The playful mispelled title was just too tempting to pass up. As most of my family already knows, the Wii has officially arrived in my household. On any given day, I idle away all kinds of time that could be spent on constructive pursuits playing the Wii, the aforementioned Xbox 360, or my recently retrofitted PC.

However, over the holidays this year, I have a new appreciation for the Wii. For the first time in my life, I have seen my entire family get in line to play a game. It’s an incredible phenomenon and entirely unexpected. I had an idea of the Wii’s accessibility, but had no idea people normally not interested in videogames would step forward to give it a swing.

I’m just glad I can share the mindless time wasting with family. After all, at it’s best, that’s what spending time with family is: just having fun spending time.

Oh, and I sustained my first Wii injury. The welt is healing to a nice bruise. Hurts so good.

Recently I had the privilege of taking a business trip to Paris, France. The trip wasn’t long, and while there was time for an otherworldly meal at a bistro (think new heights gastronomic intensity), there wasn’t time to do much more than work. However, I did get a chance to stop by the popular Parisienne store Colette. I had been hoping to find some unique chotchkes to bring back w/ me to NYC, but I could find none. Instead, I felt like I was browsing a museum store, with a selection of 60 euro t-shirts, all of which can be had in NYC for less. I should mention the sneaker selection was nice; the few styles they had were high quality.

The one thing I did purchase for myself, strangely enough was a US based magazine Wax Poetics. Little did I know I would wander across an interview penned by a relative, in a magazine I don’t normally read, in a hip boutique in Paris, a city I haven’t been to in 10 over years. So I purchased and paid museum store prices. And it was worth it on the flight home.

Is it too soon for New Year’s resolutions? Thanksgiving isn’t even here yet, but you’ll find it easy to find something to work on for next year with personal-kyoto.org. Register with this site, enter your ConEd account # (apologies to the New York impaired) and view your own personal energy usage. My usage is 1.2% above the average for New York. I think this makes sense as we tend to have a lot of doodads and doohickeys sucking up juice around the house. The water-cooled PC and aforementioned Xbox 360 aren’t really helping any. In any case, the goal for next year is to reduce usage by 25%. The site kindly tracks my usage and compares to the goal.

One of the first things we’ve done is replace our incandescent bulbs with compact flourescent bulbs. Being the lazy lump that I am, I am happy to say I’m not only replacing 60W bulbs w/ 13W bulbs, but also extending the amount of time between bulb changes by three-fold at least. The incandescent bulbs we used to use apparently blow out after about 2400 hours. These CFLs are rated at 8000 hours. “Huzzah” go the lazy lumps. No more sitting in the dark while contemplating whether or not the bulb should be changed.

Slashdot has brought up a few nuggets of pure fun over the past couple days…

Bacterial DVD holds 50TB - Back on the storage tip, these will be ready about in time for the unveiling of Sony proprietary, ultra-mega-compact-mini-disk storage, to be filled with super ultraman-go-ranger hi-definition movies that will be released 6 months before they hit your local cineplex. That is to say, perhaps never. However, the idea of storing approximately 7,000 of today’s DVDs on a single disc is inspiring.

Procedural Synthesis - About.com catches up to .kkrieger, which we reported on 2 years late. This makes About.com 2.5 years late. If you read the article, you’ll see the Spore hype machine marching on in full gear.

Cow Power - Ever driven by a cattle ranch? What thoughts run through your mind as you cruise by with the windows down on a hot, breezy day? If you’re like me, you’re thinking “How can we burn all this stink and power a state?”. Well darn it, someone in Vermont has gone and done it. You can buy 25%, 50% or 100% of your power from the system. Wake up call New York: We need to figure out a way to turn all the stink on the NYC streets into power for my PS3.

Even as allegations of Mac “phone home” sensibilities (via gizmodo) have surfaced (read: evil), wherein your sweet and homely Mac is forced to check in with the mothership every 8 hours, there is some good news to bring the universe back into alignment… CrossOver Mac promises to allow you to run Windows applications within Mac OS X. Planning to ship in early August, this app, while anticipated widely, arrived a bit sooner than expected. Based on Wine, an open source “compatibility layer” for *nix and Mac OS X, the package will retail for $59.99 and will draw a considerable huzzah from that annoying Mac guy (right) in the Apple commercials. Of course we all want CrossOver Mac, but nobody wants to be mr hoodie.