Shyzer.com

EDIT: Here’s a pretty cool video of the computer:

EDIT 2: I’ve moved the video to below the fold, so just click the title here to see it if you want:

The future is finally here.

Personal jetpacks and hover cars will soon be distributed to every able bodied adult. I’ve already booked my vacation package for a week on the moon, where I’ll enjoy low gravity golf and Martian hunts. My own robot slave will soon begin typing these very Shyzer posts for me, as work, thought, and effort will join the likes of polio and the Dodo bird. And lest we forget about the underprivileged, as the homeless will soon be relocated into holographic suites, where they’ll be able to enjoy all the replicated food they can imagine.

Ok, well maybe not, but pretty soon Microsoft will be giving us this damn cool gadget.

Microsoft Corp. will unveil a coffee-table-shaped “surface computer” Wednesday in a major step towards co-founder Bill Gates’s view of a future where the mouse and keyboard are replaced by more natural interaction using voice, pen and touch.

Microsoft Surface, which has a 30-inch display under a hard-plastic tabletop, allows people to touch and move objects on screen for everything from digital finger painting and jigsaw puzzles to ordering off a virtual menu in a restaurant.

It also recognizes and interacts with devices placed on its surface, so cell phone users can easily buy ringtones or change payment plans by placing their handsets on in-store displays, or a group of people gathered round the table can check out the photos on a digital camera placed on top.

Of course, the first few batches will cost a cool 10K, but the way computer prices depreciate, it won’t be long before we’re all able to invite friends over, get drunk, and then smash our coffee table computer to pieces when we pass out on them.

I can’t wait.

(more…)

Apparently the post I made late last month has been attracting a lot of traffic from a British sex fetish search engine all thanks to my usage of the word “spanking” in the title. (If you want to see the site in question, you’ll have to find it on your own.)

Which leads to the obvious question. There’s a British search engine dedicated just to sexual fetishes?! Is there really that big of a market of people out there who are unable to find a proper smack around that a search engine has to be created for them? Seriously?

You know, I’m not even surprised such a site exists, which I think is an even bigger issue. Hell, I bet this post is just gonna keep ‘em coming now. Well, I might as well welcome you crazy Brits! The tea and crumpets are over in the corner and I’ve got old reruns of The Office on the telly. Oh, and there are plenty iPods around here to be spanked if the mood feels so.

I just got back from spending a few days down in South Carolina. The main purpose of the trip was to be there for Waynus’ high school graduation, which still doesn’t sound quite right to me. I still remember when I used to wrap him up in blankets, then strap them tight with belts before finally stuffing him in a closet and turning the lights off. I think if I tried that now, he’d just punch me in the face and laugh at me for a while.

And that, my friends, is proof enough that life is unfair.

Congrats again, bro. And to everybody I got to see and hang out with, it was fun.

A while back I wrote how I thought some of the new TV shows of the season were shaping up. What I didn’t mention was how Heroes first episode of sucktitude screwed me over.

This past August I was looking to start a new website and I wasn’t quite sure where I wanted to take it. I already had a pointless, no-monetary-goal-whatsoever site in Shyzer and a “up-and-comer” that required a bit of work day in a day out in Hey, It’s Free! So I was looking for something in the middle, something that could one day make some coin but at the same time didn’t require much work. I looked into buying a turnkey website, something like an arcade site or a Myspace resource site, but I decided against it since there are around 28 thousand of each of those already.

In the end, I settled on making a blog that would focus on a niche topic, like with HIF. But since I didn’t want to be putting in as much work on this new venture as I did on HIF, I tried to think of something topical that didn’t have breaking news that I’d need to be posting every day. And that’s about the time I remembered about LOST.

You see, back when LOST first hit the net, two or three guys each started their own fansites centered around the show. They’d post a recap of the week’s episode every Thursday morning and then just post links to any related news articles they found during the week. When the show exploded, they were the only sites dedicated specifically to it and they freaking took off. Thousands of people joined the forums, pretty soon the readers were making their own crazy thoughts and ideas that the owners could just copy and paste on the site and when the DVD box sets came out, they made for perfect little advertisements on the sidebar of the site right snug between some Google Ads.

Long story short, they were making a fair bit of spare change for not much work. And that’s always a winning strategy in my book.

So I took a look at the upcoming Fall lineup last August and I tried to envision A) What might take off and be a smash hit while B) having a type of plot line that would highly interest nerds. You see, it’s kinda hard to run a blog dedicated to Grey’s Anatomy or Desperate Housewives because their main demographic audience isn’t the type to jump on-line and start blogging about it after the episode ends. Thus, I had to eliminate any dramas, sitcoms, comedies, or reality shows (the latter being ruled out because I think I might have stabbed myself in the eyes by Thanksgiving if I had been forced to actually watch such show.)

It didn’t take long to realize that Heroes was going to be the best shot at what I wanted to do. It was on at a prime time, it had the type of story that would get computer nerds and college kids interested, and it seemed like something that I would actually throughly enjoy watching. I looked at what fansites were already created for it, they were pretty shit, and so I thought I’d go for it.

Then I saw the first episode.

And it sucked.

We’re talking suuuuuuucked. Seriously, go back and watch that first episode and marvel in the craptacularness that it is. If you’re anything like me, you probably saw that first episode and stopped watching. And if you’re still anything else like me, you probably gave it another shot later on after hearing about how awesome it was, realized that the show had finally gotten good, and then tried kicking yourself in the nuts when you realized that everybody and their cousin had already started a fansite for the show.

In the end I created Facebook Talk, which I can’t say turned out poorly for me. And I probably won’t bother trying to create a fansite for a show this upcoming season, because it’s gotten to the point now where large companies are creating fansites for every show on the major network lineups and then just sticking with the ones that are good.

But it really would have been helpful had that first episode not sucked.

Apparently I was tagged by the awesome Angela in what I think is the first time ever in the 4 1/2 years I’ve been running this place. That either means I don’t have enough Internet friends or the ones I have just suck.

Anyways, the tagged topic is simply one question: Why do I blog? Well, that’s actually pretty. Besides all the obvious benefits, like the throngs of adoring fan girls who follow me around everywhere and the massive bankroll I pull in every month thanks to all those ads under the “Sponsors” section, I blog for one additional reason. Because I get bored.

Seriously, that’s about the only reason I keep this site running day in and day out. It clearly doesn’t have a focal purpose, as opposed to Hey, It’s Free! Back when I first started it, I just wanted a place where I could put down any random thoughts that I wanted to share with people and I thought if others might comment and respond to them, then all the better. Half of the enjoyment comes in trolling through the archives when I’m bored and reading all of the random crap that I posted forever ago and promptly forgot about. Seriously, give it a shot sometime. You’ll be surprised at how much I’ve written on here and some of it isn’t even that crappy

So I guess this is the part where I have to tag people? Man, I always sucked at Tag whenever I was it. I tended to just go watch TV and leave all the people hiding in the trees and behind trash cans, but I guess for now I’ll just pass this along to Ally and leave it at that.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, MOTHER FUCKING YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Starcraft II is soon to become a reality.

I’m sorry, that sound you just heard was me collapsing onto the floor after hyperventilating from excitement. This has been, what, almost 10 years in the making? By this point, I actually thought Blizzard had given up on the series due to their massive hard on for the Warcraft franchise (which blows, but whatever). So when I woke up this morning to this news…well, let’s just say it was a pleasant little surprise.

From the videos of the gameplay that you can watch here (hint hint Tommy and Clay, that means go watch it so that we can all talk about it like the massive nerds we are), it looks like they’ve rehauled the entire gameplay to look a lot like Warcraft III. I’m not too sure I’m happy about that, but then again, this is a FREAKING SEQUEL TO STARCRAFT WE’RE TALKING ABOUT HERE! They could introduce a new race of magical ponies and faeries that run around sprinkling pixie dust and rainbows on fallen soldiers in the middle of a battle and I still probably wouldn’t raise any gruff.

Early estimates put the release date around my birthday in 2008, so that gives me just under nine months to buy a brand new desktop computer that I can use solely to play this game on. Until then, I’ll just watch this video over and over until YouTube realizes I uploaded it.

Good Christ, I can’t freaking wait!

So they did it. Jericho was left off of CBS’s Fall lineup. Turns out the final words of “FIRE!” uttered by Jake weren’t orders to his rag tag bunch of commandos, but instead was a suggestion as to what I should douse the heads of CBS with.

I wish I could say I was boycotting CBS, but Jericho was the only show I actually watched on that sorry excuse for a network. To hell with you, CBShit. I know, I’m so witty and clever, I sometimes even surprise myself. But do you know what the best part of it all is?

There’s actual a fairly large backlash against CBS going on right now.

It started with a petition that’s already up to 50,000 signatures. The official message boards for Jericho on CBS.com say a huge spike in users, both old and newly registered, who came together to voice their disdain. Before long, the phone number for every CBS executive was plastered all over the web and despite calling them all dozens of time, I’ve yet to be able to leave a voicemail message since they are constantly filling up within minutes of being emptied.

New websites, such as Jericho Lives, Save Jericho.info, and Jericho Rally Point, have popped up and are sharing ways for people to voice their opinion. Hell, a few thousand people have even started an old fashioned letter campaign (I sent mine off a few minutes ago.)

Chances are none of this will make a difference and then again, who the hell knows. It’s entirely within the realm of possibility that CBS might see this and rethink their decision. Or maybe another network, such as TNT or SciFi, will look at the 8 million viewers Jericho routinely pulled in and figure that’s not a bad draw for a cable network show. We can only try, right?

In the mean time, I’ll be off hitting redial on my phone for the next few months.

Apparently at the end of the school year, teachers like to get the hell out of town no matter what day the calendar shows. Last year at this time, I wasn’t really able to take advantage of it though as I was reliant on the pathetic excuse for a randomized phone calling system to pick a job for me.

This year it’s much more awesome though, since I have my certain school I always sub at. In fact, this entire week I’ve been down in the kindergarten wing again and dear Christ are there some good stories. But I’m still weary of being dooced, so I figure I better hang onto those stories until summer time at least.

So I’ll say this. If you’ve ever wanted a job where you get to feel like a celebrity and be showered with love and hugs at every corner, become a substitute teacher. Some mornings the prospect of going to teach a bunch of snot nosed kids isn’t the most appealing plan of action, but the minute you step out of your car and find six bus loads of kids screaming your name out across the parking lot, the day can only seem brighter.

You know you want to…

At least, they will be if they actually cancel Jericho, the show that went from being a guilty pleasure to a “Holy Hell, it’s 8:00 on Wednesday night…YES!!!!!!”

I’d give up any other show, sans Battlestar Galactica and maybe Heroes, if that meant Jericho would be around for a few more seasons. We’ll find out within a week or so if it’s coming back. Until then, I’m off making a CBS voodoo doll just in case.