You see, back in Amarillo, Texas, Joe Francis who happens to own http://www.joetheplumber.com/ got a huge spike in web traffic as people turned to the Web to find out more about the mysterious Joe. Since all his business information is posted online, Joe's office was inundated with thousands of phone calls, emails, and even requests for T-shirts bearing his company's logo. Known as "The Friendliest Plumber in Town," Mr. Francis may soon be known as the richest plumber in town if he acts quickly and takes the $800,000 bid one man offered for his domain.

According to the Dallas News, the real "Joe the Plumber" was out elk hunting, when he heard from his office manager there was a bidding war going on over his domain. Lucky for him, it looks like "Joe the Plumber" fever is just getting started. Last time I checked, "Joe the Plumber" has been referenced online thousands of times, is scheduled to appear in numerous talk shows this weekend, is apparently going to be the hottest Halloween costume this year, and I wouldn't be surprised if SNL does a skit about him this weekend too. That is one lucky Joe if you ask me.

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Despite the fact that the pillow has bright LED lights inside to recreate the natural light cycle, the designers say the pillow is soft, flexible and no different than your average pillow. A soft control panel on the side of the pillow displays the time, and has several controls that allow you to change the time, set the alarm, and turn the light on or off.

Glo Pillow has lights on both ends of the pillow so you won't be able to escape the bright light in the morning, but you'll be feeling alert and less stressed out when you wake up. The pillow goes from 0 to 500 lux over the course of 40 minutes, but most people will be up by the time the light hit 220 lux. Designers, Eoin McNally and Ian Walton, say this helps set your circadian rhythm or body clock and results in more healthy sleep/wake patterns.

The pillow started out as a design school project, but is expected to go into production at the end of the year after the design won several awards. Look for it in shops next year for around $80.

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In the state, it is legal to have a GPS device attached to your dashboard, but not to the windshield glass. I'm not clear on how or why this originally became a law, but I've always assumed it was a rather feeble attempt to ban radar detectors from cars.

Meanwhile, GPS technology has exploded, and virtually every device has to include a warning that you can't stick it on your windshield if you live in California. Numerous dash and air-vent attachment options have become available in the aftermath, but windshield mounts remain the most convenient.

The new law, of course, has a caveat: While you'll be able to attach the device to your windshield legally, it will have to be either in the lower left or lower right portion of the glass, not in the lower middle, where most people place it and where there's usually the most room. (The law actually specifies the size of the two squares in which the devices can be placed.) GPS devices can't interfere with airbag units, either. So while this is an improvement over the current situation, it's still not going to be perfect for all directionally-challenged drivers.

California isn't the only state backward enough to be dealing with such restrictions, but after the law goes into effect on January 1, 2009, only one state will retain an outright ban against attaching GPS devices to any point on your windshield. Sorry Minnesota!

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The mystery began on Monday night, when Bungie-developer of the wildly popular Halo franchise-posted an ominous-looking countdown on its Web site. (Well, actually, several mysterious goings-on preceded the countdown; I'll leave the details to 1UP.com.)

The countdown ended Thursday morning-the first anniversary of the Halo 3 launch-at exactly 7:07 a.m. PST, with the arrival of 62-second teaser video: A futuristic city, as seen through surveillance cameras. One cam pans up to the sky, zooming in on a distant formation of hurtling ... asteroids? Probes? Hard to say, but there's a lot of them. The probes tear down into the city. Explosions, then darkness. Static, then a few messages: "Please remain calm," "pardon our dust," and "keep it clean." The system "reinitializes," and then a warning: "Metropolitan disaster!" Shots of the city, in ruins. And at last, as a final probe crashes straight into the camera lens: "Halo 3 ... prepare to drop."

Whoa ... so what gives? Gamespot immediately fired off a query to Bungie, which reportedly replied with a mere "neg" (for "negative," natch).

Theories abound, of course. Gamespot has an exhaustive analysis of the video, concluding that the "probes" are, in fact, something called "Orbital Shock Drop Troopers," and that the game itself is the same Halo project ("a cross between Ghost Recon and Gears of War") that was reportedly pulled from Microsoft's E3 press conference at the last moment.

Meanwhile, Kotaku fired up Xbox Live and found the description for the teaser video, which promises that "action and deep mystery await players in this new Halo 3 campaign experience." Hmmm ... "campaign experience," eh? Kotaku's take: We might have an expansion pack, and not a whole new game, in our future.

Rabid Halo fans on the Bungie.net forums have, of course, already begun a frame-by-frame analysis of the video. Among the discoveries: What appears to be a date-1/06/09-hidden in a clump of garbled computer code. A release date, perhaps?

So, what's your guess? A whole new game? Expansion pack? Something else entirely?

I don't get it. This is awfully wierd move on Bungie's part. I'll say that. Halo Wars is coming out before that, I think, and I don't think that it's going to be a Halo 3 Expansion Pack. There haven't been any other Halo expansion packs known to man, and we don't have any evidence that Bungie is thinking about making another Halo game. Never the less, I'm not against it. I think that that would just be awesome if they decided to come out with another Halo game, whether it be an expansion pack, or just a Halo 4. I don't care. I just want another Halo game!

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More news suggesting that cell phones can be harmful in ways we haven't really thought about: A Cleveland doctor at the Center for Reproductive Medicine took sperm samples and exposed them to "talk mode" level cell phone radiation at a distance of 2.5 centimeters for an hour. After analyzing the samples, the researchers found "an increase in oxidative stress such as a significant increase in free radicals and oxidants and a decrease in antioxidants" which "equals a decrease in sperm's quality, including motility and viability."

The study is very small and limited (and sperm in a test tube may behave far differently than sperm in the body), but it's still troubling that only an hour of exposure can lead to such radical results. That 85 percent increase in free radicals sounds a little scary, and the study's head, Dr. Ashok Agarwal, says that free radicals have been linked to cancer and decreased sperm quality. An earlier study, which we wrote about almost two years ago, suggested that extended cell phone use can contribute to infertility in men, also.

Lest you think that your phone is never 2.5cm away from your gonads, consider that Bluetooth headset you have wedged in your ear... and where your phone is all that time. The irony is that many people have turned to headsets in order to avoid any potential risk for brain cancer, but may be increasing that risk in another part of the body. All that radiation has to end up somewhere.

Still, even the doctor involved in the study admits that it's too early to start panicking over the issue yet, but of course he calls for more research into the subject.

Eww. Wierd. That radiation has to go somewhere, but really. Radiation zapping our sperm?

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Talk about a thorny question, right? But the man posing it is no less than Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Web itself.

On the Web, the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable ... a sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging.

So, his proposal? A new system (or set of systems) that would label Web sites according to ... well, how truthful they are-maybe not just "a simple number like an IQ rating," he says, but perhaps "different organizations labeling Web sites in different ways."

All pretty vague-and of course, troubling. Indeed, the idea would probably be laughed off the Web were it not Tim Berners-Lee who was proposing it.

Of course, the natural question (already posed by many) is: Who'd get to decide whether a given site is trustworthy or not? Would there be a series of "truthiness" tribunals, made up of experts in different fields? (And of course, experts are never wrong.) An algorithm? Or just a Digg-like popularity contest? And Web sites would be labeled ... well, how, exactly? A thumbs-up or thumbs-down badge? A numeric rating? A color scale?

Personally, no. I don't think that websites should be rated. That would just be wierd. I mean, if it were based on age groups, which it probaly will, then i would be able to access every single website on the Internet, but still, it would be a hassle for most of the users of the Internet. I don't want to go through that. The Internet is one of the few things that we have left that isn't rated. Which is great in my opinion. Whatever. It's like saying that we should pay for the Internet. That would just suck. I already do, it's called an ISP.

So I open it up to you, dear readers: Does Berners-Lee (who, after all, literally invented the Web) have a point? Is he nuts? How would a labeling scheme work, and who decides what's fact and what's fiction?

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We've seen all types of high tech toys popping up in hotels as of late, haven't we? I suppose hoteliers hope to attract wired types with more than Wi-Fi options so they now offer in-room gaming consoles, iMacs, and HDTVs (alas, with no HD programming!). And while all that looks and sounds great, one high-tech company hopes to blow them all out of the water by furnishing the first Ambient Experience Concept Suite.

The hotel pictured here filled with glowing suites is based in Singapore where Philips is working with the Fairmont hotel chain in an initiative they call "Hotel of the Future." So what exactly is in these decked-out suites that makes them so futuristic? According to Crave Asia, the media had a chance to check out the high-tech suites where actors played executive types that unwinded in mood light filled living rooms at the touch of a button. Other toys in the suites included bath tubs under star-filled mood ceilings, motion activated night lights, Ambilight flat panels, Ambisound theatre systems, and Wake-Up Lights that simulated the sun's rays in the mornings. We'll probably get this type of treatment in about another decade, but isn't it good to dream?

I don't spend a lot of time in my hotel when I travel, but I suppose having all this stuff couldn't hurt as long as hotel rates remained reasonable.

What do you think? Is all this high-tech stuff necessary?

Yes, heck yes all of this tech stuff is nesacarry. At least for me. I think that if you are going to be traveling a lot, then you already have a Blackberry, a cool laptop, and other such things, so why not just go ahead and get all the other technology that isn't portable? But, i would only agree to this, as long as the rates remain reasonable. If then, then YAY!

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According to a new nationwide study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 97 percent of kids aged 12 to 17 interact with some form of video games. The study, conducted since November of 2007, found that out of 1,102 surveyed, 99 percent of boys and 94 percent of girls spent some time gaming.

Now I knew that gaming was a huge, multi-billion dollar business that continues to grow, but I had no idea that so many young ones, male and female alike, have gotten into gaming. It's not necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion, but ninety-seven out of one hundred is huge.

As an obvious advocate of video gaming I must say that gaming at a young age has provided me with positive skills that I still use to this day. Many video games across all genres have strengthened my hand-eye coordination, basic problem solving, situational intuition, quick decision making, and muscular reflex, all in an entertaining format.

The study also notes that about a third of the parents surveyed enjoyed playing video games with their children-a number I hope to see rise as time goes on. Additionally, most of the parents surveyed are under the age of 40 and have also grown up playing older video games, which many believe is the reason why so many parents are gaming with their kids.

So, what do you think? As a legion of young gamers are growing older, are you ready to join in on the fun, or do you think that civilization with an attention span is doomed?

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In the Sydney Morning Herald, writer Suw Charman-Anderson weighs in on the topic of how much time we waste checking email. Not the issue of deleting spam and fielding absurd requests from your boss (doesn't he understand how busy you are???), but simply breaking your train of thought from what you were doing before and concentrating on something else, then shifting gears to go back to the original task.

According to research quoted by Charman-Anderson, it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover from an email interruption. If you check your email once every five minutes, you waste 8 1/2 hours a week trying to determine what you were doing before you clicked over to Outlook. That sounds a bit high, but either way, email overload is no joke: 56 percent of users in a recent survey said that they spent more than two hours a day reading and writing email, and people really do tend to respond quickly (apparently, unless they're replying to me and I'm on deadline): The average email response time is a blazing 104 seconds.

This isn't the first time that email has been implicated as a distraction, possibly a mentally detrimental one. This post from on a similar topic from last March really struck a nerve with readers, garnering 599 comments. The advice back then (check email less often) was, in part, the same that Charman-Anderson gives, but there's a spin on it this time. Consider this: "Dr Renaud's team discovered that while 64% of respondents claimed to check their email once an hour, and 35% said they checked every 15 minutes, they were actually checking it much more frequently, about once every five minutes. For some people, checking email is no longer a conscious and deliberate act, but a compulsion they are barely aware of." One author later goes on to compare the compulsion associated with email to people playing slot machines. Ouch!

Take some of Charman-Anderson's advice with a grain of salt: She is a social networking software consultant, and one gets the feeling that she might be promoting alternative tools that are a far bigger waste of time than email. Twitter and IM are both enormous productivity drains, and dealing with wikis can strain the patience of even the the most frazzled emailer, but Charman-Anderson recommends them all. Scheduling email time isn't really practical for most people; most employers would freak out if you ignored their emails all day except for once in the morning and once in the late afternoon. On the other hand, some suggestions, like turning off alerts and using your email client to quickly scan subjects and the first few lines of an email so you can quickly dispatch them are spot on.

Me, I check my email about once an hour. Not as bad as some of the times mentioned in this article, but I still think that i can cut back on that. It's like if I'm away from my email for too long, then some part of my soul will turn against me and rip me up into little pieces. I NEED MY EMAIL! I think that that statement right there makes me think that I'm going crazy.

Hey, at least it's not as bad as my blogging habits...

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Go watch it, come back here, and start scratching your head.

The ad is so far not winning many fans, with most perplexed over the 90-second spot's exploration of churros, footwear, and showering habits, as Seinfeld and Gates (playing themselves) try on shoes in a shopping mall. Vista is never mentioned explicitly in the ad, and Microsoft only comes up in the last few seconds of the ad.

Naysayers call it a baffling, stupid disaster. Kinder critics say that it cleverly plays on Seinfeld's reputation for observational humor (Seinfeld was famously a show "about nothing"). I'll just say, for now, it's weird: Not as bad as I'd been led to believe but hopefully just a quiet opening volley for a campaign that will actually make me laugh out loud down the road.

In one sense, though, the ad is already having some effect: People are actually talking about Windows Vista.

OK armchair critics, what do you think about the spot?

Defiently an intresting move on the part of Microsoft. But i still don't know whether thier trying to get people to not think that Vista is a piece of crap, or whether thier trying to just get some chuckles out of some Vista deprived folks?

I don't know. I like the commercials though. Good choice in choosing Jerry Seinfeld as thier promoter though.

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Luckily, mine is 1080P, which apparently is the best for general television viewing. I don't know if that's totally true, but whatever. LCD, so it's really cool to watch at night, when all the light are turned off, and it's also anti glare, so if i try to shine a flashlight on the screen, then it won't show up at all. I think that all of the feautures besides the HDTV are remarkable. It's just really fun to watch. Just really really fun. A nice investment in my part, but I'm just really mad at myself for not buying one sooner. That's all the bad that I have to say.

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Being a democrat is all about Socialism. Which is simply the goverment putting more into what happens in the USA. Less of a democracy if you will. So they will have to raise taxes, because how else is the goverment going to take care of the people of the USA? They aren't just going to pull the money out of the sky. It dosen't work like that. That's your money. And they want more programs for you to. That sounds good, but how else are they going to fund for that program. Your money, taxes. Your hard earned cash.

This idea right here is not allowing me to do what i want with MY money. I want to choose if i want to help out a goverment program or not, and if i do, i want to be able to donate however much money that i want to that program. I want to be more of a democracy.

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Read and Post Comments | Get the full article at GameSpot

Read and Post Comments | Get the full article at GameSpot

Then comes along the Playstation 2. There was a big hype about it and all, and it was great, but most PC's were still in great shape when it came to the hardware requirements of games during those times. Some years go by and the Xbox comes out and brings a new wave of technology our way. Things get a little more complex, a little more expensive, but things are still good.

A couple more year go by and things are all bent out of shape all of sudden. It's like the hardware, the system requirements for games, just all seemed to go up all at once. Some people were still true PC gamers because they either loved the feel of it, or just relyed on it as thier source for games for so long. This was also the time that the brand new Xbox 360 was shipping out all over the land. Great. So now PC fans have to suffer the heart ache of having new technology, and a system that utilizes that technology to just blow us all away. People were not happy.

Well things have just been that same way since then. The PS3 came out and was supposed to be the biggest graphics showcase in the world.

The PC has just fallen behind so much, not in the graphics part of things or anything, but it's just that technology is improving at a pace that we haven't seen before. The people of the 90's and thier computers were set for a year probaly if they just recently bought a PC, before they ever got outdated by some new processor or some other piece of hardware. But no, the graphics part of the PC is right up there, if 1, you can afford it, and 2, if you have a lot of money.

It's just sad to see the PC getting more and more expensive, especially gaming computers. I guess that we had this coming with technology becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives, but I just wish that this never happened. Sad face.

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Read and Post Comments | Get the full article at GameSpot

Beginning Sept. 5, the estimated prices for the Xbox 360 SKUs will be:

360 Arcade: $199.99

Xbox 360: $299.99

Xbox 360 Elite: $399.99

This would be good. Very good. Maybe now, some of my other loser friends can afford a 360. Losers.

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I don't know. If anybody has any information on the new Xbox, the message me or something. Thanks.

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Although, i guess you would have to get a wireless reciever or something if you wanted to use a wireless controller on your PC...

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