I flew from Montreal to San Jose in California yesterday to attend a conference organized by one of our partners and visit an office that we have in this area. As I was waiting for my flight in Montreal a little bit before noon, I heard a very interesting computerized announcement from WestJet come over the loud speaker: “WestJet flight XXXX will be boarding at 12:80 am.” A lot of people looked at each other with a very confused look on their face. It’s not April 1st or anything, so some computer was having a really bad day.

The trip to San Jose was quite uneventful, with all flights departing on time, except for a very strange announcement from the flight attendant when we landed: “Welcome to San Diego”. Again, a lot of confused looks and a couple of laughs from the passengers, and the flight attendant did not even correct herself. Given that the two cities are about 740 km apart, we were really hoping that we were in San Jose.

The last funny tidbit of this venture was going to pick up my rental car. The San Jose airport has a consolidated rental car center with a single shuttle line deserving it. After getting on the bus and getting close to the center, they announced that the first stop was for Avis (the company I was using on this trip), Hertz, and shuttles for off-site rental car places! I pity the poor folks who have to get on a second shuttle to get to their car rental. Can’t they just have two different shuttle buses passing my the terminal to save people time?

Like many airports around the US these days, the San Jose airport is expanding. They are building a brand new terminal, which looks like it will cater a lot better to large aircrafts. Coming in on United Airlines on a large plane, we actually had to walk down stairs out of the plane and walk into the terminal. I had not done something like that in a long time. At least the weather was fairly warm.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that things looked pretty grim for the HD-DVD camp as Warner decided that it would soon only be releasing its movie in Sony’s Blu Ray format. Well, as of two weeks ago, Toshiba has announced that they were officially dropping out of the High-Definition format war and stopping to produce all HD-DVD players and support for the format. There will still be a few HD-DVD discs coming out over the next few months, but that will be the end of this adventure.

Now, as mentioned before, that does not necessarily mean that you can just run out and pick up a Blu Ray player since most stand-alone players produced today are not going to be compatible with the next version of the BD format, which is usually referred to as BD Profile 2.0. The one player that is a safe bet is the Playstation 3 since it will be upgradeable through a firmware update to support Profile 2.0. There are also starting to be a few stand-alone players that are promoting the fact that you will be able to upgrade them to the new version.

Personally, I am leaning more towards a standalone player than a PS3 for one main reason, the lack of an infrared port on the unit. Its controllers and optional remote control only work via Bluetooth so it is not possible to control it with a universal control such as the Harmony 550 that I have. For a unit that is supposed to become the center of a home theater system, that is quite a way to be closed to other controls and fit inside of a larger environment. I have read a few things about a third-party controller that comes with a USB component that you can jack into the PS3 to get an IR port but I am not sure how well these work. If you’ve tried one of these devices before, drop me a note and let me know how useful they are.

I just saw a preview for the next Steve Carrell (The Office, 40 year-old virgin) flick, which is a remake of the classic Get Smart TV series, originally created by Mel Brooks. It’s basically about the adventures of a goofy secret agent trying to save the world. Here’s the trailer so you can see what it’s all about.

As I was browsing the web yesterday looking for some free live concert recordings, I stumbled upon AOL’s CD Listening Party Page. This is a site that gives you a chance to listen to entire recordings that are coming out. They change the selections on a weekly basis so that they don’t stay up too long, but otherwise, you are really listening to the whole thing.

Doing a bit of research, the quality of the selections really varies from one week to another. However, I lucked out this week falling on Jack Johnson’s latest, Sleep through the Static. If you read my blog regularly, you might remember that I said that I did not really like this new album after listening to the 30-second sound clips on iTunes. However, I must say that my opinion has changed after listening to all of the tracks in their entirety. While my opinion that a lot of the tracks are a bit more gloomy, the album still has a very nice ring to it and flows very smoothly from one track to the next. I have not gotten myself a copy of this CD yet, but it is a definite possibility now.

I am guessing that the selection of music on the AOL site will probably change on Tuesday, so head on over if you feel like listening to it. Enjoy!

After talking about some cool adventure games that will be released this year yesterday, I wanted to mention that the Action-RPG front is also looking promising on the Nintendo DS for this year, starting with the release of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles - Ring of Fates. This new title is a continuation of the GameCube title that is really more action-based than RPG based. You basically control your character in a 3D environment and fight monsters in real time instead of a turn-based mode. After reading a hands-on preview on IGN, I think that this will definitely be a title to get this year.

I have always been a big fan of adventure games on the PC. Titles such as Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango were just amazing games to play through with their creative content, great graphics, and funny situations.

The adventure game dies off a bit for a number of years and then came back more recently with titles like Syberia and Runaway. Both of the companies producing these games have recognized that the Nintendo DS, with its two screens and stylus, is a perfect platform to play adventure games. So, in 2008, we will see at least 3 great adventure games on the DS.

• Last King of Africa: A DS version of Benoit Sokal’s Paradise
• Sinking Island: A DS version of the Benoit Sokal game with the same title
• Runaway: The Dream of the turtle, available April 1st, a DS version of the second game from spanish company Pendulo Studios

I’m going to have fun this year with my DS

This week is something quite unique for me. Andrée is away to a photographer convention in Florida while I am taking vacation and staying home with the girls. Two days into it, things are going pretty good. I’ve managed to get Evelyne to school this morning on time and then came back home and had a good time with Gabrielle. As I am writing this, both girls are taking a nice long nap. We’ll see how the next five days treat me but so far, it is nive to have time with the girls and they have not been too hard on me.

I’ve been using the iTunes Music Store for a couple of years, ever since I got my first iPod. While I love the concepts of being able to buy music singles or entire albums at my leisure and getting easy previews of the songs, I’ve been appalled recently by the number of album pre-orders that are showing up on iTMS. For example, the new Jack Johnson CD (Sleep through the static) has been on there since Christmas).

Pre-ordering a DVD of a movie you have seen or that you saw a good preview for is one thing, but my main problem with the concept of pre-ordering music is that you have no clue whether or not an artist’s next CD will be good or not. All you get is a single song preview which is typically one of the best tracks of the album, or which is just the first single released.

Again, going back to Jack Johnson, I was tempted to make a pre-order for his new CD since I absolutely loved his last one, “In Between Dreams”. It was kind of tempting since they even offered an extra track that you would not get when the CD actually comes out. In the end, I decided not to pre-order and was actually glad about it when I logged onto iTunes today and saw that there are not really any tracks that catch my ear on his latest effort. Perhaps 30 seconds song clips are too short to form an opinion, but the opinion of many others on the site seemed to indicate similar feelings towards the new album. So, in short, I wonder how music pre-orders have become so popular.

After making everybody jump at Macworld when they announced that iPod Touch users would need to pay to get access to the new applications for the platform, Apple has just silently introduced new higher-capacity versions of their iPhone and iPod Touch. The new devices sport 16 GB and 32 GB of flash respectively.

Personally, the phone capabilities of the iPhone is not something I need while the 32 GB of the touch just seems overkill. Seriously, how many songs and videos does someone want to carry around? I recently converted my ENTIRE music collection to Mp3 format in 129 kbps format and it clocked in at 9 GB. In a 16 GB device, this still leaves 5-6 GB of space for videos and other content. Of course, I only placed music that I legitimately own. If I started to download and put any kind of music on there, then I guess that I could use up a lot more room.

While a surround sound system is useful for a home theatre system, you often need to have other radios around the house, especially the kitchen, to listen to music while performing your chores.

The old Sanyo Boombox that I had since my college days was starting to behave very strangely, not always responding to button presses or doing the wrong thing on a button press, so I decided that it was time to retire it.

Using my AirMiles points (yes, these do come in handy sometimes), I ordered myself the Sony ZSSAT1 boombox. It comes with AM/FM radio with digital tuning (no more static!), a CD player that recognizes MP3s, a stereo line in jack to plug in my iPod as well as the ability to plug in an external antenna to get satellite radio programming.

While I will probably never use the satellite functionality, this is a very nice little radio with a full sound and all of the options needed to listen to my music any way I like. If you’re looking for a nice little radio, I would definitely recommend this one.