Wii has a problem

Yes, my Wii has a problem. It is the infamous flickering white and gray pixels problem. I talked to the support line, and they are going to repair it after I send it back to them.

Oh well. It's a bit disappointing that it has this problem so soon after it was released, but they were really good at the customer service, offering to send a brand new one right away if I didn't mind losing any virtual console games that I had downloaded. I have spent $20 on Wii points, so I decided to just have them repair my existing console and keep the few games I downloaded already.

When the problem first happened I was playing Link To the Past and there started being what looked like white and gray pixels stuck in the textures as they moved around. It later started happening in other Channels like the News and Weather, and finally I tried out a Wii game and saw the same thing, so I called Nintendo.

Oh the tumbling down

Jumping on the bandwagon here with my own Tumbleblog: Greg's Tumbleblog. When I think of a better name I will re-title it. Here is the RSS feed for it.

I like the idea of the Tumbleblog: "A website created in typical blog fashion, but with postings of a random and chaotic nature." Or, read Kottke for a longer take on it.

It makes sense as a way to share links, quotes, pics or other random things without the need to "compose" an entire blog post. I've added the feed for my tumbleblog to the sidebar, so you should be able to see the last 5 entries. I will hopefully update it much more frequently than this here blog itself.

Twitter

Twitter: "What You And Your Friends Are Doing"

This seems like a cool website for sharing what you are doing with your friends and getting notified of what they are up to.

You can update your status online, over IM, or via a text message, and you can also receive updates about your friends through the same methods.

It's free, so go and sign up and add me as a friend.

High Dupenition TV

Well, I've been duped. I thought a HDTV was a wonderful device that would show higher resolution TV shows, movies, and video games in the comfort of my own home, but I was wrong. It is a device that delivers high definition commercials straight into my brain via the optic nerves. Boy can those commercials be beautiful. I think a particular green-bottled beer has the most luscious ad I've ever seen.

We only saw the last half of the Superbowl yesterday, and none of the Superbowl ads were that great, as I understand is the prevailing common expectation. I hate ads. But as brief entertaining interludes in the football game, I guess they're not so bad, as long as they fulfill their unwritten requirement to be funny.

However, here's something to think about advertisers: The funniest ad I saw was pretty good, but I don't even remember what the product was. I think it was a can of nuts. But really, if the ad made me want to eat assorted nuts at all, which at times I want to do anyway, it didn't do much to influence which particular brand or kind of nuts I would purchase. Nuts is nuts, I say, and if I'm going to pay forth $1.59 for a bunch of nuts, I'm most likely to choose the largest package of such nuts that are available for that price. I really don't care what brand they are. You guys might want to go into a business selling a distinctive product where a memorable ad might actually influence customers to pick your product over a rival's. Nuts. And nuts are cheap. I'm sure you pay millions for your 30-seconds of high definition exposure to my eyeballs, but I have got to hope there is a smarter way of spending that money. Maybe try sending me free samples of nuts. If they are good, I will probably tell some people I see on the street that they might like to purchase your nuts. And I will phrase it thusly: "Hey you guys, you see these nuts, why don't you buy some?" Simple, concise, and it gets the point across. But I would highly recommend going into some other business.

Secondly, here's the thing: Car ads. What the hell. I know what a goddamn car driving around looks like. I also know what more than one car driving around looks like. Do we need another commercial like that? Are the cars being driven by monkeys, or clowns, or aliens, or maybe even a funny-looking guy with a funky hat? No? Then don't show me the goddamn car commercial, because I am sick to death of cars driving around on my HDTV. If I want to see cars driving around up close I'll go lie in the street. Nuts. I can't believe they would spend millions of bucks to sell me a package of mixed nuts.

Ignignokt

I don't have much to say about the recent hair-pulling-parade in Boston, except that: Fucking people are retarded.

The guys who were arrested for making the lite-brite signs of Ignignokt basically had the best press conference I've ever heard: AlterNet: Blogs: Video: Update: Cartoon Marketing Ignites Bomb Scare [VIDEO]. All they talked about was hairstyles from the 70s.