I’ve had the dreaded Windows Vista for exactly a year now and I just had my first real “issue” with the OS. It was the dreaded Windows Vista “USB Device Not Recognized” error that seemed to appear after a quick power blip in my home.

For those of you not familiar with the famous Windows Vista USB Device Not Recognized error, I’ll give you a quick synopsis: you are using Windows Vista and minding your own business when suddenly a little pop-up message appears and tell you, surprise! you have a “USB Device Not Recognized!” There’s an annoying little bell that rings and you click on the stupid pop-up bubble and get.. well… nothing.

At least for me I saw nothing. And here’s the problem: you can’t find anything wrong so you can’t actually fix anything. Windows Vista doesn’t tell you which USB device is not recognized, which USB port has the problem or what it thinks is happening. The error message “USB Device Not Recognized” is just about completely meaningless. But every 30 seconds the bubble pops up again with that annoying little bell.

So I did what I do whenever I hear a discouraging sound coming from my car engine: I turned up the volume on my iTunes and promptly forgot about the message. Eventually I got smart and just turned the Windows Alert sound off.

After a few days the error was still popping up and though I couldn’t hear the bell, the bubble was troubling me. Other people have spent hours searching through documentation and reloading Windows Vista from scratch and downloading USB drivers. I am far too lazy to do that anymore, so I just went searching on the internet for the stupidest most implausibly easy solution I could find.

And it worked.

The solution is simple: Unplug (not just turn off) you PC for about 30 minutes or so. Plug it back in. Turn it back on. Ta-da, your Windows Vista USB Device Not Recognized Error is solved.

I thought about trying to sell some sort of wacky device that would help you pull the plug out of your computer, much like my iPad invention for fixing that dreaded sad iPod icon. But then I realized: I’m too lazy for that, too.

Instead you can just thank me with large unmarked bills.

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I have a confession to make… I am having an affair with another woman.

My new lover. Photos don’t do her justice.

Her name is Bravia. She is as bright as Einstein during his wild hair period, as sharp as a Hollywood surgeon’s scalpel and as thin as a super model on a hunger strike. And though she is from a prominent family in Japan and I am a simple dorky American white guy, we get along fabulously. I know how to push her buttons and I know how to turn her on.

I have to admit that I’m a happily married man and I wasn’t looking for any extracurricular activities on the side. It all started innocently enough. There I was with my wife, strolling through a local store when we happened to pass the electronics department. And there she was! Bravia! Sure, there were plenty of beauties all around me, but there was something undeniably more attractive about her than any of the others. My wife and I kept moving down the aisle away from the electronics on our way to use a coupon for some breakfast cereal and some new curtains for the bedroom window. I thought about Bravia all day, but kept silent for the long drive home.

If it had just been that one instance I would have probably forgotten about my eye-catching Bravia. But a few days later I caught a glimpse of her again, this time at a department store were my wife was looking for those darn curtains again and I was chasing my son through the clothing racks. I jumped up from behind a carousel of blouses and started to entertain my toddler son with the growl of a lion, but right in mid-roar I caught a glimpse of Bravia across the sales floor and the sound got stuck in my throat.

I herded my son towards her, amazed at her beauty and in awe at the halo of light that seemed to surround her. And then someone moved the Philips Ambilight TV out of the way and I noticed that it was really my own mind that was putting the glow around my beloved Bravia.

Sure, I suppose my life was missing some excitement in our marriage. My wife and I both work full time and we have a toddler in the house, so we don’t have time for each other much anymore. That’s how it happens, I guess.

That night I began searching for her on my computer. I visited websites, examined small fuzzy photos that didn’t do her justice and read up on her and all of her friends. And that’s how I fell in love, I suppose. The more I learned about her the more I wanted to know.

I started planning shopping trips around her. I drive across town to get milk at the local mall just so I could accidentally swing past stores where she might be hanging out. I started searching her out and I started to become slightly obsessed.

My wife found out, of course. It wasn’t a total surprise to her. She noticed my sideway glances and my strange disappearances whenever we visited retail establishments with decent electronics departments. One night after we’d each had a few drinks it all finally came out. She asked me if I was happy and if I wanted more excitement in my life. I hemmed and hawed but eventually I declared obsession for the young Japanese beauty. I don’t know if it was the booze or my ego or the deadly combination of both, but I started throwing accusations at her. I admitted chasing after the dear Bravia unreasonably but I declared that I had on occasion caught her doing the same.

She grew quiet and looked down. She shed a single tear. She finally looked up and admitted that she, too, was looking for something else. She was tired of spending nights squinting into the darkness, she was tired of the extra weight and bulk, she was tired of feeling as though every movie she watched was really nothing more than a 5 cent picture player at a 1920’s boardwalk arcade. From that night on we looked for Bravia together, scouting her out in various electronic stores and magazines, reading all we could about her.

It took us another few weeks, but we finally decided to invite her to spend some time with the two of us. We felt guilty, of course, inviting this creature of beauty and poise into our humble home. We had never really spent much time with other creatures like her, but something told us Bravia would be different than the others. We gave her a place to sit and we sat back to let her tell…no, show us her high definition stories of wonder.

On her first night she entertained us with a story about water buffalo. It was our own little ménage à trois. Just me, my wife and Bravia. My wife and I don’t have a pet water buffalo, we have no opinions about water buffalo and we have just about zero interest in learning about water buffalo. But we sat in awe as our sexy Bravia conjured up facts and images about water buffalo that were so real that we starting counting the hairs on the backs of those ugly beasts just because we could.

My wife and I have a stronger relationship than ever, now that we’ve invited this Japanese member of the Sony family into our home. We spend a little time each night, basking in the powerful glow of our imaginative friend. We still don’t dare look at her for very long and we still spend plenty of time away from the company of this export from a far away land, but the time we do spend with her is exquisite.

Lately I’ve been worried for her, though. I’m told our fair Bravia has a cousin who shares her own beauty… intensifies it, even. I’m told she has Blu eyes that send out rays of magnificent light. I have a feeling we’ll be inviting another stranger into our home soon…

Technorati Tags: sony bravia, lcd tv, high definition tv, love affair

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As I’ve written before, I was one of the luck people who was able to snag a Nintendo Wii last year. This year I want another one for my niece, but this year I’m playing it smart. I’m gong to tell you how to play it smart, too and get a Nintendo Wii while sitting around in your underwear in front of the computer all day.

ZOMG!! CLICK CLICK CLICK!!…

Calm down. This is just a graphic of the OuttaStock.com Wii Finder Widget.

Last year I did what everyone else was doing: I drove around every town every Sunday morning around 4am, found a likely store to camp out in front of and spent the next three hours standing around in the cold with a bunch of desperate parents, only to find that we had 100 people in line and the store that we were standing in front of only had 10 Wii game systems for sale. And though I used all the super-secret rumor mill forums and spoke to the retail flunkies and even found sites that showed maps of my town with likely Wii systems for sale, I realized that the whole process of chasing down something in a brick and mortar store was relatively labor intensive.

And I am, if nothing else, pretty damn lazy.

So instead of focusing on physical stores, I started paying attention to online stores. I spend 90% of my day in front of a PC, so I’m always about 30 seconds away from an online store that might be selling a Nintendo Wii.

This year there are some great services which monitor Wii availability online and notify you instantly when a Nintendo Wii is being offered for sale. There are a lot of these services, but I had some basic criteria: the service had to be easy, reliable, and FREE. There’s no guarantee I’ll get a Wii, so I didn’t see the point in paying for a service that didn’t guarantee me anything.

Here they are:

Wiialerts.com - A pretty neat service that will send you a cell phone text message or email the moment a Wii is available from one of about 14 different Wii console or bundles for sale from various vendors. The site is free and heavily emphasizes the cell phone text message over the email because text messages are apparently sent a little more instantaneously. I’ve had varying success with this service. I’ve received about 4 or 5 messages from them in the past two weeks. One was a text message, one message was actually legit but I wasn’t near a PC and three of the messages seemed to arrive late when no Wii were available.

Wiitracker.com - A pretty good service that monitors one of the largest lists of Wii bundles and options I’ve seen. The best way to use this is to subscribe to the RSS feed and just have it check every couple of minutes. At the bottom of the screen they offer a full history of all the times and dates various Wii bundles have been available. This is somewhat useful in that you can see that many less expensive bundles sell out in about five minutes and you can sometimes see some patterns in when certain vendors offer Nintendo Wiis.

RefreshThing.com - This is a small service that I used successfully last year to snag my own Nintendo Wii from Circuit City and help several people in my office do the same. This page updates automatically every 30 seconds, so the idea is you just keep it up in the background and keep and eye on it. The page only lists 17 Wii Bundles for sale and counts some strange places like JC Penney and eBay as valid sites to get a Nintendo Wii. It often gives false positives and it uselessly tags Amazon.com as having available Wiis all the time because you can buy one for $400. Really, when people are using a service to track down a Nintendo Wii they aren’t looking to pay $400+ for a $250 item.

OuttaStock.com Wii Finder - If you’re going to use only one online service, you might want to consider this one. They have a fair number of Wii Bundles and they never seem to give a false positive on their site. The nice thing about this service is they offer a Widget you can install and just leave up on your PC all day, checking for Wii availability. Yes, there is a Mac and a Windows Version (which uses Yahoo Widgets). When a Wii is available you click on the widget, which takes you to the site which lists availability. Click on that link and you’re set. This has been a pretty good site this year. I’ve seen a Wii available about five times now and each time it’s been dead on. Yes, sometimes they are expensive bundles, but I even caught it at the very tail end of an Amazon availability once, though I was too late to complete my order.

The season is still young, so I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to get a Wii. Like I mentioned, there are patterns to when certain sites seem to offer Nintendo Wiis. Based on these patterns I will tell you that you might want to pay attention to Amazon.com right around noon central time.

Good luck, never buy from Buy.com and happy Wii Hunting!

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