I somehow magically got a Wii for my birthday, and have been meaning to post about it. Lots has been said about it, but there are two main points I think are worth mentioning.

Combining two of my current obsessions (soccer and technology), I am experimenting with an IPTV provider to get access to my beloved Champions League. Last year, we got our CL action through a subscription to a Real service. We had all the games on demand through streaming, and I just fed the signal through my laptop to the TV.

Here’s the list of technologies I want in my grubby paws by this time next year. My kingdom for a fab lab…

Is the physical world giving way to a better, more flexible virtual world? Or is it just like the promise of the paperless office?

For more information about virtual economies, see this Cyber India Online Limited article, or read Edward Castronova’s paper on the subject.

I also reference a couple of books: Snow Crash and Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games.

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This morning I installed ipodlinux on my first generation iPod mini. I’m no hacker - I used the OS X installer available from kainjow.com. This is an unsupported version of ipodlinux, but it works really well.

The funny thing about linux on the iPod is that the thing it does really badly is play music. But that’s not why I installed it. I was hoping for the recording feature available with older iPods running linux, but no cigar. If I had read the documentation first, I would have known that recording doesn’t work on newer iPods yet.

When I was a kid, I remember I had this book. It was a small saddlestitched flip book of maybe 20 pages, all of which were brightly illustrated and was written in 18 point font. It was about how you (you, being a kid at the appropriate age for this type of book) should not watch too much TV. It was general TV-will-rot-your-mind propaganda, and I distinctly recall that it advocated no more than 4 hours of the tube per week. Yes, that’s right, per week.

OK, I admit it. I have a pretty intense emotional response to a particular kind of technology. The ubiquitous cell phone. I don’t much like telephones to being with, and the idea of having one on your person at all times strikes me as a particular kind of hell. But what’s really appalling is the way that having a cell phone seems to be a license to be rude. Cell phones ring in theatres, people answer them in the middle of conversations with real live people and hanging out with someone who is checking their voicemail constantly gives you the feeling that you don’t rate too highly in their books.