Freyburg

Here’s one person’s account of ditching the tube, courtesy of the Guardian.

Since CBC Newsworld is in serious rerun territory, I’ve barely turned my TV on. It makes me question why I even pay for cable, since I get most of what I want to watch via torrents anyway. The TV makes a fine output for my Xbox, but I’m not sure I even want to bother getting a new tv when I eventually move into a bigger place. It takes up a pile of room, and if I’m having people over the last thing they’ll be doing is hanging around watching the idiot box. I;m seriously considering just getting an LCD monitor with video inputs, so I have something to play Xbox and watch torrents on, and just forego the flood of drivel altogether.

Using a picture from Flickr, you can slap together wacky (or serious, Mr. Downerpants) magazine covers using this site. Pretty nifty (stole the link from Kottke.)

According to Fortune, you can forget about the much touted “hot coffee” sex scene in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that’s causing such a stir amongst the town fathers. Instead, concentrate on the financial chicanery of the game’s creators, Take Two Interactive.

I should care that the CBC is on strike, particularly since Newsworld is my breakfast viewing of choice. But surprisingly, it’s been real easy to replace MotherCorp with a variety of information sources, mostly Internet based. I’d bet the rest of Canada feels about the same way, though you’d never know it from the insular over-analyzing going on at rival media outlets.

But that says something about the decline of the CBC over the past few years. Frankly, their radio is getting a little too over-earnest and faux-hip for me (insert DNTO rant here), and the main television station was always a bit of a write-off. Newsworld was consistently decent, but now that they’re stacking the deck with old Passionate Eye reruns, I can hardly complain.

National Public Radio, or “PBS for your ear”, used to have a lot of their programs available through Audible.com. Which is all well and good, except that I’m cheap, and don’t want to pay for public radio (even though technically my taxes didn’t have anything to do with it, and instead went to fund a labour dispute at the CBC..:) ) At any rate, apparently NPR is going to dramatically expand the number of podcasts they offer soon. I’m pretty happy about this (if it’s true), because I got hooked on NPR when I was living in Osoyoos.

I suspect the reason people are coming up with scuttlebutt about Google’s possible futures is the same as with Apple; people really like the product and want to know what’s next. Nobody’s speculating madly about what bold innovations the next version of Windows will hold, because there won’t be any.

At any rate, Business 2.0 is prognosticating on a possible continent-wide wifi network run by Google, and in a bold display of synergistic paradigm shifting, there’s another rumour floating around about Apple and Google getting together for an online version of the iTunes Music store.

The NYT looks at the current state of affairs in Iraq, and it ain’t pretty.

I’ve been an Id slave since the original Quake, back in 1995. I remember playing that fine bit o’ code on my Pentium 133, looking up more than once to find I’d been playing the game all night and had hit morning. Though I don’t go to those extremes now (I’m old, sonny, I can’t hack yer newfangled game contraptions!), I do appreciate a good FPS shoot-em-up every now and again. In fact, most of the games on my Xbox are FPS, or variants thereof (like Metal Gear Solid and Max Payne 2.) Quake 4 is the latest in a long line of bloody, entertaining kill-fests from the boys from Texas.

But Quake 4 isn’t coming out on my big green brick. It’s going to be a Xbox360 title, and it’s probably one of the main reasons I’ll pick that beast up. In a way, it’s good to have both systems; my Xbox is modded so I can use it as a media centre, but a side effect is I can never log onto Xbox Live because they don’t allow modded systems. So when the 360 comes out I’ll get to experience the joy of hearing a 14-year-old in Vermont call me a “FAG N00B” on Live, then get shot to hell by him half a second later, while still using my old Xbox for movies and such.

It takes balls of steel to run a Chinese restaurant in Baghdad, as this story in the NYT illustrates.

The Internet has overtaken television as the medium of choice in the oft-coveted 18 to 34 age bracket. I have new hope for the future; at least if kids are yelling “U R TEH SUX0R!” at one another over World of Warcraft, they aren’t being pummelled by Friends and other such drivel.