Life Sucks. Get a Helmet.

... and as I typed that, the world blew up.

Be that as it may, this remix of Heaven's Earth rocks my box/socks/bagels and lox.

In any case, last night was my first foray into the official BzzAgent action. Along with Angelsil & El Uno, we hit the "snob mall" (International Plaza) in search of the Sony Store. Fortunately, Angel knew right where it was, so the mutual exposure of yuppies::me was kept to a relative minimum. Heh.

I had every intention of doing a Good Cop/Bad Cop routine with Angel (since she is a card carrying Sony Whore, and proud of it, whereas I don't trust any pc that doesn't have at least some of my skin and blood involved in its genesis). However, the tech guy seemed to have eyes only for me (why, I wonder?). I dunno if it was giving Sil the wrong impression, but I was keenly aware of the fact that it was "guy talking to guy" rather than "guy talking to everyone" most of the time.

After a rather surprising bit of stand-around waiting for our Vaio expert to shepherd us among the laptops, it was refreshing to see that, despite the Apple-ness of the store, they're not fundamentally bad hunks of equipment (shiny points were earned for both carbon-fiber construction and the extreme niftiness of a 1ghz windows-based ultra-portable the size of a thick paperback... as well as the gunmetal grey microfiber uniform shirts the employees get).

Our presenter knew his patter, and quickly pointed out the differences between the various models in their lineup despite a completely nonlinear and non-intuitive naming convention for their devices. I blame AMD & Intel for starting this idiocy with their processor ratings scheme after moving beyond the Pentium III generation of hardware (at least carmakers have a modicum of logic to theirs - LS430 = "luxury sedan, 4.3 liter engine" and so forth).

He also cleared up a misconception on my part, gleaned from reading their promotional material too quickly (you get trade-in value towards a new laptop by bringing them your old laptop, not any old PC... so my nascent scheme to find something more useful to do with the P3-800 in my office foundered on the rocks of reality); he also said that they're looking to do something similar with camcorders (already launched on the sonystyle web site, eventually to trickle down to their B&M locations).

Bob and I then talked about HDTV while Angel perused digital cameras after they'd made a purchase decision.

In a frightening bit of confluence, I had mentioned David Hasselhoff's music videos (this will be inflicted on them tomorrow at Casa Critus *muahahaha*) as we made our way in from the parking lot, and lo and behold, who was on all the big-screen tv's when we walk in, than the Hoff hizzownself, as Adam Sandler's boss in "Click," (which, naturally, I had to check out (it was in the promo loop for Blu-Ray) because of the gratuitous slo-mo shot of a delightfully stacked blonde jogging).

On the whole, I still don't see myself as a Vaio owner, but, as I told the Sony folks, this was about as close as I've come to wanting one since seeing the first Dell XPS; I don't want a toy. If I get a laptop, it'll be as a desktop replacement, and that's still a tall order as far as specs are concerned (not RAM/CPU these days, but until there's a TB of storage in one of them, I don't see myself making the jump, because I have too much crap stored on my main rig for easy migration... also, I don't care for the difficulty in upgrade path a laptop represents; I'd much rather have the ability to yank and replace devices as finances warrant, rather than dropping a used-Miata sized chunk of change on something I can only do minimal tweaking to down the road).