Happy New Year

Well, 2005 is here. I am excited for this year. I think there are some really exciting things in the works that could make it a great year. It will be interesting to see how things work out. We have had a great Christmas. We have been at my wife's parent's house in Atlanta. It has been nice to have a break from work but I am also ready to get back to it on Monday.

Christmas is always a great time of year to both give and receive gadgets. I was lucky enough to do both this year. I gave my brother-in-law the Griffin iTrip for iPod. He got a 20 gig iPod from his mother-in-law and I know that the iTrip is the perfect accessory. I have on for my iPod mini and also have a Belkin transmitter for my Dell DJ. The iTrip works much better than the Belkin. I would prefer to have a tape adapter but my car stereo doesn't have a tape player.

I also received a couple of great new gadgets. The first gadget is a Plantronics M2500 Bluetooth Wireless Headset. My wife gave me this little beauty for Christmas. I have the T-Mobile Blackberry 7100t and have wanted a bluetooth headset ever since I bought it. It has worked perfectly. I pulled it out of the packaging, turned it on and my phone picked recognized it immediately. It has been very easy to use and I love the form factor. The sound quality is clear and the people on the other end of my call have told me they can't tell that I am using a handsfree. I have been very pleased with this gadget.

I was given some money for Christmas and was able to buy a gadget that I have had my eye on for a long time. I bought the Bose QuietComfort 2 Noise Cancelling Headphones. These things are expensive for a pair of headphones, but they are worth every penny! I had tried them in the Bose store a number of times and always thought they were pretty cool, but I hadn't really been in an environment to really test their noise cancelling ability. Then I got in the car. As my wife was driving home I put them on without even plugging them into my iPod. I turned on the headphones and was absolutely blown away. They reduced the car noise to nearly zero. If I hadn't known better I would have thought that my in-law's Honda had sudenly turned into a BMW. The difference was remarkable. I am flying home tomorrow and can't wait to try them out on the airplane. After my trip I will post an updated post with how they worked on the airplane.

I wish everyone a happy and safe New Year!

My name is Jared and I am a tech addict

I have wanted to start a blog for a few months but I didn't know what to "blog" about. I knew that I didn't want it to be a wandering, rambling waste of bandwidth. I kept thinking about writing something that I would find interesting even if it wasn't written by me. As you will see in future posts I am addicted to everything tech. I love gadgets and gizmos, the newer the better. I know I drive my wife crazy with this so I figured a blog would be a good forum for me to talk about these things without ruining my marriage.

My english teachers in school always said that you need to have plan before you start writing anything (my computer science professors in college said the same thing about programming), so here is my tentative blog plan. I want to review and research cool tech toys. The drawback is that I don't have the connections that would let me review stuff for free. So I have decided to put to use a skill I honed while being a dirt poor college student. I used to go to all kinds of stores like Best Buy, Circuit City, and CompUSA just to look at stuff. I would go in thinking, "Ok, If had x amount of money, what would I buy today? What is catching my attention and making me want to sell my kidney on the black market so I can have it?" That is what I am going to do for this blog. I am going to review products strictly from the experience I can have with them in a store.

So keep checking back for more my reviews, tech tips, and other musings on all things tech. I welcome feedback, questions, comments, and ideas for posts. Hopefully you will find this blog a somewhat humorous look at the world of tech.