Who would’ve thought that it all would’ve started with just one man in Tunisia setting himself on fire? But that’s exactly what happened, that’s exactly what he achieved; he set the Muslim world on fire in terms of protests, rebellions, revelations and revolutions, for better and for worse. I remember reading up on the events in Tunisia back in the early months of 2011 and thinking to myself that it was absolutely remarkable that a near bloodless revolution was happening in the modern era. A dictatorship was removed from power simply from the will of the people that he had been oppressing for years and through the sheer power of free speech over the internet.

If the events in Tunisia can be considered remarkable, then what happened in Egypt the following month can be considered a bloody hell miracle. I mean, with one of the most prominent and populated Muslim countries organizing a coup d’etat by the people and for the people, and removing their long-standing dictator once again through the sheer power of peaceful protests and free speech over the internet? I couldn’t believe what I was seeing with my eyes, and I was proud not only for the Egyptian people standing up for their rights but also for having the courage to become a voice of reason throughout the Muslim world. Tunisia will always be remembered as perhaps the first step forward for the movement of Islamic countries electing the leaders that they actually want and deserve, but Egypt and their bloodless revolution may have indeed been the true benchmark example that every Muslim country will try to follow and emulate. I just wish the results of the real world were as simple and ideal as that.

Since the Egyptian revolution, things haven’t been so rosy around the world. We all know the events in Libya, where the dictator there refused to give power over to the people and started slaughtering them with tanks and fighter jets. The UN had agreed to implement a no-fly zone using NATO forces, commanded primarily by England and France, but I’m not sure if anything truly positive has been achieved. Has it been a disaster for Libya to have Europe’s help? Absolutely not, since most likely intervention prevented another massacre on the scale of Darfur. It’s just that, now Libya is locked in the middle of a civil war that may go on for years unless the rebels get crushed first or the UN decides to actually invade the country itself. After the events in Tunisia and Egypt, I guess a random bystander like me just can’t help but be disappointed that dictators have learned how not to cede their thrones.

It’s not just Libya that’s now marred in turmoil. Syria and other dictatorship countries throughout the world are now murdering their own peaceful protesters, though without the aid of tanks or military might that would get the attention of a UN mandate. Even Egypt, the true beacon of a revolution, is having issues again with their military arguably refusing to follow the will of the people. Factor in the continued US quagmires in Iraq, Afghanistan and arguably even Pakistan, and then you have potentially the most global conflict that I’ve experience in my lifetime. Although in my respective youth, I do realize there have been much worse periods for humanity over the course of even the past hundred years, it all certainly still worries me especially during this ongoing recession.

After the events in Libya and with another European bankruptcy in Portugal halting the recovery of the economy, it was due time for some good news. When President Obama announced on live television on Sunday that Osama Bin Laden had been located and killed in Pakistan, I admit that I felt a great sense of relief, followed shortly be a sense of personal remorse. I mean, I remember just how terrified and angry I felt when 9/11 happened almost ten years ago. A major attack finally hit home in North America and all of a sudden, I didn’t feel safe. A part of me was ecstatic that "justice" had been served in the killing of Osama Bin Ladin, and then a part of me felt terrible for arguably celebrating the death of another human being. Did he deserve to be hunted down in his mansion and, if rumours are to be believed, executed in front of his family? I don’t know, I wasn’t there and it’s not my judgment to make. At this time, I just hope that his passing will help the US and the victims of 9/11 to ultimately find closure, and I hope that Osama’s death will not incite more terrorism from the Middle East. I’ve read reports that amongst all the protests and revolutions going on in the Islamic world, Bin Laden’s demise was barely a newspaper footnote. Even though we all know the conspiracy theories about his final days will continue on for decades, I just hope that for the common person, we forget about Osama Bin Laden and manage to move on with our lives.

And that’s just the summary of events in the Middle East. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and the death of Osama Bin Laden have been more than enough headlines to make a full year memorable, and yet that’s not even the half of what’s occurred in 2011 so far. On a Canadian note, while our recent election wouldn’t make headlines around the world in this day and age, I’ll admit here that I was shocked that we managed to elect a majority government for the first time in what felt like ages. I was predicting yet another minority government after yet another $300 million waste of taxpayers’ money for an election, and then I heard plenty of "I told you" so’s from my family shortly after the results came in. I also certainly did not predict that the NDP would rise to over a hundred seats like they did, that most definitely caught me off-guard. While I was quite frankly overjoyed by the fact that the Bloc Quebecois was essentially wiped out once and for all (I still blame them for making me so tense and nervous back in Grade 8 during the Quebec Separation Referendum), I’m not sure how I feel about the Liberals being ousted and embarrassed down to just thirty seats. Canada has been a three-party system since I was more or less born, and it’s weird to think that perhaps it might become a two-party system like the United States. I wonder what will happen next time around.

The biggest news that potentially shocked both Canada and the world this year was arguably the earthquake in Japan. It’s still hard to believe that a 9.0 on the Richter Scale hit the island nation, and it’s even more frightening to remember all the damage and death that the ensuing tsunami caused the Japanese people. Tsunamis are named after the Japanese word for a reason, and it was heart-breaking to watch live footage of the devastation that the disaster caused as waters engulfed entire towns and villages. The largest earthquake I’ve ever felt in my lifetime was only probably a 5.5, so I can’t even begin to imagine how Japan must have felt when the earthquake started and wouldn’t stop for over a minute without end. Hopefully the 9.0 will be Japan’s "big one" and a similar sized earthquake won’t target them for decades into the future. It’s still not over yet though, not in terms of aftershocks. With more than ten thousand dead and infrastructure severely weakened from the original earthquake, I’m terrified of what might occur with an aftershock of 8.0 or higher as predicted. It happened after the 9.2 Sumatra quake, and it’ll happen here too.

While I can only compliment and congratulate the Japanese for building such earthquake sturdy infrastructure (it’s amazing to watch their buildings sway during the quake like trees in the wind), I wish they had been as forward thinking when it came to their nuclear reactors. I’m not sure if they were just trying to save a few billion dollars here and there or if the reactors were already worse than they admitted to the public, but I have no idea why they didn’t just immediately cool the reactors down with oceanic salt water before hydrogen explosions occurred and the containment walls were breached. Today we still have a situation where the least damaged reactors have been finally cooled down once the Japanese eventually chose to dump sea water into the cores, but the first reactors to undergo meltdown still are a hazard and are terrifying not just the local populace but also all travellers throughout Asia.

Is the threat of radioactivity completely overblown? Absolutely, as flying over Japan doses a passenger with no more radiation than an X-ray at the airport. But I still can’t believe that the Japanese government decided to risk the safety of their entire country and arguably the entire Pacific Rim by not shutting down their nuclear reactors early on at all costs before the nuclear rods inside started to melt down and contaminate the environment. The situation may be under control now, but where does this leave nuclear power in the eyes of the public? I was so hoping that along with solar power and natural gas, that pollution-free Thorium nuclear reactors would help relieve North America from Middle Eastern oil reliance in the future. Even though a pure Thorium reactor has pretty much zero chance of ever melting down and produces magnitudes of energy more efficiently than current nuclear reactors, what community around the world would ever trust having a nuclear site near their home and people now?

And all of this, from revolutions across the Middle East to earthquakes devastating New Zealand and Japan, are only a small sample of everything that has happened in the year 2011 so far. It’s only May now, and we still have a long way to go before we witness all that this year has to offer. I admit, I’m still considered young in the world’s eyes, but I feel I’ve had more compelling news to read over the past five months than the past five or so years combined.

The world is still suffering from a global economic depression and it won’t get any better with so many factory shutdowns in Japan, rising oil prices around the globe, and the national bankruptcies in Portugal and potentially soon Spain. I can’t help but be curious and concerned; what will the world look like by the start of the New Year?...

I don’t know if I can make my cliche remark, "sounds like fun", but it does sound like a story I will want to hear.

...

While everything has been going on in the world, I’ve just been sitting comfortably at home or twiddling my thumbs away at work, with nothing to do but think of random materialism even in this day and age. This sort of does make me feel self-centered and selfish, especially after all the world events I just talked about, but I’ve been compulsively reading up a lot on tech blogs about the future of computing, especially that of smartphones. After getting my Google Nexus One about a year ago when I visited Chicago, smartphones have sort of become my obsession.

I picked up my Google Nexus One (unlocked at $529 USD) while visiting my sister in the United States last May. The specs of the phone (800x480 resolution, 3.7" AMOLED display, 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 512 MB of RAM, and now Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system) are not consider other-worldly anymore, but they were pretty much top of the line when the phone first came out. I chose the Nexus One because it was completely free of bloatware and was promised to be given free updates from Google immediately after they’re complete. While I did have issues with the company after I waited months for Gingerbread without any hope it would be released on the Nexus One, I’m more or less happy now that Google did eventually update my operating system to version 2.3.4.

From my last Tweakui update, you two readers out there will know that I’ve had my issues with this smartphone. I basically paid $580 CDN for a useless brick of frustration. My original Nexus One started melting down on me, to the point where I couldn’t even make a phone call or load a single picture on the web browser without it randomly overheating and rebooting with the "X" screen of death. I returned the phone to HTC back in August and it took me a month and a half along with constant goddam arguments with their repair service to finally get another Nexus One, only to realize that they sent me back a refurbished brick that worked even worse than the failure I had mailed out.

Finally, it seemed like the third time was the charm, as the final Nexus One they sent me would only temporarily freeze when overheating instead of dying and rebooting. I figured I could live with that, so I’ve been using it to this day. Unfortunately for me, more problems have crept back to make this smartphone into yet another total pain in the ass to use on a daily basis. The antennas on my new Nexus One are absolutely terrible, as I regularly get no phone reception in my home or in buildings. Whenever I do get reception, I often get dropped calls or missed calls that go straight to my voice-mail. The funniest thing is, often whenever I try to make an out-going call from inside an office or restaurant, instead of actually contacting the person I’m trying to dial, I’ll get some random fax machine sound on the other side instead. My GPS detection rarely ever works, my 3G connection stalls every time, and if I leave WiFi on during a phone call, often the other party can’t even hear half the words I’m trying to say. WTF?...

As a backup phone, I bought the LG Optimus One P500 from Telus last November. It has paltry specs in comparison (480x320 resolution, 3.2" TFT display, 600 MHz Qualcomm ARM11 processor, 512 MB of RAM, and Android 2.2 Froyo operating system), but considering it was only $125 CDN from Telus after a gift card rebate, I thought it was worth a shot. On one hand, I really commend LG for making such a great discount Android phone. The key thing is, it actually works well as a phone, as the call quality is much better than my Nexus One ever achieved and I’ve never experienced a dropped call with the Optimus One yet. Speed-wise, it’s not a bad smartphone either as the 600 MHz processor still loads webpages in acceptable times thanks to the lowered resolution. On the other hand, compared to the Nexus One, I just can’t stand how cheap this phone feels even as a backup phone. The touchscreen is the worst offender, as it often miscalculates where I touched and where I’m trying to scroll to. It’s absolutely frustrating to get to where I want in a webpage or even when scrolling through the settings menu. I also can’t stand how the Optimus One feels so cheap in the hand, not just because of its thick plastic shell but also because of its complete lack of gorilla glass on the display. The plastic display feels absolutely terrible to touch, and it really bothers my OCD how easily dust gets in beneath the display permanently without the constant use of a sleeve or protective casing. I did like the phone for its pricing at least, until Telus / Koodo dropped the price to about $75 CDN the other month. Hindsight is 20/20, but dammit, now I don’t feel like I even got a bargain.

While my Nexus One was away for repairs last summer, I tried using my old 1990’s Nokia candy-bar brick of a dumb-phone as a replacement. I couldn’t take not checking my e-mail and tomorrow’s gas prices on the road for very long, so I opted to pick up an old skool Nokia C3 pay-as-you-go phone at the time for $79 CDN. The specs on it were horrible (320x240 resolution, 2.4" TFT display, 64MB of RAM, Symbian S40 operating system, and I can’t even google what kind of processor it has), so it doesn’t even classify as a smartphone. Still, I somehow fell in love with that shiny atrocity of ancient technology. There was just something so classic and relaxing about the primitive S40 interface in terms of simplicity and reliability, the call quality wasn’t clear but it was loud enough that I could hear it anywhere I used the phone, and the physical keyboard with its large space button made texting other people into a joy for the first time in my life. After I got back a working Nexus One, I didn’t have a need for the Nokia C3 anymore so I gave it away to my sister-in-law since her LG Cookie was on its last legs. Still, I somehow miss the ol’ Nokia C3, as it did every job I asked of it adequately (never had a dropped call, it was fantastic as a pocket watch to check the time, and I was still able to browse websites in 2G with minimal effort) all at a really good price.

Feeling extra nostalgic and materialistic this past week, I decided to go out of my way and pick up a Nokia E73 Mode smartphone from Mobilicity for $149 CDN. It’s not a powerful phone by any stretch of the imagination (320x240 resolution, 2.4" TFT display, 600 MHz ARM11 processor, 128 MB of RAM, and Symbian S60 operating system), but I was hoping it would be a better version of the Nokia C3 I so missed and loved. I was completely wrong though in my idealistic assessments, as the E73 (and I assume the entire Nokia "E" series line-up) just doesn’t have the innocent charm that my precious C3 did. The S60 interface has a hell of a lot of features, so many to the point that Nokia made it confusing as hell even to an engineer like myself where all the settings would go. It took me over a day of searching to locate and memorize all the basic settings that Android and other modern operating systems would have at literally the touch of the finger-tips. I was so looking forward to free GPS with Ovi Maps, only to wonder why my GPS connections wouldn’t work until I read online that the satellites don’t lock on until about 15-20 minutes of non-standby mode searching. I was excited that Nokia finally implemented a persistent hierarchy system between 3G and WiFi, only to realize that even the native apps on the E73 still asked to make a new WiFi connection every time I opened a program up. For all the charm and simplicity that the Nokia C3 had in spades, the Nokia E73 really is an absolute mess of an operating system experience. The plus side though, is that I really do feel like the E73 is one sexy phone. While its golden colour is not as nice as the titanium finish on the E71, I do admit that the contours and thin shape of the E73 make it the best feeling phone I’ve ever held in my hands. It honestly makes the Google Nexus One feel like the brick it is and the LG Optimus One feel like an obese cousin. The irony is, I still wish the E73 at 130g could remain as smooth as it is yet still feel as light as the 110g C3...

So I guess the question now is, what does my future hold in terms of smartphones? Well, I already know the next one I’m targetting. Considering I’m tired of the Android interface after the Nexus One, I feel like a change of pace in terms of operating system is in order. I’m tempted to take a look at the Blackberry Bold Touch because of its combination of a physical keyboard along with a candy-bar touchscreen form factor, but I don’t think I want to jump onto the Blackberry bandwagon without the QNX operating system coming next year. I’ve also thought about going for Windows Phone 7 instead, and if Nokia would release a WP7.5 phone with the Mango multi-tasking update right now, I’d definitely consider it seriously. Since the Nokia and Microsoft joint venture won’t have any real tangible results until 2012, and because there’s no way in hell I’m going to buy an iPhone or an iPhone wannabe (though to be fair, the specs on the Samsung Galaxy S2 dual-core are incredible), that only leaves one remaining option...

I feel like bucking the trend again and going for what I feel is the best operating system experience, even if its current popularity has much to be desired. While I’m still young and before the smartphone eco-system industry gets fully consolidated, I want to try my hand at WebOS, specifically the HP Pre 3 which I’m hoping will be released at $450 CDN like the Pre 2 was. The specs on this phone aren’t anything to gawk at for 2011 (800x480 resolution, 3.6" TFT display, 1.4 GHz Qualcomm Scorpion processor, 512 MB of RAM, and the rumoured WebOS 2.3 operating system), but it’s all the WebOS touch gestures and the real multi-tasking features that I’m salivating about. I love the fact that finally we get a 3.6" vertical phone with a physical keyboard, although I am worried that the construction of the slider might be flimsy or that weight at 160g might be too heavy during long phone calls. I also am concerned that many features of the HP Pre 3 may remain locked without a bridge connection to the HP Touchpad, which I don’t plan on purchasing unless it drops to below $300 CDN itself. Still, I can’t wait until I get a HP Pre 3 in my hands this coming summer to finally replace the aging Android 2.2 experience I’ve had for the past year. It might be a mistake to go for a phone with the HP reputation for shoddy reliability, but I know I’d replace it in a year anyway.

As for 2012, that’s when I plan to finally get a true superphone. I have no real urgency to pick up a dual-core Samsung or Motorola this year, considering they will be replaced by tri-core and quad-core beasts next Spring at the latest. What I’m hoping for in 2012 is a great showing from Microsoft, especially in terms of Windows 8. They’ve confirmed that their new operating system will work on ARM processors, so why wouldn’t they build a Windows 8 superphone that will run Windows applications natively as a smartphone, a laptop and a TV desktop, all on the same device? I’m expecting to purchase by the end of 2012 one single phone that will be both my primary smartphone and also plugs into a laptop shell to become my new home computer, all without the limitations of the crappy Linux interface that the current Motorola Atrix superphone provides. The key thing is, I would only want a superphone to replace the x86 computers I have at home if it can run all my Windows applications (built for Windows 7 or higher) with a smartphone interface in my hand and a keyboard and mouse interface on my lap. What kind of specs am I expecting for a phone like this? I’d want at least a 960x540 resolution on a 4.0" SAMOLED Plus display (if not 720p to compete directly with Apple’s IPS retina display), a quad-core ARM processor with each core running at least at 1.5 GHz, and I’m thinking around 2GB of RAM if not higher to manage all the desktop functionality.

Is this all just a fantasy? Potentially, yes. But dare to dream, I say. Before the world ends in 2012, I want the goddam superphone of my dreams. So Microsoft, make it happen. Make it bloody happen...

...

Besides wasting countless hours reading up on world news and smartphone tech blogs, what have I been up to? Well, beyond also all the other hours wasted on analyzing Nintendo Stream rumours, Nintendo 3DS software line-ups, and everything else associated with this year’s upcoming E3 video game show?...

I guess a lot has happened to me in 2011 on a personal level, though that’s more or less an update for another day. Short story short, I haven’t had much to do at my workplace for the past few months, and then my company followed that up by giving me an insultingly low offer. I didn’t want to be at that office anymore, and I soon found out that nobody at that office really cared that I didn’t want to be there either. In the end, leaving my job was a mutual decision, as I was easily replaceable, they wouldn’t offer me the money I asked for, and there was nowhere in the company that I could move up to without stepping on the toes of people I care about. I wish things had ended better, and I wish the only person I had considered a friend there had actually been a friend. Like I said, it’s a longer story for another day. My past few months there were a waste, but I do miss the times when I felt like I mattered.

Besides that, I’m now almost finished my Accounting certificate from York University. Combined with my Computer Engineering degree from the University of Toronto, I thought a hell of a lot more recruiters would be contacting me now that I’ve updated and uploaded my resume. Turns out, either this is an abnormally slow hiring season for both auditing and programming even by this recession’s standards, or even my combined backgrounds on my resume still doesn’t cut it in this day and age. My last year at my company was a complete waste in terms of my skill-set and pay, and now I’m afraid it didn’t help my resume either at all. I am getting a few phone calls and I still have a few opportunities to follow, but it’s going to be a long year if I can’t find the career I’ve been searching for.

Because it all sounds like so much goddam fun, now doesn’t it? I don’t know how 2011 will end, but it’s already given myself and more importantly the world more than it can handle over the past few months. It’s almost frightening how much has happened, and yet, I can’t look away. This will be an interesting year for all, indeed...

And on that note, as always, I wish you few readers out there a God Speed, a Good Will Hunting, and God Bless Us, Everyone...

I’m so bloody damn sick, or I have been since the start of the week. On December 26^th, it all started with a fever so hot that it burned my throat, and a migraine so painful that my newfound sensitivity to light restored my belief in goddam vampiricism, and from there on it all went downhill. The next day my throat was so sore to the point where I couldn’t swallow anything but scalding hot water without it feeling like I was ripping apart my insides. The day after that, I felt like I was in a zombie apocalypse of an insomnia escapade, where I was too weak and too demoralized to do anything so I just laid there on my bed staring at the ceiling for God knows how long out of boredom. I don’t even remember what happened to me the days after that because none of it mattered. I was too sick to read anything off of my smartphone or laptop for more than minutes or even seconds at a time before a headache would ensue, and I just didn’t have the energy or the will-power to do anything but stay dormant in my bed with absolutely nothing to do.

You know what’s the saddest part of it all though? I’ve been absolutely plastered to my bed for the better part of the past five days, and you know what I dreaded most? The goddam recovery process. I’ve been through this whole influenza song and dance many times before. As much as I can’t stand the torching temperatures or the fiery brimstone throats, I know those symptoms will pass with due time. But when they finally do start to disappear, that’s when the real menace shows up: my eternal goddam fucking cough. It’s what I warned all my friends at the University of Toronto about on the first day, that a) I don’t like elevators (I still prefer not to use them to this day), b) I write really small (anything larger would be uncivilized), and c) I cough a lot - a hell of a lot. Whenever I get the flu or a bad sickness of any sort, when I finally recover, I cough absolutely non-stop at a rate of pretty much ten coughs to every uttered word and five coughs to every gasp of breath. I’ve never found a solution to it, just a bunch of placebos that never work the same the next damn time I try. And I certainly found this all out again the hard way last night.

So yeah, starting last night, this is the beginning of my recovery process, where my fever is now being produced mainly from all the excess heat that my goddam coughing is causing. If I try to drink some water? I cough it up. If I want to talk over the phone? I cough some more. If I want to eat a goddam grape? I’d probably choke in the process and cough it back out. And the sad thing is, it’s going to be like this for me for the next few days at bare minimum, and I’ve had whooping coughs in the past that have gone on for weeks. It’s sometimes mitigated in the short-term with exercise, such as jogging or stretching the chest muscles, but none of that helps when it comes time for sleep. I hate, I hate, I hate the flu recovery process, because how the fuck am I supposed to recover when I can’t get any goddam sleep? It doesn’t matter what medicine I try, nothing helps to suppress my constant cough at night. And I don’t even need my cough to be constant to keep me up at night. All it takes is for one nice, soft lull to put me on the brink of sleep, my neck then slips out of its perfectly attuned position by one little micrometer, and then bam, the sensitivity in my chest and throat goes all ballistic and suddenly a whirlwind of coughs ruins however long I was trying to fall asleep in the goddam first place. My cough is insidious that way, and this will go on for days.

So no, this is not the way I would’ve preferred to ring in the New Year. Last night when I tried going to bed around 11 pm, I may have gotten an hour of sleep out of sheer exhaustion before being woken up by torrent of coughing that cornered me in my room in the goddam fetal position from spasm severity. And from that point on, I tried everything I could to get back to sleep, from taking NyQuil and whatever other stronger medicines I had, to sleeping in countless awkward positions in the hope that one of them would work, to even trying to move around my Adam’s Apple to the exact right position where it doesn’t feel extra sensitive every time there’s a slight rush of cold in the room. But no matter what I did, the cough came back the very moment I closed my goddam eyes. Like clockwork. I hate this, I hate this so very much.

This is normally the part of my Y2kk Update where I talk about things going on in the world. I guess plenty of things have happened in 2010, from Team Canada winning the Hockey Olympics back in the early winter, to the World Cup festivities in South Africa in the summer, along with plenty of stuff occurring with Barack Obama and the United States (especially with the loss of Congress during mid-term elections and all). And oh, some asshole young techie guy who did nothing in 2010 got Times’ Man of the Year because somebody made a movie about him and made it look like easy for anyone to become a billionaire (although in his case, maybe it was). Then there was the whole Wikileaks debacle that never really resulted in truly juicy details like hybrid alien-human wars or anything like that, so I don’t even really count it as relevant news in my books. There was certainly news in 2010, but right now I can’t remember what.

The truth is, I know that plenty of other happenings have been going on in the world including many natural disasters and too many deaths to mention, but as callous as this sounds, I’m actually drawing a blank right now because every time I try to think long and hard about it, I start coughing to the point where I start to black out. In a sense, maybe I should only write these now-rare Y2kk Updates of mine on days where I actually have the energy and peace of mind to produce something substantial and meaningful rather than just ranting and whining about my current state of miserableness on a day to day basis…

Then again, it does make sense to remain consistent with my last ten years of random noname writings…

…

For me, I guess you can say 2010 was the year of smartphones. It was back when I was visiting my sister in Chicago that I picked up my Google Nexus One, manufactured by HTC and sold at a price of $529 USD + $30 tax. I certainly wasn’t happy about having to pay tax even after purchasing the phone in the 'States, especially considering shipping costs would’ve been free if I had sent it all the way to Canada instead. But at least I didn’t have to pay any international duties, and for a while everything felt great with the phone. With a 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, 3.7" AMOLED screen with 800x480 resolution, a pretty nice capacitive touchscreen that was one of the best at the time along with stock Android 2.1 Éclair (which I thought would receive OS updates unhindered from Google for the next few years), I thought I had made a wise choice. I accepted all the known faults of the shoddy multi-touch implementation and occasional bad reception issues that rival the bumper-less iPhone 4, because beyond all that, what else could go wrong?

I can’t believe how bad my luck with electronics is. Why must it be that every time I purchase a high-tech device that is actually high-tech, it completely craps out on me without myself doing anything wrong, no matter what the reliability rating is for the product I just bought? I swear I didn’t physically punish my Nexus One, I swear I didn’t root it or even install more than a few apps in total for trial purposes, and I swear I didn’t let anyone else use or abuse it in any shape or form that could’ve caused it to malfunction like it did. But the problems all started in late summer with the over-the-air release of Android 2.2 Froyo; I was so excited to get USB tethering at the time so I was more than eager to download. Immediately after the installation had completed itself, I booted up the stock browser and started surfing the web. Within five minutes, the phone suddenly rumbled and shut itself off, revealing the dreaded "X" mark of death that would soon become essentially my start, home, and end screen. I didn’t think it would fail again at the time, it was the first occasion I had ever seen my Nexus One falter, so I rebooted again and thought nothing of it.

But the crashes started becoming more and more frequent. By two weeks after the Froyo update, I had trouble with scrolling in Google Maps with GPS locked on. Any quick scrolling would cause the smartphone to lock up and reboot with the "X" symbol, but I believed it was a problem with the new version of Google Maps and thus I thought nothing of it. It was around late August at the time of my brother’s wedding that I really started noticing big problems with my phone. Whenever I would browse even regular, non-plugin-based websites with 3G access, my phone would crash in the middle of loading images. Hell, I even had to be careful when showing my brother photos of cars on Google Images because I knew that any of them when clicked on for hi-res could lock my phone and crash it out of commission for minutes. Whenever my phone would freeze with the "X" mark of death, no amount of pressing or holding the power button would help. The only solution was to remove the battery for up to ten minutes if need be and then finally pop it back up, praying to the Google gods that the phone would work again. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. I knew it must’ve been an overheating issue, but from what? I was charging my phone on a standard wooden table, I was keeping it in a standard cotton pants pocket, and I normally just hold it in the palm of my standard, wriggly hand. What could possibly cause it to meltdown like this?

After my brother’s wedding, all bets were off. It wasn’t even just GPS and 3G access that caused my Nexus One to die anymore, because the ‘X’ appeared from anything one could possibly think of when using this goddam swiss cheese, piece of shit of a phone. If I wanted to use Bluetooth to talk in my car? Nope, I needed a better phone for that. If I wanted to browse the net with WiFi? Nope, I also needed a better phone for that. And if I actually wanted to receive phone calls? I couldn’t believe my eyes when my phone seemingly bricked itself when I simply got a phone call from just my cousin. Really, my $529 USD smartphone can’t even accomplish what my $50 Nokia has been achieving without fail for ten fucking years? That was the last straw, I had hoped for a software solution but obviously one was not coming.

I called HTC technical support, specifically the number for the Nexus One. I had heard horror stories about them, especially after Google had left them for Samsung instead, so HTC had no cares about keeping Nexus One customers in good faith (especially those in Canada). Thankfully, the first call went through without a hitch. I told them my problems, and after going through the usual routine of software resets and crap that I had already tried a thousand times, I suggested to them that perhaps it’s a battery issue and asked them to send me a replacement. To my surprise, they immediately agreed to it and it arrived at my house within the next eight days. I popped it in, prayed for the best, and received nothing for my goddam prayers.

So I called HTC back, the first time amongst many. I believe this phone call was near the end of September, when I was given my first "ticket" to process the return of my cellphone to their repair services in Seattle. The thing is, HTC in Canada required me to first ship my busted product to a nearby Markham location near Toronto, and from there it would be transferred to either their Houston location next or their Seattle repairs directly. Either way, I openly admitted to them I was fine with waiting as long as three weeks for my phone to be returned to me (which they said should be the upper limit of time I would need to wait). After they issued my ticket and sent me a prepaid shipping label, I was good to go. Or was I? The label that I got back for shipping was sent to me from a character called, "Panky Li". Panki Li, really? I even called back HTC to confirm that the name was valid. Apparently it was, so I delivered my phone.

It arrived at the Markham location the day after and from that point on, I had nothing to worry about, right? I called HTC three days later and they had no word yet on where my phone was. Fair enough. I called HTC another three days after and I got the same response, that they still had no idea where my phone was located. Okay, fine, a bit worrisome but still fair enough. I called back another three days later and again HTC gave me the same response, that they still didn’t know where my phone was in transit, and, wait, what? I didn’t understand what the hell they were saying. How could they not know where my Nexus One was that they themselves shipped from Markham to Seattle? The standard HTC representatives over the phone that I talked to were all completely useless in that regard, so I had to upgrade the situation to a manager instead. The supervisor insisted to me that "determining the location" of my phone was now their top priority and that it was passed onto the "Escalation Team". I even got a call back from the so-called Escalation Team a few hours later, reassuring me that they were on the case and that locating my Nexus One would take top priority over all other repair issues currently on demand. You’d think their word would’ve been good enough, but I also didn’t know back then just how horrible HTC service really is…

One week later, without a single word back from the Escalation Team yet, I fucking called HTC again. It had been over two weeks since I shipped out my phone and as far I could tell, it hadn’t even been located yet let alone repaired. So when I was forced to talk to a lowly standard representation again because all the managers were "too busy" to come to the phone, I had my HTC repair ticket checked and guess what? The representative said that the ticket was no longer valid. Wait, what? WTF? Why, I asked? And according to the rep, apparently the ticket was "closed" due to "inactivity" on the account. What kind of bullshit response was that? I had been calling every three days, I had spoken with two or more supervisors in the process, I moved the ticket up to the damn escalation team, and despite it all, HTC dismisses this as a non-issue and stops looking for my phone? And wait, they didn’t even notify me about this, not even with an e-mail? Disgusting. It took an hour but I finally got a supervisor to come to the phone and she was not very pleased to hear my voice. Well, of course I was going to be pissed off as fuck that my $529 USD phone had been missing for two weeks and HTC cares so much about their own mistake that they closed the issue as if it never happened. The supervisor in her ‘generousity’ opened up a new ticket for my case to use, and from that point on, all the ticket information got fuzzy. Whenever I would later call the HTC repair service to get a status update on my phone, they would mention that my ticket was closed, that I had "no phone" listed in their computers, and that I should have a good day. When I would then routinely raise a stink about their crap, they would then bring up excuses like, "oh, there are actually five linked tickets, let me look through them all", and then put me on hold for at least half an hour every damn time in the hope I would go away.

I don’t know why, but I actually put up with this bullshit for about another week with still no results. It was just the same representatives and the same supervisors spewing the same shit every time about being sorry they can’t find my phone. They eventually admitted it was a problem on their end where the IMEI number and their internal serial numbers weren’t matched up properly in their database upon scan or something, so it was impossible to locate my phone. Knowing this, I asked them why can’t I then get a replacement Nexus, to which they claimed they don’t have the authority. I don’t get it, if they fucking lost my phone, how do they not have the right to give me a fucking phone back? I had gone over three weeks with my Nexus One missing in action and I was completely fed up with their incompetence. If managers and their escalation teams wouldn’t handle it, then I told them the head office would. At the one month mark of my phone being missing, if I was not given acceptable compensation in writing, I would call the head office and lodge a formal complaint using the names of the very supervisors and representatives I had been dealing with. That did get their attention, I even got a phone call out of the blue from the Escalation Team, claiming that I could be eligible for a full refund if I gave them more time. I waited a couple of days, after which I tried contacting them again and they claimed no recollection of what they had said. Bastards.

The funniest thing when threatening HTC about calling the head office was their progression from fear to "nah, he won’t do it". The first time I made my demands, the supervisor perked up, started giving me serious answers and created yet another new ticket for the Escalation Team for me. But by the last time I made my threat, the manager was basically rolling her eyes at me in the background, arguing that I "can’t reach the Head Office" because there is no direct phone line. Wait, say what? WTF? She insisted that HTC’s American Head Office is through e-mail only, which goes through a lengthy process before being screened by anyone of importance and that none of my demands would make it through within months. I found it ridiculous that a) HTC would have such a pathetic customer support service, and b) that one of their own employees who should be fearing the Head Office didn’t even give a shit about my threats.

When I checked online for HTC’s Head Office contact information, the employee I had talked to was partially right. When I called the Head Office, the listed directory they had did not include any options for customer support or filing complaints, except it did regurgitate the same damn HTC repair service phone number I had been wasting away with for a month. Luckily, I’m not that dumb to be stumped by just an automated voice. I pressed "0" for the operator and when a live voice actually came up, I asked to speak with someone who I can file an official complaint with, whether it’s a manager or Director or whoever should be liable to sue for losing my phone. That got their attention, and I got transferred to apparently the head of the real Escalation Department. She of course had never even heard of my situation up to that day.

That’s finally where things started to go my way again, or so I thought. It still felt like an eternity of time had passed by, but negotiating with the head of the Escalation Department was a lot easier than dealing with any of those ungrateful peons below. I did try to get greedy and make some demands, because after more than a month of waiting for my phone lost in limbo, shouldn’t I have gotten something at least in return as compensation for my time? I actually tried to get a free smartphone out of the Head Office, citing reasons like two months worth of lost money on my 3G data plan and for all my hours of lost productivity at my hi-tech job without a smartphone and yadda yadda yadda. I would’ve been happy with a HTC Legend even (I was praying for a HTC Desire), but they would have none of it since I wouldn’t accept the phone as a replacement for my Nexus, only as a free complementary gift. But to say "sorry" to me for all my lost time and frustrations, they eventually did send me a few useless trinkets that I barely even use. There’s the car dock for the Nexus One (which my brother is now using to charge his BlackBerry Torch in his vehicle), a worthless 4GB USB stick with the HTC logo printed on top, and a 16GB mini-SD card for when my Nexus One would return (a gift I had to fight with them for since it was the only one of value). I wasn’t happy with these being the only complementary gifts I got, but I wasn’t ready to sue or anything.

The next issue then became, when am I getting my damn Nexus One back again? The Head Office admitted that my phone was lost for good, there was no way that they could find it in the warehouse after the mess-up that they had. I asked them if I could get a new one in return then, but apparently they have none of the AT&T variants left in stock and I wasn’t willing to trade mine in for an AWS one since I can’t use it on my current network. They wouldn’t give me an adequate replacement phone either (though to be fair, my idea of an adequate replacement phone was a customized, penta-band Desire HD or something…), so I had no choice but to accept taking a refurbished AT&T Nexus One from them. Once that was decided, I sucked up my pride and waited for the phone to return with bated breath. Thanks to overnight pre-paid shipping, it actually arrived just one day later. I was so fucking relieved. I was also so fucking naïve.

I opened up my "new", old phone. Ah, the shiny Nexus One all over again. I popped in the battery, booted it up, started browsing the internet on 3G, and… wait, I got the "X" ring of death again? WTF?...

No, that can’t be right, can it be? Maybe the crash was because it was from a cold boot, or so I thought. I let it charge for a bit, turned the phone back on, turned on 3G data again and… I got the fucking "X" ring of death yet again. What the fuck is this shit? How is it possible that out of all the fucking phones that they could’ve sent back to me, they found the one phone that was even worse than the one they had lost? WTF?

Obviously, I called the HTC Head Office again about this debacle. And to be fair, they immediately apologized and sent another phone to me before I even had the chance to send their first replacement back. The second Nexus One they sent me is the still the one I have now. Is it bulletproof? Hell no, but I guess it’s not much more wonky than I expect from the Nexus One line in the first place. The touch-screen calibration messes up on me all the time until I turn off and back on the screen, my phone reception is exceptionally lousy if I receive a call and I accidentally was surfing on WiFi in the background at the time, I’m getting way more dropped calls than I ever did with my first Nexus One, and my GPS is so messed up in conjunction with 3G that it actually thinks I’m eight blocks away from my real location if it can find "my location" at all. There’s also some weird issue where I try to call home land-lines and I either get random busy signals or a fax sound effect instead. While the modem buzz is nicely nostalgic, WTF is this shit?

But at least besides all that, it works… 60% of the time, every time, which is sadly a goddam miracle…

In the end, it was 47 fucking days from the moment that my phone arrived at their Markham location to the day I finally got a working Nexus One back. That’s forty-seven fucking days of me being fucked over by the HTC repair centre, where the supervisors care so little about their jobs that they even mocked me about trying to call the Head Office about their shenanigans. And while I will give all the credit to the world to the Head Office for at least getting my phone back along with some minor compensation to boot, I still can’t believe they sent me a defective fucking phone like some troll attempt the first chance they got. That was so fucking stupid that it almost made me laugh. Almost, except I wanted my goddam phone back.

So where do I go from here? Well, obviously I can’t look towards HTC for a phone ever again. That’s like me saying I will never get the flu shot again because I so love the virus I have right now so very fucking much. I did make a small purchase the other day of a comparatively modest LG Optimus One P500, the little Thomas the Tank Engine of a smartphone that is a surprisingly good value for the money. I bought it when Telus was giving a deal of a $75 Future Shop gift card back in return for the $200 CDN outright price. How could I resist this hopefully reliable backup smartphone for that kind of discount, especially after what happened with my Nexus One? I might even try it as my primary phone when I get it unlocked.

And for what essentially comes at a net price of $150, I am still very shocked at the value that this LG phone provides. The build and feel is obviously cheaper than the Nexus One but not by a wide margin, the resolution is low at 480x320 but still manages to look decent on the 3.5" screen, the monitor is only a TFT LCD but the brightness levels actually don’t make it look bad compared to my brother’s BlackBerry Torch, and the 600MHZ CPU with the 512MB of RAM provides enough horsepower that many sites that I browse between my Nexus and my Optimus One load in almost the same amount of time. It’s even an Android 2.2 phone so I can upgrade my Nexus to Gingerbread next year and keep the Optimus on 2.2 if I want. The only downside of the phone is the touchscreen. While it is capacitive, it’s an especially lousy one at that. Accuracy is a total bitch and a half, and half the time it doesn’t know when I’m trying to scroll versus when I’m trying to select. But what else can I expect from a phone one third the price of my useless Nexus One?

In a sense though, it was a mistake for me to get the LG Optimus One. As just another Android phone, it’s too similar to my Nexus One to even be a fun toy for me. It’s a nice safe backup in case my primary phone goes down the drain again, but otherwise it’s just sitting there in my room without any real use. What I should’ve gotten was the Nokia E71 because I like having a physical keyboard for text messaging and I’ve only heard amazing things about the reliability of the Nokia E71 line. As for any other phone purchases this year, the only thing that might entice me would be the rumoured alliance between Microsoft and Nokia. I’m always looking for a phone that will run on both the Rogers / AT&T and Mobilicity / T-Mobile frequency ranges here in Canada, and the only decent phone that does so is the Nokia N8. If Microsoft and Nokia release a similar penta-band smartphone with Windows Phone 7 as the operating system, then I just might bite this year, but that’s a big if. I’d also want a nice IPS-quality LCD screen on it too but I digress.

And what do I want in the far-flung future? Well, I’m not really looking for anything truly outrageous in specs, or so I claim at least. What I’m waiting for though is a smartphone that will actually be used as the core hard drive, memory and CPU / GPU for a make-shift laptop. That is, I’m expecting smartphones two or three years down the road to be able to hook up to LCD monitors via an HDMI dock and keyboards via Bluetooth to create desktops and laptops more powerful than the netbook I’m using now. While I know I may cave in before the day it happens, what I'm looking for is an Android phone that will load web pages on its 4" screen as quickly as a dual-core Atom processor would on a netbook, and then when docked with a laptop or desktop shell, it must run HTML5 and Flash-based websites just as smoothly as I would expect from a modern Core2Duo computer. I’m thinking the specs required for this and the specs required for me to upgrade would be a bare minimum dual-core Tegra 2 processor, 2GB of RAM, a 4" or 4.1" Super AMOLED 2 capacitive touchscreen with a native resolution of at least 720p, an actual metal casing and none of that plastic crap plaguing the current Nexus S, and of course I would prefer it if the phone was installed with stock Android with instantly available updates from Google themselves.

Although technically, isn’t the Froyo update from Google what caused this whole Nexus One fiasco of mine in the first place? I guess I’ll find out soon enough again with Gingerbread 2.3 in the New Year...

…

This is the point where I normally talk about the Toronto Raptors. But really, what’s the point? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ve essentially lost interest in the team. I’m the guy that watched every single game I could on television five or so years ago when the Raptors were winning less than 35 games. Even this season, I tried to get tickets to a bunch of games but became discouraged when I saw that ticket prices actually increased during a goddam tanking year. Watching the games now, aside from some surprise wins against teams like Boston, I just don’t feel any connection to the current Raptors playing on the court. DeRozen I can imagine becoming a 20PPG scorer in the future with decent defence but I just don’t see him as a star in terms of an overall game with rebounds and assists. Bargnani has truly proven he can be a Top 2 or 3 offensive option on a decent team by already scoring over 20 PPG and sometimes thirty points in a game with ease. His defence has become suspect though, not just his help D but also his man-to-man against other bigs, so that just discourages me even more from the current Toronto Raptors. Ed Davis has potential defensively and I hope he can become a good pairing with Bargnani, but I still don’t see the type of chemistry I want from this team or the kind of elite strategies I hope for from a coach.

I barely watch Raptors games anymore, but maybe that’s a by-product of how busy I’ve sadly been this past year. I’ve been going to York University full time while also working full time at my computer programming job for insurance companies. My day normally consists of a 9 to 5 day-job that sometimes takes me to 6 or 7 pm depending on deadlines and development milestones, and then I’m off for night school between 7 and 10 pm. Some of the classes I’ve had, especially my Intermediate and Advanced Financial Accounting courses, are pretty heavy with memorization and mathematical calculations. There are also classes like Auditing where participation marks and group presentations are mandatory, forcing me to go to every lecture and pay too much attention in order to just survive with a decent mark. My nights normally consist of this crap, I get home around 11 pm at night, I finally have my dinner around midnight, and then I often just sit in my bed reading random crap on the internet until three in the morning because I feel like my entire day was such a waste if I don’t have some personal time to myself at the end. I’m often not even home to watch Raptors games or to play video games anymore. Weekends are even worse, as I’m stuck meeting my university groups for projects almost every damn week. I actually look forward to the little free time I do have just so I can finish house chores and home maintenance. It’s kind of depressing.

Because it all sounds like so much fun, now doesn’t it? I have now finished 19 courses at York University Accounting, 14 of which were done at the same time as my full-time job. I have three courses plotted for the upcoming winter term and three more in summer to finally finish off my Accounting Certificate. I’ll be so fucking happy and relieved when I’m done. School was fun when it was easy, not so much anymore.

And you know what’s even more sad? I feel so old now because I can’t even remember most of my days. I don’t even know if I want to remember my university lectures or full-time job, but it scares me that I don’t. The days just pass me by without any meaning whatsoever. Sort of like a Y2kk noname update, actually…

And on that note, I wish you two readers out there a God Speed, a Good Will Hunting, a God Bless Us, Everyone…

Worldwide, big things are happening almost every single day. Whether we’re talking about more earthquakes or the global economy double-dipping into yet another recession thanks to the European debt crisis, it’s fascinating to read about everything on the news but not so great to live it through day by day. Back in the early 1930’s, the public was led to believe that the recession would end soon, only for it continue and become The Great Depression that we all know today. I refuse to believe the same will happen to our current global economy, but what happened in Greece and the subsequent slow-down of the economy in North America as a result has definitely got me worried...

Here in Toronto, we’ve had a 5.0 earthquake for the first time in what, twenty or thirty years? The sad thing is, I actually didn’t notice the ground shaking at all, maybe because I was on the first floor of an office building at the time. I still remember being shocked to feel the 4.5 earthquake we had ten years ago, and I guess I’ll be watching the Twitter feeds ten years from now so I don’t miss the next earthquake whenever it hits Ontario. The dumber thing was, that very same day, because I had missed out on plane tickets to Charlotte at a sale price (then suffered through an hour of being held up over the phone in a failed attempt to get that sale price back), I actually got into a car accident on the 401 highway during the rush hour ride home. I missed out on the earthquake but definitely felt my whiplashed neck the next morning, and now I’ll be suffering from expensive as hell premiums for the next ten years.

There was also the combined G8 and G20 summits held in Toronto and wherever other regions up north. Police cars were being torched and burned in Canada for the first time that I can recall in a very long time. It was ridiculous how the police actually lied about their rights and special privileges about security measures during the summit, but I also believe the majority of polled Canadians agreed that they couldn’t think of a better alternative after seeing what actually happened with the protests in downtown Toronto. And ever since the G20 summit finally finished to a tune of something like billions of dollars, the city still hasn’t calmed down much thanks to all the embarrassments at the World Cup in South Africa. The huge Italian, French and Portuguese communities here went crazy until their teams all proved to be no better or even worse than the United States and goddam England in this tournament. No wonder the Euro-cup is so popular around these parts, as less competition means somebody’s favourite gets to win...

I also had gone to Chicago for a short weekend vacation a month or so ago. I had a pretty decent time, although I’m thoroughly disappointed at what turned out to a supposedly authentic Chicago hot dog. Besides that, I had good food at the Brazilian BBQ chain of Fogo de Chao (which was much more worth the price of admission than I thought it would be) and then had my first real authentic Chicago-style, deep-dish pizza at Gino’s downtown. My brother and I were actually there in the city the day that the Chicago Blackhawks won the conference finals. We expected there to be a huge celebration downtown and yet honestly, we saw maybe one fan with a positive expression on his face and that’s about it. I later read that when Chicago finally won the Stanley Cup for the first time in forty or fifty years, that over two million people showed up for the championship parade. Wish I had been there to see that, but seriously, where were the festivities when they even got to the finals? Here in Toronto, even if we win just the first round of the NHL playoffs, there would be celebrations and riots that would rival the G20 summit protests. I can’t even imagine what it would be like if we could just get to the Stanley Cup finals, let alone win the whole thing...

...

Since obviously there weren’t any hockey playoffs this year that I cared about as a Toronto Maple Leafs fan, I tuned into the wealth of serialized television instead this spring. It’s amazing to think about how many big shows had started or ended within the past few months, and also about how many of those shows turned out to goddam suck...

After eight seasons of television, including a first (and arguably fifth) season that will go down as one of my favourite seasons of television of all time, 24 finally left the airwaves and I honestly still haven’t been bothered to watch the series finale. And after six years of being one of the most talked about and popular shows that I can ever recall, Lost finally came to its conclusion and provided one of the most shittiest television experiences ever made, in my opinion at least. To be fair, I only watched the second half of the series finale, but seriously, what was the point of the episode and the whole series? The finale gave no real closure, confusing a hell of a lot of bandwagon fans into thinking the past six years had taken place in heaven or something, while providing no real answers to the long-time fans who actually understood that the alternate universe was just a large fan-wank to see the old cast members long ago forgotten. Honestly, what the hell was the island? How the hell does it make immortal smoke creatures? What is the significance of the goddam numbers? And why the hell did people waste six years of their lives on this shit?...

LOST.

Other than those two huge disappointments, it’s been a good year of television for me. Chuck has been great as always, though it couldn’t match how amazing season two was just a year ago. I’ve also fallen in love with White Collar, which ironically feels like a well-written, blue-collar show that knows how to best to utilize all the actors and chemistry on the series. Even other newcomers like Human Target get a smile from me now and again, as I’m definitely enjoying this revival of fun shows that don’t take themselves too seriously. Perhaps the biggest new success of the year was Glee, which even I admit I fell in love with, though mainly only for the first half of the first season (as the latter half felt more like a big iTunes commercial than anything else). I don’t honestly believe that the series should have already been renewed for a third season, not to mention all the Emmy award nominations it’s already received, but there’s no doubt in my mind that Glee is one of the more refreshing concepts to come in a very long time. The songs do get stuck in my head, and the over-the-top writing usually keeps me coming back for more.

Movie-wise, it hasn’t been a real blockbuster summer so far. I saw Iron Man 2 and wished that I hadn’t, and it churns my stomach to see the latest Twilight film do so well. But if there is any silver lining to this year, it’s the animated films I fell in love with. I’ve never really respected Dreamworks as an animation studio before, but getting the people behind Disney’s Lilo and Stitch was genius, because I thought How to Train Your Dragon was one of the best films I’ve seen in years. Thanks to the heart and humour that the characters all displayed, I even liked it more than recent Pixar films like Ratatouille, Wall-E and maybe even Up. Of course, even still, it’s only natural that Pixar would come roaring back and take back the throne. I never expected Toy Story 3 to be as good as it was, especially considering early reports of it claimed it was just a quick cash grab like Cars 2 hopefully won’t turn out to be, but I honestly feel like Toy Story 3 may not just be the best film of the year but also one of Pixar’s best of all time. That’s huge praise from me, considering I will always hold dear in my heart films like Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo and of course the first Toy Story. For the third movie in that latter series to actually be comparable to the first is an amazing feat in itself. Pixar may have very well made the best original screenplay trilogy of all fucking time somehow...

When it comes to the video gaming world, I’ve already discussed in the past how 2010 may very well be the year of forever. We’ve already gotten some amazing titles like Mass Effect 2, Super Mario Galaxy 2, God of War 3, and I guess Final Fantasy 13 (except for many, that turned out to more of a dud than anything else). This summer, I’ll be picking up Dragon Quest 9 for the Nintendo DS next week, and I’ve still got Starcraft 2, Sin and Punishment 2 and Metroid: Other M for the Wii on my list of must-have purchases to kill my spare time in August. That’s not even counting the list of games that will probably make my wallet cry this holiday season. I’m kind of disappointed that it doesn’t look like The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword will be arriving until 2011, but I think I’ll have more than enough play-time to go around when Halo Reach and Donkey Kong Country Returns both reach store shelves. After watching some Halo Reach campaign gameplay from E3, I’m still skeptical that it can bring back the epic feeling that I got from the first Halo and the first Halo alone, but everything I’ve seen so far has looked to be a huge step forward in the right direction for me. And as for Donkey Kong Country Returns, I just came back a week ago from a family party where my cousins and I all fell in love with the simultaneous multiplayer in New Super Mario Bros Wii. Being able to play side-scrollers with a friend or family member at the same time was always a dream of mine as a small kid, and I just can’t help but fall in love with Donkey Kong Country Returns because of this too.

There are other reasons why 2010 is such a huge year for the video gaming industry, and the E3 show last month demonstrated it all in style (a little too much so, if you remember Microsoft’s strange Heaven’s Gate coming out party). The Xbox 360 Slim has just arrived on store shelves and if it weren’t for the price, I’d seriously consider getting a replacement for my current three red rings of death. The bigger news is Project Natal, now renamed to Microsoft Kinect, arriving on store shelves this fall. The price is egregious at best for a peripheral, and I will laugh my ass off if they don’t fix the issue by launch where they can’t identify a user’s hand gestures when sitting down. Still, Kinect at its core has the potential to revolutionize the video gaming industry as much as the Wii did years ago. While Sony’s Move using glowing dildos and a modified EyeToy does look like it’ll replicate or even improve upon Nintendo’s own Wii Motion Plus controller, it only offers more of the same that we’ve already seen. I can’t imagine Sony taking a big chunk of Nintendo’s market and mind share as a result, but if Microsoft can just get Kinect properly out of the door (which is harder said than done), they have a real chance at becoming the NA market leader.

Of course, when it comes to the handheld industry, I am a firm believer that Nintendo is second to none. The PSP had a few good games, but it’s the Nintendo DS that continues to make worldwide sales record every single November and December. And in all honesty? If there was ever a reason why I wish I could fork over my money right now, it would be the Nintendo 3DS. I wish I could’ve been there at E3 to see the 3D effects up close and personal, but even through lame attempts using 2D video to try and show off the different 3D perspectives, I am still more hyped for the 3DS than perhaps any other system since the Super Nintendo. Having a 3D screen without the need for glasses is brilliant enough, but having a slider adjuster for the level of depth is even more genius simply because it allows every game to be in 2D if that’s what the user prefers. Combine that with an analog nub that is said to be far superior to the shit attempt on the PSP, and add that all on top a mobile processor and GPU that supposedly can give us real-time graphics equal to that of the PS2 or Gamecube, and then what you’ve got is a perfect recipe for Nintendo to print money from my goddam pocket for the next ten years or so. The game line-up for the system already has me drooling over what really are just remakes and ports. Star Fox 3DS and Paper Mario 3DS are games I wish I could be playing right now, and don’t even get me started on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D...

For now though, as the nerd that I am, I am still wasting my money on my collection of video games that I will never ever play, with my latest addition being Devil Summoner 2 for the PS2. When I was at the game shop making the purchase, the owner started complaining how the Wii has taken over and that "Nintendo has abandoned us real gamers". As the Nintendo fanboy that I am, I defended their honour with mainly their E3 line-up, but I also decided to point the finger of blame towards what I believe to be the real threat looming on the horizon. I mentioned to the store clerk, "it’s not Nintendo that I would be worried about, it’s Apple that’s gaining all the gamers. All my cousins and friends now mainly game on their iPhones. They don’t even remember how many purchases they’ve made"...

I just wanted to admit here that I myself have jumped on the smartphone bandwagon. For a while there, I contemplated getting an iPhone 3GS, because even I would admit that it has perhaps the best touchscreen I’ve ever felt. But in the end, I just couldn’t justify both the price and the public image of the iPhone being in my hand. I’ve always been an outsider, half by choice and half because that’s just who I am, and I would feel too self-conscious of being like everyone else in Toronto where the iPhone sits in pretty much every single person’s pocket or purse...

So when I was in Chicago last month, I ordered and picked up the Google Nexus One, the Android 2.1 phone made by HTC. And what’s my personal, bias review of it? I both love it and hate it at the same time. On the one hand, the screen quality is gorgeous compared to the 3GS, the price is much more affordable as well (at $529 US), but what I like most of all is how it’s unlocked by default and it’s not tied to any single carrier. I’ve used it on AT&T, T-Mobile, Telus Mobility and Fido / Rogers here in Canada already, all without jail-breaking or rooting the phone. Even better than that, I was able to receive the Android 2.2, over-the-air, Froyo operating system update free of charge the very day that Google approved it for release. While I expected a bit more from Froyo speed-wise (I never had memory problems myself with apps in 2.1 in the past), there’s no doubt that I love the built-in tethering, and it’s always convenient to use Adobe Flash to view videos on websites (provided the Flash plugin is loaded on demand).

When it comes to the downsides of the phone? I do feel it’s a bit heavy when I’m making a long phone-call, but maybe the iPhone 3GS has the same issue, I’m not sure. I am a bit critical about the speed of the Nexus One as well. It’s a 1Ghz Snapdragon processor with 512 MB of RAM (300MB of which is free on my phone for app use), and yet I honestly still feel like a lot of websites (by trial and error) load just as fast if not quicker on my cousin’s 3GS. What’s most annoying though is that the touchscreen is just not as good as the 3GS’s. Scrolling is fine but clicking on html links or using multi-touch functionality (like zooming in Google Maps), while sufficient, just can’t compare to the feeling you get on the iPhone somehow. Google still has a lot of work to be done, especially in regards to the crappy touch-screen keyboard provided by default. I’ve heard that I can use better apps for typing, such as the HTC Sense keyboard or even the Swype beta going around, but it’s still embarrassing that Google hasn’t provided a better stock keyboard with their Froyo 2.2 redesign. If there’s one thing Apple gets right, it’s the little things and touches...

Still, I think I’ve sadly become addicted to my Nexus One, and I’ve obviously got an element of pride in it when I instinctively get defensive every time someone asks, "what’s a Nexus One? Is it an iPhone?" I use it for my internet browsing all the time now except for when I need to type, such as writing to a friend on MSN Messenger. I cared so much about the data plan that I actually fought with Fido Canada for two hours over the course of three phone calls to get a retention plan (and I still only managed 1GB bandwidth for $15 a month). It really is so convenient to have a smartphone where not only is the internet always at your finger-tips, but the comfort / weight is far superior to my netbook and the Nexus One hurts my eyes less with prolonged use than any other LCD screen I’ve used before. And in all honesty, thanks to the noise-canceling hardware in the speaker, the Nexus One is a pretty damn good actual phone too. Sure, I wish I could make the output volume louder, but despite reports of poor reception in the States with the Google Phone, I’ve never had a dropped call here in Canada unlike everyone I know with an iPhone (who probably grip it the wrong way and get cut off almost every frickin’ time I’ve called them somehow). I do prefer the touchscreen on the iPhone better, and I’m sure the App store is amazing if you’re into that kind of thing, but I’m happy with my purchase of the Nexus One thanks to price, decent speed, and the fact it actually is a good phone...

Alright, guess that’s enough product placement advertising for one day. It’s a shame though that there probably won’t be a Nexus Two or anything. I could really use another phone like this, but with a slider keyboard that just works right. I’m sadly already considering what my next phone will be in the future. I’d love one that was unlocked by default and carrier free like the Nexus One, but I doubt there will be any a few years from now since the Google phone was such a market failure. I’ll probably wait until 3D screens (with 3D photography) become the norm, when hopefully reflective colour e-Ink displays also become feasible, and when smartphone CPUs become equivalent to at least a dual-core, Intel Atom. And then and only then, maybe I won’t mind gaming a bit on a phone now and again...

Honestly, as an old skool gamer, I dread the day the iPhone truly takes over gaming... but until that day?...

... please let me just drool over the Nintendo 3DS in peace...

...

Okay, this here is normally where I start ranting about the Toronto Raptors, but I think we all know what I’ll talk about instead...

And why?... well?...

... wait for it...

... ahem...

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?

Seriously, what the fuck just happened? I was completely blind-sided by the "Big Three" (or the big two-and-a-half) going to Miami to play together on the same team. Hell, they even just completed sign and trades where all three of them took pay-cuts to give the Heat another ten or so million dollars of cap room to improve their team. I know we all look back and now see the writing was on the wall, but as a Toronto Raptors fan and a fan of the NBA in general, I can’t help but shake my head in disappointment. I know parity has always been an illusion in this league, as the team with the most superstars always wins. We’ve had mini-dynasties lately with San Antonio, Detroit, and more recently Boston and the LA Lakers, but for Chris Bosh, Dwyane Wade and Lebron James to screw over the rest of the NBA and make a potential dynasty of their own? There’s just something so unfair to the fans about that...

Even worse, it was how they formed their new coalition that reeked of giving the finger to every single fan and team investor out there. Dwyane Wade gets to play the silent hero throughout all this, looking like the darling of the Big Three by sticking with his own team while also taking less money, when in reality he was the lynch-pin of the whole damn situation. He was Pat Riley’s eyes and ears as he spied and laid thoughts in Chris Bosh’s head of fame and grandeur and of happiness in greener pastures. Now, it’s not like I knew him personally, but after seven years of watching Chris Bosh, it really came as a shock to me that he really did crave the allure of a city like goddam Miami. Watching the WWE-esque press conference that introduced him to the city, I was shaking my head at just how much he seemed to be happy with it all. Seriously, this is what he really wanted all along? And to get it all, he lied to the Toronto Raptors front office and his fans for the past three fucking years, so that we would get nothing for his departure but a worthless Miami pick and our own draft pick we sent out to try to appease him in the first place?...

And do I even need to mention what Lebron James did? Wow, talk about a heel turn. It was rather hilarious actually, the ESPN special even had a jersey burning like it was goddam scripted or something. Seriously, what the hell was going on in Lebron’s mind when he chose to have an hour long, national special to rip the hearts and souls out of his fans from not just Cleveland, but also Chicago and New York who were hoping he would join as well? WTF?...

There have been a lot of comparisons to wrestling’s NWO over the past few days and I’ve got to say, the analogy is pretty damn spot on. Lebron on national television literally just turned on all his fans in Cleveland and proved without a doubt that this entire free agency frenzy has been a damn charade. It has now become apparent from interviews and comments that Lebron James, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade all decided to play together a long time ago, maybe stretching back two or three years ago when they met in the Beijing Olympics or even when they first signed their contract extensions. And since then, it’s been just playing out the motions for money, with an injured Chris Bosh laughing like Vince Carter as his team was losing in the race to the playoffs, and with Lebron James perhaps even quitting on his team because he didn’t want a chance to win it all in Cleveland. And then you had the whole free agent farce where the Big Three would go visit other teams, listening to power-point presentations and being showered with adoration from wishful fans, when they had no intention but to play in Miami together in the first place. That’s what all the rumours suggested at the time, and Miami really was the only team that had enough cap space to accommodate them all, so why put up the goddam act? Maybe it was to make it look like there wasn’t tampering involved, I don’t know. I just know Pat Riley is a goddam fucking evil, used-car salesman of a genius...

So going with the NWO parallels, Lebron James is obviously Hollywood Hogan, Dwyane Wade is Scott fucking Hall, and Chris Bosh is Kevin Nash but with even less personality. Mario Chalmers can be bloody hell X-Pac, I guess, so what does that make Mike Miller? Buff fucking Bagwell?...

A lot of fans are now rallying behind Kobe Bryant as the Sting or saviour of the NBA, especially since I’d wager only Orlando and the Lakers have any chance against Miami this coming season. Ironically though, Kobe is the perfect example of proving just how winning can make any fan forget about a player’s transgressions. It was Kobe Bryant who refused to play for any other team but Los Angeles when he was drafted as a rookie, and forced a trade from Charlotte to the dynasty-in-the-making Lakers. It was Kobe Bryant who demanded that Shaquille O’Neal be sent from the team, it was Kobe Bryant who publicly demanded a trade after he couldn’t carry his team past Phoenix in the playoffs, and lest we ever forget that Kobe Bryant was accused of rape and at least is guilty of adultery? He’s a great player, but I will never forgive the Memphis Grizzlies for gifting the Lakers with a mini-dynasty by trading them Pau Gasol for nothing (and no, Marc Gasol as a lucky 50+ second round pick does not count as a good return). That trade was perhaps league collusion and rigging at its finest, but I guess that was between owners and not players unlike this time around. Fans are really upset at Lebron James right now and I’m sure his first NBA title will be tainted from the fact. But if he can win three or four or even challenge Jordan with six, all will be forgotten...

As a Raptors fan, I’m laughing off for now the whole situation with Wade looking like a saint and Lebron becoming the villain of the entire NBA, but it’s Chris Bosh that I can’t help but be disappointed in. Yeah, I know basketball is just a hobby I follow, and it’s not like I’m taking this personally for real. He made a smart business decision, going to a state with no income tax and having a chance to build his Bosh brand by winning multiple championships in a row as the Pau Gasol of the Heat. I just hate the fact that he clearly knew he was leaving the Raptors, he probably decided it years ago or at least at this season’s All-Star weekend in Dallas, and yet he was never open with the fans and he didn’t help the team at all with his poor play and dishonesty that led to us getting almost no return in a trade. Vince Carter will forever be hated because he quit on the Raptors with a goddam smile, but Chris Bosh did exactly the same thing, just with a poker face until it was all said and done. He said he hoped in his press conference that we wouldn’t boo his ass off as soon as he returned to the Air Canada Centre. Wow, that sure is wishful thinking, Chris...

Really, there was nothing that Bryan Colangelo could’ve done to prevent all of this from happening. It was decided probably three years ago (with tampering involved through Dwyane Wade and his agent) that the Big Three would get together and form a dynasty of their choosing in Miami. So even if Colangelo had put together a second or third round winner in Toronto, Bosh was still certain to be gone. Even so, I can’t help but dream that there was a chance that this could have been our roster heading into the 2010-2011 season...

... ahem...

C: Andrea Bargnani, Ed Davis, Solomon Alabi
PF: Chris Bosh, Amir Johnson, Joey Dorsey
SF: Danny Granger, Sonny Weems, Linas Kleiza
SG: Andre Iguodala, DeMar DeRozen, Marco Belinelli
PG: Chris Paul, Jarrett Jack, Ricky Rubio

And you know what’s scary? Even my own fucking dream team still probably can barely compete against this goddam NWO monster that has been created. Imagine if the remainder of the off-season went like this for the Heat...

... ahem...

C: Shaquille O’Neal, Joel Anthony
PF: Chris Bosh, Udonis Haslem
SF: LeBron James, Richard Jefferson
SG: Dwyane Wade, Mike Miller
PG: Derek Fisher, Mario Chalmers

Seriously, I’ve tried pinching myself to wake the fuck up from this nightmare, I’ve tried turning off the goddam Xbox, but somehow this goddam fantasy team still exists and they’re wearing Miami Heat jerseys that make them look like goddam assholes. How the hell did this happen, and why the hell didn’t Bryan Colangelo make it happen?

... well, except for the fact he sort of did, by trading Jermaine O’Neal’s expiring contract and our future first round draft pick to the Miami Heat for their overpriced garbage in Marcus Banks...

I knew Colangelo had it in him to make perhaps the best NBA team ever assembled since the Jordan and Bird era long ago, but why couldn’t he have just done it on the goddam Toronto fucking Raptors instead?...

... though I guess in hindsight? I never should have told him, "make it happen"...

LOST.

...

Every year, one of the video games I look forward to is the NBA 2K series on the Microsoft Xbox. I always buy it the first week it comes out, and I always play the Toronto Raptors first against the team I expect to win the NBA Championship for the season. But really, this will be the first year where I truly believe the odds are stacked against me, no matter what difficulty I choose. To have Lebron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh all on the same team? How is that even fair? Anyone who picks the Miami Heat in an online tournament will be banned for cheating...

Until then, I still have the rest of my summer to go through. I’ve finished two of my courses at York University for the term and I still have two more left to go. I would’ve had three courses finishing in August, but the one I cancelled required class participation marks and quizzes every single week, and I simply can’t attend the lectures considering they’re scheduled for the afternoon when I’m working at my full-time job those days. Working at the insurance company has been alright for me, but it’s draining mostly from the fact that I suffer through a rush hour commute that lasts often an hour and a half in bloody hell stand-still traffic. Like I mentioned before, I actually got into my first moving car accident the other day and sadly, even with a whip-lashed neck, that was one of the few nights where I actually didn’t feel like total shit after the long drive home...

Because it all sounds like so much goddam fun, now doesn’t it? Well, to be honest, with my trip to Charlotte in a couple of weeks and my brother’s bachelor party a few days after that, this might be the best part of summer...

My brother will be getting married in August. I’m a groomsman, so I better do a damn fine job. And for that, I wish myself, both you two readers out there, and the millions of fans pissed off at both Lost and Lebron fucking James...

A lot has happened in the world over the past two weeks, and I just can’t help but feel like I need to write about it all...

In January, Haiti had been devastated by a 7.0 earthquake that levelled everything in sight. I was extremely impressed by the world’s response to the disaster, as there’s been far more financial relief and international support than I ever originally predicted. Maybe all the goodwill news is just what I’ve been spoon-fed by the media here in North America, or maybe we only seem to really care here in Canada because Haiti is in our own backyard. Either way, from what I’ve seen from the sources I do have available, the disaster relief has been inspiring in the island nation and I hope that it continues until the country is fully restored. Or more than restored actually, considering that perhaps the reason why a 7.0 earthquake levelled so much of the capital city was because of all the poverty and the lax building construction codes. To prevent future loss of life, even if the next earthquake happens in over fifty or a hundred years, I just hope everything being done now helps the nation to both grow and stay secure in the future...

The planet has certainly seemed angry as of late. Obviously, the ring of fire has practically been in Olympic flames the past few days, including a couple of 7.0 earthquakes in the Japanese area and a ton of smaller 6.0 aftershocks across the Pacific Ocean. With 2012 not so far away, the internet has been set ablaze with the usual panicking and fear mongering about the end of the world, even though the very sources of the Apocalypse (namely the Mayan Calendar and the Book of Revelation) speak more of a paradigm shift in humanity than anything else. Even if 2012 is to believed (and while I admit, as a child I fell into the trap of following prophecies that never came true and were shortly after forgotten), there really is no reason to be afraid. I don’t know why so many, especially in Western society, seem to take the "end of the world" to be the deaths of everyone you know and love. Why not interpret it as an epiphany for humanity, or even a gradual process over the past ten thousand years of shifting from an agricultural society to a technological one that actually cares for and sustains every person on this planet? Maybe it’s just the inner hippie in me talking, but I guess I got over my fears of 2012 long ago when the year 2000 came to pass...

Sometimes though, I admit that even I get a bit nervous. I was shocked that Chile got hit by an 8.8 earthquake the other day. That’s the sixth largest earthquake ever recorded by humanity, and it feels so sudden after the even larger 9.2 earthquake that caused the Indonesian tsunami a few years ago. In our short lifetimes, it really does feel like Mother Earth has been acting like a complete bitch lately, though I know part of this feeling is from my generation’s own ignorance and self-centered millenniumism. I mean, I didn’t even know Chile had previously been struck by an actual 9.6 earthquake back in the 1960’s. Hell, even the 8.8 that just hit is so unbelievably powerful that it boggles the mind. What’s even more amazing to me is that partially thanks to being struck by such a giant earthquake before, Chile’s construction standards and foundations were so secure that "only" some houses, bridges and historical buildings collapsed from all the shaking that lasted well over a minute. While it’s awful to hear of the 700 or more lives that perished and the thousands more who remain injured or homeless, it’s still amazing to me and a partial triumph of humanity that an 8.8 earthquake didn’t cause a massive swath of destruction that left millions dead in its wake. Regardless, I hope the international community helps Chile out during this time of need exactly as we have and should continue to aid Haiti. And I admit, it feels a bit unsettling that both disasters happened so close together...

2010 has already been a year of so many memories, both good and bad. We’re still in a global recession, NATO is still involved with a war against terrorism in Afghanistan, America is still involved in the rebuilding of Iraq, China is reportedly on the verge of another housing mortgage bubble, and tsunamis from the Chile earthquake caused so much damage in so many remote places that it’s almost unfathomable to think about how vulnerable we all are...

Yup, that’s the old skool hippie in me talking. I guess some things just never change...

...

Here in Canada, I admit it, we’ve been spoiled. The only thing we’ve personally had to complain about was the couple of feet of snow that dropped on us over the past week, and of course the complete lack of same said snow for the past month prior to that. I know I should be concerned about the lives and experiences of the rest of the world more than I am, but maybe despite everything happening as of late, a distraction from it all isn’t so bad...

The Winter Olympics of 2010 was exactly the kind of distraction that we needed. We as Canadians were all collectively ashamed and shaking our heads when it all began, because it really seemed like the games we were hosting were cursed. There was the death of the Georgian athlete that cast a dark shadow over the events, the opening ceremonies were a complete disaster to the point where Wayne Gretzky didn’t even have security as he was driven with the torch next to all the Olympic protesters in the streets, and of course I was bitter that NBC had put my beloved Chuck television on hold for the two weeks of the games. That TV series kicks so much ass, afterall...

In the end though, ignoring the pathetic closing ceremonies that followed, these Winter Olympics in Vancouver were perhaps the greatest and most memorable that we’ve ever had as Canadians. The previous generation would always be able to talk about the Summit Series in ’72 or witnessing Terry Fox make his way on one leg across Canada, and while I don’t personally feel these Olympics compare to either of those events, there’s no doubt that even my usual cynical bastard self felt a twinge of national pride at how my fellow Canadians fought and competed.

I will never forget the Beijing Olympics of 2008 for a couple of reasons (or three if you include all the gymnastic cheating and the fake Michael Bay fireworks in the opening ceremonies). It was my late grandfather’s dream to see a Summer Olympics hosted in his home native country, and he actually got to witness it before he passed away that August. In a sense, it sounds dumb and foreign to me that one of his final wishes was for his nation to be showcased as a leader among the world, but it truly was important to him nonetheless and I was happy at least that he got to live to see the day it happened. And I will never forget just how much pride my father felt in watching China (whether through legit methods or not) win as many gold medals as they did on their home soil. My dad departed the country long ago but I know his heart never really left. Hell, he must’ve watched the opening ceremonies a dozen times...

Maybe it was just 2008 Olympic nostalgia that clouded my eyes, but even I couldn’t help but root Canada on as we were going for gold, literally this time around as we won the record of fourteen gold medals. That’s the most gold medals ever won in a single Winter Olympics, and Canada did it all on our home soil to make it all the more memorable and meaningful. Sure, the critics can argue that Russia had previously won thirteen gold medals at a Winter Olympics that had half the number of events the 2010 one did, just like the backlash against Avatar can’t accept the fact the film has grossed over $2.5 billion worldwide and may even reach $3 billion with an extended release. The way I see things, if it was actually easy in today’s competitions to win thirteen gold medals let alone the fourteen that Canada did these Olympics, why hasn’t any other country done so yet? Sure, considering Canada’s past reputation for being a bunch of chokers on the athletic world stage, and sadly from these games being hosted in British Columbia of all provinces, I’m a bit worried about potential doping and how the hell we could’ve excelled so well. Then again, since when has Canada ever been intelligent and capable enough to actually cheat? I rest my case.

I’m not the biggest hockey fan anymore, but even I couldn’t help release a genuine fist-bump and a wide grin when Sidney Crosby scored that game-winning goal in overtime, to not only win gold in men’s ice hockey (the only sport that Canadians truly care about on a whole) but also ice total victory with our record-breaking fourteenth gold medal. Being the cynical bastard I am, I will always criticize Crosby for being so invisible in the tournament up until that final moment, but goddammit, that kid sure has a knack for getting the puck in the net at the right damn time. He already has a Stanley Cup on his belt, he already won gold at the World Championships, and now he has scored the game-winning goal to secure gold at the Winter Olympics hosted in his own native country? That’s one damn impressive resume, I’ll give him that, and now he’ll forever be remembered with the likes of Wayne Gretzky thanks to how many Canadians witnessed this one event all at once. The pictures of Yonge Street in Toronto after the win were insane; the entire downtown core was packed to the brim with people celebrating together as a nation. It hasn’t been this crazy since the Blue Jays won the World Series, and I can’t help but imagine what the scene was like all across Canada. In a few weeks, we’ll forget all about how we felt together, but goddam was this ever one nice day...

It was weird and almost surreal to hear from my sister, who never ever watches hockey aside from the Olympics, how her heart nearly stopped when the United States scored with 24 seconds left on the clock to tie the game in the third period. If I have any complaint or worry about yesterday’s game, it was that I was not nearly as emotionally involved or into the event as so many other Canadians were at the same time together. Yes, I did want Canada to win, but more for the record fourteen gold medals than just for the glory of ice hockey. Part of me wants to blame the population for being a bunch of bandwagon fans, but as soon as I saw the country’s reactions after the gold winning goal? Even the cynical bastard in me couldn’t help but be happy for everyone else being so happy together. For the first time in a goddam eternity, I saw national pride on the faces of so many Canadians all at once. To be honest, I never thought in this generation that I’d ever see the day that happened. It felt good actually, to have faith...

But now that the Winter Olympics are over, now what? I still love my NBA Basketball, but even my own interest has wavered ever since I started watching Canada win gold in ice skating, curling, skiing and ice hockey to name just a few sports I now will miss. As of today, we’re all back to just our normal pedestrian lives, where I’m stuck still studying for more damn university midterms and still searching for a goddam job. I miss having a distraction...

Well, at least Chuck Mondays are back. Did I mention that show kicks fucking ass?...

...

After talking about the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, and the Winter Olympics of 2010 in Vancouver, it feels kind of shallow to change the topic over to video games, but I just can’t help but be excited for this year of gaming as well. 1998 was previously seen as the best year ever in the industry, as I believe that one year alone gave us legends like Half Life, the original Starcraft, Metal Gear Solid and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. No year since then has been able to match that kind of output, until maybe 2010 that is. I really am excited about all the upcoming titles.

Okay, to be honest, I have no idea what’s coming out for the PS3 and PSP. I know God of War III will soon arrive on store shelves if it hasn’t already, but what else is on the schedule? Either way though, 2010 will be the year that the "magic wands" of PS3 motion control will be released, probably in late summer I last heard. While there’s no guarantee that the glowing sticks combined with an updated EyeToy camera will provide the kind of 1-for-1 motion detection that Sony promises, the possibilities and potential if it does turn out to be lag-free and true would be endless. I seriously doubt that Sony could get the technology to work in all the varied environments one would find in a bedroom or family room, let alone all the other areas that a PS3 could be placed. But if it does work even remotely close to as promised, Sony may have done again to Nintendo what they originally did with analog sticks and rumble support; they copy Nintendo’s ideas and make them cheaper and arguably better. We’ll see though if Sony has the remaining skills to pull it off, especially after today’s fiasco that will forever be remembered as "ApocalyPS3". Thanks to some intern badly programming the GMT clock on the console, the PS3 went from "it does everything" to "it does nothing", for one groundhog day at least. I will always revel in Sony’s misfortunes...

I may not know what the PS3 is offering to the software table, but Microsoft looks to soon have an amazing year, if they aren’t already. Mass Effect 2 was released back in January and already is being touted as one of the best Western RPGs ever made. Whether or not that’s true, it’s still a good omen that this may very well be the Xbox 360’s year to shine. Also on the known list is Final Fantasy XIII, Bioshock 2 and Fallout: New Vegas (all three of which are coming to the PS3 and PC as well, I believe). The exclusive game I’m most anticipating though is of course Halo Reach, supposedly coming this fall. The previous three Halo’s were all big disappointments to me, especially the route they went with ODST, but interviews and early footage of the latest iteration of the franchise definitely has me excited. No first person shooter for me has yet to replace the original Halo or Goldeneye before it in my book, but I can’t help but hold out hope for Halo Reach. And beyond that, we have Microsoft releasing their own Project Natal 3D-Camera technology as well, which has even more potential than the PS3 motion detection to transform the video gaming industry. Do I honestly believe that Microsoft will be able to work out all the kinks and get Natal to work in all lighting and room conditions with almost zero lag and input misinterpretations? Absolutely not, but I can still hope to be surprised, now can’t I? Natal’s technology has all the makings to be a disaster, simply because of all the variables involved. But if it works like prescribed, 2010 may be the year gaming changes forever...

We can’t forget about the PC either. To be honest, I’m not sure what’s really coming out in the near future for personal computers, although I believe another Command and Conquer is on the way and maybe Half Life: Episode III will finally be released. Still, do any of the other titles really matter when 2010 looks to be the year that Starcraft 2 will finally make its official debut? The original Starcraft is still considered one of the greatest games of all time and is still being played in competitive tournaments to this very day. While thanks to unrealistic and unattainable expectations, I seriously doubt the sequel will truly live up to its predecessor’s name, but early reviews for the beta release of the title seem to be all very positive so far and it looks like Blizzard will have yet another amazing success story on its hands. I haven’t bought a PC game as a new release in almost an eternity, maybe not since the original Starcraft, so it’s only fitting that I break my streak twelve years later with the sequel I’ve been waiting so long for...

If all the above wasn’t enough to rip apart my wallet, the Nintendo Media Conference held a week ago back on the 24^th made me weep for my complete lack of income even more. I’m normally very disappointed with every public presentation that Nintendo has provided in the Wii-era, but even though no new games were technically announced, I was still very impressed with the release dates and line-up the company has set for the first half of 2010. Monster Hunter 3 Tri, Metroid: Other M and especially Super Mario Galaxy 2 are all games that I feel I have to get, although I don’t even know if I’ll find the time to play any of them on a regular basis. The footage for all three has been amazing so far, and I honestly can’t believe that Nintendo has so much quality scheduled within such a short time span. The Nintendo DS line-up is much less favourable, but I’ll be happy enough with Dragon Quest IX in August and hopefully a translation of Last Window before 2011 (since I loved the original Hotel Dusk so much). The rumours are also still abound that new Nintendo hardware will be announced at this year’s E3. I seriously doubt the Wii will be replaced anytime soon, especially with so much software for it finally being released, but the sparse line-up and the leaks about Nintendo’s contract with nVidia’s Tegra mobile graphics leads me to believe the second DS is just around the corner. Add more fuel to the fire that with all known Nintendo titles being released in the first half of 2010, we have all come to realize what’s coming in the second half of the year. The next Legend of Zelda for the Wii is on the way, and combine that with a potential DS 2 this holiday season? I just can’t help but be excited...

So yeah, talking about video games does seem a bit shallow now somehow, but the kid and collector in me just can’t wait for Halo Reach, Project Natal, Super Mario Galaxy 2 and the next Legend of Zelda. I don’t know if 2010 can really match or surpass 1998 in terms of being the greatest year of gaming ever, but it already sort of feels it’s on the way with so many great releases for the Xbox 360 and PS3 to date. Goddammit, I still need to finish Mass Effect 2...

Because it all sounds like so much goddam fun, now doesn’t it?...

I honestly haven’t been playing many games for the past few years, but 2010 looks to change all that...

I can deny it all I want, but gaming is a real part of me. I can’t help but be excited, wallet be damned...

...

With the Winter Olympics now over and the Toronto Maple Leafs season long finished since their third fucking game, I’m very much looking forward to witnessing the return of the Toronto Raptors to the playoffs. Well, if they do make the playoffs that is, considering the cold streak we’ve fallen under since Chris Bosh has been injured...

Okay, I can’t really fault the team for struggling to beat strong opponents like Cleveland, Portland and Oklahoma City, especially when our franchise player has been out with what is suspiciously being called just a "sprained ankle". Still, thanks to the recent stretch where our offence has looked dismal in conjunction with our usual matador defence, and thanks in part to the Winter Olympics stealing the thunder and spotlight for the past two weeks, I admit that even I have felt a loss of interest in my beloved Raptors. Without Chris Bosh in the line-up, they just feel like they’ve lost their identity, or their mojo so to speak. Aside from their win over a depleted Washington team (granted, one where Blatche is no longer playing like a goddam biatch, but I digress), I have seen almost no team chemistry or confidence or spirit, even when they went into overtime against the Cleveland Cavaliers. I hate it when a team shows up playing like they simply don’t want to lose rather than they’re really hungry to win. I hope that the team brings the fire back tonight against a Houston squad still struggling since losing Carl Landry for Kevin Martin’s complete lack of defence, but can I really expect much on a road back to back? I somehow doubt it...

For the first year in ages, I actually wasn’t very invested or interested in the NBA trade deadline. I guess it was because I knew there was no chance we’d trade Chris Bosh until maybe the summer, but still, it was strange how I seemed to be losing interest in the NBA as soon as All-Star weekend hit. Either way, I still refreshed my browser like a madman to see what all the other teams were doing, but without a chance that any deal would happen with Toronto, I just didn’t seem to care. What will matter most though is what happens after the playoffs. I’m praying that Toronto makes it to the second round for only the second time in franchise history, that would truly make 2010 into a sports year for me for remember. But even if that doesn’t happen, I expect big events to occur in the summer off-season for a hell of a lot of teams. A lot of critics are now trying to downplay the summer free agent list, saying most big name superstars will simply re-sign with their current teams, but my gut feeling is telling me otherwise...

This is the way I envision the summer off-season to go down. I know Lebron James already has a winning culture in Cleveland, but the amount of money and fame he can make in terms of endorsements as a New York Knick is simply something I don’t think his personality can ignore. He has always struck me as a guy who cares more about his spotlight than pure team winning, despite the gaudy triple double numbers he consistently puts up. I definitely see him going to New York even without a sign-and-trade, simply because of all the guaranteed advertising revenues he would immediately receive. Joining him in New York will probably be Amar’e Stoudemire, another player who seems to seek fame and money over a team winning culture. With Lebron and Stoudemire in New York, I see Wade being too frustrated to stay with Miami, instead choosing to pair up with Derrick Rose in his hometown of Chicago. With a championship ring already on his finger, I can’t help but believe he will try to cement his legacy and his Jordan brand by trying to live up to the name of number 23 in the Windy City. And as for Toronto’s own Chris Bosh? Call me bias if you will, but I believe he’s staying, at least in the short term. There’s always the threat that he may sign with us now and demand a trade two years down the road, which may very well happen if we don’t become contenders. But at this point in his life, the way I view his personality, he prefers having his own team and the security of a long term deal in a city he’s familiar with. Maybe in two years he’ll join the Dallas Mavericks or the Los Angeles Lakers, but for now, he’s Mr. Raptor and Bryan Colangelo won’t let him go without a fight...

So in the fall of 2010? I personally predict that Lebron James, Amar’e Stoudemire and Danilo Gallinari will make up the Big 3 in the Big Apple as New York Knicks. Chicago meanwhile will become a contender with Dwyane Wade, Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah all leading the charge (and they’ll be even better if they can move Luol Deng for Carlos Boozer, Al Jefferson or Paul Millsap if they’re lucky and bold)...

And as for Toronto? I give to you their true opening roster for the 2010-2011 season...

... ahem...

C: Andrea Bargnani, Brendan Haywood, Rasho Nesterovic
PF: Chris Bosh, Amir Johnson, Reggie Evans
SF: Hedo Turkoglu, Sonny Weems, Antoine Wright
SG: Joe Johnson, DeMar DeRozen, Marco Belinelli
PG: Jarrett Jack, Jose Calderon, Steve Nash

Wait, you’re asking why Joe Johnson is there? Well, besides him being a player that has also proven he cares more for the money as a mercenary than winning (he left Phoenix for Atlanta, afterall), and considering I seriously doubt that Atlanta will pony up a max deal for their often maligned, soon-to-be-30 All-Star? Knowing all this, why would anyone question Bryan Colangelo’s ability to get Joe Johnson here in Toronto through a sign-and-trade for fringe talent like Marcus Banks and Patrick O’Bryant? I mean seriously, he’s Bryan fucking Colangelo. Make it happen...

He will make it happen. I don’t even need to tell him to do so. He will just make it goddam happen...

Combine that with the Jays somehow winning the World Series after Roy Halladay demands a trade back to us?...

And then yeah, it’ll be a good year for Canada. The Toronto Maple Leafs will still suck, but what else is new?...

Bryan Colangelo, make it happen. Do I even need to ask?...

Make it all fucking happen. Please...

...

Regardless of what else occurs in sports, regardless of what happens in the video gaming and movie industries, and regardless of what more will happen on this planet within the next ten months of the year, 2010 has already proven to be one of the most unforgettable years in the life of this little Canadian behind the keyboard. I will never forget the moment that Sidney Crosby scored the winning goal of the entire Winter Olympics, and I will never forget the devastation that happened in Haiti or the international help to rebuild the nation. In terms of entertainment, we’ve already had Avatar break all known box office records, we still have the Nintendo Wii rapidly approaching the Playstation 1 and 2 for sheer supremacy over all other video game consoles in history, and we still have ten more months of successes and surprises to go. 2010 may very well become the Year of Forever, whatever that may mean.

And personally for me, for the first time in ages, I’ve been so busy and tired that I actually feel alive. Either in a download update or a previous Tweakui update, I’ve said before that I would make 2010 into a year to remember. I don’t exactly know how far I will take my promise, but I already feel like my life is finally going somewhere that I want it to go thanks to my return to university, thanks to job interviews (and even a job offer) finally returning, and especially thanks to the warmth of the next Canadian spring just around the corner. This will also be the year that my brother gets married, and somehow that just makes me feel like my life has more meaning than usual, if only because I have the chance to help bring him and both families some real happiness. There are still so many wishes and desires I have in life, but 2010 finally feels like a step in the right direction rather than all the previous years of so many steps back. I want so much now and I don’t know if I’ll ever get it, but finally for the first time in ages, I feel the confidence that I might just have a chance. Regardless of the outcome, it’s a good feeling, to have faith...

A lot has happened in the world the past few weeks. I know a hell of a lot more will happen in the next ten months...

2010. The Year of Forever.

Alright, so I’m about two or three weeks late with my annual, New Year’s Eve Tweakui update. So sue me.

So what have I been busy with? Not that much, actually, but I just haven’t had the biggest will to write even when I had an hour or two of absolutely nothing to do. In summary, over the past six months or so, I moved into a new home in the Vaughan (Ontario) region and only recently have we finally gotten a decent offer on our old house. We also picked up that Lincoln MKZ 2010 sedan that I wrote about so much here on this website, although I didn’t get any further discounts like I was originally dreaming that I could. In the end, I tried playing hardball for an extra $800 off the price of the vehicle and all I got instead was a voucher for a couple of free oil changes. Meh, at least it was something, I suppose. And besides all that, I’ve also been busy with the fall and now winter terms of university. It’s hard to believe that I’m back to being a full time student, but I’m now studying for an Accounting Certificate at York University in order to be eligible for either the CMA or CA (Chartered Accountant) designation...

When it came to the holiday season however, I know I normally write a Tweakui Update on the eve that’s December 31^st. Kind of sad that each and every year since I’ve started this website of mine back in high school, I’ve had enough time and freedom to write for two or three hours a night as everyone else in the world is supposed to making out at the stroke of midnight. Still, at least this year I had the company of my best friend here from Charlotte. I originally was supposed to go to the States this holiday season to visit his home instead, but I had to bail out of those plans thanks to York University exam scheduling, and now I owe my friend big time for making the trip here in the middle of the goddam Canadian winter. We had a great time together, we went to the Toronto Raptors vs Charlotte Bobcats game with lower bowl seats, we watched a bunch of movies starting with Up in the Air and ending with an IMAX (or LieMax?) version of Avatar 3D, and we even got to enjoy the one hour return of Royal Canadian Air Farce for perhaps the final time until the next New Year special with that cast and crew. For the first time in a long while, I’ve had a close friend here for New Year’s and for once I didn’t have a reason to write on New Year’s Eve...

Two or three weeks have passed since then though and I still haven’t had the will to write. I don’t know what has been wrong with me lately, as ten years ago I would’ve figured that I would be eager to write about the first decade of the millennia gone by the moment that it was done. But the funny thing is, even though the 2000’s so far have really defined my life, starting from my final year of high school, continuing through 9/11 happening in my very first month of university, then also including everything else that has happened in my life since then such as falling for the only woman I’ve ever loved and soon after losing my last job in the process. The 2010’s are so far not off to a great track record was well. Even if a 7.0 earthquake isn’t even close to being the largest on record, the complete devastation that has been wrought upon Haiti is something that may define this entire upcoming decade. It’s good that the world has pulled together and is doing all they can to help out the survivors, but with all those messed up predictions of 2012 soon to come to pass, even if they’re all a bunch of bullshit like anyone with a rational mind should believe, I still know that panic in some places will ensue and who knows how things will turn out...

Over this past decade, it’s amazing how much things have changed over the past few years in so many ways. Take the smartphone industry for instance, where new reports claim Apple is about to go head to head with Google for domination over this industry in the next few years. Back in the old days when I was so into computers, the PC was king and apparently I was on record as saying, "I would never work for Microsoft". My how things change, where I would love to have MS on my resume if not for the endless work hours required, and the PC has given way to handheld devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry and even the new Amazon Kindle using the e-Ink technology I’ve been following for a decade now. I didn’t even notice how drastically the world had been altered over the past ten years, all thanks to a search engine called Google and the expansion of Web 2.0 technologies like YouTube and Facebook. The internet was meant to connect the entire world with text and images, but it’s been videos uploaded and twitter blogs updated faster than even news stations can report that have truly defined this past decade and most likely these next ten years to come. And to think, I didn’t even notice I was being left behind. Hell’s bells, I don’t even have a bloody hell Facebook account. I’m still typing on this goddam Tweakui website of mine, afterall...

Which sounds like so much bloody hell fun, now doesn’t it?...

And with so many memorable stories for 2009, I think the year actually was...

... for better or for worse, goddammit...

...

I already mentioned that I saw Avatar at IMAX 3D with my friend before New Year’s. Now don’t get me wrong, it was a good movie and definitely the true definitive showcase of 3D technology. I had worn the glasses before for films like Up in the past, but that Pixar movie would’ve been just as good without the added layers of depth to the visuals, simply because the depth of the plotline and characters overshadowed the 3D perhaps too well. Avatar was the exception though, the plotline was just so simple and derivative that it truly let the 3D effects and atmosphere shine. Normally in a film I can’t help but feel like having to go to the washroom at least once (or three times if we’re talking about shit like Transformers 2), but there was just something about the landscape and the surrealness of Avatar’s Pandora world that completely made me forget that I was in a movie theatre. Sure, the plotline was shit, but in this case that actually helped the film because I was forced to turn off my brain and I never wanted to look back...

I expected the movie to do well, or at least make back it’s $500 million total budget (half for the film and half for its marketing). But did I ever expect it to do as well as it’s doing now? I mean seriously, who the fuck saw this coming? What is Avatar at domestically now, almost $600 million? And worldwide, I hear it’s past the $1.6 billion mark and most likely will match Titanic’s record of $1.8 billion revenue by the end of next week. I think I speak for the entire planet of earth and maybe Pandora when I humbly ask, what - the - fuck? It’s simply mind-boggling that a film that so many critics claimed would be nothing more than the usual generic, Christmas-time movie, became perhaps the most successful film ever on damn record. Hell, here in Toronto and Vaughan, there are still one hour line-ups to every goddam IMAX showing of the film, and even the traditional Real3D theatres are mostly still sold out for every single weekend viewing. Who the hell would’ve predicted that after setting a record with Titanic that has yet to be challenged by any other film, James Cameron makes a return to cinema after twelve fucking years and his first movie back will not only match Titanic’s record domestically but easily destroy it worldwide? Seriously, WTF?...

I know that the wannabe film elitists out there who all can’t stand the simplicity (or classicalness, if you want to call it that) of the plotline refuse to believe that Avatar is actually a good film that deserves its piles of money. I’ve heard plenty of excuses drawn out throughout the internet that total ticket sales should be the only true measure of a film’s success, that Gone with the Wind and the original Star Wars should still be considered the best films of all time or some crap like that. Call me an old timer or whatnot, but I’ve also heard all these same excuses made when Titanic was selling out theatres months after its initial release. Yeah, I get the idea of inflation and the larger worldwide markets now available to the film industry, and I won’t deny that there is some merit in the fact that Avatar revenues are inflated due to the higher cost of 3D showings. However, does any of this really matter in the end when Avatar is being shown in less theatres than most other blockbusters of the past decade? And not only that, there is still a bloody worldwide recession and yet people around the planet are still choosing to pay more to see this film in 3D than any other movie available. I still remember how many film elitists simply scoffed at Titanic blowing away the revenue records twelve years ago, citing the same excuses as they do now for Avatar. Well, I think the most telling thing is that despite all these excuses, Titanic’s record of $1.8 billion hasn’t even been remotely challenged for twelve whole fucking years, until James Cameron finally decided to make a return and dictate, "fuck it"...

Goddamn at the Avatar revenue returns. Simply put, what the fuck else can you say?...

Goddamn...

...

Speaking of printing money, has anyone seen the latest NPD reports for video game sales?...

"Dear fucking God". That was my exact reaction when I saw that the Nintendo Wii sold an unbelievable 3.8 million consoles in America in the month of December alone. I mean, we all knew that the system was a juggernaut, but the one monthly record that it had always failed to beat in the past was the Sony Playstation 2’s December of 2.7 million sold. And considering we are still in a worldwide recession, one where Nintendo Wii sales were down almost every single month compared to last year? For the console to suddenly just absolutely kill every previous NPD December number without any real warning or reason, and for the Nintendo DS to also shatter the PS2’s once untouchable record with 3.3 million sold in the same fucking goddam month? Talking about rolling in the goddam printed money. Even I as a Nintendo diehard fan since the 80’s was left goddam speechless. I couldn’t help but laugh...

It’s almost unfair to Sony and Microsoft, not that I’ve ever been loyalist to either company in the past. Some were predicting Playstation would turn it around this year with the new PS3 Slim, and I was impressed that the numbers did improve quite a bit for the console year over year. But Microsoft still held firm, both in hardware sales and especially in terms of software, as they had what I consider to be the strongest overall gaming library of 2009. To be honest though, I wasn’t impressed by the software releases for any of the three consoles (or handhelds, for the matter) in the past year, with probably the only memorable games being Resident Evil 5 (in a bad way) and Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story (in a good way). Still, the "dear fucking God" moment for me in November was seeing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s sales on the Xbox 360, especially compared to how much they dwarfed the numbers for the same title on the PS3. Considering both systems sold about 1.3 or 1.4 million consoles in the month of December (which if not compared to the Wii, is very impressive in its own right), why the huge discrepancy in the sales of the same fucking game on two separate consoles? Microsoft certainly has a lot of mindshare going into 2010 amongst the legions of "hardcore" fans, though we’ll see how loyal they eventually do turn out to be...

A lot of analysts (and anal internet bloggers, might I add) predicted that the PS3 or Xbox 360 would at least match the Nintendo Wii in terms of total revenue for the year, especially considering there didn’t seem to be any huge hits on the SD system compared to Modern Warfare 2 for the HD ones. Of course, it boggles the mind how people continue to forget just how successful 2D Mario games have been in the past, whether we’re counting the 30+ million sold for Super Mario Bros 3 on the NES or the 20+ million sold for New Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo DS. I mean, when people think of the best selling games of our generation, images of Call of Duty (12-15 million sold, I believe) first spring to mind. Yet those numbers pale in comparison to Wii Play (almost 30 million sold, I last heard), Wii Fit (22+ million sold), Nintendogs (20+ million sold), Mario Kart Wii (almost 20 million sold now), and the aforementioned New Super Mario Bros DS. So why the fuck wouldn’t New Super Mario Bros released on the Nintendo Wii also do massive numbers and push systems out in December like there’s no tomorrow? And that’s exactly what happened, prompting "hardcore" websites like IGN to write ignorant rants how the new 2D Mario game is simply no fun and hinders the overall progress of the video gaming industry. I mean seriously, do they not see the appeal in having four players platform in 2D at the same time? This was the kind of gameplay I dreamed of as a little kid playing on my NES and SNES, and finally it has become reality. New Super Mario Bros Wii may not be my own cup of tea, but it’s blindingly obvious exactly why it’s becoming the Avatar of the video gaming world...

Because seriously, oh dear fucking God at the Nintendo Wii numbers for December. And along with the record breaking 3.8 million consoles sold in one fucking month, came about 3 or 4 million additional sales for New Super Mario Bros Wii. And if the insane "legs" (or longevity on the charts) for Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii can be applied to this new 2D Mario game (and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t)? Considering the game is already at 10 million sales worldwide if not more, then there’s no doubt in my mind that New Super Mario Bros Wii will become the next 20 million selling game in a heartbeat. This is a feat that I believe only two Western games have achieved in the past fucking decade (The Sims and World of Warcraft, both on the PC), and yet Nintendo will have surpassed this mark at least four fucking times with just the Nintendo Wii alone? Seriously, the system prints fucking money. WTF?...

The irony is, movies thanks to Up and especially Avatar will be moving towards 3D more and more as the years go by. The first real 3DTV’s will be arriving this year along with formal 3D technical specs for Blu-Ray movies, and I’m sure both technologies will be pushed hard to consumers even though I can’t personally see myself relaxing at home with a pair of 3D glasses over my existing goddam spectacles. Avatar was special and is raking in the money at an insane pace because it produces an utterly surreal atmosphere in 3D and audio that cannot be reproduced now at home. For me at least, the reason I’m willing to accept putting on the 3D glasses in a movie theatre is because I paid for the experience so I might as well get my money’s worth and concentrate on nothing but the screen. At home though, there are just so many distractions, from cooking a meal to even going to the goddam bathroom. I don’t personally see 3DTV’s taking off anytime soon, but I never thought Avatar would beat Titanic’s record either...

And like I said, the irony comes into play when you see 2D games like Wii Play, Wii Fit, arguably Mario Kart Wii and especially New Super Mario Bros, all selling more than 20 million copies each in a single generation, maybe 30 million for some when it’s all said and done. Some hardcore elitists consider these titles to a be a "regression" of the industry, but I simply believe that if something ain’t broken, don’t fix it. Avatar succeeds in movie theatres because it has a simple plot that everyone can relate to while enjoying the symphony of the 3D visuals. And video games like New Super Mario Bros Wii may very well be the new (or old?) wave of the future, simply because the simplicity of the 2D visuals allows us gamers (both old and new) to truly enjoy the symphony of the gameplay fun at hand. I think it’ll be funny if movies all transition to 3D while games "regress" back to their 2D roots. While I do still enjoy a game of Call of Duty now and again, there’s just something about New Super Mario that puts a smile on my face...

And I can’t be the only one. Because 3.8 million Nintendo Wii’s sold in the US in the month of December?...

Goddamn at the Nintendo revenue returns. Simply put, what else can you say?...

Goddamn...

...

When it comes to my Toronto Raptors, maybe it was a blessing in disguise that I didn’t write my annual Tweakui update on New Year’s Eve. Because if I had written it then, even though the Raptors were starting their current winning roll, I would’ve acted like the usual bipolar Toronto sports fan and demanded for Jose Calderon to be traded, Hedo Turkoglu to be neutered, and head coach Jay Triano to suck a giant fat Cack (you know, the usual thoughts for a sports fan around these parts). But luckily for them, since the end of December, the Toronto Raptors have been on a huge roll with the only truly disappointing losses being to a Boston team that simply has our number, and an Indiana team on the road in a grueling back to back. I would’ve liked the Raptors to have gone 12 out of 12 the past few weeks, but I’ll take what we can get and that’s looking to be fifth or sixth in the Eastern Conference, pretty much exactly where I expected us to be at the start of the season (with 45-50 wins at the end of the year)...

Things were looking really rough in November and early December though. I’m not going to lie, the team chemistry was so bad at times that I really thought our team needed a complete overhaul at the end of the season yet again. Like most Toronto fans, I’m completely impatient and completely irrational when it comes to rosters. We too quickly assume that a bunch of "good" names from other cities put onto a single team would all of a sudden work together as a whole, but it takes a lot more work and effort than that to make a real team. In November and most of December, I didn’t think that Jay Triano had the skills or the smarts to pull it all together and make the chemistry happen, even after the team meeting in Washington a month or so back. But after each and every game, you can see the teammates on this Toronto Raptors team trusting each other more and more, and that’s truly a beautiful thing to see in a sport such as this. Every fan may love the Michael Jordans or the Kobe Bryants of the world making ridiculous shots one-on-five at the end of the buzzer, but unless you’ve got a true championship roster (thanks to David Stern rigging in favour of the big markets), we fans must be content with seeing excellent game-by-game basketball with players who enjoy running the court and sharing the ball. You know, real basketball with fair rules...

That’s what we got in the latter half of the 06/07 season and that’s exactly what I saw again in recent games such as against the Dallas Mavericks yesterday afternoon. Do I expect the Raptors to make the NBA finals, or even for certain get to the second round of the playoffs? Unfortunately no, not in a league where David Stern wants his prized Celtics to face down the Lakers when all is said and done. Unlike most other fans though, somehow I’m okay with that. I understand the financials and revenues involved, and the league gets so much more money from seeing cities with long basketball histories or marquee players like Lebron James in the finals than if some small market team managed to win it all. I would love for the Raptors to win the championship as would the fans of 29 other teams, but until we truly get a marketable player, I somehow still find myself very satisfied with the team I saw on the court the other day. As long as we’re competitive, as long as we put in the hard effort night in and night out, and as long as I get to see players enjoying the sprint down the court or sharing the ball in a half court set, I still end up falling in love with my basketball. I guess I watch the sport more for the individual plays and games than the playoffs...

Oh, who am I kidding? I won’t be satisfied until the Raptors go 82-0 in a season and finish the playoffs in a full 28 games. Because of course, I can still dream of the day we trade Jose Calderon, Antoine Wright and Marcus Banks to the Sacramento Kings for Kevin Martin and Andres Nocioni, right (and oh, I guess we can accept Tyreke Evans as filler as well)? After which soon afterward, Jose and Antoine are waived and released back to Toronto at the vet minimum wage, just to make sure our team chemistry is intact for the inevitable playoff run?...

Because of course, only then can I give you the final Toronto Raptors roster of 2009-2010...

... ahem...

C: Andrea Bargnani, Rasho Nesterovic, Reggie Evans
PF: Chris Bosh, Amir Johnson, Andres Nocioni
SF: Hedo Turkoglu, Sonny Weems, Antoine Wright
SG: Kevin Martin, DeMar DeRozen, Marco Belinelli
PG: Jose Calderon, Jarrett Jack, Tyreke Evans

Considering how badly Martin and Nocioni have played this year? Bryan Colangelo can definitely make it happen...

It’s a new year and a new decade. You know what that means? Raptors Championship time...

Make it happen, Colangelo. You know what to do. Make it fucking happen...

Because if the turnaround from last season to this year is any real indication?...

Then goddamn at the money I’ll spend on ticket sales. Simply put, what else can you say?...

Goddamn...

...

Uggh, I get lazier every year, don’t I?...

It’s a new year. It’s a new decade. I haven’t written in so many months, and I don’t know when the next time I’ll write will be either. And the ironic thing is, I love writing; it honestly makes me feel good to pour my thoughts and feelings into these goddam websites of mine that nobody will ever read. It’s like I type with purpose, as pounding away at my keyboard is one of those few free things in life that I truly do enjoy. And yet for the past few months, I haven’t ever had the will or determination to just sit here like I am right now and spend some time with my goddam old friend, the PC. Why is that and what will become of me in the new year, in this new goddam decade?...

I’m a bit worried right now, actually. I’ve already been through two terms of Accounting at York University, but both of those were part-time in terms of total number of hours involved. This winter term will by my first as a full-time student since way back when I was studying Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. I have six courses this term including Managerial Accounting, Intermediate Accounting I and Corporate Finance. I’m starting to get into the tough courses, beyond the touchy-feely ones of first and second year classes where I got A’s and A+’s thanks to open book midterm exams. It’s not like I haven’t had six rough courses at once before, I also did at U of T (although that wasn’t really by choice but rather because of my constant goddam failures). But considering I want to continue my studies throughout winter, summer and fall at the very least while still searching for a full time job from 9 to 5? I’m not worried about finishing assignments or whatnot, but I can only imagine the kind of stress I will be under if I have both work deadlines and six goddam exams to study for all at the same time. What am I thinking?...

From all this, I don’t know if I have a better life in mind, but at least I do know I have a different one in hope. I don’t know whether I’ll successfully combine my future Chartered Accountant designation with my Computer Engineering degree. Hell, I don’t even know if I’ll use either of my education’s properly, considering my dream is to kind of take over the family business and expand it like my father always dreamed I would when I was a kid. In part, I became an engineer half because he wanted me to become one, and half because I loved computers at the time and didn’t know how dismally depressing the actual programming workforce would be. And now I’m choosing to go for an Accounting Certificate half because I think knowledge of finance will help me if I choose to have my own business in the future, and half because I have nothing better to do while unemployed. I know going through school is not much of an achievement in life, at least not in my eyes compared to finding the woman that I long for or starting a family of my own, but it’s really the only thing I have going in my personal life right now that I care for. We’ll see if I can find a job I want this year though, and we’ll see if I ever find (or rediscover) the love of my life...

At least between Avatar, the Nintendo Wii, the Toronto Raptors, and my goddam busy schedule, this new decade is already shaping up to be something special. It’s the first year I didn’t write a New Year’s Eve update, and who knows? Maybe being goddam busy every December 31^st will turn out to be a new tradition for me. I can only hope and dream, and maybe even make it fucking happen if only I opened my goddam eyes. Fingers crossed, if only...

Because it all sounds like so much goddam fun, now doesn’t it? And yeah, if 2009 was, why wouldn’t 2010 be?...

And if all goes to plan? Yeah, I just have that gut feeling. That this will be the year... of something for me...

Until then though, I wish you two readers a God Speed, a Good Will Hunting, a God Bless Us, Everyone...