Since the last post about the Nikon D3000 contest I came across another CrunchGear post that reviews the Eye-Fi Pro 4GB wireless SD memory card.  I did a blog post about a video review of the 2GB Eye-Fi Media Card almost 2 years ago.

Wow, that was a blast from the past. At the time of that blog post, I was unable to embed videos, so I just took a screen shot and linked to the Viddler page for the video which I might as well embed now.

So it’s almost two years later, and I still don’t have one of these chips. Now they have a 4G chip, and it is now going on my Christmas list.

Since Black Friday is rapidly approaching, I don’t feel too bad about writing a post that talks a little bit about the commercialization of Christmas. I better stop ranting..sorry. How to reduce the Commercialization of Christmas will just have to be an upcoming post.

The list of STUFF on my Christmas List

1. 4GB Eye-Fi card
2. A new compact digital camera for restaurant pics for thegrubhound.
3. A new air compressor.
4. A gas or cordless  bush trimmer( I cut too many electric cords with my old corded trimmer)
5. a new 5 gallon gas can that doesn’t leak
6. new dress shirts
7. new undies
8. new jeans
9. a gas or cordless blower
10. solar panels for house
11. wind turbine
12. new laptop
13. a 4 wheel drive
14. Xbox 360
15. PS3
16. A dozen of whatever is the must have present for this year?
17. YakTrax for climbing my driveway.
18. I just saw an infomercial for Back Joy and just have to add it to my list.

What’s on your Christmas List?

Got a Christmas list blog post, why not drop the link to it here.

Just checking out TechCrunches post Google Announces Fastest Growing Search Terms and fount the top ten popular search terms are:

1. iphone
2. webkinz
3. tmz
4. transformers

5. youtube
6. club penguin
7. myspace

8. heroes
9. facebook
10. anna nicole smith

I was looking at the comments and one person had no idea what Webkinz or club Penguin were. I have actually been working on a post about those two, which if you did not know, are two social sites for young kids(3-10), whe

re kids can play online games and make online friends. Boy the Social sites are starting out young.

My daughter actually had a Club Penguin account and had managed to work her way up to a rather nicely equipped igloo when the 6 month membership her mother had bought her expired and her igloo vanished. Due to this occurrence, Club Penguin has left a rather bad taste in her mouth. She tells me she won’t bother with it ever again.

Club Penguin which was bought by Disney in August for $700 Million is a really fun site that starts out its users with free accounts that enable them to create penguin characters that can play all the games of the premium characters, but can not buy stuff for their characters without upgrading. After creating a Penguin character, penguins engage in playing games where by they receive coins that can be used to buy things for your character. Each Penguin comes with an igloo, but to upgrade the furnishings for it, the kids must get mom and dad to fork over $5.95 a month, $29.95 for six months or $57.95 a year. With over 700,000 paid members and well over 12 million activated accounts, that is certainly a lot of young eyeballs that Club Penguin and Disney have captured..I find it hard to believe that Anna Nicole is still in there.

Webkinz, is similar to Club Penguin in that it is a site with lots of games, and other features including Webkinz email. A user starts out by purchasing a little stuffed toy animal, which has information attached to an character id card, such as an account number, name etc. Each toy enables the the kid to extend his account another 6 months. My daughter has many of these little creatures around the house, and has managed to get me on the Webkinz site more than once.

Ganz, which is the manufacturer of the toys, has a really popular money maker here. I was in Canada not too long ago, and when I was walking down the street in one of the Ontario towns, at least a half dozen shops had Webkinz merchandise for sale, which now includes clothing, dolls, trading cards and more. Quite a little racket. I can remember the first time I heard about Webkinz…now I wish I had never heard of them.lol
Webkinz Domination

Of the two sites, I believe that Webkinz will be the more popular of the two because they seem to have established themselves as both a dominant online presence and as an actual physical presence in stores. Webkinz has a great marketing technique were they are continuously rotating stock. Dolls that remain on shelves for too long are sent back to Ganz, and new ones are continuously being pumped out. This process of creating limited supplies of characters reminds me a lot of the Beanie Baby craze that was popular not too long ago.

Anyway, I thought I would let you know about Webkinz and Club Penguin, which happen to be two of the most popular search terms in case you were wondering. I maybe doing another post or two on these subjects, so don’t be surprised if you do.

How about you, do you have a favorite Webkinz animal. I kind of like the Panda.
Stumble It!

I just made a video of me making a Rightsizeonline.com Chocolate smoothie for my lunch. I wanted to embed the video on this blog, but I seem to be having technical difficulties. I will have to work on the embeded video functions.

Well the video can be seen on my Google video account or on my Viddler account.

I added a little bit of German Chocolate cake from last nights desert…sssh I was cheating a little bit.

If you watch the video on Viddler, be sure to leave a comment within the video stream, that is the beauty of Viddler.

Related posts:

Here is my previous Viddler post.

Other Web2.0 networks I use.

Guest Blogger

A new generation of quieter and faster laptops is in the pipeline. The hot, heavy hard drive we all know is being replaced with cool, lightweight flash chips. Flash chips will usher in a new wave of laptops that in addition to being light and fast, won’t need charging so often and won’t heat up the tops of your thighs.

The new technology is not quite ready for the mass market, but it won’t be long. Flash chips, which use solid-state technology, are already used in digital cameras, mobile phones and iPods. Their price is falling by a half each year and industry experts expect around a fifth of all new laptops to be running on flash drives within the next three years. A 32GB flash-drive laptop is already on the market from Fujitsu, but you’ll have to pay an extra thousand dollars for it. It is rumored that Apple and Sony will be next to launch such machines.

Once flash drive laptops become widely available, a wave of change will sweep through he industry. It will boost flash memory chip makers like Hynix Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics and Toshiba. Such firms will make money before other players join in and prices drop futher. The problem with hard disks is they consume a lot of power. So conventional laptops need frequent charging through the day. Flash drives are half the weight of hard disks. With no moving parts, they are more sturdy and they can process data faster. The lack of a motor or spinning disk means they consume less than half the power and generate less heat.

Apple may win the commercial race. It is already using flash memory in its iPods, which transformed how people hear music worldwide. The company is believed to be introducing a flash-based notebook the size of a paper-back book towards the end of 2007. We could also start seeing laptops with special drives for both an old-fashioned hard disk and a new flash one. But if money is not a problem, you can get a very special flash-drive laptop right now. For one million dollars, a number of luxury gift companies are offering diamond-encrusted laptops with a 128GB flash-drive installed.

About the Author

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