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Random observations

Gary Busey: bizarre

This is bizarre. Ryan Seacrest of KIIS FM and E! was doing an interview of Jennifer Garner and Laura Linney at the Oscars when Gary Busey interrupted the interview and kissed Garner on the neck. The next day, Busey calls Seacrest on his radio show and, well, I’m not going to try to explain it. Just listen to it. Watch the Oscars incident first…

… then visit this site and click the first “play” button on the right.

Credit to the Breakfast program on Triple J for bringing this to my attention a few weeks back.

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Random observations

This brought tears to my eyes

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Random observations

Scoble writing about Fox News

Yesterday I noticed that Scoble had posted an article about Fox News and the Anna Nicole Smith saga at around the same time as I had. It turns out that he actually scooped me by 15 minutes, and here I was thinking I was original! D’oh!

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Eco-philo-pol

Fox News Channel

Watching Fox News Channel is highly entertaining. After having watched quite a lot of it recently, I can’t say that it’s as biased as I once thought, though it still clearly does have a leaning toward the conservative side of politics. But, that’s probably okay since some of the other channels have a clear leaning toward “progressive” side of politics. However, I’m fascinated by the weight Fox News Channel gives to some stories.

For the past weeks, the intrigue surrounding the death of Anna Nicole Smith has been given an extraordinary amount of air-time. I can see why: it’s highly interesting stuff. Who’s the father of her baby (there are at least three possibilities, though another one surfaced in the last day or so)? How did she die? Was it murder, and if so, whodunnit?

Competing for air-time are the annual Spring Break and the Democrat bill to pull the troops out of Iraq by the end of August 2008. Among the questions being asked by Bill O’Reilly and co are why are young women doing all sorts of lewd things these days for what seems like barely any compensation? In particular, they ask why women will do pretty much anything for the Girls Gone Wild film crew in return for a t-shirt. Probably alcohol (and other stuff) has a bit to do with it, but it surely can’t be the sole explanation for the phenomenon. Again, an interesting story, but hardly worth the major air-time it’s getting. I wonder how it’s affecting Fox’s ratings?

The story about the House Democrats Bill is both interesting and fairly covered by Fox in my opinion. There’ve been numerous guests on a number of different shows debating the merits of the Bill. Personally, I’m not sure whether politicians in the House of Representatives ought to trying to dictate military strategy. Furthermore, while I’ve never really followed the progress of previous US Bills so closely, the level of pork barrelling that was required to get this Bill passed by the House seemed unbelievable to me. Democrat representatives have inserted subsidies for everything from shellfish to shrimp to peanuts and spinach, to the tune of $21 billion. How a Bill called “U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans’ Health and Iraq Accountability Act” can have anything to do with any of that stuff is beyond me. Even some of the Democrat sympathisers on Fox News were understandably struggling to justify these inclusions.

While I haven’t seen an actual news story on the incredible events at the Cricket World Cup on Fox News, the ticker at the bottom of the screen does show breaking news related to the murder of Bob Woolmer. So Fox News in the US is not completely oblivious to the world of cricket. Anyway, I can’t believe what’s going on in the Windies. Cricket, it seems, still has major, major problems to solve.

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Random observations

From Zero to 1.65 billion in less than two years

Speaking of Google acquisitions, YouTube has been snapped up by the Web search giant for the not insignificant sum of US$1.65 billion. YouTube was founded in February 2005. Not a bad pay-off for twenty months’ work! Okay, so a lot of the work was probably done before the company was founded, but still…

Anyway, this acquisition comes less than two weeks after Mark Cuban suggested that you’d have to be a moron to buy YouTube because of the litany of lawsuits that are, apparently, just waiting to happen. Material is often posted to YouTube by users who are not the copyright owners.

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Random observations

Blake’s 7

Some time ago, Karen bought us season one of an old BBC sci-fi series called Blake’s 7. Karen has already seen the whole series, and really liked it. We’ve finished watching season one together, and I’ve got to say I love it too! Naturally, it appeals to my inner geek, but the political intrigues are what hooked me. Avon rocks!

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Random observations

My new set-top box

I think many people observe that birthdays come around faster as they get older. For me, the last year seems to have flown past, despite the fact it has probably been one of the most eventful of my life so far. It started with an overseas holiday and ended with a new job as a researcher. Along the way, I submitted a Ph.D. thesis, began and ended a job as a software engineer, got engaged, bought a house, moved into said house (thereby leaving "home" for what was the last time), watched Australia finally qualify for the World Cup, and was awarded a Ph.D. (in something like that order). Needless to say, there are many, many people to thank for helping to make that year what it was.

So this year has a lot to live up to. It will start off well enough, for I’ll be marrying Karen in April. What else happens during the year remains to be seen, but I’m looking forward to it! I’m thoroughly enjoying my new job, and my interest in ubiquitous computing has been re-energised. On the one hand, I’m hoping for another eventful year (as long as the events are positive!). On the other hand, it would be nice to have a quiet year in which Karen and I can just enjoy being married.

Karen bought me a Humax set-top box for my birthday/Valentine’s day. It’s standard definition since we only have a standard definition 4:3 television anyway. It’s got an 80GB hard disk drive built into it for recording, and it has some nice features like being able to press pause while watching live television and having the stream buffered to the HDD. Handy for when you’re watching football and you get interrupted by a phone call. We used it last night to record Gilmore Girls, but I think we might have missed the end of it since the stupid Commonwealth Games swimming qualifiers went way overtime. Do television viewers really find it interesting to watch people swimming laps in a pool for so many hours on end? We were at Suncorp Stadium watching a highly entertaining game of football. :-)

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Random observations

Former Secretary of State in Gilmore Girls

The former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, will appear in an episode of Gilmore Girls. What I’d really like to know is, as one of the few shows that I used to watch on a regular basis, when is it coming back to Australian television? I know I’m not the only one who’d like an answer to that question. Please, Channel 9, bring it back.

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Random observations

NUMB3RS

There’s very little that I watch on TV these days, especially now that Desperate Housewives is in remission. I’ve been told that House is pretty good, but I haven’t watched any episodes of that yet. However, I’ve watched the first two episodes of NUMB3RS (Mondays at 8:30pm, Channel 10), and I might continue to watch it. If you haven’t seen it, the story follows two brothers. One is an FBI agent, and the other is a maths genius. The maths genius helps his brother to solve crimes by drawing upon all sorts of mathematics. Sound a bit far-fetched? It is rather. But you’ve got to give it points for attempting, and partially succeeding, to combine action drama with the P versus NP problem.