The Toffa guys at BrainShare gave away a Sony PSP today at 4pm. I was there for the give-away, and had I been eligible, I would have walked away with the device.

The device, by the way, is really, really nifty. The graphics in the driving game I played for 5 minutes or so were amazing — this is NOT what handheld gaming has been for the last few years — not by a longshot. It seemed to me to be at least as realistic as Playstation graphics.

The Toffa guys imported the device from Japan, followed somebody’s instructions on getting it to display interface in English, and then gave it away here in the U.S… and the winner had only to answer a pretty simple tech-trivia question before anybody else did. The answer, by the way, was “SyncML,” and there was time enough before the answer was shouted out for me to turn to Chris and say “Okay, I know this one. Are you SURE I’m not eligible for the device?”

So yeah, I held, played, and helped* give away a Sony PSP today. Does any of that device’s inherent coolness transfer onto me?

–Howard

(*Note: by “helped” I mean “failed to interfere with.”)

I’ve never been diagnosed with any sort of anxiety disorder, or mood imbalance, or whatever you want to call the manic/depressive-ADHD-bipolar family of “issues.” I’ve always compensated well enough for my mood swings that there’s never been the need.

For the record, I’m STILL compensating well enough.

That said… I’m down now. Yesterday I was on the way down, and did an evening at BrainShare, which sucked the last of the mania out of me. This morning it was all I could do to drag myself out of bed after 9 hours of sleep. After a short errand run in the morning I was grumpy, depressed, and exhausted, so I took a two-hour nap.

Does this happen to everybody else, or is it just me? Last week was great — I was productive, and for lack of a better term I’ll say “manic.” This week I worry that I’ll struggle to stay awake, much less get everything done. Oh, I’ll prop myself up for my appearances at BrainShare just fine, but I have this sneaking suspicion that Thursday and Friday are going to get written off as a bad investment, or as “damaged in shipment,” or something like that.

This is one reason I keep a buffer.

–Howard

Unless you live in a cave, you’ve heard that John Evander Couey confessed to sexually assaulting and then murdering nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford.

You may have also heard that Couey is 46 years old.

Photos behind the cut

I’m an iTunes junkie. Every week they publish a small list of free tunes, one of which is their “featured” freebie, and I download ’em all. Even the stupid “street mix” rap stuff that is 20 minutes of what might as well be called “unlistenable,” at least from my point of view. But maybe someday I’ll want it.

Yesterday I downloaded “The Bad Touch” by Bloodhound Gang. That’s the “do it like they do on the Discovery Channel” song with the feeelthy lyrics. Lyrical genius, I say… “love, the kind you clean up with a mop and bucket/ like the lost catacombs of Egypt only God knows where we stuck it.” Naturally I can’t listen to it around any other members of my family. I spent 99 cents (well… $1.05 after tax) for something I might get to listen to a dozen times.

Then I found that Daft Punk (or their corporate masters) had finally put their stuff up on iTunes. I almost blew the last $12 or so of my iTunes credit in one spot… and then I realized what I was doing. I was binging. I wasn’t going to be able to listen to all this stuff at once. I would quickly forget about having bought some of it, and might NEVER get around to listening to it, as it got lost in the 3500-song library of stuff I’ve ripped or iTune’d. I still have the new Sting album ($10+ of my $30 iTunes birthday credit) which I haven’t worn the shiny off of yet (okay… according to the playlist count I’ve heard the whole album over a dozen times, and the dance mix of “Send Your Love” over 30 times), and both Vangelis albums I got for my birthday are still shiny, too.

After a little introspection I only bought TWO of the dozen or so Daft Punk tunes I want. I’m listening to one of them right now, and the other one is queued up next. I’ve sorted a bunch of the newest music (new to me, anyway) into a single playlist called “Still Shiny,” and I’m going to auto-repeat that into oblivion as I draw today.

the playlist