Luckily I can get my fix watching reruns of season one and two starting March 10th.

Anyone else losing sleep in anticipation of season 3?

Breaking Bad follows protagonist Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a chemistry teacher who lives in New Mexico with his wife (Anna Gunn) and teenage son (RJ Mitte) who has cerebral palsy. White is diagnosed with Stage III cancer and given a prognosis of two years left to live. With a new sense of fearlessness based on his medical prognosis, and a desire to secure his family’s financial security, White chooses to enter a dangerous world of drugs and crime and ascends to power in this world. The series explores how a fatal diagnosis such as White’s releases a typical man from the daily concerns and constraints of normal society and follows his transformation from mild family man to a kingpin of the drug trade.

Source: AMC

I have been running a stock iPhone for probably a year now. I didn’t really have much of a reason to jailbreak, but as soon as I heard the Grooveshark app was out I downloaded Pwnage Tool and freed my iPhone.

If you have a jailbroken iPhone I highly suggest you download the app and give it a try. Why you ask? Well how about access to any song in Grooveshark streaming to your iPhone over 3G whenever you want? How about access to your Grooveshark favorites and playlists (for users with accounts)?

Currently missing from the iPhone app are the Library and People features. However, something not available on the desktop app but available on the iPhone is the ability to make songs available offline. In fact, you select entire playlists and make them available offline. Grooveshark will download the song to your iPhone’s memory and allow you to play them even when your radio is off. This is especially good for an iPod Touch that might not have access to WiFi all of the time.

Combine Grooveshark with the Backgrounder app for allowing 3rd party apps to run in the background and you have a full iPod app replacement.

Good work Grooveshark, very impressive app. Has anyone else tried the Grooveshark? What are your impressions?

Here is a tip I just discovered recently. Most brick and mortar stores that have a website have some kind of mailing list that you can sign up for. It’s a great idea to sign up for your favorite store’s mailing list because they will send you exclusive savings on a pretty regular basis. But, the real tip is that for major stores they will generally give you a discount coupon just for signing up. Some coupons are for online use only, some are good for in store purchases too. I received a Banana Republic one before Christmas that was good for 40% off your entire purchase in store.

It’s an easy way to save a few bucks, and it takes almost no effort.

On a side note, a lot of these sites send out emails pretty frequently so I have some filters set up in Gmail that make any of these newsletters automatically bypass my inbox and go right into my Rewards label. So now I get all of these deals without them cluttering up my inbox.

I highly suggest you check out the websites for the stores you regularly shop at and sign up for their newsletters.

Does you have any tips for other stores that give a coupon for joining their mailing list? Drop me a comment.

Grooveshark is a web based streaming music service quite similar to Pandora or Last.fm. However, unlike most streaming music sites you can upload your music collection so you can stream it from anywhere. Grooveshark is free with banner advertising or you can pay $3USD per month to remove the advertising and get access to the newest features before everyone else.

I have been using Grooveshark a lot lately since I decided to get rid of all of the music from my library that was not paid for. I decided to pay the $3/month for the vip service. The legality of Grooveshark is still up in the air, so if you upload unlicensed music to Grooveshark you may be breaking the law. Also, Grooveshark only has licensing deals with a handful of record labels, EMI being the only major one. I would like to know that when I listen to a song on Grooveshark the band I am listening too is getting paid. However, that is most likely not the case given none of my favorite bands are on EMI.

The interface is very iTunes like and is quite easy to use. There are a bunch of different themes you can choose from to personalize the look. Grooveshark claims that you can find any song in the world and listen to it instantly. If you only listen to mainstream music this is probably true. With my preferred genre of music being Melodic Death Metal there have been a few times where I have not been able to find what I was searching for. Also, since the library is mostly user built there are a lot of incomplete albums and duplicate songs.

Grooveshark also has a suggestion engine. If you add a few songs to your playlist and then hit the Radio button Grooveshark will continue to play similar songs once your playlist ends. In my experience the suggestions were pretty similar to what I like.

If you don’t want to keep your browser running you can install Grooveshark Desktop which is based on Adobe Air. Also, Grooveshark Mobile has just been released an is available for Blackberry and Android phones. Their website says that the iPhone and Palm Pre apps are coming soon (pending approval probably).

Grooveshark is sleek, fast, and is constantly being improved. However as it gains in popularity it is getting a lot of attention from the music labels which could be good or bad. The labels will either decide to partner with Grooveshark or crush it. As it stands now Grooveshark is my favorite streaming music site. I have pretty much given up Last.fm, and Pandora has not been available in Canada for quite some time. I am going to continue purchasing music that I love, but for me Grooveshark is a great way to discover new music and listen to music I already own when I am away from my own library.

Has anyone else been using Grooveshark? What are your thoughts?

My wife and I decided to rent the movie Orphan in HD. After purchasing the movie, it took about 30 seconds to a minute to buffer enough before we could begin watching. Our internet connection is the standard 7.5Mbps from Shaw in Calgary. We watched the entire 2 hour movie without any glitches. At no point did it need to pause to buffer.

Video and sound quality was quite good. To me the HD video clearly wasn’t Blu-Ray quality, but I would say that it was better than the HD movies I have watched on Shaw HD. I can’t make a comparison to an SD iTunes movie though because I have not rented one.

The next day I purchased a few episodes of The Office. I purchased both HD and SD episodes. I was very pleased with the SD quality but I didn’t feel that the HD episode I purchased brought enough increase in quality to justify the extra dollar.

Overall I am really pleased with how the Apple TV performed for renting and purchasing. I am going to need to start budgeting for monthly iTunes gift cards though.

Do you use an Apple TV for renting Movies? Do you like it? Hate it?

Has anyone bought one of these? Thoughts?

The book is written as a sort of confession by a man named David. He is now in his 40s, but all of the novel’s events in the take place when he was a young boy in the 1950s. For the first few chapters the story is very tame. It plays out like the beginning of a love story and it is sort of hard to tell where things are leading. Then within a few short pages that all changes and you are in over your head. Soon I found myself disgusted with what I was reading. The torture is shocking and brutal. The things that happen cause physical reactions in you as you read. I wanted it all to stop yet I was compelled to turn the page. I had to find out what happened next. With each page I turned I wished and hoped that the horror would end. It couldn’t possibly get worse. With each page I was denied. In fact, I began to expect things to get worse. I have never had a book make me feel so uncomfortable in my own skin. What I was reading made me feel like I needed, like I had to get up and do something about what was happening. But as you read you are powerless. Before you know it you are a guilty accomplice to the heinous acts just like David.

Ketchum has this amazing ability to build up your hope and then rip it away with only a few words. This book is not for the weak at heart or the weak stomached. A few times I wondered if I would be able to go on, to continue reading.

It may sound like I am giving the book a horrible review, but actually it was very thrilling to read. It created feelings within me that I don’t ever feel. This is the first Jack Ketchum book I have read and I’m hooked. Next I’m going to read Off Season, which comes highly recommended.

Side Note: Half way through reading the book I discovered that Ketchum’s inspiration came from the real life story of Sylvia Likens and that in 2007 her story was made into a movie called An American Crime. The movie version of Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door was also released in 2007.

I have been wanting to do this for a long time now but for various reasons (excuses) I hadn’t. Music is a huge part of my life and I believe it is important to support the music you love by going to concerts, purchasing merchandise, and of course paying for music.

Over the next few months I will be slowly purchasing all of my favorite albums. Music is cheap these days and there is no excuse not to pay for it. I have always been weary about purchasing music from iTunes due to the DRM and the fact that you don’t receive anything physical. But these days all of the music on iTunes is DRM free and if I want a physical copy I’m free to burn one myself. I am also going to be exploring online streaming music sites like Last.fm which I already use.

Bale is one of my favorite actors, due mostly to his roles in Swing Kids, American Psycho and The Machinist, but also because he’s just an all around badass. This tape just confirms his badassness. I have read a lot of the reports of this tantrum and I just don’t see how Bale could have gone off like that if the guy didn’t have it coming. I sympathize with Bale on this, not that he gives a crap that it got out anyway. I’m sure if we knew the back story to this conflict we would know why Bale went so far off the deep end, but we probably never will. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt though.

I’m sure this will be taken down before the end of the day, but here it is anyway:

“Well, its nourishing me, so that’s useful…”. GOLDEN.