The MVNO Virgin Mobile, which resells Sprints network has seemingly undercut Sprint in pricing their unlimited plan.

Today Virgin Mobile USA announced a new unlimited calling plan. The Totally Unlimited plan, which will be available beginning July 1, will give customers unlimited nationwide calling with no roaming or other fees for $80 per month. Add $10 to also get unlimited text messaging, picture messaging, instant messaging, and email.

Best of all Virgin does not require annual contracts, Hey Sprint – You watching this!!!!!

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Windows 7 is already being reviewed by U.S. government technical appointees. Under the terms of Microsoft’s November 2001 Justice Department settlement, and final court judgment issued about a year later, a government-sanctioned ‘Technical Committee’ has been formed to oversee Windows development. The TC is responsible for ensuring that Microsoft complies with the terms of the final judgment, investigating complaints about Microsoft abuses and regularly reporting on the company’s compliance.”

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Have you ever seen or sat on a large plush bean bag? They are the La-Z-Boy of modern day. A quick query of Wikipedia reviews the history of the bean bag (also known as the "Physics Bag" or "Oversized Sac").

Bean bag chairs are a popular form of furniture made of fabric and filled with small chunks of styrofoam or PVC pellets. They were hugely popular as mod furniture during the late 1960s and early 1970s; their popularity resumed in the mid 1990s, as companies began selling chairs filled with shredded polyurethane foam, charging a premium for the extra comfort this can provide. #

As a youth, I remember the pleather wrapped bags at my grandparents house filled with tiny white styrofoam balls. Land your rear-end on one of those bags too fast and risk popping a seam exposing the loose innards. Since the 1960′s, manufacturing techniques, craftsmanship, and quality of have improved a hundred times over.

Fast forward to the late 1990′s and early 2000′s. Reality shows like MTV’s Real World feature completely furnished homes with giant plush bean bags. The plush bean bag quickly becomes an "I want it" item. For most, the reality of owning a giant bean bag quickly transformed into an afterthought after seeing the sticker prices hit $400+. Premium prices for premium bags.

Sumo brings plush without the price

A few weeks back I caught wind of the fact that LoveSac – makers of the giant plush bags popularized by Real World – had filed Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. Soon after, Andrew at Sumo notified me of an update to their line-up of lounge furniture. Note: UNEASYsilence review of the Sumo Omni. Sure enough, Sumo now offers a larger option for customers – the SumoSac.

The SumoSac is Sumo’s answer to the question "where can I find a large super comfortable bean bag without having to resort to eating Ramen for a week?" Priced well below the competition Sumo offers the SumoSac with a footprint of 4 ft., 5 ft., and 6 ft. diameters (priced from $179-$229). So how is life with a giant SumoSac in the living room?

Unpacking the 6 ft. SumoSac

The SumoSac is shipped compressed inside of a nylon bag. When FedEx dropped off the package, the concierge at the bottom of my building mentioned something about a giant block of cheese having been delivered. An appropriate description considering the shape of the bag. Deceptively heavy, I dragged the bag to the elevator and rolled it into my unit for unpacking.

With the shipping bag completely removed, I found myself staring at a vacuum packed bag of fill (inside a cotton inner bag) and a micro suede outer bag. You would think that immediately after unwrapping the fill, the entire bag would begin to expand on it’s own. It does, to a certain extent. In order to really promote the fill to expand, you need to physically break apart some of the shredded foam to coerce a little air into the inner bag. Break apart = beat and kick. I called the next step the filler beat down.

The SumoSac slowly expands into a familiar blob shape. Once most of the foam has been broken apart from the vacuumed chunks, the outer bag goes can go on.

What you’re left with is a giant bag (depending on the size) capable of swallowing up an entire individual + dog. Even better is that the inner foam continues to expand over the next week which means an even bigger fuller bag.

SumoSac things you’ll like

• Affordable. With prices ranging from $179-$229, the SumoSac is a much more affordable option compared to the competition. In addition to the price being considerably lower, the customer service is unparallel.
• Two layered system. Face it. no one can resist the initial urge to launch themselves on to the bag. I’ve witnessed friends out of the corner of my eye look over to check if my head was turned away before launching themselves on to the plush chair. Fortunately, if one bag does break, chances are the loose innards won’t be flying around.
• Washable outer bag – imagine falling backwards into an unpredictably uneven bag of foam with drink in hand. ‘nough said.
• Comfortable. Period. I found myself falling asleep in the living room on the bag during the first week.

SumoSac things you might not like

• Moving? Good luck. Soon after unpacking the bag, we packed the apartment up for a move. The comfortable 6 ft. bag quickly becomes an unwieldy bag of foam even the movers despise.
• If you purchase one, you’ll probably find a reason to buy a second, third, or even fourth.

The SumoSac is available now – direct from Sumo.

Alisa Miller gives this brief but meaningful look at US news coverage. I personally prefer the TV news coverage of the BBC with CNN: HLN after that.

You know you like it.

Facebook has been the source of a lot of angst among people just wanting to get work done. Who needs to do a company report when you can poke your friends and tell them what you really think of them in their honesty boxes? Luckily, the people at Facebook have added the ability to chat with your friends on the site, which is sure to alleviate a lot of the productivity problems people claim to be having. Just kidding, this thing is probably going to get your fired.

When the chat feature first launched one of the first things my less tech-savvy friends expressed was that a lot more time was going to be wasted on the site. While I see their point I can still see the use of it. For one thing, it means you can now chat with the people you’ve added on Facebook but aren’t quite comfortable with yet to give them your actual IM accounts. C’mon, you know you have those friends!

Since everyone on your friend list are supposed to be your friends there isn’t any way to block certain people just yet, at least I didn’t find any way. You can a “go offline” but all it does is disable your ability to chat with anyone, so if you wanted to chat with some people and not with others you’re out of luck for now.

The chat can be popped out which is nice, meaning you can have the chat without actually being on the site itself though there aren’t any sounds or distinctive visual cues to tell you there is a new message when the window is minimized. Annoying for me when I want to get people’s messages, but a blessing for those who want to check for messages on their own time. Personally it just means I’ll be checking for a new message every 5 seconds, and no, I’m not nearly as popular to warrant such actions.

Facebook, Facebook Chat, Twitter, Pownce, Google Reader, Socialthing, Friendfeed, UNEASYsilence. I think the internet officially hates me. When will I ever get time to go outside?

I consider Facebook and MySpace to be two different type of sites. MySpace is more for the “I don’t care about society”� type person while Facebook is for a more sophisticated crowd. I could be wrong. I don’t and won’t use MySpace, and if I had to use a MySpace-like site I would o with Virb. I saw MySpace as a breeding ground for spam and a sort of “don’t care”� attitude by the people behind the site. I mean, any time I happen to come across the page for an artist I like, I see the comments with a bunch of spam. Facebook is different, at least I would like to believe that. Imagine my surprise when I saw a friend of mine posted this message on my wall. Facebook spam isn’t particularly new and I think it’s safe to say it isn’t rampant either but I am a bit disappointed this could happen. I am assuming that my friend’s account could have been hacked and this was sent out to all friends, or more plausibly an application added would have done it. Anyone with info on this?

Choosing between American Dad and Family Guy is like choosing your favourite friend, you don’t really have any reason to but you could still do it. What better way to choose the show you prefer out of the two than by one on one style fighting? Definitely not the deepest of online games I’ve played it’s still a decent little time sink.

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For some reason or the other I am guessing that someone is going to give a very good explanation for this. Or can this even be justified?

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The New York Times has an article entitled “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop” and boy has it hit a nerve in the blogging community.

The story, which is an interesting read for anyone in blogging or interested in the craft looks at the recent deaths of two bloggers, Russell Shaw and Marc Orchant as well as the near-death experience by Om Malik as potential realities for anyone in the constant-blogging lifestyle. Bloggers for sites part of Gawker Media and the like are consider sweatshop workers driven by the monetary reward of posting popular posts and often. Self-employed bloggers don’t fare much better as people like Michael Arrington admit to declining health and poor sleep due to the constant worry of missing a story.

Some have rubbished the story with Mathew Ingram calling the story “blog trolling 101″ and Marc Andreessen taking a comical stab at potential New York Times article titles but I wasn’t totally convinced. Then i saw Larry Dignan’s post on why he wasn’t mentioned in the article even though he was interviewed — he adds a not so serious reality to the situation by saying he works out and asks if blogging is any more stressful than being a corporate lawyer and I agree that there probably are a lot worse jobs to have than managing 5,000 RSS feeds. Agree or disagree, I still think there is an underlying issue that gives the article some validity. Sure, other jobs are stressful, but the focus was still on blogging.

When we look at Michael Arrington being in the position he is in right now it’s safe to say it’s a position he could avoid and blogging around the clock might work for a while, but it really isn’t sustainable. Could it be just an overall addiction? Or is the money also a real reason for people to work continuously thereby lumping blogging in with any other stressful job? I don’t have the answers, but it got me to thinking after realizing how much time I spend online, blogging.

This site isn’t updated nearly as much as others but it doesn’t mean a lot of time doesn’t go into it, sorting through stories, testing things out, writing and even tossing stories before they ever see the light of day. I especially found it ironic seeing this article and realizing this week that I’ve been pretty sick this past Saturday to Saturday, only now feeling better yet I found myself blogging, not because it’s my means of income, or for money at all, just because I like doing it. But could I be confusing my “love” of writing for people to read with an addiction? I sure hope not since I didn’t exactly force myself to do 8 posts a day or anything, but reading the NYT article we should face the reality of life and try to be healthy. Don’t let something happen before you come to a realization, learn from others and if you spend a lot of time at a desk, in front the computer, blogging, reading a lot of blogs or both, consider taking a walk every now and then, getting a check up and taking care of yourself. Now let’s get back to having some fun online.