Retailers decided to officially pull the plug on VHS tapes stating that there was no longer shelf space available for the awkward looking cassettes.

After a 30-year career on the market, “the groundbreaking home-entertainment format VHS has died of natural causes…” (Variety) The format was expected to survive until January, however, high-definition formats and “next generation” video game consoles have hastened it’s decline.

“It’s pretty much over,” concurred Buena Vista Home Entertainment general manager North America Lori MacPherson on Tuesday.

“VHS is survived by a child, DVD, and by Tivo, VOD and DirecTV. It was preceded in death by Betamax, Divx, mini-discs and laserdiscs.” (Variety)

Toys ‘R’ Us will continue to carry limited quantities of titles like Barney while some “dollar video chains” will continue to handle cassettes for those who can’t cope.

From Variety.com:

Born Vertical Helical Scan to parent JVC of Japan, the tape had a difficult childhood as it was forced to compete with Sony’s Betamax format.

After its youthful Betamax battles, the longer-playing VHS tapes eventually became the format of choice for millions of consumers. VHS enjoyed a lucrative career, transforming the way people watched movies and changing the economics of the film biz. VHS hit its peak with “The Lion King,” which sold more than 30 million vidcassettes Stateside.

With the launch of DVDs in 1997, VHS casettes started to decline in popularity – a quick drop in 2003 occured when DVDs became very popular for the first time.

“VHS continued to make as much as $300 million a year until this year, when studios stopped manufacturing the tapes.” (Variety)

All of this goodness and holiday cheer has me itching to create some Christmas designs. I’M ALREADY LATE! It’s past Thanksgiving. Oh well.

I will have something done for this site and Blog What BY December 1… or else my holiday won’t be complete.

Happy Holidays!
(I love saying that.)

edit: Holiday greeting and header up over at Blog What Design. I love the graphics in the one set I got from iStock… I think I’ll use them for this website. Keep watching ;)

I would like to make a little personal welcome to Danielle at “A Little Lucky” into the blogosphere! I just finished up her design at Blog What, and everything has seemed to turn out just right.

Danielle blogs on everything and anything a girl could wish for. She features unique items, fitness tips, and a whole bunch of other cute lucky finds. Go drop her a line!

Work requests have been non stop at Blog What Design! It’s great to see so much support!
Thanks!

Do you believe?The Flat Earth Website owns a website here, and a forum here: with such posts as:

Australia Doesn’t Exist
I own a space shuttle, and am giving free rides by “mbrooksay” who says, I own a space shuttle, and I am willing to give all you retarded **** free rides in space, AROUND the Earth, to once and for all end this crazy society. Sign-up list is here.

while another

moves to dispute the whole “water turns the other way in Australia” idea. Which brings to mind that funny Simpsons episode.

Here’s the interesting bit of their mission statement:

Then, in the year of our Lord fourteen-hundred and ninety-two, it all changed. For decades a small band of self-proclaimed “enlightened” individuals had been spouting their heretical nonsense that the Earth was in fact round. Citing “proof” based on nothing more than assumptions, half-truths and blind guesses, they dazzled the populace with their ” . . . undeniable mathematical and scientific evidence . . . that the world is shaped not like a pancake, but an orange!”

So are they just plain old cooks? Do you think they’re absolutely true? Or maybe you just like their quote at the top of their website…”Deprogramming the masses since 1547″.

Here’s something pretty cool (and very confusing). Click the Discover Magazine link for the larger version.

It’s a map of the internet! Here’s what it means,

From Discover Magazine:

1 FLAT EARTH SOCIETY

CAIDA’s map represents a flattened Earth, with cities positioned around the circle. Tracing the circumference clockwise corresponds to moving from east to west. Each square represents a data hub, which lines up on a spoke with the city in which it is registered. The closer to the center it lies, the more data it traffics.

2 SINOSNUB

The United States owns 74 percent of the 4 billion available Internet protocol (IP) addresses. China’s stake amounts to little more than that of an American university. Not surprisingly, China is championing the next wave of the Internet, which would accommodate 340 trillion trillion trillion IP addresses.

3 YOU STILL WON’T GET TO HAWAII

Hubs in Honolulu—and all over the Pacific—connect to only a few other hubs, which means your data are highly unlikely to pass through the Aloha State.

4 RING AROUND THE NET

The concentric rings of squares near the perimeter result from CAIDA’s mapping mechanism, which plots a hub’s distance from the center according to how many connections it has.

5 BRING IT ON HOME

The farther from the center, the lonelier the hub. The squares closest to the circumference of the circle represent the Internet service providers, or ISPs, that connect home PCs to the Internet. When one of these goes down, customers have no other way to get online.

6 WELCOME TO SPAMALOT!

UUNet is one of the oldest and largest ISPs; it connects to more than 2,000 other hubs. It is also the most vulnerable to junk mail and hosts more spam-generating gangs than any other ISP.

7 CAN THE CENTER HOLD?

If a high-traffic hub goes down, the data will usually find another path. “There are shortcuts everywhere,” says CAIDA’s Brad Heffaker. If a packet can’t find its way, it returns a discouraging message to the sender.

*taps microphone* HELLO! ahem…

I would like to introduce Blog What Design to the official world of blog design studios out there. Over the past month, I have been working non-stop to launch the site (funny I’ve been blogging more because of this eh?) and now it’s DONE.

So give it a whirl… I bring you:
BLOG WHAT DESIGN!
What will you blog today? (WWYBT?)

So… you always here those gimmicks out there, “Free Money, Just click here!” Well, ReviewMe.com, a partner of Text-Link-Ads, is offering something sort of like free money; all it requires is a small 200 word review like the one I am writing now! From ReviewMe’s website:

Get paid to review services and Web sites that are of interest to your readers, and reap the benefits of conversation with advertisers.

The process is extremely easy – nearly any blogger can do it. Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for an account at ReviewMe.com and submit your blog to be approved.
2. If your blog is approved (all you need to meet is a minimum number of citations, subscribers, and traffic) then you will be assigned a payout price per review you post on your blog – mine is $20.
3. Next, you can automatically sign up to review ReviewMe.com, or wait until you receive reviews to write for other products and websites. You have the option to either accept or reject reviews that are offered to you.
4. Each review must be completed within a set time-frame, usually a period of two days.
5. Once your review is posted, simply submit the url of the post into ReviewMe’s nifty manager, and your payment will appear!

Here’s another interesting point from ReviewMe:

Problem: People ignore ads. In much the same way that banner blindness set in, many publishers have noticed their contextual ad click through rates and earnings drop over time.
Solution: Because our reviews are not formatted to look like ads, publishers are able to deliver more attention and value than through advertising via any other marketing channel.

Cool eh? So what are you waiting for, go sign up!

This is a paid advertisement.

A laughing baby:

and the Borat Soundboard:
http://ebaumsworld.com/2006/11/laughing-baby.html

Thank you Ebaum’s World for making millions around the world laugh everyday.

So around earlier this past October I was sitting in our living-room on the couch and catching up on some reading for class when I heard the faintest “scurrying” noise. I ignored it, but then nearly catapulted off the couch when I heard a little chirp and some more scurrying. I jumped onto the sofa and picked my feet up and down in the regular girl-who-screams-at-the-sight- of-a-mouse fashion, and looked around.

The coast was clear for quite a while, so I set off back up to my room. A few weeks later during my 18th birthday party, we were all waking up the morning after when we SAW it. It turns out it was a chipmunk. An enormously LARGE chipmunk that the cat’s had brought in (we have three.) Oh joy.

Since then, it has been feasting on the cats’ food when we no one has been looking, and evading ALL attempts made by us to catch it. The thing is invincible. We decided to fire our cats, my mom then went out to the hard-ware store to buy a freakishly large mouse trap. (The thing was the size of a squirrel at this point.) We then thought that we didn’t want to really get rid of our cats that much and realized that the trap could probably take off any of their arms.

Plan B: The BB gun. So we have the entire living room torn up (cat food and chipmunk poop were everywhere behind the furniture) and my dad decides to set a stand up from the second floor (it’s a cathedral ceiling type thing) to shoot the chipmunk from there. Although he was number one on his high school rifle team (yes, I said high school rifle team) the thing STILL managed to evade us.

So, by this time we’re just fed up and tired. My mom went out to the hardware store and bought one of those $30 “Have a Heart” traps. Why won’t the chipmunk have a heart and leave my home eh?

We catch it. We release it. Next day. IT’S ON THE CAT’S FOOD. My dad managed to release just close enough to the home so the cats could bring it back in. We saw Blacky playing with it today afterwards.

We’ve re-caught it and it’s sitting inside the cage right now. We’re not touching it, and waiting for my father to come home to release it.

Looking for a laugh? Watch the video from the day after my birthday of my friends attempting to catch the evil chipmunk… here.

Saddam Hussein yelled with anger and defiance as his verdict to hang was read yesterday. Two court bailiffs had to lift him to his feet after he was ordered to stand by the judge, and as his sentence was being read he continued to yell “Allahu Akbar!” (God is Greatest) and “Long live the nation!”

Saddam was convicted of ordering the deaths of 148 Shia men and teenage boys in the town of Dujail in 1982. The killings followed a failed assassination attempt against him and were intended to act as a grim warning to others not to oppose him.”

Saddam wanted to face a firing squad; the request was refused. Many celebrated in Baghdad with celabratory gunfire while fighting broke out in the northern part of the city.

Saddam’s lawyer said the former president urged Iraqis “not to take revenge” on the US coalition and to “unify in the face of sectarian strike”. [...] Amnesty International described the trial as a “shabby affair marred by serious flaws”. [...] Security was stepped up in the capital in anticipation of a violent reaction to the verdict. Sunni supporters predicted a “firestorm” of violence. Saddam, who was captured by US forces in December 2003, is still seen as the figurehead of many of the insurgent Sunni groups conducting a campaign of terror against Coalition troops and Iraqi civilians.

This trial was the first that Saddam was to face after being captured by U.S. forces in December of 2003. The event has been interrupted by hunger strikes, walkouts, boycotts, the murder of three lawyers and the sacking of the original trial judge, who announced in court that he did not believe Saddam was a dictator.

Hussein will appeal the case, as they are automatic for death penalties and life sentances, within 10 days. Within 20 days, the prosecution and the defense must submit their documents to the appellate chamber. The case will be forwarded to the appellate chamber of the Iraqi High Tribunal. If sentence upheld, execution must be within 30 days.

Watch the video here from CNN.com.

Information and additional reporting [Sky News UK] and [CNN]