This is not everybody’s guitar program. This program is for any person who already feels somewhat comfortable with the fundamentals of guitar playing, but just needs a little bit of help taking the final step into excellence.

Guitar Scale Mastery is one of the few systems on the market designed to help you (surprise!) master guitar scales. More specifically, the system is designed to help you feel comfortable learning, memorizing, and utilizing the seemingly infinite array of scales at a guitar player’s disposal. The program is designed by Craig Basset, a life-time musician with a Bachelor of Music (Performance) from Massey University in Wellington.

Based on our first impressions of this man from his website, it feels like we know him. We think you might, too. He’s the guy who walks into a guitar store, sits down, and plays so well that he gives everybody in the store an instant inferiority complex. Ah, yes, you’re starting to see it too. Look! There’s Eric Clapton in the corner, eating comfort food.

Or, even worse, maybe Craig Basset walks into the store and feels like nobody is worthy even to receive an inferiority complex from him. The very thought gives us chills.

Either way, it’s quite a promising program for the intermediate guitar player.

To learn more about Guitar Scale Mastery, visit their website here.

I have a TV that basically looks like this thing.

I hate television. It’s old and it doesn’t smell as good as it used to. Plus the internet does all the things that television does, except for it sadly doesn’t have any commercials. I miss those things.

However, I still need to own a TV. This is because of a little blessing/curse that I like to call ‘video games.’ (I hope that term catches on!) That’s why almost exactly one year ago, I marched down to my local Best Buy and purchased a Philips 27″ Flat Screen TV.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You are saying in your brain, “Jason. Why did you not purchase an LCD?” Well, I will tell you.

I am poor. Well, not that poor, but I am also not rich. And we have yet to create a word in the english language that describes people that are neither poor nor rich in one syllable. Therefore I have to pick one or the other.

Compared to the rest of the world, I am very rich. I will prove it to you. I have:

• A/C
• Electric Lighting
• Plumbing
• TV
• Computer
• Internet
• Car
• A/C
• MP3 Player (A.K.A. Instant Music)
• A/C
• A can of shoe polish

The rest of the world does not have these things. I should know. I asked them. That is how I know that I’m rich in comparison to the rest of the world. However.

I am poor in comparison to a lot of Americans. This is because I do not have:

• A house
• A ‘nice car’ (meaning any car made after 1993 with functional A/C)
• 2 or more ‘nice cars’
• 2 or more TV’s
• 2 or more MP3 players
• 2 or more cans of shoe polish

As you can see, I am neither ‘rich’ nor ‘poor’. And yet I am both ‘rich’ and ‘poor’. I am forced to choose. I have decided to choose ‘poor’ so that I may play the sympathy card. You are feeling sorry for me already. I can taste it. It is very salty.

That is why I was forced to purchase mediocre technology. But it’s not bad technology either. We have no term in the english language to describe the area in between mediocre and bad. Therefore, I am forced to choose. Never mind. I think I’m going to just quit while I’m ahead. Good night.

I got on a long tangent about nothing, and forgot what I was actually going to say about the product. How silly of me. Please forgive me. That was not a request.

Are you familiar with the various defects a TV can have? There are so many! As a person who used to walk in the electronics department of a prominent retailer, I can say with much confidence that I have seen many TV’s decay right in front of my eyes!

Sometimes the power supply goes bad, and it won’t turn on. Sometimes the switch goes bad, and it won’t turn on. If it’s a plasma, you can start to lose individual pixels. Or on some older plasmas, you could have an image burnt into your screen permanently.

The most sad defect, however, is when a TV randomly starts picking up discolored spots. This is what happened to my TV. Two weeks after I bought it.

Oh, great, I know what you are thinking now… “Jason, why did you not simply return this TV? You could have exchanged it for a nice, new, non-defective one. Or you could even have received a full refund.”

Haven’t you ever heard of laziness, you critical human being? Stop lecturing me in my head with Mr. Roger’s voice. As I just showed two sentences earlier, there’s a reason for everything I do. Or don’t do.

Anyways, if that’s what you’re thinking, then you’re right. I’m not complaining against Philips. They’re a great brand in my opinion, and there’s a reason I bought one of their TV’s.

Actually, I’m not complaining at all. In fact, I just realized that I could look at the positive side of this whole situation.

I happen to be the only person I know who has a TV that can make Johnny Depp look like a smurf, or make Ingrid Bergman look like she has cirrhosis. Beat that.

T-mobile Dash

I managed to pick one of these babies up about 6 months ago and I wanted to write a little review on what my feelings are on the T-Mobile Dash Smartphone.

Well, to start out with, it’s about 100x better then my previous flip-phone, the Samsung t219. I hated that phone and everything about it. The speaker quality was horrible, the phone felt extremely cheap, it got the worst reception imaginable. Plus, within the first 3 days after I bought it the screen cracked while I had it in my pocket. Well, what can you expect from a cheap “Pay as You Go” phone?

So you must imagine when I purchased my T-Mobile Dash, I was quite impressed with it. It had the majority of features I was looking for in a phone. Not all the features work as great as I’d like, but they do work. Here’s a breakdown of the features, and what I like and dislike about them.

Wi-fi: The fact that it even has wi-fi is a plus. Also its fairly easy to get connected to a network. The downside for me is I HATE the browser it comes with. It’s restrictive. No flash or anything. I found that you can bypass this crappy browser by purchasing NetFront and using that. That’s an amazing browser in my opinion.

Bluetooth: Good, really no complaints with this. Very easy to setup my bluetooth headset. Fairly easy to connect to another phone with bluetooth and share files. Overall the feature seems to be pretty good. No complaints here.

Windows Mobile: I used to own a Toshiba PDA a while back that had Windows Mobile on it. I liked it. The thing I disliked about it is that the speed of the browser leaves something to be desired. The Dash seemed to have minimized the sluggishness the Windows Mobile O.S. used to have. The memory can be bogged down by just opening up apps. Even when you close them they don’t totally get removed from the system memory unless you clear it yourself. Very annoying at times, but I’ve gotten used to just clearing the memory every once in a while. Sometimes features act a little quirky with Windows Mobile, but that’s what we’ve come to expect with a Microsoft O.S.,  lol.

Camera: It’s alright, 1.3 Megapixels is pretty good quality for a phone. Better then the old phones that didn’t even come close to a megapixel. I wish it was a little bit better considering there are some phones that are now doubling the megapixels this phone has. It’s good but not great.

Battery: The battery life is very good. Its estimated talk time is 5 hrs, but I usually get quite a bit more then that. 6-7 hrs. talk time is about average for me.

An aspect I’m very impressed with is the sound quality. I’ve tried quite a few different PDA’s and smartphones that don’t even come close to the sound quality of this smartphone. The speaker phone is loud and crisp. The phone size isn’t a very big deal for me. It’s comparable to the size of a blackberry. Often people ask me if I have a blackberry, cuz they look very similar.

Overall I’m very impressed with my T-Mobile Dash. It’s got the features I want and the quality I want. I recommend it to really anyone interested in something more then your average flip-phone. The price isn’t too bad, especially if you get a contract with it. You can find one at Amazon for only $28 if you get a new service plan. Here’s a link to that.

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION:

Fix-Ya-360 is a product that allows anyone to rescue their own Xbox 360 from the most common problems. Included in the guides is a detailed do-it-yourself guide on fixing the Red Light Problem, the e73 & e74 errors, Audio with No Video Problem, Graphic Glitches & Freezing, Disc Tray Sticking, Disc Read Errors. The creators make a guarantee that the Fix-Ya-360 product will eliminate the 3 red lights forever or your money back.

Click Here for more information or to Purchase the Fix Ya Xbox 360 product

TESTIMONIALS:

Hey Kei,

just want to write you and thank you for all your information. I had the stupid 3 lights and disc reading problems. I fixed both problems all in the same attempt I couldn’t believe it. I thought the laser would be an impossible task but it was so simple lol. I left my 360 running overnight playing gears of way to test it and it was still goin strong the next morning.

thanks again kei

Kei, you genius! Finally my 360 is back up and running. I was ready to go out and buy a new one because I had tried 3 other methods that all eventually failed on me again. You were right when you said the other guides are missing some very important steps, because what you showed me was the difference. Thank you.

If you are interested in the Fix Ya 360 product… Click Here

I purchased the Toshiba Gigabeat in 2006 right when it came out. I’m happy to say that I did really like it. There are definitely some really nice features about the gigabeat. I want to highlight the pros as well as the cons of the gigabeat.

First off, Toshiba did an excellent job at providing the customer exactly what he/she wanted in the way of accessories for the Gigabeat. It comes with a cradle that you can set it in to transfer music and charge the battery easily and effortlessly. Also provided with the Gigabeat was a remote which makes it easy for you to have the Gigabeat in your pocket and still be able to have control over your music without taking it out. I’ve purchased quite a few mp3 players that didn’t come with these useful additions Toshiba provides.

This mp3 player has a nice amount of space with a total of 40 GB. More then enough to store all your music, unless you have a severe music addiction. It also has nice sound, I really liked the SRS WOW feature. It definitely makes a huge difference in quality. It offers a ton of different equalizer settings, 28 to be exact. It provides a decent amount of battery life with around 16 hrs. per charge. Not too terrible.

One thing I didn’t like about the Gigabeat was the fact that it didn’t allow video. It lets you upload your pics on there and view them in very good quality but no video. Why? I don’t know. Another con is that it doesn’t have a radio. I never listened to the radio much on my other mp3 players but I do like the feature. It’s just a feature you like to know you have. Or, at least I do. The Gigabeat is kinda thick also. Nothing big but it would be cool if it were a tad bit thinner. Last but not least I didn’t like that anything you transferred to the Gigabeat through Windows Media or the Gigabeat room were immediately encrypted when they got put on the device. I didn’t like it for the reason it made it difficult for you to transfer the songs back to your PC hard drive if you needed to and listen to them there.

Overall, I have to say I’m pretty impressed with this Mp3 Player. Toshiba has come out with a nice product in the Gigabeat. I have since upgraded to the Zune. But the Gigabeat will always have a special place in my heart.

Take a look here, if you’re interested in the Toshiba Gigabeat

I own this. I bought one a few months after it came out. I was sick of The Man (Apple) dominating the mp3 player industry, so as soon as I found out The Other Man (Microsoft) was coming out with their own mp3 player I came as quick as I could to support them. They did not disappoint. Mostly.

At the time that I bought this, the iPod seemed like the only conceivable mp3 purchase for the mainstream music lover. However, when the Zune came out, there were four main features it had that the iPod did not. These are probably the three biggest reasons for why I bought it:

1) A radio. Pretty cool. Radio’s half-dead, but it’s nice to have it on there. You can use a radio on an iPod as well, but you have to buy a peripheral. Bleah.

2) Wireless sharing. You can share your music from Zune to Zune. Very cool. Finally I can attempt to impose my music tastes on anyone whose wireless waves come into contact with my own! Hooray. Just kidding. Kind of.

3) No iTunes. Probably the biggest reason I bought the Zune. iTunes is crap. It’s expensive, and it’s crap. You can use other music services with the iPod, but it’s designed to be used with iTunes. That’s why I was grateful for some good old Windows friendly apps. Now I can download wherever I want, and that means not on iTunes.

4) A bigger screen. Hey, it’s cool. You can actually see your movies. I’m pretty sure the iPod touch has a screen that’s just as big, or bigger, but it’s about $150 more expensive.

There are two major downsides to the Zune that I can think of. One I knew about when I bought it, the other I found out about after I bought it.

The first is that it’s kind of bulky compared to the iPod. I already knew that, but didn’t care. The bigger screen size makes it worth it.

The second, which is slightly more irritating, is the Zune software. I still like it better than iTunes. I think it’s just mp3 software that’s annoying, period. It’s a great media player for my music. It’s just that syncing can be a pain in the buttocks. My advice to you is get it right the first time. Or you will pay in time and blood and tears. That is all.

In my opinion, the pros definitely outweighed the cons, and still do. I still think it’s a better purchase than the iPod. However, since it does have a couple annoying things, I’d give it about an 8.5/10. Slightly better than 4 stars. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone looking for an alternative to the iPod.

I like music. I probably like it too much. That’s why my Zune is jam-packed with happiness that I can measure in gigabytes.

If you would like to buy a 30GB Zune for $50 less than I bought it for (a year and a half ago), click here.

If you would like to buy an 80GB Zune for $100 more than I bought a 30GB Zune (a year and a half ago), click here.

If you would like to buy a much more compact 8GB Zune, click here.

If you’re tired of all this Zune crap and want to go to the dark side, click here.

I’ve used my fair share of micro flash drives in my life, but none have been as difficult as this one. Here’s a short list of what I don’t like about it, I’ll go into further detail down the page. 1.) It feels very cheap and junky. | 2.) The U3 software on there is horrendous. | 3.) Slow & Software is intrusive.

I couldn’t really pass this deal up when I saw it at Walmart, on sale for $14. 4 GB is quite a bit for such a small device. Yeah I know they now make 32GB micro flash drives, but it’s still a good chunk of space. With that being said I purchased it and brought it home hoping to put some backup files from my computer on it.

Right away when I plugged it into the USB slot I noticed it was not stable at all. It disconnected itself in the middle of a transfer more then once and I also noticed that it auto-runs multiple programs that are pre-installed on the device. Very annoying. I have never used a USB flash drive that has software that’s so annoying and intrusive. I find it running in the background of my PC even though I never started the software.

Conclusion: It’s made from very cheap plastic that makes it feel as if you could break it pretty easily. The software is by far the most annoying problem of this device. Plus it’s slow and unstable in transferring. So all around I’ve found it to be a piece of crap. It kinda surprises me because I used to think Sandisk made fairly good products.

As you may have guessed, I returned the device a week after I bought it. I have heard, though, that you are able to uninstall the software on the micro flash drive. I never looked into this because I was also unhappy with the other facets of this product and will wait to purchase a massive 32GB in the future.