stark and darkly comedic series that employs strikingly realistic weaponry, alongside gritty and rough character design. Desert Punk shocks those who think they know what “anime” looks like! It is a bold new direction in both story and style.

    Speed Grapher: Speed Grapher is a stylish near-future action series full of intensity, forbidden lust and conspiracy. Using a fast-moving, high stakes plotline, the series breaks new ground with its realistic, fashionable character design and acrobatic fight choreography. Speed Grapher creates an experience that is founded on great story and real-world trendsetter style, but is also laced with exactly the kind of cool tech and sci-fi elements that make anime so unique! This combination is geared specifically to attract fans outside of anime circles as well as satisfy the core anime audience.

    Akira Kurosawa's "Samurai 7": At long last, an anime retelling of the legendary Akira Kurosawa epic, Seven Samurai. Akira Kurosawa has inspired generations of filmmakers and Samurai 7 is the anime retelling of legendary Kurosawa epic, Seven Samurai. Samurai 7 is set in a futuristic world that has just seen the end of a massive war. Many villages are being terrorized by Nobuseri bandits, but the Nobuseri are no normal bandits. They were once men, but during the war they modified themselves with machines to become living weapons and now appear as more machine than man. A group of villagers decide to hire samurai to protect their village. These men of valor are as skilled as they are unique.


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    Why is This Woman Smiling?

    posted @ 2/15/2007 12:44:00 AM by evermore
    Judging by the expression on this woman's face, she is having the time of her life. Obviously, it is the result of what she is viewing on the Icuiti video eyewear. See if you can guess what she is watching:

    A. The L Word
    B. Apple's latest "I'm a Mac" ad on TV
    C. A giant fort of unsold PlayStation 3 consoles at Best Buy
    D. Porn
    E. Nothing at all -- she's a model, dammit!

    The answer, of course, is E. A woman who looks like that wouldn't be caught dead wearing a plastic pair of wraparound shades connected to a video game (as you can see from the expanded view below).

    The nerdy guy also portrayed on this page? His expression is much more believable. The device, called the iWear VR920, purports to let you "step inside" the game via a "3-degree-of-freedom head tracker."




    Icuiti is marketing the device for players of MMORPG games like World of Warcraft, but it can also play on consoles, according to the accompanying literature. Here are some other features of the device:

    • Designed for use with a laptop or standard PC through a simple USB and VGA connection
    • Big 62-inch virtual display viewed at 9 feet
    • Built-in noise canceling microphone for Internet VOIP communications
    • Integrated “non-dangling” headphones that can be upgraded or removed to allow the user to plug in their own headset
    • Supports component video-in from the latest generation of game consoles


    We've seen lots of virtual video headsets over the years and none have yet caught on in the gaming world. Will the iWear VR920 catch on? Not as long as it makes you look like Geordi LaForge hanging out at the beach.


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    Revenge of the Nerds 2007

    posted @ 2/07/2007 01:39:00 PM by evermore
    In a story that is blazing its way through the bloggernet, GameStop has allegedly expanded its policy regarding M-rated videogames that are sold to minors. The bottom line is that we could be seeing a brand new version of The Revenge of the Nerds.

    GameStop has long had a policy regarding M-rated games that are sold to minors. You can read it right here. It's pretty simple -- an employee sells an M-rated game to a minor, the employee gets fired.

    But that was all changed in a recent conference call of GameStop employees. According to a writer for kotaku.com, not only does the employee get fired, so does the manager. That adds a whole new dimension to employee-management relations at GameStop.

    Work at GameStop and hate your manager? Get him fired! Just sell an M-rated game to an underaged kid and tell the kid to tell his parents where he got the game. After all, being fired is nothing to a 20-something kid. Heck, GameStop can't even tell future employers why the kid no longer works at GameStop -- all they can do is tell the hire date and release date. The manager, on the other hand, is probably some 40-something geezer with a failing marriage and a couple of unappreciative kids. Getting fired could make him go right over the edge into drugs, drink or maybe even suicide.

    And wouldn't that be entertaining?

    Kudos to the folks at GameStop who put their most vulnerable employees directly in the line of fire as they pander to the desires of a few loudmouths who want everybody to live by their rules.


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    Is This the Next Great Mobile Gaming Device?

    posted @ 1/09/2007 11:44:00 PM by evermore
    What would you think of a mobile gaming device with these specifications? It's only 0.46 inches thick. It has a speaker, a microphone and a camera. Held horizontally, its screen is 480 pixels wide, just like the PlayStation Portable, and 320 pixels tall, nearly 50 pixels taller than the PSP's 272 pixels. At 160 pixels per inch, its screen is the most dense of any standalone portable gaming device. It's got up to 8 GIGABYTES of RAM (compared to the PSP's 32 MEGABYTES). It's got touchscreen controls. It has 802.11 b and g Wi-Fi capabilities (PSP has only b) and Bluetooth built in.

    Oh yeah, it's also a mobile phone, an internet browser and an iPod.

    The iPhone, announced earlier today during Apple's MacWorld keynote speech, is a whole lotta things. Most people are going to buy it because it's an amazing mobile phone combined with an iPod. But there are a lot of reasons why it could become a force among gamers.

    First of all, its mere specifications make it better than any standalone mobile gaming system. Although the screen is not physically as large as the PSP (the iPhone's screen is only 3.5 inches, compared to 4.3 inches for the PSP), it meets the PSP in pixel width and exceeds the PSP in pixel height -- the PSP's pixels are simply larger and, as a result, coarser.

    The iPhone is half as thin (0.46 inches vs. the PSP's 0.9 inches) and half as heavy (135 grams vs. the PSP's 280 grams). Held horizontally, it is a third less in width (4.5 inches vs. PSP's 6.7 inches) and a half-inch less in height (2.4 inches vs. PSP's 2.9 inches).

    There's just one problem: no games.

    The gaming market for the Macintosh dried up when the computer's 10th operating system OS X arrived in 2000. But the iPhone is exactly the catalyst that could turn things around for gaming on the Mac.

    The iPhone shows great potential in this area. It has Google Maps and the Opera browser built in. It has "push" email, provided by Yahoo, which gives it email capabilities similar to that on a Blackberry. It is able to run Apple's Dashboard widgets, which should at least allow for simple games when it is available in June. Everything else is a big question mark: How much RAM is there? What is the graphics card? Is there stereo Bluetooth support? Will third-party Dashboard widgets work? Is there going to be a Software Development Kit to allow high-end game makers access to the device?

    Perhaps few people will even care. With the Nintendo DS and PSP slugging it out on the high end and LG, Samsung, Nokia and other cellphone makers battling each other in that arena, maybe no one will take a second look at gaming on an iPhone.

    But the sheer combination of all those different technologies sure is intriguing, isn't it?


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    I Don't Think That's What That Strap is For

    posted @ 1/09/2007 04:59:00 PM by Douceswild
    We’re almost one full month into 2007 or “20-O-Savage” as some have been calling it. You know what that means, don’t you? New game reviews from gaming-guru Ninjasistah, new anime and manga reviews courtesy of our very own animanga-mamas MagicMysticGrl and Pandalicious, ever-so-much-more news from Evermore, and internet jewels that are so wild that not even the wild one himself, Douceswild (yours truly), can keep them tamed and well-groomed.

    There’s no doubt about it that gaming has been taken to the next level. It’s interactive and addictive but it doesn’t help with the decision that gamers have had to make ever since Frogger tried crossing the road, “Replay or Relationship?”. Do you try to complete Act 1 of Gears of War for the tenth time or do you spend time with your significant other who has been clearly giving you signs of frustration with your constant gaming?

    Let’s look at things from the opposite point of view. How do you get him or her to put that controller down and spend a little “quality time” with you? You’ve tried skimpy outfits and even no outfits at all, but it doesn’t seem to work. No matter how strong your advances are they’d rather zerg a ZG instance than zerg the bedroom. I’ll be the first to admit that when I’m surrounded by elite half dragon/half man creatures and I start swinging my axe and dropping bodies left and right, the last thing on my mind is hours (or minutes, depending on when my next raid starts) of mind-numbing hanky panky.

    It’s been said that one of the keys to a successful relationship is compromise. For my first jewel of 20-O-Savage, I bring to you proof of that being true. Share this one with a loved one. You won’t regret it.

    I got next game!




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    Can You Hear Me Now?

    posted @ 1/01/2007 11:23:00 PM by evermore
    Now you can. Although Verizon has nothing to do with this post, it's appropriate to use the Can You Hear Me Now guy. You see, we have gotten a new tool to help our podcasts sound better. You can hear it in action in our newest podcast (Episode 33) and in a podcast from mid-November (Episode 26).

    The technical stuff: Since our podcasters (usually NinJaSistah, Pandalicious and MagicMysticGrl) are in different locations, they use Skype to connect with one another. This results in a problem with volume that can't easily be solved. Typically, Pandalicious is too hot and NinJaSistah is too light. Now hotness and lightness wouldn't normally be a problem with beautiful, young girls, but it's a real problem in audio production.

    Since we don't have the voices on separate feeds, there's been no easy way to adjust the volume -- until now. A great little free, open source program called Levelator fixes the audio problems, bringing Pandlicious down and NinJaSistah up. We appreciate the hard work of GigaVox Media, who created this great program.

    If you haven't listened to Episode 26 because of NinJaSistah's light sound levels, we urge you to try it again. We think you'll like what you hear.


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    One Thing's For Sure About Half-Naked Girls

    posted @ 12/30/2006 01:28:00 AM by evermore
    One of 28 new Girls of the PS3
    (Also check out the 9 new Girls of the Wii)
    The jury is in about half-naked girls. They're good for a lot of things, but are they any good at selling PlayStation 3 consoles on eBay? After a great deal of research, we've got the answer for you.

    In a word: No. Half-naked girls suck at selling PS3 consoles. Stories abound on the web about people who had invested a great deal of time and money, shivering in long lines at Best Buy and being trampled in stampedes at Wal-Mart, only to discover that no one was willing to pay $2,000 or more for a $600 gaming system.

    Even pimping out their sisters or girlfriends or wives or MILFs didn't help. After all, gaming consoles weren't about Pr0n -- they were about playing video games. So most of those guys who had only dollar signs in their eyes trudged back to the Best Buys where they spent a long, cold, rainy week in mid-November and pleaded for their money back.

    Here's a tip for all of you who want to play the Futures market -- do it with gold and corn and pork bellies and oranges, like everyone else in the Financial District of New York. But if you buy a video gaming system, just open the sucker up, pull out all the stuff inside, hook it up to the Magnavox and have fun. Like God and Nolan Bushnell intended.


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    Maybe They Should Rename It Xbox 365

    posted @ 12/23/2006 12:23:00 AM by evermore
    Good news for Xbox 360 owners who have had problems with their machines after they fell out of the 90-day warranty: Microsoft has extended the warranty on all Xbox 360 machines to one year.

    You can find the details amid the lawyer-speak right here. In essence, Microsoft warrants that they will repair or replace the console if it fails in the first year for the original retail purchaser.

    The new 1,700-plus word warranty does not extend the warranty period for Xbox 360 accessories, however. The warranty period for accessories remains at 90 days.

    The warranty provides for phone numbers for Xbox warranty services and the requirement that you must submit a dated bill of sale, receipt or invoice.

    Although the terms of the warranty mention nothing about expenses Xbox 360 owners have already incurred to have their machines fixed during the period between the 91st day and the 365th day of ownership before the warranty was extended, the matter is covered in Microsoft's press release: "Customers who have already paid out-of-warranty repair charges within their first year of ownership can expect reimbursement checks for the amount of their console repair in approximately 10 weeks. Reimbursements will be automatically distributed, so customers need not contact Microsoft."

    More information on support for the Xbox 360 can be found by clicking here.


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