I recently talked about how I had won cash money with Blingo. One of my buddies took me up on the offer to become a Blingo friend at that point and he wrote me today telling me how he had won a movie ticket meaning that I also won one. Yeehaw, win-win!

Then I went to perform a search via Blingo in my Firefox search box as I do a hundred times a day. But it looked a bit different this time.

Wherefore art thou, Google?

Part of the appeal of Blingo has always been that you get pretty much the same results that you’d have gotten had you went to Google… with the additional possibility of winning fat loot. Now you get some kind of bastardized, multiplexed result list from Microsoft’s Live Search, Yahoo search and Ask.com. Sorry, Blingo, I need relevant search results more than I need fat loot and Google has the upper hand in that department.

Switch back, Blingo, it’s not too late.

I mentioned previously that I won with Blingo and since then I’ve won twice more. Last night’s was a doosy: $50 cash money! If you’re not using Blingo for your searches you’re basically throwing money away. I’m here to tell you these prizes actually get awarded and there’s no catch. It’s not a scam.

How do I get in on this?

I’ll repost this from my previous post. It’s truly easy, just do your searches from Blingo. Tell them I sent you since this is — apparently — where you heard it from (full disclosure: if you use that link to create your account, you become a “friend” of mine so that I win if you win. It doesn’t change your winnings only provides me the same gift for sending you their way). You can do it from your quick search button in your browser so you always use it. It uses the Google search engine internally so your searches are every bit as accurate as Google’s. But for every search you do — well, technically the first 25 searches per day you perform through the service are eligible — you have a chance to win a prize… from an iTunes gift certificate to a car.

Gizmodo loves shiny gadgets. Gizmodo went to the Consumer Electronics Show as one would expect. What one wouldn’t necessarily expect is that Gizmodo is staffed by sugar-rushed 12-year-old mouth breathing imbeciles. In a heart-felt, placating tone they admit and ever-so-sincerely apologize for the fact that they ran around the show like halfwits and used a device to turn off the show displays. You can tell it’s heartfelt by the somber, conciliatory one and a half minute video depicting their deeds on the referenced page. And by them saying “We’re sorry.”

“CES has no shortage of displays. And when MAKE offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn’t help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn’t stop.”

No opportunity was wasted. Entire walls turned off, games interrupted, even many times during presentations. Here’s hoping your juvenile shenanigans preclude you from ever walking into a trade show again, Gizmodo. If you were looking for a way to distinguish yourselves you’ve certainly succeeded.

It’s still just a phone. An expensive phone. An expensive phone locked to a shitty provider. An expensive phone locked to a shitty provider over a slow connection.

Ah Blu-Ray. Have you learned nothing in your brief time on the planet? Nothing from, say, Betamax? Apparently not.

According to certain sources the Blu-Ray consortium is taking a stand against smut, certainly endearing themselves to large populations of conservatives. No porn on Blu-Ray. Ignore the assertions that porn drives the uptake of consumer devices, we don’t want none of them titties on our high def disks!

Those liberals in the HD-DVD consortium have no such moral code driving them so titles are already showing up in high def on their equipment. For better or for worse, really. I imagine the tolerances on adult actors and actresses will need to be made a bit more stringent given the level of detail available in both formats. I certainly don’t think I could handle Ron Jeremy in 1080p. I vomit a bit at thumbnail sized Ron Jeremy, seeing him in all his furry, rounded glory would almost certainly unhinge me.

Anyway, we’ll see who is around in 2 years.