I thought I�d throw in a quick update since it�s been close to a week since my last blog. There are quite a few interesting things going on. Too bad none of it is directly related to my life. =p Other than my first full week of classes that is starting tonight, personally speaking, things has been rather uneventful. I do have some potential good news but I don�t want jinx it by jumping the gun too early and just blabbing about it, so I�ll let it marinate a bit and just let you know about it later when something more meaningful develops. For now, here is the more interesting stuff that has little to do with me.

One of those interesting things I was referring to earlier is of course the Chicago Bears. The Bears made it all the way to the playoffs and did so well in the regular season they were able to get a bye in the first round. I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical with the Bears, more or less throughout this entire season. They haven�t brought a Super Bowl title to Chicago since the �85/�86 season and for the past couple of decades since then the franchise hasn�t been doing too well at all. You could say that they sucked and I would just have to hang my head in shame and agree with you, so I�ve trained my mind to not really pay attention to the Bears and the NFL in general for like the past 20 years.

Then they kind of snuck up on me from behind by clinching the NFC North title. I turn around for 5 minutes and now they are in the playoffs this Sunday against the Carolina Panthers and I�m like Holy Fuck! Actually, I�ve been keeping tabs on the Bears since they started making headlines this season, secretly rooting for them in silent as to not disturb the amazing thing that has been going on. It�s pretty much safe to say that I�m now out of the closet and now am an open Bears fan.

Although the Bears won the last time they played the Panthers by a wide margin, the Panthers obviously don�t want to get whipped by the Bears twice in a row, so it will be an interesting game to say the least. There are some pretty good match ups with the other playoff teams as well so I expect to see some really good playoff games all the way up to the Super Bowl. I do wish the best of luck to whatever team you happen to be cheering for, unless of course they happen to be playing against the Bears in the playoffs, then I wish your team to be skewered, roasted slowly over an open flame rotisserie style and served to the Bears with a side of fava beans and a glass of Chianti.

There�s also another interesting going on in Vegas and fortunately, for electronic gadget geeks like me, what�s happening in Vegas does not necessarily have to stay in Vegas. I�m of course talking about the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It�s basically a showcase of electronics that is slated to come out this year.

There are of course just way too many gadgets and gizmos for me to cover in-depth, but the stuff I�m specifically looking out for is the upcoming RAZR V3i, the update to the popular V3 that will have a megapixel camera, an expandable (up to 512MB) Trans Flash/micro SD memory slot, MP3 player capabilities built in and possible i-Tunes support. There is of course the Motorola Q, a smart phone with a full QWERTY keypad and a blackberry thumb-wheel that will come close to the RAZR in thinness. It will basically put current Blackberry devices to complete an utter shame; you know those huge, ugly looking things that corporate types like to endlessly tap away on to check their email on the train ride to work. Nokia also has a multimedia device (MP3s, videos etc) in the works that will have a whopping 4MB of internal memory and would put it in direct contention with the iPod Nano, Apple�s own wildly popular 4GB mini MP3 player.

In general look for electronic device functionality to converge, you are going to see solid quality cameras, music players and phones continue their trend of converging into an attractive looking device. In fact there some really good devices that are available right now, which is why I�m working on an article on the best phones of 2005 that I will be publishing in my beyondzine.com website rather soon. Don�t worry though, I�ll post a copy of it here in this blog so you won�t have to click far. Anyway, that�s it for now. Hopefully there are things in my actual life that I can blog about rather soon, but for now this will have to suffice.