An illustrated guide to the Seven Stages of Martini Madness, brought to you by Modern Drunkard Magazine.
Archive for September, 2004
LikeSit home and watch TV Friday night.
The SciFi channel is airing all four seasons of Farscape (88 episodes) – leading up to the premiere of The Peacekeeper Wars on October 17th. The mega marathon starts tomorrow at 8AM ET/PT, so set your Tivos!
Also! The next season of Degrassi starts tomorrow night on The N! It’s a special hour-long episode full of Canadian courtroom drama as Paige takes the guy who raped her to court. Pretty soon it’ll be his turn to get raped. By a man. Hurr hurr hurr!
When I first read about the TrafficGauge, they were only testing it in the Seattle area, and I longed for a southern California version. I guess the testing went well, because an LA/OC version is now available!
The device itself is $80 – I’d say that’s a fair price. But the cool factor ends there. They expect you to pay a monthly subscription fee ($7) to use it!
What the crap! Seven bucks? No thank you! I will turn on the radio and find out what I need to know for free. AM radio does the traffic every 10 minutes, and Sirius does it every 4.
Or better yet, I’ll check the traffic map at SigAlert.com before I leave.
Do they think people are idiots? CalTrans’ traffic reporting system is 100% automated and all the work is done by sensors in the road. There is no reason they should have to charge a monthly fee for these things. Setting up and maintaining one or two antennas to send a signal to these things could (and should) be entirely subsidized by the mark-up on the devices themselves.
Honestly, seeing someone trying to charge money for this makes me want to hurt someone.
FutureMark released 3DMark 05 today – the ultimate Windows benchmarking tool for hardcore gamers. It also looks and sounds beautiful.
You know that shiny new DVD Star Wars Trilogy you bought a few days ago? Well apparently it was rushed to you just as quickly as you rushed to buy it.
The entire musical soundtrack is actually REVERSED in the two rear channels. Star Wars seems to be the only movie affected; Empire and Jedi are fine.
Doh!
I spent the weekend in Palm Desert (Indian Wells, actually) at my buddy Steve‘s bachelor party. We all had a great time. Saturday we played golf, something I haven’t done in…oh…about 10 years I’d say. I’m glad we didn’t keep score.
Today I am lightly sunburned and so sore that it hurts to grip my steering wheel.
When I first heard about Sony deliberately planning to not include MP3 support in its “iPod Killer” in favor of ATRAC3, I wanted to grab the closest available Sony employee and shake them until their arms fell off.
Finally someone in Japan has seen the light. Native mp3 playback is coming to the VGF-AP1 and most of Sony’s other digital music players. I guess you can only deal with so much industry ridicule before you cave in and start providing what your customers actually want.
In related news, Emusic.com sells downloadable music – with no DRM! 192kb/sec MP3s are all you’ll find! At $0.25 cents per track, that’s a heck of a lot less than Wal-Mart’s $0.88, and a hell of a lot less than Apple’s $0.99.
Just when Firefox was really getting awesome, Google has to come and screw everything up!
Firefox, the Mozilla Suite, Opera, and Safari. Do we really need another alternative browser? I say no! Firefox is hitting its stride now – don’t you dare take that away, Google!
ARGH.
The Team America trailer is now online!
A new president, a fast-approaching 50th birthday, and a decade of neglect have all conspired to put Disneyland through one of the most extensive park-wide refurbishment efforts ever.
The latest photo tour at MiceAge tells the story. You can’t go two steps without seeing painters and carpenters hard at work somewhere in the park; tarps are everywhere. It’s sad to say, but TLC like that hasn’t been poured on the park in a long, long time. And that doesn’t even take into account the three new attractions that Tomorrowland’s getting – a gutted and completely rebuilt Space Mountain, Buzz Lightyear’s SpaceRanger Spin (imported from WDW,) and a return of the submarines. Anaheim’s jewel will shine very brightly when its 50th birthday rolls around on July 17th.
With all that investment being made in the park, it makes sense that admission prices – and annual passes in particular – will soon shoot through the roof. A Premium annual pass sells for $279 right now, and the rumors I’m hearing have that jumping to $500 during or after this year’s Christmas season. This is also an effort to ‘thin the herd’, as right now something like 600,000 people have passes and don’t pay a dime to visit the park.
Fun times!
Xbox Live
PlayStation Network
