Circuit City Closed

I've briefly mentioned Circuit City before (thought I can't find it now), but I wanted to briefly link to their updated page regarding their recent closing of all stores in the United States.

Circuit City would like to thank all of the customers who have shopped with us over the past 60 years. Unfortunately, we announced on January 16, 2009, that we are going out of business.

Please check back later for updates about the status of our website. In the meantime, we hope the information below will help answer most of your questions.

View the full FAQs at Circuit City Closed. I never worked there and I rarely shopped there, but it does make me sad to see them go.

Wil Wheaton's keynote at Penny Arcade Expo [mp3]

I bookmarked this over a year ago, but I listened to it again today in full. I checked back through my stuff and realized that I've never linked to it anywhere. It's worth mentioning for all kinds of reasons, mostly for the video game nostalgia trip that you will have if you are over the age of 30. Most geeks our age will recognize the name of Wil Wheaton from his role as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation as well as Gordie Lachance in the film Stand By Me (a.k.a.the best Stephen King movie ever!) as well as many other great roles. If you haven't seen him recently, he is still working and is active in the online community of bloggers and video gamers.

In 2007, he gave the keynote speech at the Penny Arcade Expo, a hugely successful fan-driven, industry-sponsored festival for tabletop, videogame, and PC gamers. He tells a series of biographical stories starting in his early youth and moving to his role as a parent. Honestly, it's the most topical speech on video games and what they mean to us today. If you have not already heard it, you must hear it now. Give yourself an hour and then hit play.

Wil Wheaton's keynote at Penny Arcade Expo 2007

The following video is only an excerpt of the speech intro but it's coupled with a few moments after the speech as Wil graciously meets with a fan. It encapsulates the reaction a little to see a fan shaking his hand.

Found via Delicious.

More Information

• Article on Stage Select
• Article on Macworld

What To Do With This Site?

I mentioned this before, but this site was birthed from something left behind by another site that I didn't originally create or develop. Read some of the previous archives for more details:

• January 2007
• February 2007
• March 2007

I felt weird about it at the time mainly because of the traffic, Google Pagerank and the promotion that had previously gone into promoting the "techlifeblogged.blogspot.com" sub-domain. I felt luck to have gotten it, but didn't want to take advantage of it too much.

With PR updates over the last several months, the value has dropped to zero and the traffic is low. There are still lots of visitors to older pages originally created by Scott (where I redirect them to his site as best I can) and a fair number of visitors to new posts that I've created.

But it may be time to end this project. I have too many pots percolating at once and this year promises to be even busier. My plan at the moment is to update the page template to something simple and post the content over FTP to my own site. From there, I won't necessarily delete the whole site as it is still working in the occasional redirect. But the URL will become a sub-page or subdirectory off of my home page. Since he hasn't stopped by, I'm going to assume that Scott won't mind if I do this.

Anyhow, that's the direction for 2009.