Peon's Place

For 30 brief minutes this morning, Kevin Ebert of San Jose was the Sharks’ No. 1 fan. Or at least the team’s luckiest.

Ebert, 51, emerged from a sea of about 225 devoted hockey fans with lucky wristband No. 1555 and took his place at the front of the line at HP Pavilion, where he was guaranteed to land two seats for the Sharks upcoming home games in the Western Conference finals. Ebert was one of about 80 fans at HP Pavilion who bought tickets before ushers delivered the bitter news that the games had sold out. Ebert and his brother Richard will be among the crowd of frenzied Sharks fans at Game 2, rooting for the men in teal to reach the Stanley Cup finals for the first time.

“Go Sharks,” Ebert yelled as he assumed his place at the front of the line, described by team officials as the largest this season. “I just got lucky.” Fans took less than 30 minutes to devour about 1,500 tickets for the Sharks’ first two home games in the Western Conference finals, a series that will likely start Friday or Sunday, depending on the outcome of the series between the Chicago Blackhawks and Vancouver Canucks. Several fans in line were also trying to purchase tickets by cell phone and online.

But for every fan who walked away happy, two left empty-handed. Some fans were already talking about coming back for a potential Game 5 in San Jose. For others, a lack of tickets was a temporary condition. Jody Troxel, 31, was at the front of the line when it was announced the games had sold out. Instead of fretting, the San Jose man quickly called a ticket broker and purchased two nosebleed tickets for about $200 a pop. Troxel, a butcher by trade who is unemployed and living off savings, did not blink twice about paying a 77 percent increase. ”I definitely feel like we’re doing big things,” Troxel said of his team’s playoff run.

Another week, another analyst weighing in on the iPhone’s future.

Sources predict that because of a deal AT&T cut with Apple for the iPad 3G, the U.S. telecommunications giant will continue to have carrier exclusivity for the iPhone until at least 2011. His reasoning goes like this: Apple hasn’t been happy with AT&T’s network performance for the iPhone. AT&T wanted to remain the exclusive U.S. carrier for the Apple phone, keeping it out of rival Verizon Wireless’ hands. So it offered a generous and recurring monthly data program for the iPad.

One thing, though: another firm, Global Wireless Solutions, released a study this week comparing all the major wireless providers in New York City. It found that both Verizon and AT&T were about 99% reliable, with throughput up to 20 times what they offered five years ago. Assuming that GWS’ data is accurate, and that AT&T did actually make the iPad deal to keep the iPhone away from Verizon a little bit longer, maybe that deal doesn’t matter–at least for iPhone owners in New York.

LeBron James just got the sweetest offer in the history of mankind to move from Cleveland to the New York Knicks — a lifetime of free stripper action.

The Cleveland Cavaliers star, who will become a free agent after this season, is getting million-dollar offers from several franchises to make the switch to their team, but if LeBron inks a deal with the Knicks, New York’s premiere strip club Scores says it’ll give the basketball star:

• A free lifetime of lap dances
• A “LeBron James Day” when all the strippers will wear his jersey
• And free food for life at the strip club’s very own steakhouse

Good luck competing with that Utah!

Too bad I’ve already found everything I need with Google and other applications which work together, saving myself a hundred bucks a year.

Introduced in June 2008 to much fanfare — although soon derided by critics and consumers alike for a seriesof shortcomings — Apple’s $99 per year MobileMe service didn’t exactly get off to the best start in life. However, according to a report from MacDailyNews, Apple is planning to make MobileMe a free service “soon.” MDN’s tipster couldn’t nail down an exact date for the change, citing that it all “depends on certain facilities going operational” (read: Apple’s $1 billion, 500,000 sq. ft. server farm in North Carolina), but allegedly everything should be sorted out in the near future. The question is: if MobileMe becomes free, will Apple dole out refunds to those who paid for the service within the past year, and will Apple generate revenue off the free service with iAds?

MobileMe was originally launched on January 5, 2000, as “iTools,” a free collection of Internet-based services for users of Mac OS 9. iTools was relaunched as “.Mac” on July 17, 2002, when it became a $99 per year subscription service. .Mac was relaunched as “MobileMe” at WWDC 2008 on July 9, 2008.

Lindsay Lohan is locked in a bitter feud with rival starlet Avril Lavigne after the pop star publicly branded Lohan a “loser.” Lohan and Lavigne had a huge fight in front of fellow guests at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont. It ended with Lohan desperately trying to get her rival thrown out.

An eyewitness stated, “Avril was at a table with friends just over a week ago including her boyfriend, Brody Jenner, when Lindsay came over to say hi.”

But as soon as she approached, Avril launched at her and said: ‘Get the hell out of my face, you are fake, you are a loser. I don’t like false people. Stay away from me and my friends.”"

Lindsay was furious and screamed back: ‘Don’t threaten me!’ She then stormed off to security and tried to get them to kick Avril out. They refused to force Avril to leave. Lindsay eventually stormed off.

This continues a less-than-stellar news week for Lohan. On Monday, E*Trade — who Lohan sued for using a “milkaholic” baby named Lindsay in their commercial — filed a massive heap of court documents to argue that Lohan lives in California, and not New York as her lawsuit stated. So how are they trying to prove she’s a California girl? With hundreds of pages of gossip stories linking Lohan to Los Angeles clubs, incidents and yes, arrests.

The Federal Communications Commission is considering ways of warning wireless users when their bills start getting too high. After dozens of high-profile cases in which consumers have been landed with bills of thousands of dollars, it says it wants to find ways of averting such ‘bill shock’. Many over-the-top bills arise through unexpected roaming charges, but there are plenty of other reasons too.

“My bill suddenly tripled in one month. . . When I got to looking it over, I noticed that they had charged me for my mobile to mobile minutes,” read one recent complaint to the FCC. “They had advertised free mobile to mobile.”

“We are hearing from consumers about unpleasant surprises on their bills,” said Joel Gurin, Chief of the FCC’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. ”We’ve gotten hundreds of complaints about bill shock. But this is an avoidable problem. Avoiding bill shock is good for consumers and ultimately good business for wireless carriers as well.”

One method under consideration is to warn consumers via text message whehn their bill starts to approach a pre-set level. The EU made a similar move in March, forcing operators to enforce a cut-off limit for charges and warn users when their bill reaches 80 percent of this. Gurin said he was looking for public input on wherether there are any reasons why US wireless providers shouldn’t be able to issue alerts in the same way as their European counterparts.

According to TMZ, Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren are trying to strike agreements on child custody and division of assets … and then quietly and quickly file divorce papers to end their marriage.

Sources say one of the options is to actually file for divorce in Sweden — Elin wants to move there with the kids and Tiger would have to submit to the jurisdiction of the court.  Wherever the divorce is filed, the plan is to keep the custody and property settlement agreements out of the court file.  The quicker and quieter the divorce, the better.

The big issue however is that Tiger wants either custody or visitation, and assurance that he can go into court and enforce the agreement if Elin violates it.  Tiger Woods wants the option to go to either a Swedish or American court to enforce the custody agreement.

My opinion? He cheated, and visitation should be the absolute best he should expect — after he re-rehabs.

Hopefully the Nintendo 3DS will not fall to the same fate as the Virtual Boy did.

Speaking to the Associated Press on Friday, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata revealed that his company’s upcoming Nintendo 3DS will in fact gamers the choice of playing titles in both 3D and 2D. Exactly how one would switch from 3D to 2D and vise versa is unclear, but Iwata mentioned one of the primary reasons for the ability to remove the extra dimension is for the health of children’s eyesight. Also revealed by Iwata was the fact Nintendo is going to introduce a new set of anti-piracy measures with the 3DS. Unfortunately with this one, Iwata would not comment further saying he did not want to give pirates any clues about how the measures will work. Said Iwata on the piracy of video games: “We fear a kind of thinking is become widespread that paying for software is meaningless. We have a strong sense of crisis about this problem.” The Nintendo 3DS is scheduled to make its debut at E3 this June and go on sale in Q1 2011.