It’s no secret that I listen to weird, lousy music. My better half would argue that my taste in music is “terrible” and that my Ipod is full of things that are “painful to listen to.”

It should then come as no surprise that Italo Disco is one of my guilty pleasures.

It’s not usually Italian and it’s almost never disco, so I’m not sure where that title came from. Italo Disco is basically 80s new-wave music from all over Europe, but the lyrics are in english (with thick european accents!) Wikipedia does a better job explaining it than I do, though.

I’ve listened to all of Blanco Y Negro’s gargantuan 49-disc “I Love Disco Diamonds” Italo compilation series a couple times now and I have to say that some of this garbage really puts a spring in my step and makes the day go by pretty quickly!

A lot of it is super catchy and if any of it had ever made its way to America 20 years ago I bet it would have really taken off.

Oh, and I made you a mixtape. Happy Friday!

I installed the new Wii Homebrew Channel over the weekend. The whole process took about two minutes and I couldn’t have screwed things up if I tried.

The first thing I did was load up an SD card full of emulators and minutes later I was playing Pilotwings with my Wiimote. Pilotwings! Somehow I always come back to Pilotwings.

This doesn’t break any laws (I own the cartridge!) and seeing as how there’s no hardware modification involved I’m guessing it doesn’t even void your warranty…but just to be safe I blocked my Wii from hitting “*nintendo.com” on my router, so its ‘phone-home’ capabilities have been neutralized!

Anyway, the entire process of getting this up and running was embarrassingly quick and easy, especially for what is now the number one console in the Americas.

Whose idea was it to put an SD slot in this thing anyway? I bet he/she’s sweating bullets right about now.

I got my Xbox 360 back from the repair center yesterday. That’s a 10 day turnaround from the day I dropped it off at UPS. Not too shabby, but nothing beats the three days I got from Nintendo.

Not all is well with my returned 360, however! Now I can only use the downloaded content that I’ve paid for if my gamertag is signed in to Live. This means I can’t play XBLA titles if I’m offline, and Tammy can’t play them unless she signs me in on a second controller.

I anticipated this problem, but I wasn’t too concerned because there’s a system in place for restoring access on repaired consoles.

Unfortunately that system isn’t working. Evidently the geniuses over at Microsoft’s repair center forgot to transfer over my DRM licenses for my purchased content to my new console, because following those steps does absolutely nothing.

Rather than call India to plead my case to someone who likely won’t have any idea what I’m talking about, I’m just going to deal with it for another month. That’s when – according to this interview, a tool will be released that’ll let you re-license content to a single console on your own.

That tool is about two years overdue.

VIDEO GAME CONSOLE REPAIR UPDATE!

I dropped my broken Wii off at the UPS store Monday morning and had a brand new one delivered to my house by noon THURSDAY. That’s crazy fast! If you live in Southern California and your Wii dies, you can probably expect the same results – the repair center is in Chatsworth!

The repair place even transferred over all of my saved games, unspent Wii points, and Miis to the new machine. Hooray!

I dropped my 360 off on Monday too, but Microsoft’s repair center is in Texas so they didn’t even receive it until Thursday. Unless they manage to ship a new one out within 12 hours like Nintendo did, I think I can definitively say that Microsoft lost the repair race.

A friend at work is on his third Wii. A non-work friend is on her fourth 360! I guess they just don’t build game consoles like they used to. Fully-functioning Atari 2600s are plentiful on eBay. Maybe I’ll downgrade!

Part of my morning routine includes something I like to call the “Catalina Shuffle”.

I take two Q-Tips and dip them in hot water. Then I shove them in my ears and spin them around at the same time while simultaneously swishing Listerine around in my mouth.

It’s an intense experience and it makes me weak in the knees.

Try it! You clean out three holes at once and save some time in the process.

As for the name…it just popped into my head one day and it sounded catchy. Catalina Shuffle! Ha-cha-cha!

Last night I was witness to a double homicide. In my living room.

Both my Xbox 360 and my Wii are busted. What are the odds!

I’ve had my 360 since February of 2006 and it has otherwise performed flawlessly since then. I consider myself lucky to have gotten 26 months of service out of this thing – especially since most of my 360-owning friends have had their consoles repaired at least once. Now I just have to go through DRM hell (read the comments) to restore access to my downloadable content.

My Wii has started doing this thing where sparkly pixels just show up on top of whatever you’re playing. I suspected my component video cable was screwy so I replaced it, but that didn’t fix anything. The photo above is from the channel browser where it’s particularly noticeable. The Internet tells me this is a sign of a dying GPU, and I’m not the only one seeing it happen!

Luckily both consoles are still under warranty, so last night I called up Microsoft and Nintendo. Pre-paid shipping gear is headed my way from both companies and soon I’ll be back in business.

Now it’s a race! Who has the fastest repair center? Time will tell!

Kate had her three-month photos taken yesterday. (see also, two months, one month, and zero months)

She didn’t smile much, but trust me – when the cameras are gone she smiles like they’re going outta style.

The other night I laid her down in her bassinet at bedtime and I laid down to go to sleep too. Well she wasn’t particularly tired and after a few minutes she started fussin’ and cryin’ and carryin’ on. So I got out of bed, walked over to the bassinet and looked down at her to see what the problem was. Instantly the cries stopped and she looked up at me with a big smile on her face. So I talked to her and rocked her a little for a few minutes before setting her down again and returning to bed.

She was good for a minute or two before the crying started again. So I got up, walked over to the bassinet, and sure enough she started up with the smiles as soon as she saw me. So I stood there and we made faces at each other, smiling and cooing back and forth for a good half hour before her eyelids just got to be too heavy and she finally zonked out.

So I would say that’s been one of many highlights.