Wii

I bought a Nintendo Wii the day it came out. Drove around Spring, Texas, where we were visiting some of Bridget's family, and found a Target that didn't have much of a line out front, near a Toys R Us that had NO line out front. Came back the next morning, an hour before opening, and got unit number 53 of 60. Yay!

It comes with a great game called Wii Sports, that's basically a series of mini-games, a demo for the motion-sensitive controller. Included are Tennis (HIGHLY addictive), Bowling (lots of fun, especially one of the training modes), Baseball, Golf, and Boxing.

Watch this guy get a great score in Bowling.

And this is unreal - the aforementioned training mode.

PlayStation 3

Tonight at midnight was the launch of the new PlayStation. The new Nintendo Wii launches Saturday at midnight (technically Sunday). I noticed something funny a few days ago in Wal-Mart: nearly all of the controller section of hangers had been cleared out, and new price tags had been put in place. About 8 were for Wii controllers; 2 were for PS3 controllers. I chuckled to myself at how much they were obviously pushing the Wii.

So tonight, I walk in 20 minutes after the PS3 went on sale to see people just leaving with their new $600 toys. I talked to one of the electronics workers (Eric Austin, who, by the way, will be a father in a couple of months), and found out they 6 total PS3 units. Damn.

So I walk to electronics, and still, no PS3 controllers; no PS3 games either. But there do happen to be SEVERAL Wii controllers and games.

I have found Nirvana

And this is it.

Edit: Indeed, the site appears to be down now. Probably surpassed their bandwidth limit.

David Copperfield is awesome

Just picked up this story over at Digg.

Would YOU believe an illusionist who said he had nothing in his pockets?

I'm only a year late on this...

Transparent aluminum.

In the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Scotty teaches a 20th century human how to make a substance called transparent aluminum, which is several times harder than glass.

Now, apparently, we've done it.

New Windows XP theme

When Microsoft released Windows Media Center Edition, it released with a new default theme called Royale (screenshots here). It was basically the default Windows XP Luna theme with some glass effects.

Recently, someone got their hands on another version of that theme called Royale Noir; it's essentially a black version of the Royale theme (screenshots). Very, very nice. Installing the Noir theme also installs the Royale theme, so you get two in the one package.

And either one looks better than Luna.

D&D made simple

GameSpy put together a simple explanation of how to play D&D.

tvRSS

tvRSS is a site dedicated to providing RSS feeds of TV show torrents. I recently started using this along with the RSS Feed Scanner plugin for Azureus.

It's a pretty simple concept; the Scanner periodically checks the various feeds, and if it finds a new entry with one of my keywords, it downloads the torrent and starts it up in Azureus.

RSS Feed Scanner allows the set up of multiple feeds, for multiple shows. I currently have one set up for Heroes, one for Smallville, and one for Jericho. It also has the ability to parse the filename string to determine season and episode (assuming it uses one of about 5 season/episode formats), so I can instruct it to only download Smallville episodes Season 6 episode 6 and later, for instance. It will keep track of which episodes it has downloaded, and won't download those later.

This saves me from having to search for new episodes every few days, especially now that I'm trying to watch 3 different shows.