Nintendo Wii

I have always been a fan of Nintendo ever since I was a little kid. But I just got the Wii for my birthday and let me tell you, it is amazing. I have only been playing for a couple of weeks, but it is great. It came with a sports game with tennis, golf, bowling, baseball, and boxing. They are so much fun. It takes a few times to get the hang of it. But you get to act out the full motion of the sports. And it is great exercise also. I played boxing, and it was nonstop movement for about 10 minutes. I had a sweat afterwards. I just got the new Tiger '08 version. It is unbelievable. You can either play standing or sitting. Standing is the way to go. You get to swing the club like you are on a real golf course. And it is very sensitive too, so it actually helps you work on your real golf swing. But if you are feeling lazy, then you can sit and use the nunchuck controller like any other game system. I definitely recommend this for any age group. I cannot wait for more games to come out.

I hate my laptop

I have had it for about 2 or 3 years, and it is starting to make me very upset. It has been running extremely slow lately. Everytime I try to open up a new window, it takes about two minutes. Also the other day, I tried to watch a TV show on it, but it was breaking up too much and I couldn't understand it. So I had to buy it off itunes since I had forgotten to set the Tivo. So I remembered a couple things that were in our text book this year. First I ran the Disk Cleanup, and then I ran the Disk defragmentation. This took a couple hours to complete, and it still did not make my computer go any faster. I thought it would for sure. And then yesterday a message popped up that I am running low on virtual memory. So my last guess is to get more RAM. I only have 480 MB of RAM now, so I am hoping that if I add more, my computer will respond better. A friend of our family knows how to install it, so I will try this option. If this doesn't work, then it might be time to get a new one.

Podcasts

I never knew what a podcast was. But I was just looking through itunes one day, and saw a podcast page. So I went on there just to see what it was all about. It was amazing. It had all of my favorite people from ESPN on there. I could listen to Mike and Mike in the Morning, PTI, Around the Horn, Bill Simmons, and they even had Tony Kornheiser's morning talk show on Washington Post Radio. How much do you think it would have been to download all of these every day? I would have guessed a little bit. But they are all FREE. I can listen to my favorite shows on my car ride to work, and I could even listen to them while I was at work. It really made the day go by fast listening to good stuff without having to buy a satellite radio. I couldn't have listened to any of these live over our normal radio signals. So you have to listen to it 1 day later. It is really not a big deal, when you consider the money you are saving. Plus the stuff is funny, and can keep you entertained at work, where I wouldn't have been able to hook up a satellite radio anyway. And the best part is, is that it downloads the most recent podcast everyday as soon as I log into itunes. I don't have to go searching everyday, it is all right there for me in one spot.

Fantasy sports with StatTracker

I have played fantasy sports for the last 5 years or so, but this is the 1st year I have gotten StatTracker. On yahoo, which is where I play most of my fantasy sports, you do not receive the scores of your players until the next day. But it is free to play on Yahoo, so it usually wasn't a big deal. But this year in baseball, I purchased StatTracker for $9.99. It was great. You can go to your team at any time and see how your guys are doing. Even if people are not on your team, you can still see how they did that night in case you wanted to pick them up. Another cool feature is that for the $9.99, it worked with all three of my teams in the different fantasy leagues throughout Yahoo. So I decided to give it a shot in fantasy football also. I wasn't sure if I would use it as much since you only need it 1 day a week. Boy was I wrong. It is even better than baseball. They have a Gamechannel button that will show you exactly what is going on in every game. It will even tell you when someone on your team is in the red zone and getting ready to score. I find myself in front of the computer all day on Sundays, and then changing the channel on the satellite whenever one of my players is getting close to scoring. It is also great not having to rummage through all the box scores at the end of the night, or waiting for the paper the next day. All the info you need is in one compact spot that will tell you everything you need to know. Maybe the best 10 bucks I have ever spent.

5.8 GHz

I have had a laptop for about 2 years now. And ever since I first got it, I would always be kicked off the internet whenever our phone rang. It was very annoying. So I went to Best Buy, and asked them if they knew how to fix it. They said I needed a filter to plug any cordless phone into the phone jack. But this did not work. So I finally took the cordless out of my bedroom, but we still had about 4 other cordless phones in the house. Once the phone was out of my room, it got a little better. But I noticed that sometimes it would still kick me off. I narrowed it down to a single phone in the living room, but did not know if that was the only one for sure. Then I was reading in our textbook last week how phones with 2.4 GHz are on the save frequency as a wireless connection to the internet. And that the new phones use 5.8GHz and do not interfere. And sure enough, the phone I used to have in my room and the phone in the living room both use 2.4. So this weekend I got rid of the phone and bought a new 5.8 one, and I haven't been kicked off yet. Now all 4 of our cordless phones are 5.8, and I can even talk on the phone in the same room as the computer now.

NFL Superfan

If you like the NFL as much as I do, then I suggest you get the Superfan. Last year, I just had the Sunday Ticket with Directv, which allows you to get every game. That is amazing in itself. When the normal game on FOX or CBS is not close, or just not a good game, you can watch any other game you want. But the Superfan is on a whole new level. First off, they have a channel that shows about 6 or 8 games on at a time. You can see what is going on in all of them, and then switch to another channel when it is getting good. Another perk they have is a Red-zone channel. This always switches to a game when someone is about to score. This way you don't miss any of the real action. But the best feature are the games in HD. Out of the 14 or so games you get a week, over half are brodcast in HD. Watching anything is better in HD, especially sports. Getting between 5 and 10 games a week in HD really is great. I would almost rather watch a blowout in HD instead of a close game on regular TV.

I Love Tivo

It might be the greatest invention ever. I got it last year, and the ways to use it keep surprising me. About 2 years ago, I used to need 2 different VCRs going at the same time to tape different programs on at the same time and the same night. Then you would get the tapes confused with each other, and sometimes it wouldn't tape because whoever set it up didn't rewind the tape all the way before we hit record. But not anymore with Tivo. It can record 2 shows at the same time. It can even do this in HD, which is truly amazing. Or you can just record one show while watching a different channel. This is good if there is sports on or something else you want to watch, but not record. What is great is that you can set it up to only record new shows also, so it doesn't waste your time by recording repeats. But recently someone told me I should get Chriss Angel's Mindfreak on DVD. It would have cost about $60. Instead I set up the Tivo to record all the episodes whenever it is on. It will record new ones along with the repeats. And since doing that, I have seen about 30 out of the 50 episodes. It will record them even when I don't know they are coming on. Sometimes they have a marathon, and I will get about 6 on my Tivo without knowing. And can watch them whenever I want. Just like the DVDs, only minus the price. If you do not own a Tivo yet, I suggest you get one soon.