Doug Aamoth…

A big thank you to everybody for filling our tips at crunchgear dot com inbox with wonderful, unique, and newsworthy items. Here are five that we just couldn’t get to this week.

special order

HELLO
I am Phillip Markman from florida and i will like to know if you carry in stock Cafeteria Tables for sale? if yes please do email me back with the price range and the types you have in stock and also i will like to know if you do accept credit card as your payment method.

Thank you and hope to hear from you soon

CG RESPONDS:

Credit cards? You serious, Phillip Markman? Here’s some free advice about the cut throat world of the cafeteria table game: no dough, no show. Credit is for weaklings. If I showed up at the Saturday cafeteria table dealers market with a credit card, it’d be snapped in half and used to slit my throat, capiche? Don’t mess, man. The phrase “go big or go home” originated at the Pasadena Caf-Tab Conference back in ‘82. This is for real, boyo.

Att: General Manager

Good morning,

We would like to know if there is a possible opportunity to quote your company the next time in need of Promotional items ( Pens, Giveaways, T-Shirts, Apparels, ect ) We are located in Florida and offer over 600,000 products that we can add your company logo to.

Sincerely,

Gloria
Account Executive
Guatemala

CG RESPONDS:

Hello there Gloria. That’d be great! Maybe you could send us a sample T-shirt with the CrunchGear logo on it that says, “I work for CrunchGear and I sent a bunch of money to a promotional items company that told me it was based out of Florida except ‘Florida’ actually meant ‘Guatemala’ and now I can’t get any of my money back because all the phone numbers have like seventeen digits and nobody speaks English in the non-existent customer service department of the company that isn’t real.”

If you can fit that on a t-shirt so that it’s legible enough to be read by someone standing on the sidewalk while I ride by on my sweet dirtbike, then you’ve got yourself a deal.

Still feel down or tired

I hope this makes your day a little brighter.

I wish you to know that you are very important to me, and that is why I wish you to possess this special little present for yourself.

We don’t always get to have those things that mean so much to us.

It is time that you had something that I know you like so much.

This site offers checking to you, so you can keep an eye on your shipment progress.

I look forward to you wearing it with great pleasure.

http://www.only-medications.com/gm/

Dominique Toborg

CG RESPONDS:

Wow, thanks Dominique. I definitely WAS feeling down or tired until I got your e-mail. What a warm person you are. You made my day a lot brighter, not just a little brighter. You’re important to me too. It’s not every day that someone brings the light of an internet pharmacy into your life, especially when that internet pharmacy features order tracking.

What a wonderful and uplifting sentiment for you to send this over. Thanks again.

HELLO,

HELLO,
MY NAME IS AGNES IN SEARCH OF A MAN WHO UNDERSTANDS THE MEANING OF LOVE AS TRUST AND FAITH IN EACH OTHER RATHER THAN ONE WHO SEES LOVE AS THE ONLY WAY OF FUN BUT A MATURED MAN WITH NICE VISSION OF WHAT THE WORLD IS ALL ABOUT SO PLEASE REPLY  ME WITH THIS BOX IF YOU
ARE INTRESTED IN ME.(onlyagnes@yahoo.co.in ).

CG RESPONDS:

HELLO, OH MY GOD AGNES I’VE SEARCHED MY WHOLE LIFE FOR SOMEONE LIKE YOU WHO LIKE ME HAS AN UNDERSTANDING AND UNDYING PASSION FOR THE LONG LOST ART OF THE HORRENDOUSLY LONG RUN-ON SENTENCE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS I THINK YOU’LL FIND ME TO BE MATURED LIKE YOU SAID ALTHOUGH MAYBE NOT WITH A MATURE NAME LIKE AGNES BUT DOUG IS KIND OF AN OLDER SOUNDING NAME I ALWAYS FELT THAT IT DIDN’T REALLY FIT ME AS A KID AND WORRIED THAT I’D BE EXPECTED TO GO BY DOUGLAS WHEN I GOT OLDER BUT NOW THAT I’M MATURED I DECIDED THAT I AM WHO I AM AND WHO I AM IS DOUG NOT DOUGLAS I DON’T HAVE TO CHANGE MY NAME TO FIT ANYONE BUT MYSELF E-MAIL ME BACK AT DOUG AT CRUNCHGEAR DOT COM IF YOU WANT TO MEET FOR A HOT TODDY BUT DON’T TELL MY WIFE OKAY.

The person was a good dancer

Every night will be a hot steamy night once you have your 10inch sch10ng! Satisfy your girl in bed, make sure your tool is like a power drill!

Kendrick Bond

CG RESPONDS:

Like a power drill? Have you ever…you know…before? That would NOT be pleasant for the girl, what with you constantly spinning around and around like that.

You’d probably get sick, too. A 10inch sch10ng, sure, we can all get on board with that but you really lost me with the power drill thing. Just seems like a lot of spinning, is all.

Click here to read previous Back Burner posts…

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This trailer isn’t new new (I saw it maybe a month ago before I Am Legend), but it was recently put up on IGN and if you haven’t seen it, now’s your chance. The movie’s coming out on May 2nd, 2008 starring Robert Downey Jr. and directed by Jon Favreau.

Anyone gonna see it? Show of hands?

Iron Man Trailer, Videos and Movies [IGN]

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Dan Hesse, Sprint Nextel’s new CEO and the man in charge of turning the troubled company around, said in a conference call yesterday that Sprint’s still exploring the possibility of a WiMAX partnership with Clearwire.

“Sprint has an enormous asset—nearly 100 megahertz of un-utilized spectrum—and we have the opportunity to have a three-year head start with our Xohm service, true wireless broadband with multi-megabit speed,” he said, according to a mocoNews.net article. “We have had wide ranging discussions with Clearwire on potential relationships but no final agreements have been reached.”

The main focus for Sprint, according to Hesse, is to get its main wireless business back into the black. That’s important, sure, but I’d submit that Sprint should get this Xohm thing up and running as soon as possible because it could probably help turn things around relatively quickly. If the service is fast enough and affordable enough, you’d see a puff of smoke where I’d just been standing in the doorway of my nearest Comcast office after turning in my cable modem.

In preparation for a more widespread Xohm launch (current test cities include Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington DC), Hesse said that later this year, Sprint will be pushing out dual-mode devices capable of working on both CDMA and WiMAX networks.

Sprint: WiMax Partnership With Clearwire Still Possible; Dual-Mode Handsets Out This Year [mocoNews.net]

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I wondered if people might enjoy a nice little CrunchGear-themed crossword puzzle. You can find the answers to the clues spread throughout the last few days of posts.

If you enjoy this, leave a comment and I’ll keep trying to set these up for Friday mornings if it seems like enough people are interested.

CrunchWord Puzzle for Friday, February 29th

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Power suit, power tie, American Express card, neck-mounted Bluetooth headset. That’s the ticket right there, folks.

The RoadRunner Bluetooth headset with larynx microphone suppresses noise harder than a Fortune 500 company suppresses its cube-dwellers into a life of mundane paper shuffling and mandatory happy hours.

Your voice is transmitted directly from your voice box so the headset is a great fit for convertibles and motorcycles. Good for nine hours of talk time and apparently has a less than one-percent error rate for voice dialing (however that’s been calculated).

It’s around $80 US, shipping from the UK.

RoadRunner Bluetooth Communicator [Pro-Idee UK] via Gadget Review

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After reading this article from The Register, it’s become blatantly apparent to me that leap year babies are A) mad as hell and B) not going to take it any more. I was born on the first day of February and would like to express my admiration for those of you out there who were born on a day in this great month so callously overlooked by many a web-based form.

Case in point, the automated birthday greeting sent out by Toys ‘R Us mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe. The long-necked jerk won’t send any well-wishes to those of you born on February the 29th, a day he considers “invalid.”

The Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies is trying to evoke change via a Perl script “that web designers can use to avoid the dreaded ‘Invalid birth date’ bug,” according to a press release on the LeapYearDay.com website.

Apparently, this whole thing started as a bug wherein the year 1900 was counted as a leap year. Here’s more from the press release.

Peter Brouwer, a spokesman for the Honor Society, says he’s not surprised by the Invalid birth date bug, “Many Americans don’t understand leap year – so why should the Internet?” Brouwer doesn’t want to see a repeat of the leap year bug, which has taken over 20 years to correct. “In that bug, 1900 was counted as a leap year, even though it was not a leap year. Only recently has there been an agreement to fix the bug, when an international standards organization got involved. Brouwer says “We would be very proud if everyone used our software to fix their leap year bugs.“

[Co-founder Raenell] Dawn said “These bugs are mostly just a nuisance, and as adults we can cope. But, for example, how do you explain to a five-year-old, that they won’t receive a birthday card from Geoffrey over at the mall toy store this year because the toy store’s computer has no way to recognize their birthday? These are modern times, and for children born on ‘Leap Year Day’, lessons about the imaginary world of computers, where February 29th often doesn’t exist, start at an early age.”

Godspeed, my intercalary brethren. Godspeed.

7000 Leap Year Babies attack Steve Ballmer [The Register]

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Ah, the return of the MP3-playing watch. This time, without the ridiculous headphone cord running up your arm. The GoldLantern Bluex Bluetooth MP3 Watch comes with 1GB of storage and a pair of Bluetooth 2.0 headphones.  

The watch is good for 12 hours per charge of its lithium-ion battery and will play either MP3 or WMA files.

I’m not much of a watch man myself, so I asked our resident watch fanatic John D. Biggs what he thought of this doodad. I’ll give you the first part of the quote and then you can finish it off in the comments section.

Me: “John, here’s a new watch for you to buy.”

John: “I wouldn’t buy that if it came strapped to the wrist of an…”

Finish John’s sentence, if you please.

Goldlantern Bluetooth Bluex Men’s MP3 Watch with Bluetooth Headset [Buy.com] via Crave

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It appears that it might be time to call upon the spirit of motivational speaker Matt Foley to help Sprint figure out how to get “back…on…the right…track.”

Sprint announced an almost $30 billion quarterly loss today. That’s such a big loss that Sprint also announced that it will stop paying dividends to shareholders for the “foreseeable future,” according to a Reuters report. Not good.

Here’s more from Reuters…

Sprint, which has been losing ground to rivals amid network and customer service problems, forecast that it would lose 1.2 million customers who pay monthly bills in the first quarter, compared with 683,000 such losses in the fourth quarter.

While Sprint had warned last month of continued downward pressure, Stanford Group analyst Michael Nelson said the subscriber outlook was “considerably worse than even most of the bearish estimates out there.”

Nelson, who had estimated that Sprint would lose 400,000 valuable post-paid subscribers who pay monthly bills in the first quarter, said investors were also disappointed that the company did not lay out a plan to turn around the business.

“People expected that things were going to be really bad but were hoping they were going to have a game plan of how they’re going to fix it,” he said.

Instead, Sprint said it was assessing a reorganization of its business model, and associated sales, distribution and marketing plans. It also said it borrowed $2.5 billion from a revolving credit facility.

The newly-announced $99 unlimited plan is a step in the right direction, but it’s still just Sprint playing catch-up to the other wireless carriers’ $99 unlimited plans.

Sprint posts huge loss, scraps dividends [Yahoo! News]

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Best Buy will take your old consoles and give you a gift card to use at one of its bajillion locations. The process is fairly straightforward and shipping costs are taken care of by Best Buy, not you.

You provide some basic info about the current shape of your console, print the shipping label, and send it off. About a week after the item arrives at the shipping center, you’ll get a Best Buy gift card.

My mint-condition Nintendo DS (mint condition because I think I’ve used it five times) is worth $46.01 according to the Dealtree.com-powered trade-in center. It’s the old chunky DS, too. Not bad, eh?

BestBuy.com Trade-in Center [BestBuy.com] via SlashGear

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Unwired View has some details about LG’s upcoming line of KF-series phones. Apparently we might expect to see the fancy KF750 phone and the KF240 music phone at CeBIT next week.

The KF750, pictured left, “appears to be a stylish high end touchscreen slider (above), with a new and interesting take on a navigation touchpad, which is something of a cross between the ones found on LG KF510 and LG KF600 handsets,” according to Unwired View.

It’ll also feature a 5-megapixel camera, 160MB of onboard memory, and a microSD slot. The KF240 music phone should be announced tomorrow and there’s apparently a KF300 model coming out, although details are sparse at this point.

LG KF750, LG KF240 and LG KF300 “Fashion” phones in the works [Unwired View]

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