Well, the events of last night certainly make for an entertaining story if nothing else. A Goodyear Blimp (1 of the 3 in existence) crashed across the street from my apartment last night around 7 P.M. What these two pilots were doing flying that thing in such horrible weather (flash floods here and hail reported just 10 miles south of here) still remains a mystery.

Well, with their crash they took down a utility pole and thus we had no electricity until 6 this morning. My oh-so-brilliant neighbors were arguing with a police officer as I pulled into the parking lot last night - seems they thought they had a constitutional right to stand outside in the pouring rain (barefoot or in flip flops) with live power cables down just a few feet away.

Every few minutes you'd here the cop on his mega phone telling everyone to go back into their homes. I was hoping that he'd either finally arrest them, or decide to let Natural Selection take it's course (I could have witnessed a Darwin Award in the making!).

These are the same neighbors of mine that allowed their children to run around outside last fall during the hurricanes - perhaps they have a large insurance policy for their kids. I know that ignorant people exist everywhere, but why is it that there is such a large concentration of them here in Florida? Serial killers, pedophiles, miscellaneous felons... all end up in Florida it seems.

For photos of the downed blimp go here:

http://www.nbc6.net/slideshow/news/4620402/detail.html

I actually happened to have been quite fortunate yesterday. Besides my neighbors providing excellent entertainment (since there wasn't TV without electricity) I also had the good luck of winning a Sony PSP from a raffle at the DMA conference I went to last month - I only found out about it a couple of days ago, and it arrived just yesterday. (Thank you St. Ives - they do printing, creative and web production services out of Miami if you happen to be in the industry).

On my way home I stopped off at Best Buy (finally found something there to spend my gift certificate on that I received at Christmas) to pick up "Hitch" (Wil Smith and Kevin James). I was able to watch it on my PSP and still have 3 hours of power remaining on the charge. It was a really good movie - and it helped pass the time w/ no electricity.

The only downfall is that now it's not likely that I'll sell it on eBay - $300 potential profit out the window - and I have no idea what else I'll do with this thing. Clearly the PSP was not intended for women. I understand their marketing strategy for women was to promote it to them as more of a portable device for watching movies, listening to music and storing photos - sounds good on paper, and as a marketer myself I can certainly appreciate that they even bothered to have a marketing strategy for my demographic.

However, I can't help but notice that all of the movies available for this thing are "man movies" and a limited selection at that - whereas they have a large amount of games (that's my impression, but most men would say that it's not enough games). As for using it for other media - well I'm the last person on Earth to learn that everything with Sony is proprietary only (believe me I never would have purchased a PSP even as a gift for someone - I won this thing for free so I'm trying to see how I can use it). So to download files you need a special cable, files have to be a special format, and the 32mb memory cards cost approx $1/MB.

After startling the men at Best Buy with my question as to where the PSP accessories were, I ended up choosing a hard storage case, a screen protector and the movie - the USB is tonight's purchase.

I will be selling 2 Counting Crows tickets on eBay though (as soon as Ticketmaster mails those darn things to me) and they seem to be going for double what I paid so there is hope. Of course had I sold the PSP on eBay I would have had the money to go to the concert.. is that irony? I'll probably post a message on CKKL or CC.com about them - it's in Atlantic City on July 8th.

Check out those Blimp photos - I've attached a couple to this - my apt. complex is in the upper left corner of the 2nd photo.

Until next time....