I’m pretty sure I just make up most of the facts I come up with… I need to work on that, or at least I need real time fact checkers to work on it for me. This episode is more entertaining than I expected, some cool stuff about Video Games if you give a crap about it. We even talk about World of Warcraft and mention “the Halo 3 release date”. Listen to find out the truth.
We Digress Episode 5.2, Febuary 26, 2006 Part 1

We Digress Episode 5.2, Febuary 26, 2006 Part 2

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Anyone who knows me knows I am somewhat of a sports guy, and every four years comes one of my favorite sporting events. No, it is not the World Cup. It is the Winter Olympics. The first Olympics I remember watching were Sarajevo’s games in 1984. The first real games I remember, however, were Calgary ’88. In those games, I fell in love with the speed and excitement of the Winter sports. There are a few of those sports from which I cannot take my eyes. They are: Nordic skiing, Nordic combined, biathlon and ski jumping.

Who the hell knows why I became addicted to those sports, but I have fond memories of watching them as a little kid. I’d plop down in front of the television and wait for the events. My father would always help me out and make sure he told me what days the sports would be on the TV, and then, I’d wait.

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They rang the gong on the Aggramar server in WoW last night. Now there are giant Anubis-like creatures running around the world killing everything.

It is a once-in-a-server-lifetime event.

The event has been going on since around midnight when I logged off.

I logged in this morning to check it out and was immediately in combat.

I wish it would last until tonight when I get home…but much like all MMORPGs…the shut-ins and losers will get all the good loot. Not through skill or even dumb luck, just through sheer hours logged on to the game.

I only play because I consider myself a casual gamer. I help out guildies with stuff and give advice. And if I get to kill elves along the way, well that’s cool too.

I am having fun on a PvP server also (Cho’Gall). I was invited to a “twink” guild due to my “Battleground” presence with my L. 26 Priest.

I am a dork…but so is Nikki!!

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I tried to pick it up again tonight, and I couldn’t. The reason I’ve played it so much is because I’ve always expected to find some new cool stuff or have something exciting happen. But it never does, and I’ve come to terms with myself and accepted that it never will. Therefore I will not play it again… even the online element was completely not fun. I love Nintendo but this game is well… lame.

Also: I’ve removed it from the “playing” link section if any other eightandfivers are still playing it feel free to put it back up, but I need to stop.

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HP has come up with a tabletop monitor that works with a regular PC. Its a touch screen and it looks really cool. I don’t expect to see this thing hit the market for a while (if ever) but I’ve fantasized about playing Starcraft across a table against someone. This could be really, really cool.

HP Coffee Table PC

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I use Google. I use Gmail. I use Froogle. I use Google Images. I use Google’s homepage thingy (which doesn’t seem to have a name). I use Google Talk. Overall, I love the Google, but somehow the Gmail + Google Talk combo has left me with a bad taste in my mouth over the past couple of days. Allow me to explain…

Apparently, I have been spamming contacts from Gmail to start using Google Talk. It’s not that I wouldn’t recommend Google Talk, but somehow friends of mine are receiving fake emails from my Gmail account trumpeting the greatness of Google Talk. Here’s the message that I supposedly sent to my friend Jaime:

Hey Jaime, this is the fakest message you ever got. I use Google Talk.
You should too.

That seems like something that I might write, if I was going to suggest Google Talk. I’ll admit, I will email people while blindly drunk, so I thought that maybe I actually wrote that message. But then here’s the message I supposedly sent my friend Justine:

hey j.
I dunno why you’re still old schoolin’ with the msn, but the cool kids are over on gmail. I have a million invites, and I’m givin them out left and right (but not tonight—elp!! I”m being tortured! My punctuation points are being1!*%#^&)

There is no way in hell that I would write that shit. I only found out about this whole thing by chatting with Justine last week, and she randomly mentioned that she downloaded Google Talk after my last email message on said topic. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I dismissed it at the time, but this morning I was doing some serious Gmail message sorting and came across this supposed missive IN MY SENT MAIL! Google is inviting people to Google Talk on my behalf, pretending to be me, and is giving me the luxury of perusing the fake emails that I’ve sent.

I don’t know what the hell is going on here. This is so un-Google. If anyone has any information on this practice, I’d love to hear it. This is a wonderful example of the type of unauthorized access that the Gmail Privacy Policy says they’re protecting us against.

Edit: I cannot prove or disprove anything that I mention in the text above. As you’ll see in the comments below, I cannot prove that this is a real issue. I think it is, but that does not matter. Readers will notice that I added a ? to the end of the original article.

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Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) is introducing legislation for A La Carte Cable, or being able to pay for only the channels you want to watch. I’m not a big fan of the guy, although as a republican he could suck a lot more (note to John: since you’ve abandoned your campaign finance reform crusade this cable thing is all ya got). The channels I’d subscribe too would be: C-Span, C-Span 2, C-Span 3, ABC (lost), UPN (Veronica Mars), Comedy (daily show–Colbert), 2 versions of public television, Aljazeera (If they had a channel), NBC-USA-CNBC (only during Olympics–GO CURLERS FROM MN!), maybe Discovery or History, but I find myself watching C-span and netflix documentaries a lot more.

How about the rest of you? Any channels I left out?

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So Cheney was quail hunting (continuing the fight in the war on song-birds) and seems to have shot his hunting partner… I’m assuming it was inadvertent. I remember him duck hunting with Scalia a while back and Cheney didn’t shoot him, I suspect that he gives favorable treatment to conservative-supreme-court-judges probably to influence the bench.

Cheney shoots guy!

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I will try and do my best to add some fuel to the fire that is the rampant rumor mongering surrounding every Apple product release. It looks like Apple is planning to update the iPod for the second time in the last six months. What is even better is it looks like they are finally moving from the standard iPod click wheel to a screen that covers the entire face of the music and video player. I think this is an obvious improvement to the iPod’s capabilities, but I am still waiting for Apple to leverage their considerable weight in the mp3 sector into a general purpose device that can run third party software. Apple has the engineers to pull off a new PDA-like device (they invented that term, anyway), and there have been rumors about Apple buying out Palm. Is it at all possible that Apple will reenter the PDA market with a new Newton? I would like to see Apple transition the iPod into a PDA, but I’m not sure people want that or that it would be a good move economically for Apple. My guess is that iPods are so popular because there really isn’t anything nerdy about them-nobody would buy a digital Rolex with an LCD screen, no matter how feature-rich it is, and I think that the iPod will be stuck as a music and video player for exactly the same reason… But there could be something cool comming from Apple in the near future.

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