Picked up the space shooter Super Stardust HD for the Playstation 3 last night in the PlayStation store for $7.99:

Super Stardust™ HD for the PLAYSTATION®3 system is a fully updated version of the classic game Stardust. Your mission is simple: destroy everything in sight! Twelve years have passed by. The times have been peaceful and prosperous in the home solar system. Not a single sign of evil penguin Professor Schaumund or his sinister forces have been detected. That is, of course, until today…

My son and I went into Co-op mode and shredded those Asteroids like blocks filled with kryptonite green power-ups. This is one of the more enjoyable original PS3 titles released to date.

You rotate around a 3D planet blasting gigantic rocks and bombing enemies racking up points. Leaderboards track your position against other PS3 players.

Sony, one request: more, please, more!

Hmmcast #138 mp4

My wife may correct my tattered memory but I believe the bike ride we took Wednesday night was our first bike ride ever together. This September we will be married 18 years. Our oldest teen was there to catch us gearing up.

Doing our part to stay green. Something we’ve been wanting to do in our house for awhile: get rid of standard lightbulbs in favor of CFL bulbs which use up to 75% less energy and last up to 10 times longer. In our home, including one outside bulb, this meant replacing 13 bulbs total. Most were 60 watt bulbs which we replaced with the 13 watt CFL bulbs. We’re giving the replaced incandescant bulbs away to our neighbor.

At a savings of $38/year per bulb this equals $494 a year. But the first year we need to factor out the cost of the bulbs which have really come down in price. A package of six CFL bulbs at Wal-mart cost $15.16 + tax (my wife informed me after publishing that the 6-pack of CFL bulbs was on sale for $9.88) and the bulbs advertised to last with regular usage 5 years.

Not going to start a daily countup like we’ve done for ridding our family of television and credit cards, but it is in the same spirit.

Next thing we’re considering doing is adding wireless outlet plugs so that we can conveniently power off devices that are left plugged in and not being used. Any other good energy saving, money saving ideas to share?

As an Apple shareholder, I’m glad to see Apple releasing a new product today. Releasing a new product line and expansion into a new market is a good thing. My reading list — like many others I’m sure — has been dominated by excitement over today’s release of the Apple iPhone. Like AppleTV, however, I haven’t been seduced by the device. The iPhone looks somewhat intriguing but it has a few major drawbacks that quickly shriveled my interest:

1. using AT&T network only
2. requires two year contract (the contract I could live with, doing business with ATNT? Nope)
3. no removable battery like the iPod. I don’t want to take devices to Apple or ship them elsewhere to change out the new battery.
4. price seems about $200 too high
5. looks too fragile. As many times as I’ve dropped my Pocket PC and phone (when I had one), I can only imagine what dropping the iPhone would be like. Yeah, I could buy the warranty, but then that pushes the price of an iPhone after tax to well over $600 USD. A few hundred more bones and I could buy an Intel Mac which is still on my wish list.

Are you not buying an iPhone today or planning on buying one in 2007? Why not? Join the club by leaving a comment below. If you are buying an iPhone like Gerald, you’re welcome to chime in about what is making you reach for your wallet.

Hmmcast #137 mp4

Disclaimer: I’m being paid to write this review.

Onetime.im — in beta as of this writing — is a Firefox add-on that allows you to chat using multiple Instant Messaging networks. Support will be “available soon” for AOL, ICQ and Yahoo. Note the domain, .IM which stands for the Isle of Man. A bit of a developing trend in the instant messaging area I learned with others including meebo.im, web.im (Yahoo), pidgin.im (formerly GAIM), portal.im, coccinella.im and imo.im. At nic.im you can register tdavid.im for 45 pounds a year. td.im is available for a whopping 495 pounds a year! Pass on both accounts.

Perhaps Oneteam.im biggest competitor in the browser space meebo has the all important dot com where oneteam.com leads to a foreign website that isn’t related. Major bummer. Suggestion #1: use an .im domain name where you actually own the dot com. Most people are going to associate your business with .com, not .im.

Oneteam requires registration which was trouble-free and accepted the + in my email address. They might consider adding OpenID.

You’ll be sent a standard validation link email. After clicking through it’s time to login. My first login on a test Windows XP SP 2 box was met with the unfortunate message:

Suggestion #2: fix this error message. I wasn’t too concerned because the email address given on the review request was from process-one.net, so I connected the dots, but some (many?) new users will be put off by this message. Once logged in a gigantic window opens that I immediately resized.

Suggestion #3: keep IM windows small like the Skype UI and respectful of screen real estate. From here my experience with Oneteam.im was mostly downhill. It doesn’t feel like much more than a prototype in its current form and I decided to list the things it needs to become a complete and usable beta. But before getting to that, I invited a friend of mine, Lestat, to check it out and see if he drew similar conclusions. Here’s a bit of our conversation inside a oneteam.im chatroom.

More suggestions for Oneteam.im
One of the first things I do with sites is update my profile. I like to change the default avatar image — usually something nondescript — with a picture. That leads to suggestion #4:

#4: Fix the avatar upload function with the profile. I tried uploading an avatar picture in JPG and GIF format. Neither was accepted. I was able to update my profile.

#5: Make it a lot easier to add a contacts from the oneteam.im chatroom. With a right mouseclick there should be an option to easily add the contact and yet there isn’t. When you click on the add new contact button in the upper left corner, the two options are Jabber or MSN but nothing for Oneteam? I asked my friend to try adding my Jabber ID and he said it didn’t work. The easiest part of using an IM service should be adding existing and new contacts.

Adding insult to injury, as part of the review I was given contact details to add (an email), but no instructions how to add the contact. Was this a Jabber ID? Or MSN? Those are the only two gateways currently supported as of my review.

#6: Turn off the sounds on the Oneteam.im chatroom by default. While you can easily click on the gears and uncheck the box, that ding sound whenever somebody types a new message in the channel gets old fast. Just start with sounds disabled.

#7: On the Mac OS X Firefox, Oneteam.im tells me I need to use Firefox. Huh?

#8: All new windows launches should open with buttons visible. Some default window sizes don’t contain all the form elements visible on initial load. For example, when I load the add contact window I have to expand the window to see the ‘add’ and ‘cancel’ buttons.

#9: 12 browser validation errors. Lestat took this screenshot using the Firefox add-on Firebug on his Windows XP SP 2 machine:

Overall thoughts
I’m not going to leave a grade for Oneteam.im in its present condition as of this writing like I would with other reviews. It’s just way too early to grade in its condition. Besides looking for suggestions to improve their interface, they mention Meebo and I’d say Oneteam has a long way to go to be as simple to get into as Meebo. They might have some cool features once you get connected, but if it’s not fast and easy to jump into, people will move along and try one of the other zillion IM solutions out there. I realize the browser IM space isn’t too crowded yet, but the IM space in general certainly is. I wish Oneteam.im luck as even if they fix all the things I mention, they still have a lot of work ahead of them to get noticed.

A final suggestion and I mean this positively not as a slam: perhaps it would be better to blend the Oneteam.im feature into another less crowded space.

This morning TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington uses the word ‘dead’ in two titles (dead fetish day, Mike?), one of them pondering: Didn’t someone tell Feedster they were dead? My first thought looking over the next iteration of Feedster was the design is amateurish. I’m not some design pro or anything, but even I know not to use something that looks like it was rolled off a conveyor belt.

And this is coming from someone who has a soft spot for Feedster. They ranked this blog #7 in 2005 and you’d think I’d be biased toward them — and I am, somewhat — but the design reminded me of a FrontPage theme circa 2000. Either that or some sort of celebration page (party on the patio at 4pm?!)

Ick.

On the Feedster blog they explain:

To start with the obvious, the site looks completely different. When comparing the old with the new, it’s quite apparent that we decided to keep only the name from the old design. Everything else we set aside, in favor of our newer, shinier self.

I’m glad to see Feedster isn’t dead, but the design doesn’t do it for me at all. What about you? Also, I don’t like how their blog is pointing to a form page to leave feedback. Is there something wrong with comments on the blog? Wait, I get it. No time to moderate comments or allow trackbacks on a blog search engine?

(rolls eyes)

Maybe Arrington is right and the dead is walking among us. It’s in beta, so maybe they’ll kill the shiny look in favor of something less polished.

Hmmcast #136 mp4

On our last vacation I bought us a blood pressure monitor to be able to check our blood pressure at home. We’ve been trying one in the pharmacy inside Fred Meyer and my wife’s blood pressure was a bit on the high side so I wanted to have a way to check it out at home. For under $60 you can purchase an automatic blood pressure monitor for home usage. We bought ours at Target.

Approximately 1 in 4 have high blood pressure [source]. Things we can do to keep blood pressure down include:

- maintain a healthy weight and diet [calculate your body mass index (BMI)]
- exercise
- limit alcohol consumption
- reducing salt and sodium in your diet
- quit smoking

My wife suggested buying bikes to ride on the trail in town together. We still have the stationary bike but it’s not getting nearly enough usage. In the summer time riding bikes seems better than a stationary bike both for scenery and fresh air.

Update 6/28/07 4:23am PST: As my buddy Harold correctly notes in the comments below last night, this Hmmcast does not demonstrate the proper method to check your blood pressure. Sorry, my bad. A confession: that was somewhat intentional in order to force a high blood pressure reading for the video (dramatic license, since I don’t have high blood pressure under the correct blood pressure taking conditions and my wife wasn’t available). The problem is nowhere in the video do I ever say this, so the viewer is left with the assumption that I’m demonstrating the proper method and showing a true reading.

I’m not.

Clearly not one of my brightest ideas ever without any explanation as some viewers might get the idea that this was intended to be a serious instructional video — as Harold did. Being put by me in the “how to” category doesn’t help that much either. Doh! My apologies to anybody that might have been confused.

Seriously, if you want to check your blood pressure correctly you should do the following (and this is paraphrased from the Healthy Living pamphlet that comes with the automatic inflate blood pressure monitor, no messing around):

- be sitting down in a comfortable environment for about 10 minutes before taking the reading. Take deep breaths and slowly let out your breath. If you just smoked a cigarette or drank something with caffeine in it (coffee, soda, etc) then wait 30-35 minutes.
- always check the blood pressure using the same arm
- sit with your legs uncrossed and feet flat on the floor
- wear loose fitting shirt and make sure the cuff is placed over your naked arm, not over clothes
- place your arm flat on the table with your palm facing upward

Additionally, Harold offers some other good suggestions in his comment below.

I watched wrestling a little bit in my younger days. Playboy Buddy Rose, Andre The Giant, Rowdy Piper and others. One of things I liked about TBS out of Atlanta was Mean Gene and wrestling but I never got into it in a big way like some folks. Nowhere near like I’m interested in the “real” sports like the NFL and MLB. Still, I appreciate the entertainment value that wrestling brings.

But when it becomes real like the situation with Chris Benoit it’s scary.

The disturbing details of WWE wrestler Chris Benoit involved in a murder suicide and questioning if these crimes were the result of roid rage.

The 40-year-old champion strangled his wife, Nancy Benoit, and suffocated his 7-year-old son Daniel, authorities said, before he hanged himself on a portable weight machine inside his lavish home outside Atlanta … authorities suspect “that [Daniel] had been taking growth hormones for quite some time,” and are hoping to prove that with toxicology. The boy, Ballard said, was diagnosed with a form of dwarfism.

The part about this story that bothers me the most is the 7-year old son being allegedly injected with growth hormones. At 7 years old taking growth hormones? Is that what doctors prescribe for dwarfism for a 7 year old? Seems kind of young to be shooting the kid up at home.

Bibles were left next to the bodies.

The Howard Sterns kicked off this morning discussing the incident. The crew pondered why the WWE would be running out a tribute of Benoit’s wrestling career before the details of what investigators learned. WWE leader Vince McMahon called the incident a “tragedy” in a follow-up response, adding (emphasis mine):

… now some 26 hours later, the facts of this horrific tragedy are now apparent. Therefore, other than my comments, there will be no mention of Mr. Benoit tonight. On the contrary, tonight’s show will be dedicated to everyone who has been affected by this terrible incident. This evening marks the first step of the healing process.”

Wrestling might be fake, but this is real. Real sad.

Hmmcast #135 mp4

For $4.99 we picked up the hamburger press, a handy tool for your grilling arsenal this summer. Eat your heart out, Rachael Ray!