Christmastyme Revue

Well, the day is finally upon us. Christmas is two days away, and we sure do hope that all of you out there have finally finished your shopping, but we know that most of you haven't. If you're still searching for that perfect gift, we have a few good tips and product ideas for ya.

1. Send 'em an online gift card.
The deadlines for shipping a gift by Christmas has passed for most retailers without their own private Concorde jets, so actually buying your special someone a physical gift is not near impossible without heading into the deadly masses of shoppers at the retail stores. The solution? An online gift card. Most online retailers offer there cards, and they can be emailed to the recipient within seconds of ordering. No traveling, no wrapping, just gifting! Easy.

2. Give 'em a USB stress relief thingy!
If your friend is angered by you not getting him/her a present for the past few years, give them this. Instead of releasing their rage on you, they'll happily punch this plastic face that makes noises of pain when impacted.

3. Give 'em a Wii VC game.
If the guy/gal has a Wii, and you do too, then a Virtual Console game could make the perfect gift. Just recently, Nintendo has updated the Wii Shop Channel to allow users to send a game to one of their friend's Wii's over the interwebpages.

4. Get all that shopping done by living at Wal-Mart.
A woman from Georgia did it, so why can't you? This woman shopped, ate, and slept for 72 hours inside a 24-hour Wal-Mart Supercenter in Lilburn, Georgia. She eventually had to be escorted out of the store by police, but not after checking out. So if you really want to get that physical gift by Christmas morning, then get your comfortable shoes and bring a pillow to your local Wal-Mart!

Wizardry: Rare J.K. Rowling Book Sold For $4 Mil

Amazon.com flexed their check-writing muscle recently buy purchasing one of seven handmade copies of J.K. Rowling's compilation of fairy tales, The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Here's a little bit from Amazon's bragging page.

We're incredibly excited to announce that Amazon has purchased J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard at an auction held by Sotheby’s in London. The book of five wizarding fairy tales, referenced in the last book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is one of only seven handmade copies in existence. The purchase price was £1,950,000, and Ms. Rowling is donating the proceeds to The Children's Voice campaign, a charity she co-founded to help improve the lives of institutionalized children across Europe.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is extensively illustrated and handwritten by the bard herself--all 157 pages of it. It's bound in brown Moroccan leather and embellished with five hand-chased hallmarked sterling silver ornaments and mounted moonstones.

If you take a look at the pictures of the actual book, the cover and illustration designs look pretty morbid, so who knows what the pages hold.

T! At Black Friday 2007

My video camera was on the fritz, so I only have pictures from my cheesetastic cameraphone to report to you.

I crawled out of bed at 4a.m., and left the house by 4:15. I traveled 25 miles to Circuit City in Denton, Texas, to take advantage of the $8 2GB USB drive.

I wasn't expecting to see any die-hard shopper lines in Denton, but when I passed Best Buy on the way to Circuit City, I saw a line full of tents, chairs, and crazy people. The same sight greeted me when I arrived to the City.

I waited in line for about ten minutes before the doors opened at 5. Once opened, everyone started to pour in.



After wriggling my way past the crowd, I finally found the huge cardboard box full of USB drives. I grabbed three of them, and charged to the register.


Once the cashier scanned my items, the total popped up on the screen. $48. What? These are $8 bucks apiece! What I didn't know, and the folks at black-friday.net didn't tell me, was that there was a mail-in rebate, and there was a limit of one per person. I immediately snapped back a demand to have my money back, then I calmly said that I would like to just have one. It wasn't what I expected, but I got what I wanted.

After Circuit City, I traveled to many stores looking for prospective gifts and watching the crowds take this day way too seriously. My first stop was across the boulevard to the Golden Triangle Mall, our local mall since 1979. Even though it's drawing it's dying breaths, and will soon be snuffed out by a mega shopping center on the other side of town, the anchor stores were open extra early to greet shoppers.

I walked through the empty halls, and through the busy aisles of JCPenney and Sears.




This lady is so tired that she apparently can't even carry her pillows without dragging them pathetically on the ground.

After the mall, I stopped by Target, which was by far the most crowded store out of any other that morning. I didn't stay very long, especially after I witnessed this sea of people:



Once I escaped Target, I just want to random stores, picking up a few gifts along the way. I had a good time, but one thing is for sure. I probably won't be doing this again for a loooooong time.

Techoo! Goes To Black Friday

I'm setting my alarm for 4a.m. in the mornin', cause I'm taking part in the festivities of Black Friday.

First, a trip to Circuit City, to nab a couple of those 2GB Sandisk Cruzers for 8 bucks. After that, anything goes. I'm thinking about videotaping my travels for publishing on this interweb tubepage, so stay tuned.

Amazon MP3 Will Be A Winner...If It Has Songs

I haven't had the chance to actually download a song from them yet, but the Amazon MP3 store looks pretty promising.

Released to the public just a few days ago, Amazon has made quite a contender for the iTunes Store.

The number one selling point with Amazon is its DRM-free music. That's right. When you download it, it's yours. No strings attached. Sure, Apple has DRM-free songs with EMI, but that's the problem. It's from EMI.

The interface looks pretty good. It's pretty much typical Amazon fashion, and I've heard both good and bad reviews of their Music Downloader software that's required to download from the service. I'll try it out and give my two cents on it soon.

Amazon's done a great job so far, but the big thing that needs to be done is what will make or break the service. Selection. There isn't much of it now, but soon they should grab the attention of the big labels.