How I Met Your Mother – Holy smokes, it was Robin all along. The wedding two years – yes two years in the making. We knew about this wedding from back in the beginning of season six. The writers of this show gave us little glimpses of it here and there since then like showing that it was Barney’s wedding at the end of last season. Now we find out it is Barney and Robin’s wedding. Holy smokes. Also, Ted drove off with Victoria? No way that turns out good but kudos for the writers and creators for bringing her back in, that story never seemed finished.

Big Bang Theory – Howard goes to space and the group comes together. It was clever, cute and funny but not overly great. This show is heading into their sixth season and at some point you do wonder where it really is going. It still is funnier than most shows out there and will probably last another three years if the cast is up for it but where is this group going now? Are Penny and Leonard going to tie the knot? Is Sheldon finally going to come around to a physical relationship with Amy? All fun questions really.

The Office – I’ve said all season that this show has gotten better. Without Steve Carrell as Michael Scott the show was missing something but between the early success with The Garden Party episode and the few episodes with half of the cast in Florida, this series came back around. Now David Wallace is returning to take over the paper company and Ed Helms’ Andy is back in charge. I love it. I have a feeling season 9 won’t be the last either, at least for most of the cast. I do think writing off Jim and Pam will happen and it is only fitting that they do so too – it is just time for it.

Bones – Another thriller to end the season. Bones runs away as she faces a murder that she didn’t commit. The gang fights hard to figure out how to save her. Man it was intense.

Castle – Yay, Castle and Beckett finally have the talk and things go from here. About freakin’ time those two come together.

New Girl – this first season of this show was hilarious from start to finish. The season finale was alright though, nothing over the top or amazing but good enough. Nick nearly leaves the apartment but in the end he returns. He and Jess will eventually end up together, it is only natural.

Just a weird, random thing I felt like doing. I wanted to see exactly where I go and how often I go there. I’m leaving out check-ins at work, home and friends houses. No need to do any of those. Some check-ins will be public, just for reasons that I don’t care to try to explain because I don’t even know them. Ha!

We’ll see how long I can keep this up. Maybe eventually – a few months down the road even – I’ll open all the checkins up to my friends list so more people can see them (if they want to obviously).

“30 Rock” has reportedly been renewed for a shortened seventh season, but sadly with a bit of a catch – it will be its last, according to Deadline.com.

Seven seasons to any TV series these days is quite a bit. I’d say that this coming year may be the year we say good-bye to this show, The Office, How I Met Your Mother, and probably a couple other quality shows.

Bummer.

As the MLS season continues to roll on I’ll keep having items to add to my various writing samples on here. I recently added more samples to the FCDallas and MLSSoccer sections of the portfolio. Last week I was asked once again to step in for MLSSoccer.com and write a game recap and sidebar for the FCD-Colorado match.

I have to say the sidebar was a challenging one to write seeing how Dallas played down two-men for the majority of the game. Players were exactly too eager to talk afterwards as one might imagine.

Still it has been a fun experience this season getting to write for both outlets, definitely in a way a dream come true that one sense.

I think this is a change for the better until Becca and I begin the whole family thing. I’m still trying to figure out where to put all my photos. I may just create some cool galleries on here for a change. We’ll see.

The biggest thing I’ve noticed myself doing a lot of is data usage on the phone and on the Xyboard. I’m typically around wifi but I thought I would experiment for a little bit with using strictly data for a couple days on both devices (more so on the phone).

Obviously the 4G LTE on Verizon is ridiculously fast and amazing. Here in Dallas it is totally reliable and rarely misses a beat. It’s quick and the more you use it the more you want to use it. The downfall of that is you don’t realize how much you are using when you go strictly on data and stay off wifi. I noticed that because I’d use the data on one thing and it was super fast that I’d keep using it on other things like surfing the web, downloading an app or whatever. It’s almost a Catch-22.

Still the experience with the RAZR has been a good one. Once it is gone I’ll just be testing the Xyboard for Verizon. Something I can’t leave home without these days.

The RAZR is nice and all but for me the tablet is pretty sweet. The smaller screen size for a tablet is different. Instead of the typical iPad type screen size, this tablet clocks in at 8inches. To me, the small screen size isn’t a bad thing on a tablet. Why? Something about it just feels natural.

The Xyboard is a lot like the RAZR in terms of the Android OS on it. Still no Ice Cream Sandwich or Android 4.0 but the OS seems nicer on the tablet than on the phone. The biggest drawback however are the apps for the tablet. Most of the phone apps aren’t worth getting on the tablet because they aren’t scaled to fit the tablet much like on an iPad when the apps are universal across the iOS.

I’ve found many quality apps like Twitter, Facebook, ESPN to just look off on the tablet. The experience is still decent with those apps but the look and feel of the apps on the tablet is lacking.

Another downfall if you will on the tablet is the weird corners. Instead of rounded corners like on most devices, this tablet has some weird edged corners. After holding it a while, the corners feel weird in your hands.

I’ll have more on this tablet as I get to play with it more.

As for the RAZR, it goes back to Verizon in a week or so. My usage of it hasn’t been nearly as much as before. After I tested out the call quality and the text messaging on the phone, I sort of stopped using it for what it really is, a phone. I mainly use it to play some games or watch some TV shows on the go, something the screen on the phone makes worth using for.

Now I normally use my iPhone to snap photos of anything. But I have to give it up to the RAZR, the camera built in this thing is pretty good.

Here are a couple shots I snapped from my desk yesterday afternoon.

And another of my little desk pal….

I plan to do another update later today. I am getting a gift from Verizon according to an email I got last week. I missed FedEx the first two times but not today! I’m very excited to see what it is (though I hear it is a tablet thanks to the folks Tweeting about it!).

For one, the battery is a little better when both the Bluetooth, the LTE and various apps that require location services aren’t running at the same time. Common sense really I suppose. Should have known not to have all of those things running at the same time during the day.

As for the LTE experience, it is still pretty sweet. I have vastly enjoyed being able to ride around Dallas with a phone that has such a fast internet speed. It certainly makes lunchtime more fun to be able to surf the web.

I’ve also finally done some customization to the phone, just general theming really. I’ll try to post some photos whenever I can figure out how to take a screen shot of the phone.

One final note for this post, nothing new on the Ice Cream Sandwich to the RAZR though. I still would really like to play around with that on this round of testing.

The first device I get to try is the Driod RAZR. This is my first experience with an Android phone. I’ve had an iPhone since the original so having “the other” kind of phone is totally new to me.

So far my experience has been a bit mixed with the RAZR.

The good:

• The new 4G LTE network is ridiculously fast. One speed test and it was remarkably faster than my home’s wireless network. In fact it was nearly double. Very impressive.
• The call quality on Verizon – something also new to me – was good as well. Not a lot of dead spots that I could see.
• The Android OS is pretty nifty when you get down to it. Lots of different, yet, cool features to it.
• The phone itself is pretty quick, apps load fairly quickly and run pretty smooth.
• Having flash on a phone is pretty interesting. I was able to get ESPN3.com to work, which was awesome.
• Speaking of streaming video, the quality on the RAZR screen is remarkable. It’s a bigger screen than the iPhone that I have right now and the quality is very nice.
• The “turn-off when phone goes in to pocket” feature is a nice touch.
• Widgets are pretty cool, and can be customized pretty easily.

The eh-not-so-great

• Battery life on the RAZR is pretty pathetic. It takes a while to charge for one thing and either its because I don’t know how to turn some processes off or something but the battery just drains even when you aren’t using the phone.
• Just like with most devices during heavy use, it gets fairly warm. Almost laptop warm.
• No Ice Cream Sandwich loaded on the phone was a pretty big disappointment. I’ve read/heard great things about that update.
• Too much crapware loaded on the phone that you can’t remove.
• The back of the phone has a weird plastic that doesn’t seem to be removable yet bubbles up real easy.

I’ll do a few more of these blog posts about the RAZR until the device has to be returned in late March.