I'm a huge fan of both Netflix and Gamefly. I love the convenience of rentals being delivered to my door and I love that these services afford me the ability to sample everything without breaking the bank every time I want a new game or film. The systems work beautifully and it's incredibly simple to manage your queue. Unfortunately, as I recently discovered, both services become huge inconveniences when you want to downgrade to a lower tier...

So I have a huge cache of legacy video games just sitting around collecting dust. Sure some of them are great games, but if I'm honest with myself I can see that I'm never going to play any of them ever again. To put it another way, these games have effectively become a trading card, serving little more purpose than to show that I own them. Well, in these troubled economic times (drink) it would be nice to magically turn the 'cache' into... well, 'cash'. Thankfully, Amazon has made this possible with their recently started video game trade-in program...

In the grand scheme of things, 3D filmmaking is relatively new. However, with each passing year, the technique is becoming more and more popular. For the most part, I've been of the opinion that 3D was just a big gimmick. I mean, with the MPAA crying so much over revenues they're supposedly losing to piracy, I just figured 3D was their trick to jack ticket prices up to $14 a pop without everyone complaining. For this reason, I've avoided seeing anything in 3D. Everything changed this weekend though, when I sat down to watch Coraline in 3D...

I love watching films and for the most part I love experiencing them on the big screen. Like most people, there is one particular spot in a theater that I prefer to sit. That spot is of course dead center of the screen and dead center of the side mounted speakers. This is why I always arrive early for a movie to ensure I can get this choice spot. Now if this spot is taken, I obviously have to choose an alternate seat. The question is, where do I sit? Astonishingly, most people apparently don't know that there is an unwritten rule that establishes an etiquette for theater seating. Last night I went with a friend to the theater to see Valkyrie. At first, she and I were the only two people in the entire theater. A few moments later a small family (a father, mother, and two kids) walked in. Even though they had hundreds of seats available to them, the family chose to take the four seats directly behind where we were seated. This my friends, is not good theater seating etiquette...

For the longest time, gamers have been fighting the stereotype that we're all just a bunch of anti-social kids playing games alone in our parents basements. Over the last several years, however, social gaming has become mainstream and most developers have begun to focus a lot more on competitive multi-player and co-op game styles. This means that now, more than ever, gamers are coming together to experience games as groups in social environments. Unfortunately, there are a hand full of game developers who apparently only want our money if we plan to play their games alone in our rooms. Developers who are robbing us of our split-screen...

Ok, so here's the thing. I have this great idea for an improvement to a commonly used product. Though making it happen myself could probably make me quite a bit of money, I know that I simply don't have the means to do it. So, I've decided to blog the idea in hopes that someone more talented than myself will one day do it for me. So listen up Kleenex, I want to see this on the shelves sometime in 2009...

I think of myself as a fairly courteous and considerate person. As such, I often do my best to hold doors for people when entering or exiting a building. The way I see it, there is an unwritten rule that establishes a magic radius around the door to a building. If at any time two or more parties enter said radius, whether entering or exiting, the first person to make contact with the door gets the job of holding it for the others for the duration the radius is filled, or until someone else places a hand on the door, taking responsibility for the door holding position. Unfortunately, most doorways to public buildings are made of glass. This means all parties can see each other before reaching the magic radius, which leads to what I call 'The Door Hold Conundrum'. The situation can best be explained with an example. Let's say you just bought a Slurpee from 7-Eleven. As you begin to walk to the exit, you notice someone walking towards the store from the parking lot. At this point several things can happen...

The other day while waiting in line at a drive-thru, I noticed something quite typical of most drive-thrus, bus stops, road signs, and intersections. The board next to my car, which may have once been used for a condensed menu, was completely obliterated by layers upon layers of stickers. The drive through was moving unbearably slow, so I just sat there and stared. As I read sticker after sticker I wondered to myself, where the hell did this phenomenon come from...

Sorry, but I just need to rant for a second. When I came home tonight I had to deal with the usual bad apple roommate's annoyance of blasting his music with no regard for the the rest of the roommates in the house. Though it would have been a wonderful night if that's all I had to deal with. Unfortunately, I also came home to a destroyed bathroom. About a month ago, my bad apple roommate decided to lose his keys. You know, just like he lost his cell phone on four different occasions over the last year. For over a month he has made absolutely no effort to replace his keys, but he is completely fine knocking on doors and windows until someone wakes up to let him in when he gets off work at 1am...