Now that we all know that Nintendo Wii is here to stay, what awesome old skool Nintendo games do you want to see redone?  Wii rally posted their list here:   Hmm, they chose pretty good games.  I personally would like to add:

• River city ransom
• Castlevania
• Megaman
• Super Dodgeball
• Contra
• Tetris

Any other suggestions?

I may be considered a freak, but I actually enjoy working through the maze of tax codes and putting my taxes together.  As someone that works in business, I should be able to fill out a couple of tax forms, right?

I’ve always been an earlier adopter of doing taxes online.  First using the free online services to do nothing more than allow you to enter in figures off a 1040ez .  As my income grew I moved on to filling out the 1040 long form.  I found the process extremely easy and effortless.  At present day I’ve been using Turbotax for six years, and I’m feeling somewhat trapped.  I admit that its mostly my fault that I’ve become so comfortable using their interface and not to mention the great feature that allows you to roll forward information from previous returns, especially losses (ouch.)

So now it looks like I’m about to embark on another tax journey but I hate the idea of paying $40+ to file my taxes online.  Is it just me or does it feel like the price to file has increased every year?  I guess like all well-heeled dealers, the first couple hits are cheap.  Did I fail to mention that every year I also embark on another journey and thats the trek to find some kind of coupon for Turbotax.  So far the best thing I found was a special offer by Visa that gives you 15% off the entire purchase price if you use a Visa card to pay for the package.  If anyone out there sees a better offer out there, give me a holler.

Sometimes it takes The Onion to put it all into perspective…Damn you Onion that hurts:

Potato-Chip Connoisseur Detects Notes Of Sour Cream, Onion

When I moved into my current apartment, I was faced with furnishing an entire kitchen by myself for the first time. For a semi-foodie, this can be a really great sort of fantasy regarding what kinds of kitchen appliances you’d like. For a real foodie, the possibilities must be nearly orgasm-inducing. (yeah, japadamus, I wrote “orgasm.” stop flinching.) Instead of just getting the $10 on sale slot type of toaster, I opted for the $150 BLACK & DECKER Infrawave Oven Now, this might seem a bit odd, but it seemed like a decent enough idea, especially if it lived up to the hype. I’d like to be able to bake more than 4 taquitos or whatnot, so I wanted a larger toaster oven anyhow, and this one claimed to reduce the cooking time. I’m particularly impatient on weeknights when I’m cooking dinner, so speed and efficiency was really my main concern.

The InfraWave oven works by using infrawave light instead of traditional heat to cook food, so it will convert conventional oven settings’ temperature and times to its own infrawave light cook times. The toaster’s display is fairly simple. There are a few presets for cookies, pizza, and toast (all of which I’ve used to varying degrees of adequacy), but generally, you select a category (such as poultry, meat, baked goods, casserole), input the conventional oven temperature and time, and boom, you get a new estimated cook time. I’ve mainly used the oven for chicken and toast, and both of those have a drastically reduced cooking time. The chicken normally takes about 55 mins to cook and is about 39 minutes now with the Infrawave. It also does a fine job of cooking fish, which can be somewhat tricky if the temperature’s off by too much.

My main complaint stems from using the oven to bake baked goods.The oven cooks by alternating light from above and below. The main problem, though, is that this will create uneven baking for cookies and cakes. In a conventional oven, you don’t get the above heating element working, so it’s really not an issue. As Japadamus will attest, when baking brownies or cookies, the oven will either undercook the baked goods or scorch them. It doens’t seem to do a very good of converting temperatures and cook times at all. It’s really just like a retarded or dyslexic child doing math. You never know what they’re going to say is the answer, but you can bet it will be wrong.

The infomercial claims that it will somehow reawaken leftovers to their original standards, which seems pretty ludicrous. I can’t really tell any difference, though I haven’t had much of an opportunity to use it to warm up leftovers. It’s still faster to nuke your leftovers for 1 minute than to let the infrawave do its thing. And unless you’re warming something that does require a level of crispiness, the microwave does just fine.

In a nutshell, the Infrawave oven does a bang up job of cooking meats in a significantly reduced amount of time. It does toast just fine, too. If you just want something for those two purposes, this is definitely does the job. However, I don’t know if I’d recommend it to anyone over a regular toaster oven, which will cost a lot less. I mean, for $150, I expected some unusual level of gratification that would come from using it. Although I appreciate the extra 15 minutes for cooking meats, I don’t know if it’s really saving me that much time in the long run. Maybe I’m really just a cheapskate at heart, but I was expecting to be able to do anything and everything I wanted with this oven. Now I know that I can’t really use it to effectively bake stuff, which is annoying. Although it is neat to watch the heating elements switch from top to bottom, it’s not a cheap thrill. When Black and Decker makes a toaster oven that can do something fantastic, then I’ll consider upgrading. But for now, get yourself a conventional toaster oven for a lot cheaper.

Well, the SF Chronicle is reporting that Gavin Newsom is entering treatment for alcohol abuse. I’ll just add him to my exclusive list of other really “sorry” people:

• Patrick Kennedy [source]
• Lindsey Lohan [source]
• Mark Foley [source]
• Mel Gibson [source]
• Isaiah Washington [source]
• Mike Tyson [source]
• Kate Moss [source]
• Gavin Newsom [source]

Waaaaaa, I made a mistake and now I need help, waaaa