People can get addicted to just about anything. So, the American Medical Association's proposal that videogame addiction be considered a mental illness is a (excuse the pun) no-brainer. But there's an even bigger problem highlighted by the aforelinked Associated Press story -- parental responsibility, or lack thereof. Joyce Protopapas of Frisco, Texas, said her 17-year-old […]
Journalists get math wrong -- a lot. I used to joke a lot that I was probably the only journalist in the world who had taken multi-variable calculus. Then I found out that OpinionJournal.com's James Taranto had too. (For the record: It's been nearly 16 years since I took the course. I passed, with a […]
My desktop computer had a minor meltdown last night. About a week ago I installed Office 2007 professional on the desktop. I'd been running it for a couple months without incident on my laptop and I figured: "Why not?" Yes, that would be a mistake. The installation was uneventful until about 2/3 of the way […]
The Recording Industry Association of America is going after people who have the gall to share digital copies of of yet-to-be-released songs leaked by the band Nine Inch Nails itself. This isn't news. What is news is how this was described on G4 TV earlier this evening while I was flipping channels: "The RIAA is […]
Sony's PlayStation unit has had a bad year. Last November, Sony launched their Playstation3 video game console. Depending on the model you chose, it would run either $499 or $599 -- that includes the console, one game controller and zero games. The only half-way decent game at launch was a first-person shooter called "Resistance: Fall […]
I got Microsoft Windows Vista Business edition and Office 2007 in the mail yesterday. Seven hundred bucks worth of software for free -- all for playing six Webcasts -- including one or two that I actually did listen to (and didn't understand more than a fraction of what they were talking about). The strange thing […]
Microsoft and Acer collaborated to send review PCs loaded with Windows Vista to certain bloggers which they can keep, gift to readers (yeah, right) or return to Microsoft (yeah, right, right). Just a note to the Microsoft marketing team: I can be bought. Cheap.
I can understand how tech support people can get frustrated. I've heard the stories about people complaining that their computer isn't working, and after asking enough questions the tech support person learns that the building has lost power -- who knew that computers required electricity? But I've also dealt with tech support people who clearly […]
About 10:30 last night my 5-year-old Toshiba cable modem apparently figured that five years of blogging was enough and committed suicide. It was a quiet death. No bizarre behavior leading up to the tragic event. When it died, there was no smoke, sparks or flame ... the lights simply went out. Needless to say this […]
This is a tech-related post. If that sort of stuff doesn't interest you, just skip the rest. It seems like those USB thumb drives only seem to last about a year. At least, that's how long my last two have lasted -- the second died today. I didn't have anything on it that I don't […]