So for those of you out there that already have a Wii, what games would you recommend? If you own one I would love to become friends on the Wii and try out some online play. Especially if you have Mario Kart too. The other games I will one day own will of course be a version of Rock Band or Guitar Hero, but until then, I will be mastering Mario Kart. The other thing I plan to do is get a classic controller and buy a few of the original NES® games. Then my kids can really learn to appreciate great games. Afterall, Nintendo® keeps proving itself as a world leader in video games, and has proven that faster, better hardware and graphics don’t make games better. Great game play, and design do! Thanks Nintendo® for years of entertainment and many more to come at the Grunau’s.

A simple game: Go to the address bar in your favorite browser, and type one letter. Start with “a”, end with “z”.

Here’s my list along with a brief explanation of some of the more obscure sites that some of you may not be familiar with:

• A: apple.ca/store – yes I love apple and I like to see all the things I can’t afford
• B: brandsoftheword.com – one of the best sites to snag vector logos from companies all over the world
• C: cornerstone-church.ca – a website I design and help maintain, as well as my church
• D: dafont.com – best free font site
• E: ebay.com – weird, guess I don’t have many other “E” named sites as I don’t use it often
• F: facebook.com/
• G: greathobbies.com – just part of my addiction to R/C Trucks
• H: homedepot.ca – ???
• I: isohunt.com – torrent site for downloading TV
• J: nothing beginning with J came up.
• K: kershawdesigns.com – more R/C stuff
• L: nothing with L either
• M: mininova.org – torrent site for TV as well
• N: neural-net.ca – local store that sells and fixes Mac’s
• O: otvtech.com – tech store in Saskatoon
• P: poeticindustries.com – my online portfolio of graphic/web design
• Q: qbrushes.com – free brushes for Adobe Photoshop
• R: rlbc.ca – website of Ranger Lake Bible Camp, which is where I work.
• S: saskatoonultimate.org – Ultimate Frisbee League I play in.
• T: terriblypoetic.com
• U: nothing here.
• V: vimeo.com/rlbc – camp’s videos that I produce
• W: wiserockdevelopments.com – new website I am just starting on
• X: xe.com – currency conversion tool
• Y: yfcsask.com/ – website I help maintain sometimes
• Z: nothing here either.

Looks like I am geekier than I thought. Although it should be noted that I took these from my computer at work and not home. I am willing to bet it would look different at home, however, then it might have sites my wife looks at like this dumb one.

Feel free to add some of yours in the comments or send me a link to your list on your blog.

Eigenharp Alpha, the future of music

RELEVANT Magazine – Why Music Should Be Free

“By now, we can admit that most observers would be lying to themselves if they thought that downloading music for free is ever going to go away. This isn’t to say that the debate is over or that artists are wrong to want money anytime someone gets their grubby little hands on their music. It is just to say that the future of music—in fact, the future of most everything in the cultural world—is going to be FREE. Yes, free.”

Just read this article over at Relevant Magazine. Does a great job of summing up the great debate about file sharing and as it relates to music. However, most of the same principles apply to things like TV, Movies, Books, etc. Very insightful and worth a read.

If you are a die hard addict to your computer, and when you are trying to finish up a order online for some Christmas presents and the computer crashes. You might try to just reboot said computer and discover that it won’t boot up anymore. At which point you also discover that the computer’s hard drive is dead, finished, done. Oh, but you feel good about yourself because said computer is on warranty and you have a nice backup of the whole computer. However, you then realize that the backup is a week old and that you just finished a rather important design and the only place it is stored is on said hard drive.

So you panic.

Mainly because the design came together so quickly and you felt it was an inspired work that you feel is now lost forever. But being a techie, you take said hard drive to another computer and try to recover said files. Upon connecting the dead hard drive to your work computer, you realize that your work computer is now locking up as well. Ah, but this computer is okay you say to yourself it hasn’t been rebooted in 39 days. So you reboot only to discover it is doing the same thing as the previous computer.

Real life altering panic begins to set in.

At this point you realize that it just isn’t your day. Thankfully, this computer isn’t dead, but was just performing a rather lengthy update and after awhile booted up successfully and worked as always.

So glad that this didn’t happen to me as this would suck, hard.