So you’ve decided to get a Wii. Well, it’s a good news/bad news proposition. First the bad news: Nintendo keeps a level playing field by setting a standard price for its console — $199.99 — which makes shopping around for the best price fruitless. But the good news is that the Wii world is a little more complex than that, so savvy shoppers can still save some dough. Here’s how.

1. Look for a gift-card bonus. The way some retailers get around Nintendo’s MSRP (or any manufacturer’s, for that matter) is a…

I recently read a powerful analogy about the dynamics between children and parents and technology. Michael Lewis, in Next: The Future Just Happened, describes the bewildered parents of a 15-year-old charged with stock fraud because of his online activities:

Greg and Connie were born in New Jersey, but from the moment the Internet struck, they might as well have just arrived from Taiwan. When the Internet landed on them, it redistributed the prestige and authority that goes with a general understanding of the ways of the world away from the grown-ups and

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Check out my post today on Decoder, the blog of The Partnership for a Drug-Free America. I’ll be guest blogging there for the next week or so.

http://decoder.drugfree.org/

Call in the mediators! Send us all to therapy! All four people in my family have dug in their heels, thrown tantrums and refused to share. What is this valuable “toy” we each want to claim for our own? It’s our kitchen TV in the morning. Joe wants CNBC for the stock ticker and market analysis. I grew up watching the Today Show and depend on it to know where the world sits as I start my day. Andy must see ESPN and its derivatives to be totally up-to-the-minute, just…

This week, our kitchen sitting area has been the site of a social experiment of sorts. Our TV there went suddenly and permanently mute a few days ago.  Without warning and for no apparent reason (other than poor manufacturing), the two-year-old TV’s internal speakers stopped working. Next week, we’ll have the TV repaired. But in the interim, we’ve been using headphones. And this has created an interesting kitchen dynamic.

On the first day of mute, I was joyful with the silence. But then a pall began to slowly descend over the room. There’s something…

We’re hosting a “Dangerous Camp for Boys” this week, a take-off on the best-selling The Dangerous Book for Boys. For the week, Andy and his a few of his buddies get to do all sorts of dangerous and old-fashioned boy stuff. (They’re off fishing as I write this.) Today I happened to stumble upon this old clip from Esquire (always one of the cleverest mags out there, imho) that instructs on some really dangerous activities for boys. It’s a hoot. The last one, which…

Even as I’m typing this, I’m installing YahooMessenger on my computer. Why? Because I’m just back from planning the annual technology issue of the magazine I work for, and it turns out that the hot thing that these adults, ages 25 – 55, were talking about was IMing in the work environment and the generational gap that it highlights. This is a topic that we will be covering in our issue, so I figured I should get better acquainted with the Instant Messenger concept and see what…