Time for television networks to go global?

I gave my predictions for American Idol several weeks ago. I think I did fairly well, I predicted Talylor Hicks would be in the final three, although I picked Chris Daughtrey out as the likely winner.

Having watched the build up for several weeks I was really ticked off to find out before the final show was broadcast in the UK that Taylor was the winner. The news landed in my aggregator from Halley Suitt, not that I blame Halley for posting on what was going on in her world.

I also keep falling over spoilers for The West Wing on Dave Winer's blog. Again, I don't blame Dave.

What I don't understand is why can't we have ABC, NBC and Fox broadcasting concurrently in the UK. I'm sure someone will fill me in with all the really clever reasons why this can't happen, but with the globalisation of information via the internet and blogs, the failure of television networks to go global is an anachronism.

I assume IPTV and ever faster broadband speeds will make my issue go away sooner rather than later, but right now sooner can't come quickly enough.

Tags: American Idol, Halley Suitt, Dave Winer

PowerPoint with a difference

This is a slide from my generic PowerPoint deck. I use it whilst I'm explaining why you won't see a bullet point during my presentations and why you will see lots of graphics. Bullet points are boring, images improve the transfer and retention of information. The panda is Tai Shan, resident of the National Zoo, Washington DC.



Tai Shan will be one year old on July 9th and you can often see him "live" on the PandaCam .

There is currently a campaign underway to make Tai Shan the official animal symbol of Washington DC. The details are over at the Pandafix Blog.

Tags: Tai Shan

SnagIt to Flickr made easy

TechSmith have released a very powerful new (and free) extension to their world beating SnagIt screen capture tool. The extension loads new profiles to the application that, at the touch of a button, enable the familiar screen capture and editing capabilities of SnagIt but then add the capability to push the finished capture straight to Flickr. Awesome.

I picked this up on the Techsmith blog here. And here is a direct link to the screencast that demonstrates the new functonality.

I took a screenshot of one of my favourite web destinations, Pandora, which is here.

I'd love to see a similar extension for Blogger!

Tags: TechSmith, SnagIt, Flickr, Pandora

Yawning

I love this picture. I think it's one of the best pictures that I've ever taken, which probably makes me not much of a photographer.

This is our cat Mulder, who looks like he's really angry in this picture. In fact this is him in mid-yawn.

Development in C# and .NET

One of my geek colleagues at work, Tony Caruana, has started a blog about C# and .NET development. It's not my field of expertise at all so I probably won't understand a lot of what he writes, nevertheless, welcome to the blogosphere Tony.

Tags: C Sharp, .Net

The Da Vinci Code

Last night, Linda and I went to see The Da Vinci Code starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou. The reviews have been pretty negative but I have to say we found it to be an excellent film and if you liked the book I'd definitely recommend it.

Tom Hanks has taken a fair amount of stick and to be fair he did look a little stilted, particularly in the early part of the story, but I think he was acting the role - of a bookish professor drawn into a murder mystery, a character a little out of his depth but doing his best to deal with the puzzles presented to him.

I think Ron Howard did a terrific job of bringing a complex plot to the big screen and I didn't walk out trying to work out what was missing from the book. This makes for a long movie but to be honest when I worked out we'd been in the cinema nearly three hours our first thought was about how fast the time had passed.

As for the controversy over the some of the ideas woven into the plot, when did we forget that fiction is a creation that does not represent actuality but has been invented?

Tags: Da Vinci Code

SnagIt the wondertoy

I am a huge, huge fan of SnagIt, and am seriously enjoying the latest incarnation; SnagIt 8. Betsy Weber, Chief Evangelist at Techsmith (the creators of SnagIt) blogs over at the cunningly titled Techsmith Blog. She's at a conference in Vegas and making short screencasts with visitors to the Techsmith booth using another tool from the Techsmith portfolio, Camtasia. Very cool if you want to quickly see the power of what can be done with both SnagIt and Camtasia.

Tags: SnagIt, Camtasia, Techsmith

Capturing a Dream

My best friend, who also just happens to be my wife, Linda has started blogging over at Capturing a Dream. She's planning to focus on her adventures with photography, Adobe Photoshop and all things digital. Welcome to the blogosphere sweetheart.