Electronics: March 2008 Archives

After seeing the crowds of people camped out the day after Thanksgiving I vowed to myself that I would not be caught up in Wii-mania. After all I am not much of a game player whether it is on the computer or on a console. I mean I have not seriously sat down and played a computer game since the Atari 2600 came out. Oh the days of Pong, now there was a real game! My kids of course think I am crazy as they would never even classify that as a video game. But just because I am not a game aficionado does not mean that my kids have grown up deprived of electronic goodness. Quite the contrary, I think we have owned pretty much every game system developed or at least it seemed that way. There was Nintendo and Super Nintendo, there was Ninetendo 64 and XBOX. I think at one time we had a Sega and I am not positive but I think there was a Playstation briefly in the house too. Last Christmas all Dakota wanted was an Xbox360 so now we have that too. And when the kids received Guitar Hero III, they spent their entire Christmas break strumming and rocking away. But after watching Trina who is much more coordinated than I am struggle to press buttons and flick the guitar (which only comes right-handed by the way what is up with that?) I decided to keep what remaining dignity I had and gracefully decline the children's offer to play. But I truly thought we were finally up-to-date with game consoles and therefore would not be having to deal with the Wii phenomena; as always I was wrong.

The day after Thanksgiving is always chaotic around our house. On Thanksgiving evening Trina and I sit down with the newspaper and plot our plan of attack. You see Trina is the queen of the door busters. If it is possible to save three cents by standing in line for four hours you can bet that it makes the list..I am slightly more pragmatic than that. Unless it is electronic, a new gadget, or something to do with the Diamondbacks I probably don't care. So as Trina was going through the stack of newspapers trying to find someone who had socks for a quarter I sat there motionless trying to appear interested. One store that Trina had on her list was Best Buy. I love Best Buy. There is just enough technology there to keep me interested and I just love going in there and making the Geek Squad feel like idiots (which by the way isn't really that hard since most of these guys have only gotten through the first chapter of the Owner's Manual for any piece of software or hardware in the store). The newspaper had several door busters that I would actually stand in line for.