The F-35: A weapon that costs more than Australia. The U.S. will ultimately spend $1 trillion for these fighter planes. Where’s the outrage over Washington’s culture of waste?
Author: Greg
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The Red Button
Press the red button, ubiquitous for interactive TV in the UK. The interactive TV revolution began in August 1999 when Sky Sports broadcast an interactive version of Arsenal vs. Manchester United that allowed viewers to change camera angles and later added a fans commentary stream, since then a whole slew of sporting events have been made better by the red button.
Wimbledon? Choose which court you wanted to see. Golf? Watch pairings or individual holes. Champions League? Choose which group match you wanted. Olympics? Choose your event. Cricket and Rugby? Choose camera angles and commentary. Super Bowl? Choose if you wanted the US or UK commentary. The list goes on and on…
I’m currently watching the Wales vs. Ireland 6 Nations match that comes with no fewer than 5 commentary streams, one of which is the referee’s mic which makes for interesting hearing at times. It got me thinking that interactive TV wasn’t really as ubiquitous in the United States, at least not in my experience. The closest thing was DirecTV’s channel mix which pulled feeds from separate channels rather than having it all on the one feed. Instead of flipping between feeds it just bumped you to that particular channel.
NBC offers an interactive experience on their website, they offer multiple camera angles for Sunday Night Football Extra and the opportunity to watch 4 streams at once or picture in picture during the Olympics but as it’s on their website it can’t really be thought of as interactive TV.
I’m very surprised, we’re entering our 12th year of interactive TV in the UK, but yet it hasn’t quite gotten any traction stateside, I thought they would be all over thise…
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Burned Out on Google Doodles
Another day, another Google Doodle, our 44th this year so far. Remember when these used to be special, now there is practically a new one every other day. Hard not to get tired of them…
Today’s is for International Woman’s Day, a couple of day ago it was Will Eisner’s 94th Birthday, a few days before that it was St. David’s Day. It’s starting to spiral out of control…
Compare the numbers:
1998: 3 Doodles
1999: 5 Doodles
2000: 33 Doodles (bumped up by being a Summer Olympic year)
2001: 22 Doodles
2002: 47 Doodles (Winter Olympic and FIFA World Cup year)
2003: 39 Doodles
2004: 24 Doodles (Summer Olympic year)
2005: 44 Doodles
2006: 58 Doodles (Winter Olympic and FIFA World Cup year)
2007: 36 Doodles
2008: 151 Doodles (Summer Olympic Year)
2009: 197 Doodles
2010: 271 Doodles (Winter Olympic and FIFA World Cup year, also the first interactive Google Doodle in the form of PacMan)
2011: (so far) 44 DoodlesGrowth year over year, and it must be noted that you don’t see every Doodle as some are only shown in selected countries. How soon before the Doodle overtakes the Google logo?
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Pixar’s Up Movie House Re-created in Real Life
Pixar’s Up movie house re-created in real life. It was a project undertaken by the National Geographic Channel along with a team of scientists, engineers and experts (the kind of people who can can launch a 16? X 16? X 18? house to an altitude of 10,000 feet). The effort is considered as the largest balloon cluster flight ever attempted.
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IE6 Countdown
10 years ago a browser was born. Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it’s time to say goodbye. “This website is dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide, so more websites can choose to drop support for Internet Explorer 6, saving hours of work for web developers.” HALLELUJAH!
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Chain of Fools
Upgrading from MS DOS 5 to Windows 7 using every major version of Microsoft Windows. Let’s just forget he skipped Windows ME, in fact let’s just forget that even existed…
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Angry Birds Letters from the Front Lines
Angry Birds Letters from the Front Lines. The enemy has now taken to placing boxes of TNT inside their own camps. Every night, I am haunted by visions of innocent green pigs senselessly killed by these horrific explosions. They’re using their own people as human shields. What kind of god would allow such beastly, immoral acts?
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Winning!
Charlie Sheen joins twitter, hilarity ensues. He currently has just over 800,000 followers in less than a day, we’re all waiting for the inevitable meltdown. 140 characters at a time…
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Blowing Cobwebs
My yearly attempt to restart this faltering blog begins again…
There will be no recap of the last 10 months, those who need to know already know. There might be pictures again on the Flickr/Moblog side, there might not be. There might be the reposting of links in the Linklog side, again there might not be. There might even be actual Blog posts, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Baby steps.
The strange thing is I find that I’ve rolled full circle from when I started this iteration of my once popular blog, I’m back home, living with my mother, lamenting lost love. So this is a reboot in so many ways. Needless to say there’s more to see than can ever be seen and more to do than can ever be done, that’s the circle of life, and it does move us all…
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Old Firm, New World
A few day ago I heard the first rumblings of what could be a great spectacle, but now I can’t help feel it’s a recipe for disaster… I am, of course, talking about the proposed Rangers vs. Celtic “friendly” at Fenway Park in Boston.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m so there, but while I read more about Red Sox officials saying how they handle rivalries like Sawks vs. Yanks at Fenway, I’m thinking they are completely unprepared in every sense… Simply put, there is no rivalry in America that comes within a million miles of Rangers vs. Celtic, they claim games like Red Sox vs. Yankees, but at the end of the day, those fans sit together in peace and harmony at both stadiums. Try that with these two teams and you’ll end up with a proverbial bloodbath. It’s not just a game, it’s religious, it’s political, it’s life and death and that’s not just hyperbole.
Fenway Park is a nice baseball stadium, a little cramped, holding only around 37,000, some say it has poor sightlines, and it’s jammed into a city neighbourhood with plenty of bars within spitting distance. How can they possibly try to segregate these fans? In fact how can they even begin to sell tickets publicly? I’d love for it to happen, but there is still a lot of unanswered questions right now.
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Cleveland’s Social Deck
Cleveland Indians open up a “social deck” section for bloggers and tweeters. In this press box for social media types, they get a press kit, media guide and press releases, and they are free to update followers and readers throughout the game just as they normally would. But unlike the traditional press box, they don’t get any access to players or managers. It’s a very cool idea I’d like a few other teams to follow.
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House Finale Filmed With Canon 5D Mark II
House season finale filmed with Canon 5D Mark II. Just like Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride was filmed using a pro-sumer DSLR, so has this years Season finale of House. With more models offering full 1080p HD video output, will we be seeing more of this filming technique?
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Business Tips From Van Halen
Business Tips from Van Halen. How Van Halen’s “infamous” no-brown-M&M test acted as a diagnostic, allowing the band to spot potential problems early.
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These Hands Don’t Write…
It’s been a while, I gave up a long time ago, basically when I lost my job back in the heady days of 2008. Intermittent posts here and there, but basically… Y’know?
This really hit me a week or so ago when I was at the Ballantyne tweetup when an aquaintance I hadn’t seen before we went to Scotland in January (yeah, we went to Scotland again) asked me if there was a blog post regarding this… My flippant reply was “these hands don’t write” and that is both true and decidedly untrue. I don’t blog (is it still called that?) but I tweet my days away like no-ones business.
So right here, right now, I’m trying to get back into it, whatever it is…
