mjm wired ;)  

My brother bought a Dyson DC24 off of Amazon for my parents as a Christmas present last year. My initial thought was "Did they need another vacuum cleaner?". Then when my dad assembled it, I was a little taken aback. The thing is tiny and looks almost like a toy. It seems a little flimsy and even a little mechanically quirky. And the dirt tray is so small you would have to empty it frequently. When I looked up the item on Amazon, I [...]

Happy New Year! I started writing this yesterday, but didn't get a chance to publish. This last year was quite an revolutionary year. Lots of up's and down's, hello's and goodbye's and some serious shakeups in the workplace. I want to list some of notable points about the last year. There is really no major order, anything and everything that came to mind I added. Some of the positive things... Had 4 memorable fun trips this year. High point: U2: 360 Best CD I [...]

I got back from my trip to California last night. As previously noted I was intending to relax a bit but that never really happened. For better or worse (more of the better), I went around. A lot!. I had a different city for pretty much every day. And I really don't know what I was expecting, but the traffic and driving were too much for me. Although, I was doing much more traveling on account that I was a tourist. I had a [...]

I think it was during late 2004, that my younger brother said he wanted to buy a digital camera since he would be taking a trip to France. After a little bit of research (and seeing the ugly pictures from a co-worker's Sony camera), we both settled on a Canon PowerShot S410. I had a gift certificate from Best Buy, so I picked up S500 that Christmas (same camera but 5MP instead of 4.1MP). I have never regretted that purchase. For the past 4+ [...]

I don't feel the need to discuss or debate the merits of the decision to buy an American made versus a foreign made vehicle. The purchasing process of the American individual has never been a rational thing. The point I do want to make is the rare opportunity that this economic situation has afforded to people who might be in the market to buy a new car. Prior to the financial meltdown that started at the end of 2008, one of the major selling [...]

Back when the whole "Metro" craze was going on (it did end right?), I remember being told that having a nice watch on your wrist was a "requirement". Of course the implication was that women would be looking out for that. I really did not pay attention back then. Later I remember someone showing me their imitation Rolex they bought for a couple hundred bucks (I think it was $1200?). Of course the real watch would be in the ten's of thousands (40 grand?), [...]

I've been doing some research about switching my wireless provider so when it comes to the end of my current contract I can seemlessly carry over to my new provider. So in preparation I called and verified what the process is. For any cellular/wireless provider "porting" is the term for switching your number from one provider to the next. In the technical section, I read that porting wireless-to-wireless should technically only take 2-3 hours. However it is fairly typical for it to take 1 [...]

I've been holding out on an MP3 player for over a year now. My biggest frustration with things like the iPod is that they have bad battery life and support few sound formats, and their compatibility is mediocre. ... So if I were to list my requirements they would be: * Play MP3, WMA, Ogg - (I ripped most of my CD's to Ogg format) * 10-15 hour battery life - (iPod does 6?) * Can act as a removable USB2 hard drive in [...]