Hello all! For those of you who read blogcritics.org, you might have seen the Halo 3 / Halo Online post I made about a month ago show up there. It was basically a reprint of the origninal article, but once again it got a pretty good response. Anyhow, I’ve joined the sinister cabal of elite bloggers known as blogcritcs. How cool is that? Now I get to infest a sinister cabal with my sinister rumors! Wooohooo!!! Seriously, I’m pretty excited about this. It will definately be a great opportunity to improve on my writing and maybe even get some more visitors here. Either way, check out blogcritics.org. It’s a cool site with lots of great people blogging for them.

Bob Parsons, the founder of GoDaddy wrote an interesting post about the new .eu domain name registration scandal. Basically the EU domain registry made it way too easy to become an official domain name registrar. For as little as $12,000 pretty much anybody can be a domain name registrar. From there you could landgrab as many .eu domain names. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that with some domains selling for six figures, there is plenty of money to be made from buying up .eu domains early and often. It’s a good read. You should check it out.

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My last post seemed a bit sad and depressing to me, so I felt the need to blog something a bit more amusing. After all, it can’t all be doom and gloom right? Of course not.  Anyhow, I just caught myself telling my friend he could “just tivo ESPN” instead of buying every broadcast game for the whole season. Then it hit me: tivo is not a product name, it’s now a verb.

For many among us tivo is still a relatively new and complicated technology. It’s a magic box that does magic things all on its own without interfering with our magical television watching. Ok, maybe it’s not that magic. At its core it doesn’t do anything that people didn’t already to with their trusty vcr right? Well of course it does. It’s magic!

I don’t own a tivo or any other pvr type device. I miss television shows all the time and my life goes on. What astounds me is that even as a non-owner or user of a tivo, I call all personal video recorders tivos. Some of you may scoff at me as if I’m one of those people who calls all mp3 players iPods or all video game systems playstations or nintendos(for you older gamers out there).  Nope, I know the difference betweeen a tivo and a junky pvr rented from your local cable or sattlelite provider.

So why did I tell my buddy to tivo ESPN? I don’t know, I guess it just sounds cool. I digg it. That alone will probably be Tivo’s greatest success. Obviously Tivo is getting stomped into little bits by cable companies preying on dumb consumers with their free pvr’s. The beatings will continue and Tivo will never be as big or as hip as it probably deserves to be. However, Tivo is one of those rare companies that managed to create not just a cool product, but for their product to become a verb. That alone is a pretty impressive legacy.

I read a blog post today that reminded me of one of those really harsh realities of being a tech blogger. As much as we love the cool products that Apple makes or the “Don’t be evil” mantra of Google attempts to live by, once in a while we must all be reminded that Google, Apple, .and every other corporation at their very best are still very much for profit corporations. Now, this in itself isn’t perhaps a bad thing. However, the one glaring problem with all companies is that the rules are usually decided by what is illegal (what they can get away with) and not always what is “the right thing to do”.  (more…)

Right now everyone is trying to figure out the HD-DVD and Blu-ray battle before any products even hit the market. Ironically, both Blu-ray and HD-DVD have seen endless delays. Sure, techies and journalists love to blog about the virtues of both formats, but do consumers care? (more…)

I suppose since every other blog on the face of the planet is buzzing with this fantastic news, I should say something. Yes, now the Mac can run Windows XP and Apple is supporting it. How cool is that? It’s pretty cool. It’s phenominal. It’s outrageous. It’s the best version of Windows XP ever. *drinks more kool-aid* OOOHHHHHH YEAH!!!!!!

It seems like every time you turn around Sony is pimping some new format that is meant to change our life, or perhaps just Sony’s bottom line. Yet Sony, more than any other company I know of, seems to be consistantly hell-bent on creating a new format for every device they create. At the same time the failure rate of these formats is extremely high and very well known. When I hear Betamax, MiniDisc, and UMD almost by default my eyes glaze over and I think what might have been. I sypmathize with Sony because they create some really awesome technology, but the more I look at Sony, the more I see a company who doesn’t even understand its own success. (more…)