Writing Stuff

As much as I despise Gamestop and their full retail prices, lack of sales on new games and accessories, and depressingly low trade-in values for current games and video game systems, I've gotta say that they sure are convenient. The other day I was interested in picking up some new games for one of my systems without spending any money. I have an Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii and a crapload of games for all of them that I never play or have already beaten. I decided to stack them up, take them in to Gamestop, and see what I could get for them. Turns out it wasn't so bad, actually. For the mix of 10 or so current and older games that I brought in, I walked out with about $165 in store credit. Sure, I could've sold the games for a lot more through eBay or something like that but those are hardly convenient and my decision to sell the games was made in all of about 5 seconds. Driving to Gamestop took another 15 seconds, and so less than 5 minutes later I was able to walk out of the ...

Even though BlizzCon 2009 was just announced , I'm already excited for it. Last year's ticket debacle made me lose nearly a whole day of productivity and the convention itself was fairly packed, but I still had a ton of fun and so did the wife. We're both fairly casual World of Warcraft players but it's still nice to be able to get our nerd on with fellow gamers for a couple of days out of the year. While BlizzCon is still a little over 6 months away, I've already made preparations. I've requested the time off work and booked our two night stay at the Marriott that is literally right up against the convention center. We always get a hotel room for BlizzCon, even though we live maybe 10 minutes away. It's nice to be able to just walk to the room after the convention. This year we're staying about a mile closer and we're checking in the night before the event itself. Ticket pickup the day before is an annoying and tiring event (especially since the ...

Okay, so the iPhone isn't so bad anymore. I got mine replaced for the third time a week or so ago and it's been pretty much smooth sailing since then. Battery life is fantastic, and I'm easily pulling 4+ hours of usage and over 48 hours of standby. That's not bad and all and I'm actually really happy with it. Google just launched Google Sync , which provides an awesome and awesomely free way to sync your Google Contacts and Google Calendar (you do use those, right?) with your iPhone over the air (OTA). It uses Microsoft Exchange to push out change to your contact list and calendar immediately, and it works great. I've been waiting for something like this for a while as it's nearly a complete replacement of MobileMe . As of right now, it doesn't support push email but I do hope that it's coming soon. I'd like to apologize to Apple. I was just really pissed off when my iPhone started giving me crap for the 4th time. I've had nothing but bad lu...