It’s that time of year: I look around my house and look at all the stuff I bought. What was the best thing I purchased all year? What was the worst? Here’s 2007, and 2005 … looks like I skipped 2006. Whoops!

The best Gibberish gadget of 2008
The HTC Touch / Verizon vx6900
I never gave my Windows Mobile phone a proper review, but that was probably because I was too busy checking email, sending text messages, taking pictures, and approving Gibberish comments on it. Oh yeah, you can call people, too. When I first started my job they didn’t allow access to private email like Gmail or Hotmail, so Touch to the rescue. Thanks to an update to Windows Mobile 6.1 and an unlocked internal GPS receiver, my HTC Touch is a lot more stable and feature-filled than when I bought it at retail. I liked the phone then, and love it now.

Honorable mention: Kapoosh Universal Knife Block. Yeah, it may be droll, but I use it almost every day. The Kapoosh is a product of quiet genius. It is simple and effective, and you don’t realize how much you needed it until you have it. A great product, and a great value at $20.

Worst Gibberish gadget of 2008
Motoport
This is a no-brainer. The multiple fitting issues, the ranting and admonishment at the hands of Wayne Boyer, the owner of Motoport, and an equally disastrous return process put bitter icing on an already bad cake. In fact, my experience with Motoport may make it the worst Gibberish gadget ever. You have to be a mighty big asshole to dethrone a product that kills dogs, but there you are, Motoport.

Honorable mention:Navigon 2100 Portable GPS. How can you sell a new GPS in 2008 with maps from 2006? Long satellite acquisition times, poor user interface, and an insensitive touch screen display makes this off-brand GPS a stinker.

For better or for worse, I live in a conservative city in Virginia. I have become accustomed to some of the cultural affordances, like being able to acquire a concealed handgun license or carrying a pocket knife in public without people thinking I’m a terrorist. As such, it’s weird when I go to places in the city that don’t follow the same train of thought. My employer is pretty squeamish when it comes to pocket knives. I may be in technical violation of their “no weapons” policy by carrying a utility knife. I can’t really help it: I was taught by my father at an early age that a real man always has a cutting tool on hand. Even if I could help it, I wouldn’t. It’s a stupid ordinance, and until someone says something, I will do as I please.

That being said, I don’t want to wave my disregard for the rules in everyone’s face. I typically carry an X-Blades folding razor blade knife, but it is fairly conspicuous. No reason to raise any hackles if I can avoid it. I do, however, like the idea of using disposable razor blades instead of a standard permanent fixed blade. I own a few traditional pocket knives, but I am too lazy to sharpen them at the end of every day like my father.

I had been carrying my old Spyderco Cricket knife until I found the Gerber EAB Exchange-A-Blade razor folder on sale at Target. Would it be discreet enough to take to work, and effective enough to handle day-to-day cutting tasks?
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Ride the shit out of it!!

My step-father was in town for part of the holiday, and we got a chance to ride in the 70°F weather. He rode Cylon, my 2005 Yamaha FZ6 for awhile, I was on Raider, my 2004 BMW R1150R. We switched later in the day, and he definitely preferred the FZ6.

Look, I’m all for increased literacy. People play too many video games, watch too much television, and don’t read enough.

This, however, is fifty shades of wrong:

This is one of the stalls at my office. I took this picture on Monday, but it’s been a busy week with the holiday. Anyway, I don’t know what’s worse about this picture: that you’d have to touch the now pee-laden backside of the magazine to pick it up again, or that someone was reading PC Magazine in hard copy.

The horror! The horror!

It took me a little longer than the fourteen days expected to go from session 55 because I spent one day getting holiday stuff taken care of, and the rest I just blew off. Frankly, going through the P90 Phase 3 and Phase 4 program has taken its toll on my enthusiasm. The standard workout seems robotic and the repetition is killing me. As such, I was very happy to break the recommended routine and do a six-day detour to Hawaii.

The Beachbody P90 Fat Burning Express Hawaii edition, that is. Here’s my opinion of this DVD after a second helping.
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I have grown a full beard for the last three years in a row. I mixed it up a bit this year by starting and ending earlier. I typically started after Thanksgiving, but I had been on such a tear riding my motorcycle to work I thought starting early would be a good idea. Unfortunately my commute was a little too scary at night for my tastes, and I’ve been driving my car back and forth to work. I also got a TON of feedback this year, since I am in a “real job” now and see tons of co-workers every day. I also see about a dozen or so fellow gaming dorks once a week. Opinions ran the full spectrum, from disgust (“it covers up your enviable bone structure and it makes me crazy”) to one lass throwing herself at me (you know who you are).

I don’t know if it was a combination of those things, or just not wanting to wear a face sweater any more, but I cut it off last week.

Behold, the winter 2008 Beardaggedon.
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I love, love, love Pandora Radio, which suggests music for you based on the types of music you like. One of the things I’ve always wanted is a way to listen to Pandora in my car. I was jealous when iPhone users got to listen to Pandora on the go, and I hoped for a Windows Mobile version. Time passed, and passed, and passed, and finally you can listen to your favorite Pandora station on your Windows Mobile device.

Sort of.

The catch is that it only works with two phones right now, the HTC Touch (Verizon xv6900) and the Motorola Q9C. Luckily (for me, at least), I have an HTC Touch. The mobile version of Pandora.com works great. I had a problem copy and pasting my username/password into the application and had to peck out my password via the phone’s virtual keyboard. That took FOREVER, as I have strong password with all sorts of randomly-generated letters, numbers, and symbols. After I got past that, though, everything ran well.

I am a little surprised to see that you can’t buy music directly from the mobile version of Pandora. I have purchased a half-dozen albums from Amazon through Pandora. I am not sure if the iPhone version has this, but it’s a definite “nice to have.”

My next task is connecting my phone to my MazdaSpeed3′s stereo. The stock head unit has a 3.5mm standard headset jack, but my Touch does not have a headset connector. I will have to buy a mini-USB to 3.5mm adapter cable, and most of the ones I have found online are from dubious places I’ve never heard of. On eBay, every single adapter I found is sold out of Hong Kong. I’d rather not pay $15 in shipping for a $5 cable, but if that’s what I have to do to have Pandora in my car, then that’s what I have to do.

Here’s my favorite Pandora station, “Relaxed.” I used to listen to it while working from home. It is seeded with songs by Juno Reactor, Lamb, Mocean Worker, Mr. Scruff, Truby Trio and Weekend Players.

Wolverine has always been my favorite X-Man. The graphic novel by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller hit me at a particularly opportune moment in my life while I was going to high school in Utah.

I always imagined Wolverine as a psychological case study on internal conflict. Wolverine is powerful because he is a killer and wrapped up in rage. Wolverine is weak because these same attributes put him at odds with the rest of humanity. His typical foil, Sabretooth, is what happens when the natural predatory instinct is not tempered by friendship, responsibility, and love. The aforementioned Miller/Claremont graphic novel is a great example. Wolverine is in love with a Japanese woman, but her father reveals him to be an uncontrollable beast. Stuff happens, and Wolverine has to mete out some rough justice. Problem is, he can only do so by being an uncontrollable beast. Dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t. As such, it always makes me nervous when I see Wolverine depicted in the movies. The first two X-Men did a good job of depicting him as trapped between his loner nature and his desire to be part of something bigger. By the third movie it was all about action, and the next thing you know we have the X-Men: Origins movie starring my good friend Logan.
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I have a hard time ingesting adult vitamins without getting nauseous. I have to bracket a pill-taking between eating two hours beforehand and not exercising two hours afterwards. I don’t plan ahead very well, so this meant I skipped taking a vitamin more often than not. I found that I can chomp down a child’s chewable vitamin without incident, and wrote about Costco’s chewable vitamins about eighteen months ago.

The short version: nasty.

However, I was desperate to develop a tolerance to the taste in order to get my essential vitamins and minerals. I Pac-Manned my way through two bottles, and shared more than a few with my dogs. When it was time for round three, I was disappointed to see that Costco didn’t carry them any more, or at least didn’t have them in stock. They were replaced by the sugar-free version. I was both skeptical and optimistic. I was hopeful that they tasted better than the sugar-rich ones, but I’d developed a sort of chewable vitamin Stockholm Syndrome.

The short version: less nasty, but I hope you have strong teeth.

I almost busted my toof apart the first time I ate one. I heard a loud CRACK! and something shattered in my mouth. I wasn’t sure if it was my molar or the vitamin. Some cautious munching revealed that I had broken the vitamin in two. In the two weeks following, I have yet to comfortable eat one of these fuckers. It is at the point where I steel myself and squint my eyes before chewing.

They are so tough that my dog Pearl has a hard time with them. This is the dog that has eaten two DVDs, a hardback book, two mobile phones, and who knows what else.

However, they don’t taste bad, or as bad as the originals, so that’s good for something. The price also stayed the same … I hate it when I get penalized for buying the healthier version of something.

If you find it difficult or uncomfortable to process swallowed vitamins and want to get 33% more vitamins than an equivalently-priced bottle of Flintstone’s, give the Kirkland sugar-free child chewable a try from Costco. Just make sure your teeth are in good order, and you have your dentist on speed-dial.

I opened up a savings account with Internet-only bank ING Direct several years ago. I retained my First Union-to-Wachovia bank checking account, mostly in order to have a check card and access to ATMs. However, ING started their Electric Orange online checking accounts, complete with check card and online bill pay. They’ll even send paper checks out on your behalf. Oh, did I mention my ING checking account currently gives me interest, too? Not nearly as much as my savings account, but much better than the 0% APR Wachovia offered.

As I used my ING Electric Orange account more and more, fewer things went onto my Wachovia account. I used to use my Wachovia account for everything, and in the onslaught of consumer spending activity I never noticed that Wachovia was hitting me for $6 month for “electronic statement transfers,” which means that this triggered the ONE time I tried out Quicken almost two years ago and never stopped. It was time to cut ties with my old bank. I had a $0.10 balance, and just sort of wrote it off. Until today, when I received this in the mail:
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