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.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

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.

Online DVD and on-demand video giant Netflix suffered a severe service disruption last week. This was only the second service interruption in the company’s nearly 10-year history.

Although the “mystery outage” didn’t affect on-line viewing or ordering of movies, it did prevent Netflix from shipping movies via U.S. mail for three days. But the company has no plans to leave consumers feeling the brunt of the problem.

Netflix customers whose movies were delayed will receive a 15% credit on their next billing cycle. New subscribers still using the free 2-week trial will receive an additional week without charge.

If you ask me, that’s some impressive customer service.

My latest rant about social networking is up at Pajamas Media. But if you’re following me on Twitter, you already know that.

So, I downloaded Firefox 3.0 yesterday, a week after their much-hyped download day since we were out of town and I didn’t trust the hotel’s LAN.

Now, everyone who anticipates I’m going to proclaim Firefox 3.0 the greatest thing since sliced bread (and TaB soda), and how using the internet will never be the same again, raise your hand.

Oh, stop it already, especially you over there with your finger in your nose. You know me better. You know I don’t like change, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m not terribly thrilled with Firefox 3.0.

I miss my cool themes, for one thing. I also miss about 60% of the add-ons I use on a daily basis. Oh, and I absolutely cannot stand that “Smart Locator Bar”. Fortunately, I figured out how to turn it off:

1. Type about:config into your address bar.
2. Assure Firefox you realize this might void your warranty.
3. Enter the following into the filter bar: browser.urlbar.maxRichResults
4. When that result comes up, right-click on it and select “Modify”.
5. Change the value from the default 12 to -1.
6. Close the window.
7. Close and restart Firefox.

Sure, you’ll probably still have to look at the ugly default theme and the browser’s usability will continue sucking until the add-on authors write updates, but at least you won’t have to put up with that annoying drop-down menu on every single search form you use.

UPDATE: Oh, and the way Firefutz just crashed on me reminds me of another annoyance: despite having the option selected to restore my previous session next time I start the browser it doesn’t. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you’re in the habit of having, oh, forty-plus tabs open simultaneously it gets to be a big freaking pain in the ass. Fortunately, it’s Friday, and that means it’s almost martini o’clock, which even I know means that subsequent errors are most likely attributable to user stupidity.

A 2007 Harris Interactive Reputation study released today says that America’s most trusted company is Google, the ubiquitous search engine with the name that’s since become a verb (much to Google’s annoyance).

According to people who get paid to study this kind of stuff — which I don’t — that level of trust shows that U.S. consumers look beyond mere name-recognition when deciding whether a company is trustworthy.

“Google is the perfect example showing reputation does not correlate with ad spending,” said Robert Fronk, senior VP-senior consultant, reputation strategy, at Harris Interactive. “The positive perception of how you treat your employees, your corporate-social-responsibility efforts, and your products and services and the amount of media that can generate probably trumps any ad spend they would ever want to make.”

In other Google news:

• Today Google is expected to reveal a new method of tracking user clicks to help advertisers better target their ads to coincide with users’ interests.

• Also announced today, Google’s much-anticipated cell phone will be delayed for at least two quarters due to manufacturer’s difficulties programming in Android, the Google-created software the company hopes will revolutionize the cellular industry.

• Publicly available Google local search data is being used in a trial to define pornography, with an attorney arguing that frequent searches for sexually explicit material demonstrates a community’s obscenity standard.

With 81.85% of 27,000 respondents declaring Google as the most trustworthy company, it seems the real news here is how few people understand the word trustworthy.

So, you’re sick of paying the Meep-Meep guys through the nose for your high-speed internet. Or maybe your Meep-Meep provider just “upgraded” your digital cable TV service and you’ve found, as we have, that the new programming guide is awful, that you’ve lost the ability to do keyword searches to record movies featuring your favorite actor/actress, and that your box reboots in the middle of your favorite programs? Meanwhile, forking money over to Ma Bell’s offspring seems like a waste since even their “fastest” services are still intolerably slow.

In that case, don’t forget to check the Cox services in your area. Cox operates in numerous states and provides both home and business service.

In addition to Cox packages combining deals on various television/internet/phone configurations there are a variety of Cox bundles offering savings when you order all three. (The availability of packages and bundles depends on where you live.)

Remember, starting next February your television with rabbit ears won’t receive programs if you haven’t installed a converter box or subscribed to cable television. That doesn’t mean you have to spend a fortune, though: Cox cable TV subscribers can stick with basic programming or upgrade to a DVR (digital video recorder). Believe me, once you’ve experienced the power of watching television on your time schedule you’ll wonder how on earth you lived without it.

Ironically enough, just as I’ve been looking for ways to go offline a little more often, my in-laws are becoming more plugged-in than ever. Now that they’ve relocated permanently up north (which means no more stops at our house as the migrate from one end of the country to the other), they’ve decided to ditch their dial-up service.

For ten years we’ve been trying to get them to do just that. Being senior citizens who feel there’s something shameful about watching TV at night, they shunned our recommendations to get cable television and internet. So every time we received ATT internet offers in the mail we’d send them to the in-laws in the hope they’d sign up. Nothin’ doing. they remained convinced the internet was just a fad, and that dial-up service was good enough for anyone.

After their last visit to our house, though, they got hooked. My mother-in-law had just bought a new laptop so she can play Solitaire to keep herself entertained (and from watching the road) while my father-in-law does the driving. Then she realized she could tap into our home’s WiFi and spent the next 6 hours cruising from one recipe site to another, downloading and saving data faster than she’d ever thought possible.

Then there was the evening when she discovered the blessings of watching time-shifted TV, and how nice it is being able to pause the DVR so no one missed their TV program when she’d start talking. (That wasn’t so much of a blessing for the rest of us, as you can imagine.) By the end of their visit our DVR’s hard-drive was bulging with recordings of Walker, Texas Ranger and Matlock… shows we’d never watch if they weren’t around.

Yesterday I got an email from her complete with a dozen or so family pictures. That’s not something she was able to do with her old dial-up connection since uploading the images would tie up their phone lines for hours. It seems that, as soon as they settled in to their new residence, one of the first things they did was sign up for ATT satellite tv with DVR-service included. Plus, they’d taken advantage of one of those ATT offers to bundle high-speed DSL with the television service, and now she’s hooked.

Do you have any idea how strange it is to get an email from your elderly mother-in-law raving over the latest Two and a Half Men episode or dissecting the first airing of Living Lohan? I swear to God, though, if the woman starts sending me pr0n I’m canceling our own internet service pronto.

Lifehacker has an interesting entry today about people unplugging their computers to avoid distractions. Honestly, I don’t know that I could take things to such an extreme: when I want to go online to look something up I want to do it right then. That 3-minute boot up process seems far too long when I’m in a hurry.

But I do make a point of pretty much ignoring my computer over the weekend. This, of course, infuriates friends and family who’ve come to think of me as being online all day, every day. They dash off quick emails then expect equally quick replies and, when I don’t answer for two days, assume I’m either angry with them, dead or both. Fortunately I’ve been slowly training those close to me to understand that I need that time offline to avoid blogging burnout.

Unfortunately, I still lose quite a bit of time to the computer during the week. It’s just so hard not to pop open my laptop to quickly check email as I walk by… only to find that 15 minutes later I’m still hunched over the thing dashing off a flurry of responses. Or I’ll go online to look something up quickly, then find myself sitting there two hours later still mindlessly surfing, usually without having found the information I was originally looking for.

Yes, I could use one of those programs that blocks access to time-wasting applications and sites. Yes, I could exercise a bit of self-discipline (but, hey, if I was good at that I’d still be a size 6, wouldn’t I?). I’ve made some progress by refusing to even look at email until I’ve read the morning headlines and written a couple of draft blog entries, but even those things often lead to further distractions.

How do you avoid losing entire days to the internet? Share your tips and tricks in the comments!

I’ve about had it up to my eyebrows with all of this “social networking” crap on the web. Oh, sure, I thought they seemed fun at first and I hurriedly signed up for Twitter and a few other places. What a great way to stay in touch with my blogging friends, I thought, even on days when I don’t have time to visit their blogs.

Then a few sites turned into a handful, and a handful became two handfuls, and now every morning when I check email I’m swamped with notices from Friendfeed and messages about who’s added me as a friend, fan or favorite on this or that site. Naturally, I feel obligated — for some strange reason — to check out who those people are and what their blogs are like.

But by the time I’ve done that my morning’s shot, and most of it’s been wasted on strangers who — despite having labeled me as a ‘friend’ or whatever — I don’t know, don’t really have much in common with and, when it comes right down to it, don’t actually want to get to know better. (But, hey, if you added me “Thanks.”)

Now even Google is getting in on the social networking thing with its “Friend Connect” service which — if you ask me — sounds remarkably like running a blog:

Using Google’s new Friend Connect product, any Web page, whether it is devoted to curling or pizza or a folk singer, can allow visitors to make and connect with other “friends” who visit that site. Like any major social network today, any Web page using Friend Connect could easily present to each user the names and pictures of friends and potential friends. Those people could then post messages to one another.

Thing is, I used to love being online in order to avoid being social. I loved sitting down in the morning with a cup of coffee and reading the news, blogging about whatever struck my fancy and exchanging emails with a couple of people before ignoring the computer until the next time I was bored.

Social networking changes all that. If you add someone as a “friend” you’re going to get messages (or Twitters or Friendfeeds or whatever) about every single entry they’ve written, sites they’ve Stumbled or Dugg or added to Del.icio.us and comments they’ve left around the web. And — if they actually know you’re following them — they now expect you to know everything they’ve written within hours of it happening.

The thing about this “social networking”, really, is that it actually seems to be having the exact opposite effect. Why bother sending an email to a close friend saying you’re having a crappy day when, instead, you can just blog about it and assume they’ve read it (then resent them if they haven’t)? Why pick up a phone and ask for a shoulder to cry on when your cat gets run over when, instead, you can Twitter about it and be offended when others don’t know about your loss? When did “socializing” equal monologues which others absolutely must pay attention to or they’re not really your friends?

They can call it “social networking” all they want but as far as I’m concerned it’s all becoming increasingly anti- social. Or at least it’s making me feel that way. So if you happen to be among the four dozen or so people today whom I stopped following, don’t take it too personally. If we were really friends you’d have my email address and/or my phone number, and you’d know you’re welcome to use them when the mood strikes.