am always one to rush into things. That is how I recently bought a new laptop on eBay. I know what you are thinking, “We know about your laptop, you talked about it for weeks.” Yes, yes I did. But this is another new laptop, purchased this very day. Here’s the deal. I always look at technology, it’s my thing that I do. I look at this laptop a lot because Julianne has a similar one and I think it’s cool. This one has all the same specs, it’s just a little smaller. Anyway, I haven’t seen one go for under $900 in a long time and this auction still had days left when I first saw it. I always feel that if I am the highest bidder on any eBay item at any given time then I owned it however briefly. The bid was at $700 and I figured, what the heck, I’ll bid $750. I did so, and the price jumped to $740 (if you know how eBay works this will make sense to you). I did this without really reading the item description because I see so many of these things and they are always sold brand new by the same sellers. This time though, it was a different seller and the item was only “like new” having been used for two weeks. I guess two weeks of use depreciates these things by $160 because no one bid on it after me.

So, here’s the deal. I now own two mid-level laptops. My plan is to list them both on KSL.com and just wait until one of them sells. Then I will keep the other. I looked on KSL to see if any of this type of laptop were available for sale. It turns out there was one on there. It has been used for two weeks and it already sold after 8 days. It sold for $895. That would give me a $155 profit. Here’s hoping anyway, but so far I haven’t had the best experience selling on KSL. I guess that’s what I get for being impatient.

I tell you all this to save myself the trouble of explaining when I see you in person.

If you’re like me, you often wonder, sometimes even aloud, what is the largest Lego set ever sold by the Denmark-based company? The answer used to be the 5,195-piece Millennium Falcon, truly a trophy and a status symbol among nerds. But last year, Lego started to distribute the new pinnacle of Lego buildings, the 5,922-piece Taj Mahal.

Needless to say, I want one. And I don’t even know why.

If you were saddened by Adamo, this new tiny tablet PC may thaw the cockles of your heart. While no specs have been released yet for Lenovo’s newest creation, this is a very usable tiny PC with a close to full size keyboard. Lenovo has wisely ditched the tiny track pad and buttons in favor of a touch screen. This is hopefully the first of many tablet pc netbooks we will see. Here’s hoping that Apple is the next contender in this field.

The news of the day is that Dell has finally released specs on the new Adamo. I got their exclusive email this morning (if you’d like to be one of the “in” crowd, visit the site here). This machine has created a lot of hype since its super slim .65″ chassis beats the well known MacBook Air, and everyone in the geek/tech world has been hoping for a real Air competitor that wouldn’t cost $1700. Unfortunately, disappointment on that front. The new Adamo starts at $1999 and can go as high as $2999. The major issue with this is that while Adamo does boast a 1.4Ghz Core 2 Duo and up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM, the MacBook Air comes with a 1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo (or 1.86 if you feel like a big spender), has an Nvidia graphics card and is now the cheaper option. I want to offer condolences to gadget guys all over the world who are weeping at this prohibitive price.

1. Fellowship of the Rings and Two Towers were shoved down our throats.

I’ve heard some students are even forced to read some novelization of the movie in their literature classes. Ridiculous. Does Hollywood run our classrooms now?

2. Greed.

Hollywood can’t make a movie these days without crapping out a sequel the next year to squeeze more money out of the sheep. Guess what; there’s ANOTHER LOTR movie coming this Christmas. Gee, I wonder what will bring Rocky out of retirement this time?

3. Quality Control at New Line.

Millions of copies of the LOTR DVDs have thick black bars at the bottom and top of the screen throughout the film. Didn’t anyone catch this? You know what happens at the end, in the extreme foreground and extreme upper sky? Neither do I. Bush league, guys.

4. They switched Darrens on us!

Look closely in Fellowship and you’ll notice the human member of their party is played by two different actors at different points of the movie (it takes a sharp eye to notice, but one of them has red hair, one black).

5. Quality Control at New Line, II.

In the massive Mt. Doom battle scene at the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, a DVD pause reveals at least half a dozen of the 50,000 Orc Warrior extras are wearing modern tennis shoes.

6. Speaking of Orcs…

The Orcs were obviously stolen from PC game maker Blizzard and its Warcraft series. Too bad Blizzard is apparently too scared to sue New Line over it.

7. Racism.

Percentage of protagonists in Fellowship who are white: 100. Meanwhile the black antagonists and their black crow spies and their black glass seeing ball inhabit their black towers and perform black magic. Gosh, I wonder if there’s some symbolism there?

8. Gold: The Stretchy Element.

The ring, which is seen to be at least two inches in diameter at the beginning to fit the polish sausage-sized finger of Sauron, suddenly fits Frodo’s child-sized finger later. I guess this movie takes place in a world where rings magically change sizes on their own.

9. Violence.

Give me one reason that story couldn’t have been told without all the fighting.

10. Horse sense.

Why didn’t they take horses on their quest? Or even better, why didn’t Gandalf’s giant flying bird friend haul them into Mordor? Watch out, Frodo! All of your methods of transportation have been swallowed by the Dark Lord of the Plot Hole!

11. Retracted.*

See below.

12. Return of the Living Dead.

In FOTR, if you watch closely during the Inn scene, Frodo and his crew are shown getting stabbed by the Ring Wraiths. Then, five seconds later, they are fine again. Note to the director: try proofreading your movie before you release it to the public.

13. Did someone say plot hole?

Liv Tyler’s character is seen easily defeating nine strong supernatural beings, even though she is clearly a woman.

14. The Battle Droid Syndrome.

The mutated muscular soldiers of Mordor turned out to be hilariously ineffective fighters, a dozen of them held off by a single dying human. Apparently they made the beasts by crossing Orcs, Goblins and the French.

15. Sloppy CGI.

Gandalf’s smoke boat at Bilbo’s party is pretty impressive, but smoke cannot be made to travel horizontally, thus revealing it to be nothing but a cheap special effect.

16. The Asbestos Wizard.

We all saw Gandalf fall into the molten core of Middle Earth after his battle with the firebeast thing in part 1. Well, I guess the Gandalf action figure must have sold well, because in the slap-together sequel Two Towers, Gandalf is back. Perhaps it was voodoo, a la the corpse in Weekend at Bernie’s II (look closely and you’ll notice LOTR steals several elements from the WAB films).

17. Invisible Implausibility.

Every time Frodo or Bilbo went invisible with the ring they should have also gone BLIND. Your eyes cannot function unless light is reflected off the cornea. If light passes through it (as must be the case with invisibility) sight is no longer possible. Also, rings do not turn you invisible.

18. The Asbestos Wizard, II.

The giant fire beast thing at the end of part 1 was breathing a firey breath hot enough to send heat-distortion waves through the air. The sheer temperature of the air should have burned off Gandalf’s beard and eyebrows. None of my reading on evolutionary biology reveals a single reason why a particular race of humans would develop unflammable facial hair as this would provide practically no advantage in either survival or mating.

19. I’ll have to rent that one.

The rushed-through story the screenwriter threw in as the first ten minutes of Fellowship of the Ring looked a lot more interesting than the movie we were forced to watch. Why didn’t somebody make a movie off that instead?

20. Magic Mechanics.

Experts on the occult say in order for a wizard to floorspin a fully-grown man like Gandalf, he’d need three magical staffs, not two.

21. Finders, keepers.

So Bilbo, who we are supposed to identify with as a protagonist, finds a piece of someone else’s jewelry and just keeps it for himself? That’s funny, because I would expect a good man to submit it to the local Lost and Found so it could be claimed by its owner. It makes me wonder if he bought that hillside house or if he was just squatting.

22. Go-Go Gadget Arrow Sprouter.

Legolas shoots arrow after arrow at his enemies, and yet the number of arrows in his quiver never decreases. I guess elves have glands on their back that secrete arrows.

23. Watch out! He’s going to explode!

The heroes are shown eating again and again, and yet no one ever goes to the bathroom throughout their entire quest.

24. Meesa gonna make theesa movie suckah!

The character of Gollum in The Two Towers was entirely computer animated (a cheap effort to cash in on Jar Jar Binks Mania) but was just a dim shadow of George Lucas’ effort. Thank you, Peter Jackson. Thank you right to Hell.

25. Propaganda.

The Elves, clearly the most advanced and wise species, are also clearly gay.

26. Speaking of Elves…

Elves are beautiful and wise and tall? Great warriors? Makers of fine lightweight weapons? Our modern knowledge of elves has observed only an ability to make cookies and toys. All the elves in the film are portrayed as living in a warm paradise (Rivendell) but our own information tells us the aforementioned group of toymaking elves work and thrive in the arctic. Hey, Mr. Jackson: Research is half of writing.

27. Homage or theft?

The “happy village of little people” idea was stolen from Willow.

28. Homage or theft II?

The wise old wizard character was stolen from Harry Potter.

29. Homage or theft III?

The “travelling on our quest through a corn field” scene was stolen from Shrek.

30. Homage or theft IV?

The character of the rebellious-but-helpful Ranger was stolen from Val Kilmer in Willow.

31. Homage or theft V?

The concept of the violent dwarf was based on Al Pacino.

32. Homage or theft VI?

The “old man looking through the door hatch at the approaching little people” scene was stolen from A Clockwork Orange.

33. Homage or theft VII?

The cantina scene with a noisy bar filled with a mix of otherworldly species was stolen from Cecile B. DeMille’s One Night in an Alien Bar.

34. Homage or theft VIII?

The incident with the flock of evil magical spying crows serving the All-Seeing Eye was based on an actual incident.

35. Homage or theft IX?

The character of the Giant Evil Flaming All-Seeing Eye was based on former President Jimmy Carter.

36. Homage or theft X?

The character of Elrond was based on Agent Smith from The Matrix.

37. Weighty issues.

AKA “Plot Hole No. 273.” Even with all that walking and light eating, the character of Sam only got fatter.

38. Realism, schmealism.

Liv Tyler’s immortal elf volunteers to give up her eternal life for a single romance with a human man.

39. Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow.

The most advanced civilization is that of the elves, which are long-haired, new-age types? Sorry, Mr. Jackson, but modern science has proven that in any modern civilization, hippies would be extinct.

40. Too many notes.

No movie should be over two hours long. Did we need that whole thing in the mine in part 1? What about that almost-infinite battle scene in part 2? Didn’t it seem like they were just adding pointless scenes in the middle to pad it? It’s like they decided beforehand they wanted three hours for each film and used filler to flesh them out.

41. Too many notes, II.

I just want to re-emphasize the above point. There is no reason entertainment can’t be concise.

42. Too many notes, III.

Too many characters to keep track of. The dwarf was clearly only there as a token dwarf character to sell tickets to lucrative movie-going dwarf demographic. Lose him.

43. Rationalization for violence.

Why, in part 1, is the black octopus creature painted as the bad guy when it attacks, when one of the fellowship had clearly been throwing rocks at it?

44. The Shoeless Land.

The Hobbits both 1) refuse to wear shoes and 2) run a livestock-based farming economy. Wouldn’t they constantly be stepping in crap? Why doesn’t the movie address this issue?

45. Casting.

Why couldn’t Frodo have been played by Christopher Walken?

46. Casting, II.

Why couldn’t Gandalf have been played by Bruce Campbell?

47. Casting, III.

Why couldn’t Bilbo have been played by Vin Diesel?

48. Casting, IV.

Why couldn’t Strider have been played by a monkey?

49. The Score.

The background music wasn’t nearly funky enough for me.

50. What’s that smell?

As bad as the Lucasfilm leaks were with his last film, the filmmakers of Return of the King already have the novelization out in paperback. I’ve seen it at Barnes & Noble already. As if we needed any less of a reason to go see it.

The shuffle version of Apple’s popular iPod underwent a rework that was released in stores today. The new version has 4GB storage capacity, but the buttons have been moved exclusively to the headphones. Anyone who is used to the iPhone’s headphones can tell you it is convenient to have headphone control, but the chances of losing the headphones are a lot larger than the chances of losing the shuffle itself.

Following up with an earlier post on morrise.com, the Dow Jones News Wire and Reuters have confirmed with a source close to Winktek that they are indeed supplying 10″ touch screens to Apple although the source was still unclear as to the product that they would contribute to.

Rumors have been flying around the web that a company called Wintek recently contracted with Apple to sell them a new touch screen. The purpose behind this, tech blogs claim, is that Apple will release a new netbook in the third quarter of this year.

If this is true, this may confirm some of the rumors that Steve Jobs has been thinking up new, innovative products ever since he stopped coming into work. Given Apples other products (the MacBook Air comes to mind) this new netbook complete with touch screen could be quite a contender in the netbook market provided apple is willing to price it competitively.

Drat, one more thing I want that I likely will never buy.

Some products are highly anticipated be cause we’ve seen the features and they are must-haves. But Dell has efficiently created a buzz in the tech world by shrouding its new Adamo line in mystery. Dell set up a website devoted to Adamo that is nothing more than a list of press releases about Adamo and a place to input your contact information so they can keep you up to date with all the exciting Adamo news. I subscribed to Adamo, but so far, no news.

The Adamo website is intriguing for two reasons. First, it is very reminiscent of the artsy Mr. Plow commercial for Homer’s snow plowing business on “The Simpsons”. Second, the website doesn’t actually do anything. It doesn’t shed light on Adamo - all the press releases were written by people who are just as clueless about it as you. After all the pondering and speculation I have done, one question has come to the forefront of my mind. Namely, “How are they getting away with this?”

With this much hype, the product behind it will have to be beyond amazing not to be seen as one of the most Epic Fails in recent tech history. Gutsy. At the press conference where the first Adamo product was introduced, Dell reps wouldn’t let anyone turn it on. Who knows, maybe it’s a time machine. The way I see it, if you’re going to build a time machine into a laptop, why not do it with some style.

For a gadet guy like me, the iPhone exemplifies the kinds of things I look for in a phone. But what if you’re a chef, lawyer, hermit or gamer? What kind of a phone do you look for? The chef gets the Motorola Cleaver, the lawyer gets a BlackBerry, the hermit gets no phone and the gamer gets this one.

Cellphones aimed specifically at gamers is an emerging market, and has been wide open ever since Sony decided not to release a PSP phone.

This guy even appears to fold up small enough not to be a pocket nuisance when games aren’t being played.