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Erica Boeke is on the show today to talk about her new book "GameFace: The Kick-Ass Guide for Women Who Seriously Love Pro Sports." On the show, we talk about women and their fascination with watching hockey players kick each others' ass. And Justin reveals that he has never played baseball, basketball, football, or hell, even played catch in his life.

Ericka Boeke in a 404 sandwich.

(Credit: Matt Fitzgerald/CNET)

We don't talk too much technology today, but we promise: we have a good time with sports and our general ability to turn any seemingly benign topic into a sexual innuendo. After Justin talks about men playing hockey, you'll never think about it in an unerotic way again.

Briefly on the show, we mention the war going on between Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," and Jim Cramer, host of CNBC's "Mad Money." Jon Stewart pretty much destroys Jim Cramer and the entire financial news media. We've never almost seen a grown man crying on cable television.

As usual, keep the voice mails coming: 1-866-404-CNET (2638). We still haven't found the right motto yet, but boy do we have a good time sorting through them. Or if you just want to leave a message about how Erica Boeke looks like Helen Hunt, that's fine too. Everyone have a great weekend, and you'll hear us next week when Jeff asks the Sleep Doctor Michael Breus how to stop farting in his sleep.

(Updated 3/13/09 to add new iPhone app.)

Watching the Super Bowl is easy: one game on a Sunday. But March Madness stretches across three weeks and more than 60 games. Short of being unemployed in this recession (not recommended!) you're going to struggle to be in front of a TV for it all. Unless you apply a little technology.

The March Madness on Demand site flashes some new moves for the 2009 season.

(Credit: NCAA)

March Madness' home on the Web is the NCAA's March Madness on Demand site. You'll find all 63 games streamed live, and if you install Microsoft's Silverlight technology you get higher-quality video augmented by integrated team coverage, interactive boards, and a "boss button" so you can bury it all and bring up a phony spreadsheet if The Man walks by. After a game, hit the site for highlights, a full game replay, and buzzer beaters. (Disclosure: CNET is a division of CBS, whose CBS Sports unit broadcasts March Madness.)

On the iPhone and iPod Touch there's a March Madness on Demand app that will bring you a live stream of all 63 games. It's powered by MobiTV and also offers game previews, post-game highlights, and tournament news updates. They say it will do all this over an EDGE or 3G connection and offer game audio only if you just want to listen in. It costs $4.99 in the iTunes App Store.

Many other cell phones can become miniature March Madness televisions this year thanks to MediaFLO technology. Rather than a glitchy Web stream, this is a dedicated digital video signal to your phone. It looks really good. You need to check with your carrier to see if you have coverage in your market and the right phone to receive it. AT&T has the rights to offer all the games, and Verizon will pick up East and West contests.

Back home on the couch, CBS Sports has the broadcast and there's some good stuff in DirecTV's Mega March Madness package if you're willing to part with $69. It will put up to four live games on your TV at once in a four-way split screen with the ability to switch between them, a streaming stats ticker, and interactive brackets.

And of course you can beam March Madness from your living room to any connected computer and most smartphones using one of the SlingBox variants.

(Credit: EA Sprots)

March 11 marks a first for EA. Available via downloadable content is the official NCAA Tournament edition of its college basketball video game. This will be exclusive DLC for the Xbox 360, fittingly called NCAA Basketball 09: March Madness Edition.

NCAA Basketball 09: March Madness Edition will be easy to download for the Xbox 360 through Xbox Live Marketplace for 1,200 Microsoft Points beginning March 11. The game will initially feature teams from last year's tournament, and then beginning on March 18, it will feature the just-announced official Selection Sunday brackets and accurate teams with updated ratings.

"We really wanted to make our game available to a wider selection of fans that are drawn to college basketball by the passion, excitement and drama that surrounds March Madness," said Connor Dougan, Producer for NCAA Basketball 09: March Madness Edition. "Fans will be able to experience the tournament, feel the adrenaline rush that comes with a single loss elimination tournament and write their own history."

"Few sporting events capture the excitement and intensity of March Madness, so it's great to be able to offer everyone a chance to play with NCAA Basketball 09: March Madness Edition, an exclusive to Xbox Live and Xbox 360," said Marc Whitten, general manager of Xbox Live. "Xbox Live continues to break new ground, offering new ways to play and enjoy your favorite games and entertainment. With EA we are offering everyone a chance to experience a blockbuster game tailored specifically for March Madness in a way that has never been done before."

The NCAA 2009 Tournament tips off exclusively on CBS Sports on March 19.

(Credit: USB Geek)

If your favorite basketball team got knocked out of the playoffs or the Final Four, here's a way to pay tribute to the fallen warriors. Or, if they really screwed up, you can paint their logo on this "USB Basketball Player Cam" and twist it into humiliating positions.

Either way it can make a statement all your own, which is more than most Webcams can do even when they're on steroids--all without freaking out your co-workers or anyone else, for that matter. The best thing about it is the basketball itself, which you can actually steal from the little baller: That means you'll always have someone to shoot hoops with at your desk.

Friday morning, I walked past a colleague's desk and--I swear--saw a basketball game on her computer screen. When I got closer, however, all I could see were a bunch of very official-looking bars and charts.

(Credit: NCAA)

She was working hard. Real hard. Then she laughed, hit a key, and flipped back to the basketball game in a clear indication that I'm either a boss people can be honest with or a boss who doesn't exactly strike fear into the rank and file. Or both.

The "boss button" and silly office decorum strike again. For those of you who for some reason don't know what a boss button is, it's pretty simple: It helps you look at stuff on your PC at work that you're not supposed to be looking at. Hit a key, and the screen instantly flips to something that vaguely looks like something you should be looking at in the office.

Boss buttons (or keys) have been around for years, of course. Some Macintosh games back in the 1980s included them (though for most of us using Macs in those days, it was more like a "parent button" because we were supposed to be doing our homework). CNET's Download.com has a list of boss buttons, and there are even entire sites dedicated to them.

Come every March, thanks to office pools on the NCAA college basketball tournament, boss buttons are as common on desktop computers as personal e-mails and photos of your friends: They're probably not supposed to be there, but we all have them. NCAA.com has even provided a helpful boss button on its Web site.

Here's a thought: Let's stop all the silly shenanigans and make boss buttons a thing of the past. Get it out in the open and let people keep track of the office pools without worrying about getting into trouble. The average American is spending more time in the office than ever. And the average tech worker spends even more time than that. There's a reason all those Silicon Valley companies offer free food, subsidized child care, laundry, auto-detailing, and swanky gyms: So you never have an excuse to go home.

So cut those hardworking people a break. We're not talking porn here, folks. Let's put a TV somewhere in the office and stop all the sneaking around.

I know what the killjoys are thinking right now: This is a slippery slope! What's next: Christmas shopping at the desk? Sharing funny YouTube videos with coworkers? Where does the madness stop?

The ultimate office killjoys at Challenger, Gray & Christmas have even put a dollar figure on the money lost to people checking out the NCAA tournament while at work: It could be as much as $1.7 billion in wasted work time over the 16 business days of the tournament. The Challenger estimate is based on "the number of people expected to participate in office pools, the amount of money they earn and the amount of work time wasted on March Madness related activities, whether it is trash talking at the watercooler or watching live videos of the games during business hours."

While I have no idea how much money Challenger wasted doing this research, it does have a few more tidbits: A 2006 Harris poll found that 13 percent of Americans aged 18 and older plan to participate in an office March Madness pool. The press release announcing the Challenger survey goes on for six pages. In fairness, it offers some workplace tips for dealing with the tournament. OK, some of them are pretty corny, but I appreciate the spirit:

•  Pick 64 MVPs. This is high on the cornball meter. Bestow MVP honors on employees chosen ahead of time...for some reason. No, I really don't get it either.

•  Team sweatshirt day. Relax the dress code for the first Friday of the tournament so everyone can wear the sweatshirt of their favorite team. At CNET, we'd call this "formal attire day," but I imagine that would be letting down the hair at a lot of offices.

•  Offer anti-tourney prizes. Basically, start something for the people who don't care about basketball. Sure. Gotta be fair and all that.

•  Offer flexible schedules. Umm, OK, I don't know about this one. The manager in me says, "Are you insane? It's just freaking basketball."

•  Organize a company pool. Done. I mean, CNET in no way encourages gambling on collegiate or professional sports.

•  Keep a bracket posted. Good idea. But I should reiterate, CNET in no way encourages gambling on a collegiate or professional sports.

•  Keep television in break room tuned to coverage. Duh! It's what I'm saying. Let's take it out of the closet. Do away with the boss button, and accept the facts: For 16 days, nearly all of us are college basketball fans. We pretend to know the starting lineup of Western Kentucky, and feign shock when Stanford fails yet again to make the Final Four.

And please, stop with the boss button. I know exactly what you're doing.

For the next three weeks, office workers across the country will have visions of buzzer-beaters dancing in their heads.

It's NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament time, and that means brackets will be zipping through e-mail systems in organizations large and small. There are dozens of sites that let you make your tournament choices online, whether to test your basketball-prediction acumen against the masses, or to recruit friends and coworkers in a private pool.

You can even use Google's Basketball Bracket Battle gadget to place your choices on your iGoogle page. After you select the "Create a bracket on iGoogle" link, the gadget is added to your iGoogle page, and you're invited to join a league, or to form a league of your own. Clicking the first option leads to a window where you give your bracket a name, or enter an existing league, which requires a password. The gadget lets you complete as many as five separate brackets, which you can share with friends and coworkers. The brackets weren't available as of 9 p.m. PDT last night, so I can't tell you anything about the selecting your winners, but you're also asked to predict the score of the championship game. You have to complete your picks by the start of the first game this Thursday.

DIY approach to basketball brackets
I got the fever early and spent part of my weekend creating my own brackets on Google Docs. First, I added rows for the first and second rounds, Regionals, Semifinals, and Championship. Since I followed the standard custom of putting two regional brackets side by side, I made mirror images, with the Midwest and West regions on one side, and the East and South regions on the other. Then I created the "brackets" themselves by adding lines to the bottom and sides of the appropriate cells by clicking the Borders icon on the toolbar and selecting one of the eight options.

Create your 'brackets' by choosing the appropriate border option from the Google Docs toolbar.

(Credit: Google)

After I entered the seeds in each of the four brackets, the worksheet was ready to share with everyone, or a select few. I made it available to everyone by clicking the Publish button in the top-right corner of the window, which generates a URL you can send to anyone. I can also limit who has access to the brackets by clicking Share and choosing "to fill out a form" under Invite people on the left, and then the Start editing your form button.

Share your NCAA Basketball Tournament brackets with friends and coworkers by converting it into a form.

(Credit: Google)

The only problem with the form approach is that you have to create a separate question for each game, and since you don't know who'll be playing after the first round, you have to use text fields rather than checkboxes or a two-item list; the other choices--paragraph text and multiple choice--aren't suitable in this instance. Still, the form approach simplifies management by making it easy to collect everyone's choices. It's also an effective alternative to the Microsoft Word approach to conducting surveys that I described last week. (My thanks to the readers who pointed out the online-survey technique).

After you complete the form questions, or if you share the worksheet as is, you add the e-mail addresses of your "collaborators", and decide whether they can invite others. You're also given the options to make the file read-only, or include its URL.

Now that you've set up your pool and made your picks, you can get back to work--at least until tipoff on Thursday.

Tomorrow: reduce your PC's power consumption.

(Credit: Terrific Toys)

Finally, a USB gadget that's actually useful. We had pretty much given up on the one-time novel plug-and-play desktop devices until they became so common that practically anything that required electricity was being turned into a USB product. Thanko's recently released aromatherapy treatment was probably a new all-time low.

The "USB Hoops Basketball Game" is a undeniable exception to that trend, the first USB-worthy item in recent memory. Our only quibble is the obvious missed opportunity: The game keeps score on its own digital display, but the USB connection could have been used to create all types of neat stuff on the computer, such as online office tournaments.

Once again, Crave is always thinking of ways to keep your workplace at optimum productivity.

A PACE Fusion 3D high-definition camera.

(Credit: PACE)

3D cinema might be considered a corny 1970s gimmick these days, but the National Basketball Association is hoping you'll be willing to shake off that attitude in time for the NBA All-Star Game in Las Vegas this Sunday. The league has partnered with digital-cinema group PACE for live 3D broadcasts of Saturday night's pre-show event as well as Sunday night's game. And, yes, you do have to wear special glasses to see it in full. Thankfully, they're a little less geeky than the red-and-blue lenses so frequently associated with 3D cinema (they're almost indistinguishable from normal sunglasses).

I was able to check out a press preview of the 3D HD technology, and I can tell you that it's pretty darn cool--and nowhere near as gimmicky as you might think. Unfortunately, right now attendance at the All-Star Game broadcasts is limited to an invite-only guest list at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Vegas. But reps from both PACE and the NBA are hoping that the phenomenon will eventually catch on in cinemas as well as more sporting events.

Will this lift 3D cinema above its Jaws 3-D reputation? We'll see...