Nothing here about mobile tech, just a nice way to get over the hump of the week on a Wednesday. Musical group “OK Go” won one of the inaugural YouTube Awards, and I can see why. The music video is choregraphed with the band members bouncing around on various treadmills in near-perfect synchornization. Well worth the few minutes and looks like it would be a good high-intensity workout to boot!

If you have time today, swing by The Student Tablet PC and wish that Tablet gal, Tracy Hooten, a happy birthday! Tracy turns 21 day, which in my book is the last good "milestone" birthday. Sorry Tracy; the rest of the milestones are all downhill! Now that I think about it, I still have computers that are older than Tracy…..

Just a quick shoutout to Dave Zatz over at ZatzNotFunny! He just announced that he left the glitzy government I.T. sector in favor of a new role at Sling Media; couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. As I just commented on his blog: this is a win both for Sling and for Dave. Although Sling is based in California, Dave will stay on the East Coast for now. He says:

"I’ll have a variety of roles here at Sling — the two most visible ones will be my presence on the Sling Community Forum and as the point man for writers/editors in the blogosphere. The communication will be two-way: not only will I be conveying company information, I’ll also be taking everything in to keep the executive team and various internal groups informed. As a blogger, I’m also hopeful you’ll see me heading up something, somewhere, at some point."

Best wishes on the new role, Dave! Hope you can keep slinging swinging by here and continue the frequent commenting…..not on work time, of course.

InformationWeek caught my attention this morning with the following blurb: "AOL is offering a free movie to people who agree to become a beta tester of its movie download service." Here’s the catch: you’ll have to hurry up and test because the offer ends tomorrow. The test and service runs on both Mac and Windows, which is nice to see.

Apparently, AOL has tweaked the download process to speed things up, so this round will test that and provide feedback to AOL on the overall experience. Anyone using AOL Video on a mobile device that can share the experience?

I mean in the real sense as in: "one, two, three strikes; you’re out!" Earlier this week, jkOTR reader Mike shot me a note to share his strike-out story with the Motorola Q. Here’s the summary:

Mike had "a recurring issue I have been having with my MotoQ. The first one I had after 2-3 months it started acting funky. The second one after 2-3 months started having THE SAME ISSUE. And then the third one I got today I programmed it and set it up on my account and then turned it off and when I turned it back on it just sat at the Verizon Wireless screen for ever."

Mike has contacted Verizon directly and will be getting a new MotoQ and I hope this one works out better. Mike also has more patience than I do as I rely on my computing devices for my work, not just for fun; I’d probably give the Q a shot or two, but not more than that because the downtime is just too much of an impact.

How about you? Any similar issues with your Moto Q? Would you drop a device after the first, second or third strike? Got any device horror stories to share?

[Sidenote: congrats to Mike and his wife as their second baby was just born last night. Best wishes on the new addition...now go get a mobile device for that baby and some sleep for yourself Mike!]

I was scanning my feeds early this morning and noticed some press releases over at MoDaCo, a fantastic Windows Mobile site. One of them indicated that "Project Gotham Racing" was finally coming to the small screen on WinMo; the original announcement was back in May. I’ve enjoyed (read: wasted) countless hours playing PGR on the Xbox 360 and while I love the game, I’m not so sure I’d want it or any other console games ported over to my handheld. I think it would make me less productive since I’m the type of gamer that will play for hours and then wonder where the time went.

Am I "all work and no play"? How about you: do you really want ports of popular games on your handheld or are you fearful of losing too many productive hours? It probably doesn’t help that I played 3.5 hours of Hexic HD on the 360 just before bed last night….no wonder I’m tired today!

Here in the U.S. many retail stores open up at 5 a.m. and many have special sales that just last for a few hours. In my experience, if you haven’t bought everything you wanted by 8 a.m., you’ve missed the super sales since quantities are usually low and the "mob-factor" is high. A few years back, I decided never to shop on Black Friday again OR do all of my shopping on-line.

Barb and I already bought some cool tech for the kids via on-line retailers; nothing beats getting great deals while shopping in your pajamas while sipping coffee! I can’t share what we bought the kids just yet, they’re savvy-enough to navigate over here. You do know I bought a Zune player (more on that later) and although it doesn’t count as a holiday purchase, I bought an Xbox Live HD video rental. The real question is:

What did YOU buy today? Did you battle the crazy crowds and what was the experience like? What was the best tech deal you found? If you had a bad experience and need some uplifting, just read my Xbox 360 debacle from one year ago; hopefully, your day wasn’t as bad as that one.

Apple is starting off the holiday shopping season with their version of Black Friday. Figuring that not everyone can get to an Apple store (or folks just don’t want to battle crowds at the Genius Bar), they’ve got a one day online sale going on today. I woke up to an e-mail early this morning with the news; just what exactly was Steve Jobs doing up at 3:35 a.m. this morning? His early to rise approach can net you some good on-line deals.

That Intel Core 2 Duo Mac Book I’ve been lusting after is $101 off today; hey Santa, I’ve been a good little mobile-blogger, whaddya say? Anyway, just about everything from iPods to iMacs to headphones is off-price. Wow! Even the Shure headphones are on sale, which would be great for my Zune! Oh, just kidding Stevie, I’d ONLY use them in my iPod nano….shure I would.

I consider myself very lucky. I get to interact with dozens of jkOTR readers every day and share my thoughts with thousands of our readers daily. Through all of this I get to work with James; a talented writer and good friend. Last year, James provided me the support and drive to get my first print article published, which was an amazing experience. Who thought that lightning would strike twice? Lucky for me, it did.

This time around, I was blessed with the opportunity to collaborate with Dave Zatz. Dave is a frequent commenter here and runs what is arguably one of the most insightful and fun to read blogs on DVR topics, called Zatz Not Funny (oh but it is funny Dave!). Dave and I worked together on a print article that you’ll see in the December 5th issue of PC Magazine, which is thrilling; it simply doesn’t get bigger than PC Magazine. OK, an Oprah appearance might be bigger, but the Harpo folks weren’t interested…go figure!

Just to illustrate Dave’s good nature, he invited me to work with him on this article even though he was more than capable of authoring it on his own. He’s a talented writer who not only let me share in the work and the spoils, but he even drove up from the Washington, D.C. area to my home in the Philadelphia region for a day so we could crank out the article. (Well, that and to watch some college football in high-def on a 60-inch 1080p set.) Dave did all of this when he could have simply done it himself….

The digital edition of the PC Magazine issue is now available if you subscribe via Zinio like I do. If not, expect to see us on pages 107 through 112 in next week’s issue that’s devoted to HDTV; if the article is published on-line, we’ll provide a link next week. Our article shows you the simple and inexpensive steps it takes to receive and watch HDTV over the air on your home PC. I hope you enjoy it….and thanks Dave!

Folks have been reporting issues signing in to Windows Live Messenger, as in: they can’t. Ed Bott reached out to the Live support team and received a fix, but it does require a registry edit, so by all means be careful. According to Ed, you’ll need to delete the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger\Policies

I think I’ll stick with GAIM and Miranda for my IM’ing needs at this point: they’re pretty stable and support chats across IM platforms. Oh, and no registry hacks to make ‘em work!

(via Download Squad)