iPhone 3G vs. Sprint Instinct. Opinions? Go!

ETA: Meaning more along the lines of features/performance, not cost.

Christ, took 'em long enough to announce 3G.

Now give me a price drop! C'mon price drop!

ETA: :D :D

I got the chance to play with Scott's iPhone yesterday, and I have to say, it was pretty darned awesome.

Now I'm all plugged into a live audio stream for Job's WWDC keynote so in about half an hour, I can hear about the next generation.

If this is as sweet as I think it might be, I suspect I may have discovered what I'll be saving up for.

I am such a toy whore.

Toys. Gadgets. Love 'em. Need 'em.

I've been hearing the call of New Phone. I seriously want some portable Intarwebs.

I'm considering either Blackberry or iPhone. Opinions? Suggestions for other devices? Feed me, Seymour.

My monitor has been out for delivery since 3am.

IT DOES NOT TAKE THAT LONG TO GET TO MY HOUSE, HELLO.

Just watch, they're gonna deliver it to me right as I'm out the door this afternoon.

Mmm, day off. I have strawberry frosted mini-wheats, "Hysteria" on Rock Band, overcast weather, and a whole day to burn. Contentment.

Last night, the news about Netflix's new TV box for Instant Watch broke on the Net. I've been playing with it at work for the past few weeks, and I can certify the awesome. If you're a fan of IW, you may want to check it out.

There was a big party at work to celebrate the release. Lots of balloons and even more free ice cream. What was seriously cool though was watching the orders roll in. An hour after it was announced online and made available for purchase? A little over 100 had been sold already.

I'm going to miss the next couple days of flurry over the Roku box ... but as was pointed out to me, I will be there as the first of those boxes arrive in people's homes. Rut-roh.

Speaking of arriving in homes, my monitor shipped last night. Yay New Egg! It's scheduled for delivery on Thursday, but as this is New Egg, my fingers are crossed for, like, tomorrow. Which would give me a day to play with it, which would make me happy. I think I may resubscribe to CoH for a month just to give it an awesome workout. :)

I am now out of strawberry frosted mini-wheats. But "Hysteria" will be forever.

Imagine it in a sing-song voice and it works, trust me.

Today is pay day! And we're not talking salted peanut logs. (Because ew.)

It's nice to get a check again.

It's even nicer that I thought I'd have to go up there to get it on my day off but lo, direct deposit kicked in already! Smell that? Smells gooood.

So now I am flush with cash. I've already squirreled away a good bit into savings to kick off the renewed house-saving extravaganza. Docked another bit for bills. Now it's our turn.

Mike and I are taking a portion of my check plus some of the stimulus and get to spend it for fun. I'll leave him to talk about what he's planning to get. Me? I'm still a bit up in the air. But I think what I might do is finally get that widescreen LCD monitor I've been wanting for a few years now.

I am, in fact, looking at this one. Thoughts?


In other news, last weekend we saw Iron Man. I won't go into much, as it's pretty much been talked to death online. I'll simply say that I really did like it, even as much as I hate Tony Stark. And that Robert Downey Jr. was pretty much perfect. I'd definitely rank it up there among the best comic movies.

During the previews though, we saw a trailer for a one-night-only showing of Rambo: First Blood the following Thursday. Have I mentioned how much Mike loves his classic action movies? Because Mike loves his classic action movies. I think I was sitting next to a small lake of drool when we heard about it. Long story just slightly less long, we also caught Rambo yesterday. I'll also leave it to him to talk about if he wants. I will only say that 1) it was better than I remember; 2) I neither needed nor wanted the 20 minute Sylvester Stallone interview before it started; and 3) the original ending? Kinda blows.

Looks like this is either a regular thing (these one-off movies) or something they're just doing for the summer. Next up appears to be Death Note followed by the (a?) Bleach movie. Not interested in either, but we'll have to keep an eye out. There are plenty of old movies I wouldn't mind seeing on the big screen.


Oh, and speaking of movies, one more thing I can solicit an opinion on.

Netflix gives us all the free eight-at-a-time subscription, right? We split that up, so Mike has some and I have some. Problem is that my some are sitting there and I haven't watched them yet. Which I'd like to do. So pick me one of my movies for today, and I think that I'll watch it around lunch. I've not yet seen any of these, so they're all good choices for me. I've got: Raising Arizona, Little Miss Sunshine, Across the Universe and Sweeney Todd. Thoughts, take two?

Until then, I think I'm gonna go chill with Rock Band for a bit. I love days off. (And getting paid!)

And with that update, my Bowie discography on the iPod is pretty darn near complete. Over 2 gigs, and about a day's worth of music.

My smile, she is huge.

With my spendable portion of our tax refund, I today picked myself up a newly-reduced iPod Shuffle for when I exercise.

It is very green, very cute, and named Lorne. Heeee.

This morning we finally incorporated the DVD recorder with the rest of the entertainment center. Tested, and it works fantastically.

Now ... it is time to archive! I so love this sort of thing.

First up (for no particular reason besides being the first thing to pop in my head) is my collection of X-Men: The Animated Series tapes. All but like the beginning four episodes (which I got on repeat) are first run too, which just adds an extra level of awesome. I get all the cheesy FOX Kids linking graphics ... and some even have commercials! Man, I loved this show.

I have a bookcase full of video tapes, many with stuff recorded over twenty years ago. This is going to be a fantastic project. :)

(Except maybe the archiving of Mike's Beavis & Butthead tapes. That will be less fantastic.)

Quick thoughts on the the Apple event, which I am quite avidly watching at the moment because I loves my iPod.

New nano. Is indeed the "fatty" as rumoured. Has video, which I guess is supposed to be yay, but the whole point of the nano to me has always been the tininess, which means that it's either going to be a tiny tiny screen – thus rendering the watching pretty strenuous and thus moot – or it's getting bigger and ruining the "nano" part of the nano.

iPod Touch. It's a phoneless iPhone. Eh. I think I'm still hating on the iPhone so I can't get excited about this. But that's okay, because ...

New iPods! (Now "iPod Classic" apparently.) Slimmer. Better battery. Price drop on 80GB models (mine's a twenty) down to $250. A whopping 160GB model for the old 80GB price of $350. And the best part? In stores this weekend ... just as Mum arrives and was planning to finally buy one for herself.

Well timed, Mr. Jobs. Well timed.

My stuff is here!

*hops around*

My Jellifish is SO CUTE.

1. Amy's off to New York. I'm hoping she has a great time. Nick Brendon, hon. Focus on the prize.

2. Jett got her stitches/staples out today. The ride there and back was as fun as always, but she healed up very well. Yay for healthy puppies!

3. We received a delivery of King Cakes from Mum. A little belated, a lot delicious.

4. My order should arrive very soon. I was pressed to spend a little bit of our refund (on something other than Jett's surgery that is) and I decided to pimp out Devon the Guitar. I'm really excited. A strap! A stand! A bag! A tuner! Speed picks! And a funky-ass pick that just looked too, too fun. I'm buying guitar supplies! Next thing you know, I'll have magazines. And maybe soon after, I'll be able to play more than nine whole chords!

Later today I'll finish up studying for my psych test, and see if I can't capitalize further on today's good karma.

I was delayed from my customary Loot List by the sheer awesomeness of said loot. I was planning to do this yesterday but that would have required a few precious minutes of not playing either my guitar or The Sims 2, and I apparently couldn't bear it. But today I have received an imperial edict to do so, and so I do.

( Cut for massive length, possible boringness, and piccychurs. )

OMG.

I have a real guitar.

I am so much cooler than all of you.

As mentioned previously, we are the proud owners of a new toy. I do so love my new toys. Mike's upcoming oral surgery isn't going to cost anywhere near what I budgeted for, so we were able to splurge and get ourselves a bit more for Christmas than our still-untouched Guitar Hero 2. But it'll be so very complimentary.

We are now the proud owners of a home theater system. A receiver, five speakers and subwoofer made of pure awesome. I'm extremely pleased with how great everything sounds. And by installing it, I finally cleaned a section by the TV that's been a junk repository for two years! Fringe benefit!

It's really bizarre though. This is the first piece of electronics in my house that I don't understand. I look at the remote and I'm baffled. I have no idea what any of the buttons on the front of the thing do. I can turn it on, adjust volume and switch between devices, and that's about the extent of it. Never before have I owned something and been nervy about touching it because I don't know what I'm doing. Once the novelty of this situation wears off, I expect much manual and on-line reading.

Oh, and before I forget, a big thank you to Scott for helping us out with configuration.

We tested it out with the GH2 demo disc. So, so cool to actually be able to hear Player 2's bass and rhythm now. My anticipation for Christmas increases!

In other news, as mentioned, this term is now complete and the grade-waiting begins. If all goes as it should, though, I expect all As. A smarty is me.

With the term complete, I now get about a month before the next one kicks in. Today, as with yesterday, I think I shall spend time enjoying a video game (which is actually me enjoying my sound system with pretty pictures). Either later today or tomorrow, I settle in for my Great Buffy marathon rewatch, followed by my Great Chosen reread, then followed by creation of the 9x13 promo and outline and, if all goes well, writing. In even better news, this next term (and the final one after) will be comparatively light, as I zip through in all the electives I've been putting off. In other words, FREE TIME = CHOSEN TIME. None too soon, in my opinion.

But for now, I have a game awaiting me. Ooo, explosions go boomy.

Term is done. YAY!

I have a new toy that I love. YAY!

My weekend with my guy rocked. YAY!

Tomorrow, I can do WHATEVER I WANT. YAY!

More on any of the above tomorrow. IF IT'S WHAT I WANT. For now, I continue kicking ass with Mike in X-Men Legends. I think we might actually beat it this time, rather than putting in an ungodly number of hours and then not touching it again for 18 months.

YAY!

I don't think time ever crawls quite like it crawls when something has been shipped from one location and you want, desperately, for it to arrive at yours.

All my goodies have departed from NewEgg, but aren't scheduled to arrive until the 31st. I would not mind the treat of them arriving early. Of course, if they do arrive at the beginning of next week, there's not much I can do with them until later on, so how about tomorrow, UPS? Tomorrow works for me.

In the meantime, the yummies. Because as all we all know, it's fun to share.

The upgrade I was looking for was to be a significant improvement over my current system with all the shiny new stuff, but within a reachable price range. I consider my loot haul to be at the bottom of the high bracket, just before the prices get all exponential on my ass.

My last system was an AMD, and for a while, I was just going to stick with that. But after some reading, I decied to go with Intel. The Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe to be exact. This will fit on my shiny Intel motherboard. From what I can see, it's not the flashiest mobo, but it does look to be one of the most stable, and has mad crazy room for expansion (something I didn't really plan for on my last computer). For RAM, I will take 2GB of Crucial DDR2 667 plz.

For hard drives, I'm finally making a switch to SATA, and I'm very excited to see how these work versus my old IDE. I snagged 2x 320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm. 16MB cache? I drool. I can't wait to resume music vidding at some point with this new set up.

Video card, it's time to try me out some PCIe with BFG's GeForce 7950GT. I absolutely adore my BFG AGP card (I will, in fact, be a little sorry to see it go. It's only about a year old, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet), so BFG was my first pick. Very interested to see how this works.

Rounding it out, and almost as an afterthought, I'm upgrading my soundcard as well to the Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic. No new speakers for a while though, so yay for 5.1 still working with them.

I've also inclued a CPU heatsink, a video card heatsink, and some goo. Overheating, especially at the peak of summer, is a definite concern in my sometimes-cramped, unairconditioned apartment.

I'd just recently upgraded my power supply and my CD/DVD RW. I think my DVD-Rom is okay too, though if it needs to be replaced, I found some good ones for around $30, so not a big deal. The only other thing left is my case. And I really just can't settle on any other case, so I'll put that off for a while, unless I have no choice but to get a new one once I see everything (and I don't expect that to be the ... erm, case).

But for now, my toy playing must wait.

Hurry, UPS! Hurry and give it to meeeeee!

You know, it's New Episode Day, but the whole thing still feels really weird to me. This past week has been such a blur of DO DO DO that I almost feel like I haven't actually been at the controls. And now it's up, I just feel sort of sapped. Very peculiar. I think I probably just can't believe that after so long of being afraid I couldn't (deep down, believing I couldn't), it's strange how easy it felt.

And it's a bit of a tough pill to swallow that I could've gotten so much done in the past year and didn't.

So as I sit back and just check for my stats periodically (read: obsessively), I shall play with my early birthday present from my mother. (So see, Steph, you were sort of right on target.) This year she got for me a brand new TiVo (180-hour, dual tuner) and a pre-paid three year service. As I type, I am in the middle of setting it up. Soon I shall tackle making sure it's on the network and getting all the programming information downloaded.

My old TiVo box (bought around 2000, I think, with either a 60 or 80-hour capacity), I'll probably move upstairs. I'll cancel the subscription, but it'll still be great as, in essence, a digital VCR. Plus it still has this week's Stewarts and Colberts, plus the entire Veronica Mars season 2 which I haven't even started yet. Still lots of little goodies to enjoy.

But first, I have a service agreement to not read and more stats to obsess about. And tomorrow, huge day as all cleaning and tidying I've not been doing in preparation for mimisgrotto's arrival piles on top of me and demands attention before her flight lands at 8pm.

(A huge shout out though to Mike, who has – not only without complaint but with solicitations – been doing the bulk of the cleaning so that I could write. Have I mentioned he is teh awsome? Because totally teh awsome. He's so Mike. [Not to be confused with So Raven.])