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I must report a bit of sad news: despite my jury-rigging brilliance, the Hearn family’s venerable Playstation 2 appears to have met its sad but inevitable end.

It had been slowly dying for some time. A year or so ago I had to take most of it apart to clean the disc-reading laser and blow out 9 years of accumulated cat dander and other detritus. Earlier this year, the cooling fan built into it had gotten so noisy that I decided it was time to replace it, so I ordered a new one, popped the case open and put it in. Finally, last week, I noticed that it would occasionally turn itself off. I usually left it running all the time (I subscribe to a relatively-common theory among nerds that electrical devices prefer to actually have electricity flowing through them at all times, and that frequent power-off and -on shortens the life of the device) and I’d come into the room and notice that instead of the blue and green lights indicating the P2, as it was affectionately known, were off, and the red light was on, indicating that the power switch on the back was on, but the OS wasn’t running.

Then I noticed that when playing a game, the cooling fan wasn’t turning on. The poor thing was overheating and powering itself down to keep from melting. So, I took it to the kitchen table, popped it open, and started testing things. A long story short, I determined that the fan itself was fine, but that the system board wasn’t signalling it to turn on for some reason. I should probably have put the poor console out of its misery at that point, but instead I went online and ordered a cheap USB fan to stick to the front.

Then, I read a nerdy article about a fellow who took a similar fan, connected it to a USB cable, and used it to cool his enormous, sweaty forehead during extend sessions of Diablo 3. I realized that the P2 has USB ports on the front, and I have plenty of old USB cables lying about. So, I took the fan out, spliced it and a spare cable together, and plugged it in. Whirrrrrrr! Yay! I reinstalled the fan into the P2, with the fan wires going out and around to the USB connection on the front. Brilliant! Sure, the “boot OS” button didn’t work anymore. But you could simply turn the box off on the back and then press the CD load button to get things to come to life. Sadly, all I had done was delay the inevitable.

Just as I was planning another self-congratulatory post about my ability to hack anything and get it functioning again, I sat down for a few minutes of MLB: The Show last night. Powered the P2 up, inserted the disc, waited for David Wright to appear on my screen so that I could remind him that the Mets suck, and…nothing. Back to the red light. Hm. I ejected and reinserted the disc tray, which booted the OS, but again: down she went. O noes!

P2 came into our lives in January 2003, a highly-appreciated birthday present from Sarah to myself. Our first game together was Tiger Woods 2002. Over many years, we have spent many hours together playing many games of football, baseball, basketball; hundreds of rounds of golf; and slaughtered countless numbers of terrorists, Germans, rival gang members, and prostitutes. P2, we mourn you, and along with you all of the valuable saved games and customized athletes to which you gave life. Requiescat in pace.

Playstation 2, 2003-2012

Number 1: The Charmin commercials with the large brown bears who are greatly concerned about whether or not the TP will leave what appears to be dandruff on their butts. I appreciate them using anthropomorphic bears so that we can pretend it’s all cute and that they aren’t talking about, essentially, dingleberries, but I’m still greatly grossed out by it. I don’t know about you, but the bogroll at our house doesn’t leave any kind of detritus behind, possibly because my wife buys single-ply in bulk from some kind of Russian mob outfit and it’s like wiping with burlap, except that burlap might be preferable because my fingers wouldn’t go straight through it.

I’m just tired of my fingers smelling like shrimp, I guess.

Number 2: The car commercial, I think it’s for a Buick, in which a family celebrates a new car for Christmas, complete with big red bow atop, and then another car drives by and the husband (who ostensibly made the purchase) realizes he made a big mistake and should have bought the other car. As in, “I know we just got a brand-ass new automobile, but I can’t be happy because the one that just drove down the street is so much NICER.” I’m no anti-materialist, but every time this commercial comes on, I think of a family of four living in a 1983 Ford Econoline.

It’s also worth noting that a dude I know bought his wife a Lexus for Christmas once, just like in the commercials, and the Lexus people would not give him a big red bow to put on it. FALSE ADVERTISING.

Number 3: The Target commercials, which are thankfully pretty much done now that Black Friday is past, featuring the crazy lady preparing for huge sales and cackling like a maniac. She doesn’t appear to have enough skin for her head.

(The actress in question is actually Maria Bamford, a funny comedienne, but for her participation in these commercials she’s earned a lifetime sentence as an elf in a David Sedaris story.)

What weirds y’all out? Other than Chuck Testa, of course.

I don’t know what the hell is wrong with people. Okay, I get it, there’s no iPhone 5 this October. I guess if you’re a complete idiot who knows nothing more about technology than “5 is a bigger number than 4,” this is a serious disappointment. But let’s go over a few important facts:

	iPhone 4	iPhone 4S
Processor	Apple A4	Dual-core Apple A5
Still camera	5MP	8MP
Video	720p HD	1080p HD
Incredible AI-Voice Recognition application	none	Siri

I’ve left out memory comparisons (because we don’t know what the memory in the 4S is, yet) and the new dual-antenna wireless connection (because I’m not sure how big a grain of salt to take with the prediction of doubling cellular data speeds). Still: in what ridiculous crack-den world are folks living in that this is anything less than a major upgrade? They could call it “iPhone Zero” and it would be completely awesome. Sure, if I already had an iPhone 4, I wouldn’t feel the need to upgrade. But if you have to upgrade your smartphone every single year, I’m going to predict that you’re a major douchekabibble anyway. Like, you know, this guy:

There’s nothing really notable, physically, about the iPhone 4S in comparison to the iPhone 4. Do you have an iPhone 4? Pick it up. Look at it. Turn it over. There, you’ve just done an iPhone 4S hands-on. Congratulations!

Seriously? Your initial reaction to the release of a new phone with twice the CPU is “Sigh, it’s the same shape!” I wonder if this idiot refuses to buy DVDs or BlueRays because they’re the same form-factor as a CD.

This phone is obviously an upgrade over the iPhone 4, and if you’re like me and still floundering along on an old 3G, it’s like going from an IBM XT to an Alienware scream machine. I’m not sure when Apple will actually open the store to get this phone, but I plan to stay up until midnight in case they’ll take my order at 12:01 on October 7th. A few other notes on the subject:

The “back” (or primary) camera went from 5 to 8 megapixels, but that may be the least of its improvements. They’ve opened the aperture to f/2.4 for better low-light shooting (I prefer using a fast aperture over using a flash), and the new lens has 5 elements to sharpen the photos. Plus, image stabilization in the video mode, which is now 1080p (better HD resolution than my Flip).

Siri looks totally rad, although I need to use it to really see if it’s useful. I’ve had other phones with voice recognition, and it was little more than a gimmick. I also don’t fully trust AI after being boned so many times over by that damned paperclip.

I’m largely indifferent to this iCloud thing as well; we’ll see how well it works. Having only 5GB of free storage makes it next to useless, really, although I guess being able to use it to back up your phone before doing a PC-less upgrade is pretty win.

Mostly, frankly, I’m just excited to have a phone that can background apps, do Facetime, and not have things constantly crash because 128MB of DRAM doesn’t cut it with iOS4 apps.

I’ll admit: I did not follow the directions to the letter. I have a number of tools powered by 2-cycle engines, and experience starting them in adverse conditions (rain, snow, etc.), so I assumed that my brand-ass new Husqvarna leafblower would operate similarly. So I took the can of fuel (a 50 to 1 gasoline and oil mixture that I refill approximately every 2 years) and poured it in. Yanked the starter, and she fired right up! I blew leaves around in great glee for 10 or 15 minutes, and then shut the blower down to bag the leaves up.

After having done so, I attempted to restart the blower, but no matter what combination of choke, throttle, and priming I tried, it wouldn’t fire. I consulted the manual and the internet, and discovered that the engine was picky about fuel. To be specific, it required exactly the right mixture of new gasoline (no older than a month), Husqvarna-specific 2-cycle oil, a stabilizer, and three unicorn tears, stirred exactly 47 times counter-clockwise with a phoenix feather. My first thought was, “Well, this is ridiculous. I’ll just send it back.” Which is where I discovered my mistake: I’d ordered the blower from Amazon.com, and they do not allow you to send things back that run on gasoline.

In their defense, I think one leaky tank of flammable petrol in the belly of a FedEx jet is one too many. So I understand. What I don’t understand is why no warning was made of this anywhere in the ordering process. Sure, if you check their rules, it mentions it, along with 18 other pages of legalese that no Amazon customer in the history of the internet has read. It’s like expecting me to know what’s in the iTunes EULA, or my mortgage contract (“Be it known forthwith after the previous payment hath been twice En-late-enated, the Mortgageer, henceforth known as the ‘Deadbeat,’ shall release unto the custody of the nearest Notary Public Two (3) Children between the ages of 1 and 7 until such time as the Bacon shall be seen to Float from East to West despite a strengthening Jet Stream…”). I would like to think that before ordering something that can’t be returned, Amazon might put up a splash page saying “Hey! You know you can’t return this, right? Just, you know, so you know.”

So I was left with a deluxe backpack leafblower with what I assume is a clogged carburetor and no way to return it. My only option was to drop it off at a local dealer a few miles away and hope that the repairs are covered under warranty. It’s been almost 10 days with no word, which worries me a bit. Hopefully they haven’t had to surrender it to the bank for late payment.