Kids today are so spoiled

I remember when I was a kid I would fight for my time on AOL to use AIM with my friends.  It was years before my dad caved and got a separate phone line for the modem (56K, only the best), which was a combined birthday gift for my sister and I if I recall.  Then I discovered free online gaming with the epic war RTS games of Red Alert: Command and Conquer.  It wasn’t until years later that sites like Amazon and eBay existed, and even with their arrival I spent years paying via check since systems like PayPal seemed sketchy to me.  Of course, over time the virtual shifted and grew.  I now have more online accounts than I can recall and PayPal and online credit card payments are the norm.  I think i’ve used maybe 20 checks in the past 5 years.  Today however, I came across a new internet payment option that just blew my mind – “Bill My Parent$

I didn’t investigate the feature as it seemed pretty self-explanatory, but I imagined back to all the things I wanted as a child but could not obtain for economic reasons and this feature seems like a god-send.  Of course you’d deal with the wrath of your parents for the purchase later, but for less than $50 purchases (i.e. Nintendo games) they would just yell at you and then maybe take the game away for a while, eventually giving it back to you for good behavior since they are too lazy to bother with the return process that internet purchases afford.  So, kudos to the youth of today for obtaining this feature – however, it is one more reason my kids (product pending) should be banned from the internet.

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8-Bit Kicks

Courtesy of Steve Aldeus I got my old Black AF1′s updated with a custom paint job.  Of course I had the idea for a Nintendo theme but the end results were much better than I expected.  Check out the pics below and definitely contact Steve if you’re looking to get a sweet pair of shoes, he can paint basically anything.

[album: http://theGuiGuru.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/8BitSneaks/]

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Jukebox Hero

GH3

Well.  My guitar hero 3 project has come to a halt, again.  After having it work for a night (fun night) something on the main board shorted out so now it won’t recognize the fret buttons.  I’ve dissasembled it to figure this out which is the state you see above.  SO i have ordered another GH3 guitar off ebay ($60) and have also ordered an old SNES joypad to get some buttons for the frets ($32)…then tonight i won another auction i thought i’d lose for the same SNES joypad with a SNES system, 2 Controllers, and 5 games ($45).  I would be happy to win a SNES if i didn’t already have 2.

So the running total on this project (not counting hours invested or the value of the actual guitar that has been destroyed) is roughly $230.   Sweet.

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