Monday, July 14, 2008, 12:44 PM: After another long night of useless web browsing, music downloading and PSP tinkering, I rose from my summer slumber and proceeded to my PC to watch Microsoft's E3 press conference live. I press the Power On button, and...nothing.

After weeks and weeks of having to leave my PC on standby/sleep mode because it took 45 minutes to boot if shut down, my Frankenstein's monster of a computer had finally died a sputtering death. The tower itself was at least seven years old (there were two stampings dated Dec. 24, 1999 on the inside), and the guts were a smash-together of obsolete-but-good-enough parts that just couldn't work together well enough for long. I smirked at myself because even though I knew this moment was coming for some time, it just HAD to happen the Monday before E3. Desperate for some form of news, I turned to a source I'd never bothered checking, but desperate times call for desperate measures:

That's right, I was forced to keep up with E3 via my PSP, and it was not easy. Even standing right next to my router, most pages loaded so slowly that it was like going back to dial-up, and then there's the big problem of pages scaling to fit the screen; even if I changed the settings and text size, most pages either squished everything together into an intangible mess or broke the page in question into numerous vertical sections that were displayed one after another. Surfing on the PSP is frustrating, near-broken and not much fun.

But it wasn't all bad. In my search of acceptable sites I went to Joystiq, and lo-and-behold that site has a text-only "Joystiq Mobile" version that I assume detected my PSP browser and directed me accordingly. It is thanks to JS that I learned of all the comings-out from "teh w0r$t eTHree EVAR," from FF XIII being confirmed for 360 and the PS3's 80GB model getting gimped to the not-ending-anytime-soon battle between Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2 and Nintendo just plain sucking. (It was also slightly chuckle-inducing to read about the PSP's "problems" from a PSP itself; as far as I'm concerned, it's a nice handheld with some decent games and more capabilities than 95% of PSP owners realize.) I did mange to grab my sister's laptop briefly on two occasions and saw some LittleBigPlanet and Madden '09 footage, so it wasn't too insufferable.

With a functional iPod but no PC to plug it into, I had to get my numerous podcasts some other way, and so I also discovered the wonderful world of RSS feeds. After a few patience-testing loadings, I had feeds from all of 1UP Radio, the Giant Bombcast and ESPN, and I have to say, lugging my PSP around just so I could listen to the three (3!) hour poolside 1UP Yours wasn't as huge an annoyance as I thought it would be. The PSP doesn't remember a podcast's playback position, though, and nothing could top my two-year-old iPod Nano's comfort, but it wasn't all bad. I won't be going back to it anytime soon, though.

And then there's the browser navigation. The nub acts like a mouse to the cursor, scrolling is made easier by holding down Square and pressing the D-Pad, and Triangle brings up the browser menu, such as "Address Entry" and "Close Page" (which you can also do by pressing O). Text entry works very much like cell phone texting with twelve on-screen "buttons" containing letters like on a phone's keypad, which (while annoying) is much easier than the on-screen QWERTY keyboard I remember seeing in some old mock-ups.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008, 10:38 PM: Proceeding to the basement to turn on the wireless router and maybe play some Okami, I find my new rig sitting in the POS' place. My mother's friend takes his time, but it's worth it when he's done. And I'm here. You might not care, but I certainly do.