After an email tussle with a soldier friend who’s serving overseas, all of my profusely apologizing emails bounce back with an MMX error. This has been gong on for two months.

Can anyone explain what an MMX error means? And, more to the point, does this mean I should assume something horrible has happened to my soldier friend???

With VH out of the country for what seems like an interminable future, I’ve been struggling for ways to keep The Big-Eyed Boy entertained. After school today I informed him we were going game shopping.

As I previously explained, we finally got a Wii. Oh, how I love that thing. If you’d told me a year ago — heck, even a month ago — that I would wake up in the morning looking forward to working out, I’d have told you to step away from the crack pipe. But here it is, just a few weeks later, and I can’t get enough of my Wii Fit.

But watching Mommy workout is even less interesting to the Big-Eyed Boy than watching Mommy’s toenail paint dry. Go figure. And that’s precisely why I’d thought that one of our best household investments right now would be a smattering of Nintendo Wii Games.

Unfortunately, in my glee to find something — anything — to engross the child (and thus buy myself some peace and quiet), I failed to factor in the hassle of having a somewhat small yet very loud kid demanding that I let him have a turn on the Wii.

So, back to the store we went in search of something that he could play without booting me off the Wii, and preferably play on his own. In his room. Or, at least, in any other room besides the one I’m in. Of course, the first thing he spied was the XBox 360, conveniently displayed beside its version of Guitar Hero.

Since that’s one of the Big-Eyed Boy’s favorite games on the PS2 — which we already have — I just couldn’t see myself buying a top-dollar console plus XBox 360 games that are basically carbon-copies of ones we already own, but for another gaming system.

Besides, even if I’d bought the XBox he’d still be begging to play on the family room TV, requiring me to abandon my Wii time (Mii time?), and thus entirely defeating the purpose of our shopping trip.

Fortunately, right next to the XBox display was a bright, shinny array of Nintendo DS’s, something my son has been begging for since he could pronounce “Nintendo”. And I, being the softy that I am (read: determined to beat level 2 of “Bunnies Love To Dance” on Rayman Raving Rabbids) agreed that he is, indeed, finally old enough to have a DS system.

That’s right, I bought my kid a Nintendo DS — and three Nintendo DS games of his choosing — so I could have my Wii all to myself.

But — when you compare that to the cost of hiring a babysitter, calling a cab, and spending a night out drinking — it’s worth it.

I’ve mentioned before how very much I despise having .pdf documents come up in search results.

That’s in part because they tend to be massive gobs of poorly formatted text which makes for unpleasant viewing online. But, of course, Adobe managed to convince the government and big business to use their program by promising it would make information more accessible when, in fact, quite the opposite has occurred.

See, I do a lot of research online — a lot — and yet I cringe every time I see pdf files in the search results since I know I’m not only going to be staring at an ugly page, but that it’s going to be a useless page for the most part.

For all their promise, pdf files can be nothing but grief if you’re just interested in copying and pasting a section into the Word document you’re working with … unless you’ve got the program to convert pdf to text.

Frankly, I’m surprised I haven’t heard more about that program. Surely I’m not the only person irritated with Adobe, much less the high price of Adobe Acrobat? It shouldn’t cost that much to translate from pdf to text just so you can work with information!

Given the number of projects I’m juggling right now, I’m definitely going to be looking into this program further. There’s a 30-day fully-functional trial version, if you’re interested in checking it out, too: convert pdf2text.

My laptop, which I use as my primary computer, is fried. By all appearances, the hard drive is dead beyond repair, but I secretly suspect that the poor thing just didn’t want to suffer the indignity of having the phrase “President Obama” typed upon its keys.

So, I’m hoping that a change of hard drive is enough to solve the problem. Meanwhile, I’m using my old desktop computer which, because I’ve ignored it for over 2 years, means I have hours of downloading and installing updates (and making the desktop pretty) before I’m back up to speed.

Thank goodness I’ve been religious about backing up my data each week. Unfortunately, those backups didn’t include email… so if you’ve sent me something in the past 72 hours, don’t hold your breath for a response. (Unless you’re a liberal, in which case you should probably get used to holding your breath and waiting.)

(By Scott McLeod and Jeff Brenman)

Very cool, and very thought-provoking. The soundtrack’s pretty good, too.

Scientists have discovered a molecular mechanism which, when activated, can erase specific memories in mice.

Perhaps the solution to forgetting the last 5 weeks of my life won’t be hard on my liver, after all.

As much as I love the way technology’s making entertainment more portable, I can’t help getting frustrated that each provider seems to have a different file format and none of them play nicely with each other. My iPod won’t play music I copied from CD onto my hard drive using Windows format. Windows Media Center won’t play iTunes, either. My cell phone purportedly doubles as an a mp3 player, but it refuses to play music from iTunes or Windows, requiring me to instead purchase songs from Verizon that I’ve already paid for elsewhere. And don’t get me started on the whole frustration of trying to burn a kids show from cable TV — for which we pay an outrageous sum every month — so my son can watch it in the mini-van later that day.

Meanwhile, a quick call to my cell phone provider to ask why my phone won’t play my iTunes reveals that, as far as the phone company’s concerned, wanting to listen to my music on the multi-function phone they sold me means I’m a file-stealing felon. Say what? That’s right: they intentionally limit playing to their file format so they know I’ve paid for the file… or, more accurately, I’ve paid them for it.

Naturally, I’m a bit miffed over the whole thing. As a consumer, I didn’t fork over money just to play a song via iTunes or my iPod (for which I also paid): I wanted the right for me to play it any time, any where, on any device. Ditto for those CDs and DVDs I’ve bought as well as the shows I watch on cable. If I’m paying $50 per month to get cable into my home so I can watch reruns of “Absolutely Fabulous” then why shouldn’t I be the one to decide what device I’ll watch them on?

Faced with this annoyance — and an increasingly on-the-go lifestyle as VH and I travel to see our ailing parents — we’ve been looking into ways to liberate our favorite forms of entertainment. We aren’t interested in ripping off artists or violating laws against file-swapping. We just want our entertainment devices to do what they’d promised: play our stuff!

Until recently, making that happen was a nightmare in itself. The majority of conversion programs are limited to a mere handful of formats, and as we’ve discovered they lose a lot of quality in the process. There’s even more quality loss when trying to burn them to CD. Ditto for programs that claim to make transferring recorded shows from DVR to DVD easier: they results quite often look like those bootleg movies made in China by some guy holding up a camcorder in a theater. Awful.

This past weekend we learned about Blaze Media Pro which turns out to have a number of uses way beyond the standard convert DVD to AVI, MPG, WMV function. As an all-in-one audio and video converter, the program recognizes and handles dozens of formats and offers a solution on converting protected AAC (read: iTunes) files. Once converted, the program also includes CD burning software so you can back up all of your songs by an artist (regardless of format) for safekeeping.

The program’s advanced video features aren’t limited to DVD burning software: it also offers advanced video capture and editing. Although I’ve yet to figure out a one-step solution to converting shows captured on my DVR to a format that will play on my cell phone, the program’s intuitive enough that a little exploration and some inventiveness makes it happen. It’s a slick program that’s jam-packed with so many features it makes the other ones look weak in comparison.

Interested? Check out their free 15-day download. You’ll be hooked.

If you’ve been thinking about getting a Kindle — Amazon’s amazing wi-fi powered electronic book reader — now’s the time to act. Thanks to a special offer you can save $100 on the Kindle when you sign up for the Amazon Rewards Visa card.