Many moons ago, I started an online video game rental service. It was one of the first in the industry and for a brief time flirted as the #1 company in the market. It rose, it fell, but that's another story.

During the very early days of my start-up, we used to make GameStop runs to buy our inventory because it was much cheaper than buying new games at wholesale prices. The fact that we got 10% off used games by using the GameStop Rewards card made it a no brainer. Even after I exited the video game business, I still bought most of my games from GameStop out of some weird sense of nostalgia and loyalty. Price-wise they are never the cheapest and you do get shafted when you sell back games but I get a certain sense of joy when walking into the store to peruse the game titles and chat with the employees.

I'm not so sure the sordid news regarding GameStop employees removing items from game packs changes my perception that much of the company. No one ever said GameStop was the bastion of retail purity plus this is more a corporate directive than a "theft/stealing" issue. Still, it's not a positive and given that places like Amazon gets you the same exact game at a slightly cheaper price, no tax and free shipping, it may make me think twice about where I buy from moving forward.

Lots of backlash regarding the news that Color got a $41M funding for a pre-launch product in a very crowded space. I am somewhat biased in that two of the founders are Vietnamese and I always root for my peeps. The app itself is slick and well put together. Actual true utility won't come until there is mass adoption which will take time (hence the 41M bones). And don't hate because they were able to get $41M. If nothing, that's a testament to how great a team they have that a bunch of VCs would give them that much money with ZERO adoption. Let's judge them in 3 months, 6 months, a year from now. If they still don't have the adoption then let the hate rain down.

I'm bitching about how stupid people are to pay for a machine that has so many drawbacks. So stop being Apples bitch and paying out the ass for their products.

Are you one of the non-technologically inclined idiots that Apple has gotten to? Thats what it sounds like to me.

The above is a comment from a TechCrunch posting by the famously pro-Apple MG Siegler. It's always funny how the spectrum of Apple lovers/haters plays out. People either REALLY love them or REALLY hate them.

The posting itself brings up some good points about Apple's eventual killing of the optical drive in most of their laptops. I can count the number of times I've used the optical drive on my laptop in the last two years on one hand yet it's persistently there taking up valuable space and weight. When I owned a MacBook Air, I bought the external superdrive and probably used it 3-4 times, as well. Would I buy a laptop without a built-in optical drive but have an external one handy? Absolutely and that's what I think Apple will do in its next refresh of the MacBook Pro line.

Speaking of new MacBooks, I just ordered the latest 13" MacBook Pro via Amazon. Arrives on Monday - no tax and free shipping via Amazon Prime. Early benchmarks show that the lowest end MacBook Pro 13" released on Thursday performs as fast as the highest end MacBook Pro 17" released last year. Crazy!

This is despicable and embarrassing for the tech community in my opinion.

This email from Ron Conway is staggering. Yesterday, I posted that the truth of AngelGate is probably somewhere between Michael Arrington's originally post and Dave McClure's response. It now seems like the truth is closer to Arrington's version than McClure's.

I feel like a total asshole because I posted a comment to the original AngelGate post on TC saying I thought Ron Conway was probably at the meeting (even though David Lee of SV Angel was there). Shows how much I know.