grantalias

This is why I love going to Wal-Mart without the kids so I can stop and window shop and enjoy awesome toys. It's a rare occurrence and I totally have to thank my parents for looking after the boys for a few hours on the weekend.

TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE G1 SERIES MASTERPIECE SKYWARP

Star Wars AT-AS

I don't know how many of my fellow VOXer's read Team Vox's latest post but there is now a free version of Typepad called Typepad Micro.

I'm guessing with the prevalence of Twitter (@grantalias), Six Apart wanted to get into the micro blog / status site. We all knew this was eventual since their acquisition of Pownce's earlier this year.

I've done a test post on my Typepad Micro so you can see what it looks like.

You can have links to all your online sites like flickr, Vox, Facebook & Twitter. Those of us from Vox will find it very familiar. I wish it could automatically pull data from those services. It would certainly save some time for the user.

Unfortunately (like Vox) you can't pull Facebook photos but unlike Vox you can't pull photos from any service or video sites for that matter (which you can do on Vox), unless you use embed code. Unlike Twitter there isn't an ecosystem of third parties developing sites like Twitpic to close the short comings.

Typepad iPhone App

The only real saving grace is that you can use the Typepad iPhone app to post while on the go (which is how I composed my first post).You can link it to both Twitter and Facebook with manual or automatic posting to each service as you wish is nice. To bad it won't cross post to my Vox account. Too bad there is not a Vox app like this. And no Blog It does not count. Don't even get me started there.

Compose

Since it's Typepad you can import and export your blog to or from it. With Vox there is no such ability and I'm pretty much screwed if I ever want to move anywhere else.

In what's turning into a yearly event, the local mall had Dora & Diego for a two hour meet and greet.

Carts enjoyed it much more than last year. When we talked about going ET said it was for babies... that's a five year old for you. He did say he had papillons in his stomach when we were waiting in line (that's butterflys for the non french speaking). AR didn't go since she was with Donna in Zellers, maybe next year? 

The boys, Dora & Diego

Wii Says Me Too

In the three years I've had my Wii I've probably played my Xbox 360 more (and I've only had that for the last year). All be it fun and the source of all my plastic guitar collection, the Wii has always had glaring short comings in the features department.

One such example is the lack of demos. Now this might seem a trivial point but I've lost hundreds of hours over the years to demos and in hindsight I wish I could have banked them for later use of sleepless nights with children, but I digress.

Since the only hard drive support for the Wii has been a SD card which is a far from elegant solution I have never thought we would see them on the little white console. I comparison I have almost filled up my 60GB hard drive on my Xbox 360 with demos.

So you can imagine my suprise when my blinking Wii notified me that for a limited time they would have five downloadable Wiiware demos.

World of Goo is already a classic and works so well on the Wii you should certainly try it out. A super fun physics puzzle game. And great that you can play up to four players. 

Pokémon Rumble was a hit with the kids but I can see the repetitive game play getting old fast for adults.

Bit.Trip.Beat I thought was pretty innovative think Arkanoid meets Frequency. Of course the kids thought it was totally lame because dad was enjoying it.

The one negative is that the demo will launch the Wii store once completed in hopes of you purchasing it.

I really hope we see more of these demos from Nintendo it's a definite plus to try before you buy.

If you're a regular or long time visitor here to grantalias, you're probably thinking with the regularity of posts I'm either dead or living in a cave. Neither of which is true but sure feels like it sometime. As you can see in the photo below we are kept very busy by our growing family.

the busy family

I am also desperately waiting for the release of Windows 7 so I can buy a Dell I have my eyes on and get back to editing the family videos (and subsequent posting of said video). As I do not have the time to take my production machine off-line and do a clean install to freshen it up; and after 3.5 years it needs it big time.

Here are the stats of the Dell I'm looking at.

• Intel® Core™ i7-920 Processor(8MB L3 Cache, 2.66GHz)
• 8GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz
• 1TB - 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cach
• ATI Radeon HD 4350 512MB

The service I use (and many others around VOX) to post their tweets to their blog is back up. Loudtwitter is a great tool to automatically post my tweets here in a hidden post and then every couple of days I can go back and delete the junk and (hopefully) flesh out the gems with photos and video.

A little help from my tweets.

• 18:31 Judging by tweets.. Michael Jackson just passed away. Still looking for links to confirm so don't quote me. (via @ijustine) #

• 18:37 CTV Montreal confirms Micheal Jackson died. RIP wacko jacko #

• 18:01 Michael Jackson 911 call released bit.ly/1HU3NX (via @montrealgazette) #

• 22:24 Jackson almost takes Internet with him bit.ly/Maami #

Let There Be Cut & Paste

A little help from my tweets.

It's finally here and as with the 2.0 update last summer tons of people (myself included) had to wait hours to download it from Apple.

• 06:57 RT @mashable: iPhone OS 3.0 Arrives Today: What You Should Know - bit.ly/qMaMk It's going to be a long day waiting for 3.0 to release #

• 17:45 For the love of Steve, Apple get some fracking serves and bandwidth going so I can get the OS 3.0 upgrade. I mean I'm paying for it! #

• 17:50 @rossdelliott This is horrible! I remember last year for the 2.0 it took me like 12hrs to finally get the upgrade. #apple #fail #

• 18:18 @TechShowX it should be $9.99. I'm waiting for the server load to lessen to get mine for my gen 1 Touch. #

• 18:21 @andrewmerica apple servers are melting right now. You are not alone #fail #

• 22:53 After a 5 hour wait finally able to download OS 3.0 thanks #apple lets hope this doesn't #fail Fingers crossed! #

• 03:36 @tkcom I believe that I read (when purchasing it) itunes store credit can't be used towards purchase of the OS 3.0 update. #

• 03:46 Phone 3.0 a cut-&-paste win for Twitter: tinyurl.com/n2dka6 (via @web_buzz) that's one of the main reasons I payed $9.99 for update #