NWZ-W252 Walkman

When I run, I like to listen to songs that get me pumped up. I can be dead tired, but if I hear one of my power songs, it makes getting through a tough run that much easier.

I generally use my iPod Shuffle for exercise, but was interested enough to try Sony’s new portable MP3 player NWZ-W252 because it’s wireless, lightweight….. and well because Sony gave me one to try out (what’s better than that).

The Good

It’s wireless. I can’t underscore how nice it is not to have to fiddle with wires. It’s just easier. No more running the wires under your shirt or untangling sweaty ear buds.

It’s lightweight. Wearing the NWZ-W252 is very easy. After a while I didn’t even notice I had them on.

Loading music was easy. I was able to easily transfer playlists and songs straight from my iTunes library. With 2GB of maximum capacity, the new Walkman W Series can hold approximately 470 songs (4 minute length at 128 kbps).

Quick Charge Function. If you ever forget to charge your walkman (I do this often), the NWZ-W252 has a nifty quick charge function which gives you about 90 minutes of use on only a 3 minute charge. That’s pretty bad@$$ if you ask me. Full battery life will get you about 11 hours of use.

Navigating songs was a breeze. The controls which are located on the ear piece were intuitive and easy-to-use. Scrolling through my playlist was easy and there is even a way to scan your music in short spurts to find just the right song to get you through your workout.

Sound quality was impressive. The ear pieces are shaped in a way that really eliminates ambient noises well. The quality audio is noticeable. They are definitely a step up from standard ear buds that tend to allow more noise leak.

The Bad

Too cool for school. You know we’re not fans of the bluetooth headset. With the NWZ-W252, it gets rid of the wires, but the tradeoff is that it adds not one, but two bluetooth looking earpieces to your head.

One-size doesn’t fit all. Because the head piece is meant to be one-size-fits-all, there was some jingle bojangle action when I was running. I felt the ear pieces bounce around a little at first while I ran. After getting it to sit right though, I was able to make it fit comfortably and it was fine.

Sony Walkman 250 Series

Overall

The Sony Walkman NWZ-W252 is a solid MP3 player for people who like to run or exercise to music. It does more than get the job done and offers impressive sound quality. It’s ideal if you’re a fitness enthusiast who is looking for a noticeable upgrade in audio experience and where going wireless is a must.

The Sony W Series Walkman, model NWZ-W252, is available for about $60 at www.sonystyle.com.

Blank Label is a Boston-based startup that allows its customers to create their own custom dress shirts online.

I went ahead and used their online custom shirt creator and waited for my shirt in the mail. Now that I’ve worn the shirt a couple times now, here are my thoughts.

Overall, I’d say Blank-Label is really on to something here. They’ve created a nicely designed site which allows any Joe Shmo like me to easily create a custom dress shirt online. And I’ve got to hand it to them, the shirt fits almost perfect. It fits exactly the same if not better than the shirt I bought at Cafe Coton off the rack and had taken in at the local tailor. The difference though was that with Blank Label, I never left my apartment.

The Good

• I was able to customize the shirt just the way I wanted in terms of type of color, fit, number of pockets, button color, etc. Because of this, the shirt definitely feels custom and not something I could get off the rack at a department store.
• The fit is spot-on and overall quality is high in terms of materials used (Both times I wore the shirt I got compliments about the fit).
• Price wise, Blank Label isn’t a steal, but it’s definitely a great price for a service that usually cost a hell of a lot more. Shirts start out at just $45, and mine with all the unique customizations topped out at around $70.
• With Blank Label, they’ll never run out of your size since it is basically on-demand shirt making.
• The shirt came with a hand written note. It was a nice touch, but I wasn’t sure if that was special for us or if  they do that for every customer. Still the best packaging experience I’ve had so far were for a pair of pants from Bonobos.com.

The Bad

• Workmanship was fair, but I did notice a bit of excess threads and things that weren’t clipped off. This was more apparent around the buttons and in the areas where I customized the shirt a bit more. It felt like it just left the seamstress’ table…which is fine, but it did feel a little less polished than something I’ve seen come from other vendors.
• The wrapping the shirt came in felt a little budget and I would have liked to see better presentation here.

About Blank Label

Individually Designed By You, Individually Made By Us

We’re changing how young guys buy and wear dress shirts. Add a subtle personalized touch to that blue or white work shirt or go crazy by really designing a one-of-a-kind creation, hit that sweet spot in between with that shirt you leave work and go for dinner and drinks with. We have one of the hottest design-it-yourself dress shirt applications going around, have fun with it, create something individual. After all blank label is your label.

If your answer is “no,” then stop here, do not pass go, do not collect $200 (homage to Monopoly, one my favorite boardgames of all time).

If your answer is “yes,” then keep reading because the answer is quite simple, watch or listen to the interviews on Mixergy.com — all of them.

Want to learn how to start an Internet business, how to raise venture capital, how to build community, how to get links to your site, how to get people to pay for services, how to create compelling content?….there’s an interview for that!

Mixergy.com, “home of the ambitious upstart,” provides free video interviews (at least for now) with successful Internet entrepreneurs. The interviews are conducted by Andrew Warner, an accomplished Internet entrepreneur in his own right with his own fascinating roller coaster of a story where he took his company to $30+ million a year in sales.

Mixergy.com has 100+ interviews on the site and is chock full of nuggets of wisdom for entrepreneurs. Andrew asks all the tough questions and really tries to get to the heart of what made the entrepreneur successful with their respective website business. He has done interviews with people who have been-there-done-that and is slowly growing a valuable library for startups to gain insight.

I’ve watched or listened to just about every interview on Mixergy. Below are some of the interviews on the site I recommend.

I also encourage you to follow @AndrewWarner on Twitter to get the latest updates on who he is interviewing next.

My suggested interviews on Mixergy.com

Wikipedia’s Founder On How The Site Was Built & Promoted. – with Jimmy Wales

How Threadless Got People To Buy Over A Million Tshirts A Year. – With Jeffrey Kalmikoff

How 99designs Built A $5+ Million Marketplace In 16 Months. – With Matt Mickiewicz

How A Quiet Developer Built Goodreads.com Into Book Community Of 2.6+ Million Members – with Otis Chandler

How To Build Your Online Community –The Mateo Gutierrez Interview

How To Erect A Pay Wall That Generates Revenue – with Wil Schroter

Why This VC Showered With Construction Workers And Why You Must Also Be Willing To! – With Mark Suster

How Being Scrappy Made Grasshopper Profitable Within 2 Months – with Siamak Taghaddos

How The Owner Of “Fail Blog” And “I Can Has Cheezburger” Keeps Racking Up Wins – With Ben Huh

How Maponics’ Founder Learned To Sell To Companies Like Google & CitySearch – With Darrin Clement Maponics

The JibJab Story. Maybe The Most Inspiring Mixergy Interview Ever! – With Gregg Spiridellis

Bootstrapping Lessons From 37 Signals — The Jason Fried Interview

Small Changes That Helped UserVoice Raise $800,000 From Investors. – With Marcus Nelson

What Does It Take To Build A Successful Online Company? – With Michael Jones

How A Musician Built A $22 Million Dollar Business From His Home. –The Derek Sivers Interview

How Blogs Helped The Four Hour Work Week Become a Best Seller – The Timothy Ferriss Interview

This is why you’ll like GroupGreeting.com, a free service that allows you to create a digital group card that multiple people can sign and share from anywhere in the world.

By creating a group greeting card, you can have the whole office, team or group of friends sign a card for an individual without having to pass around a physical card. It’s very much like an ecard, but what makes it different is you can create one card and have everyone in the office sign it (even if they are in different locations).

GroupGreeting makes sharing the card easy as well. They make it easy to share with your friends on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. And they also include a direct link to the card so that other people can sign the card just as easily.

The site lets you decorate the card by allowing you to add a photo, change your font, and even change the color of your font when you sign it. It’s not as nice as receiving a traditional greeting card, but the fact that other people can sign it makes it very unique.

You must understand though that I grew up in the eighties and so for me GI JOE represents not only countless childhood cartoon watching, but also it’s a chance for the powers that be (studio heads and game makers) to redeem themselves after having already thoroughly destroyed the Transformers franchise.

After 30 minutes of playing:

After watching the game intro, I already knew I was in trouble. The graphics were dull, blocky and showed lots of visible jagged staircasing (and this is on my 60″ Sony with full 1080p). Just for fun I loaded up COD 4 and Killzone to compare quality and it was night and day. The difference is so glaring, but again I remind myself that I am comparing apples to oranges and reset my sights accordingly.

I do like how GI JOE the Rise of Cobra the game storyline follows where the movie just left off. Continuity there is noticeable and appreciated, but other than that, I am not too impressed. You basically play the character of Duke and shoot everything in sight as you navigate through the missions. There isn’t much to this game and it feels very familiar.

I am playing Advanced mode (medium) with a buddy.Casual (easy) mode and Hardcore (hard) mode are other options for gameplay. The game reminds us a little like Ikari Warriors or Contra from back in the days, but not nearly as fun. The only redeeming quality in the first 30 minutes of action is the Accelerator Suit feature which gives each player temporary invincibility and blares the familiar GI JOE theme song. We both laughed the first couple of times, but it quickly gets old.

After 1-hour of playing:

After passing a few of the 20 missions, I realize the game is going to be more of the same.  This game feels routine and the visuals seem like they keep repeating themselves over and over again. The levels all start looking all too similar.

There really is no strategy to the game, you basically just button mash your way through each level. An average player should have no problem passing the game in a day or so, but younger players might find the game more difficult at the Advanced mode (medium level).

I also notice the in-level checkpoints are a joke because you have to start at the beginning if you die…major flaw. What’s the point of even having checkpoints if you don’t go back to the checkpoint? It defeats the purpose of even having them and goes against the grain of many games out there.

After 3-hours of playing:

I barely even got this far. My buddy who I thought would at least stay for a few hours left after playing for only an hour so I had to keep playing by myself.

In single player mode, you can swap in/out other characters, but of course you have to unlock them first (which feels like a chore). After unlocking Heavy Duty and a few of the other characters, I realize it will take a little while before getting to all the characters and I just don’t feel compelled to keep going.

Overall, it’s safe to say GI JOE the game is a disappointment with very few redeeming qualities. The nostalgia factor made it worth a look, but it misses the mark in almost every basic game aspect. Graphics are uninspiring and not up to par with even lesser titles. Gameplay is unrefined at best with Advanced being too difficult and casual being too easy (don’t even bother with hardcore). If you happen to get this game as a gift from aunt Sally, you might be better off exchanging or getting store credit for it.

Official G.I.Joe The Rise of Cobra Site