Bad news — tonight’s episode was dedicated to airplane myths, but none of them had anything to do with a plane on a conveyor belt.

Next week’s episode is a Holiday Special, but the TiVo listings claim it’s a repeat. There’s another episode next week on the schedule that takes myths from an on-line poll. That might be likely, too.

Stay tuned, and keep your DVRs recording. . .

(And perhaps more exciting: They’re working on a MacGyver special!)

Update: Producers have responded on-line. The episode has been rescheduled for the end of January now. ::sigh::

Welcome to THE SHOT, Week Six.

As the weeks drag on, the contestants get worse and worse. Check that — Maria is getting a little bit better, but Jason has gone from being inspired to being overcomplicated. Robin is out the door now, but I never much cared for her, anyway. Dean has lost his confidence. And John the wedding photographer dude is relying too much on others to get by. He’s not bad, but he’s not as skilled as Jason. (Don’t get me wrong — I like wedding photographers. They get a bad rap, but they have to be skilled in multiple types of photography to make their living.)

Jason and John had an argument in which both sides lost by changing tactics midway through and looking like hypocrites for it. John looked immature and Jason looked holier-than-thou.

I used to think that Jason deserved to win this thing, hands down, but Maria is coming on strong.

But none of them really deserve to win. This is a lousy cast. I wish someone would do a reality show in which the contestants are nurtured and trained while they learn, rather than thrown into something cold and expected to adapt quickly while overcoming insane pressure. I think the learning version would be much more informative and interesting.

I know, I know. It’ll never happen. A boy could dream, though.

One last thing I noticed this week: All the contestants paid homage to Russell James this week by going barefoot into the judge’s room. I just noticed it this week — have they been doing it all along without me paying attention?

Trebek hospitalized with heart attack - Yahoo! News

Longtime “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek was hospitalized Tuesday after a minor heart attack, a spokesman for the game show said.
Trebek, 67, was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center late Monday night and was expected to remain there about two days for tests and observation, said show spokesman Jeff Ritter.

Did anyone play the first game?

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

This might be the release that decides the Blu Ray/HD-DVD war. Warner Bros is the last major studio to still release movies in both formats, having not yet been bought out by Microsoft. There are rumors now that Warner Bros might be deciding between the two camps in time for CES next month.

HARRY POTTER is their biggest release between now and then. So they’d be watching the sales figures on this release VERY closely. If there’s a big disparity between Blu Ray and HD-DVD format numbers on this movie Warner Bros could use that to choose a side.

Those covers above, by the way, are the regular DVD edition, the HD-DVD/Standard DVD edition, and the Blu-Ray edition.

• The Bourne Ultimatum

Sure, it goes over the edge in the Believability Column at the end, but it’s still a pretty cool movie trilogy.

• Lost Season Three

Remember LOST? It got really good down the stretch there last season. Then, it changed the game completely and left us hanging off a cliff. It’s going to do the same exact thing in the shortened fourth season coming up. I love it.

• High School Musical 2 - Extended Edition

Why? It’s Christmas time! How many letters to Santa will include this bad boy in it? How many parents wouldn’t be able to tell the difference on the store shelves between the extended edition and the regular edition? ::sigh::

Next week, we’ll have more DVDs, but not too many. And on Christmas week, we’ll likely have none, but let’s not get TOO FAR ahead of ourselves.

As always, you can follow all my Twittering over here.

For now, here are some recent highlights to start your week:

• Best Buy sent me a coupon that might be a $5 winner or a $5,000 winner. Odds are, the employee will snatch it from me, giggle, and gimme 0
• Having a TalkShoe account does not make you an interesting podcaster. It’s likely the inverse, actually.
• Tallest waste of ad dollars this holiday season? Nintendo advertising the Wii - the gift nobody can keep in stock. (A couple of days later, this story sprung up.)
• Remember Microsoft’s Origami Tablet PC? That’s OK, the rest of us had forgotten about it, too.
• With all of the negative Leopard/Vista publicity, isn’t this the perfect time for the Amiga OS to rise triumphant? Nah. . .
• What’s the 2007 equivalent of “Be kind. Rewind.”? “Return your Netflix DVD quickly.”?
• Canon XTI now below $600 at Amazon. ::drool::
• Next door neighbors are arguing amongst themselves again. “I didn’t mean to throw the dog,” the daughter just said. Uh oh.
  He says the step-daughter is “taking it out on the dog.” This is a 250 lb man defending a 10 pound purse-sized pup.
• Entertaining Trident Original Flavor is God’s Gum.
• I know what I’m getting for Christmas and that doesn’t bother me. I’m an old man.
• Do you think sit-com writers hear laugh tracks after everything they say?
• CompUSA is officially closing all stores. They all closed over here months ago.
• EEE or OLPC? If you understood that question, you might be a geek. . .
• At the beginning of each week, I have too many podcasts. By Thursday, I’m digging deep for ANYTHING. ::sigh::
• I found the music I keep hearing as background music in other podcasts - it’s built into Garageband. UGH

I totaled up all the writings on this blog for the month of November. I did not include the quoted passages from stories I linked to, though I did include the repurposed Twitter content.

10,000 words.

Only 40,000 short a novel.

One of these days, I’ll figure out what my average month’s writing is to see if this experiment was at all a success.

Overlooked last week:

Will he outsell Jordin Sparks? I believe we’ll find out in the next couple of days.

And Jessica Sierra’s downward spiral continues. . .

Commodore 64 still loved after all these years - CNN.com

Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people’s hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever.

“There was something magical about the C64,” says Andreas Wallstrom of Stockholm, Sweden. […]
Often overshadowed by the Apple II and Atari 800, the Commodore 64 rose to great heights in the 1980s. From 1982-1993, 17 million C64s were sold. The Guinness Book of World Records lists the Commodore 64 as the best-selling single computer model.

::sigh:: They don’t make them like they used to. Mine lasted me through high school and wasn’t replaced until I started college in 1994. Those things were workhorses!

Related Various and Sundry Stories:

• C64: GEOS (14 Feb 2004)
• C=64 - with pics! (10 Sept 2003)
• The Rise and Fall of Commodore (20 Nov 2006)
• Commodore to Get 30-in-1 TV Game (01 May 2005)

Dear Best Buy,

Thanks so much for sending me that special Christmas coupon, worth somewhere between $5 and $5000. It’s a brilliant promotion for this season, as it expires on Christmas Eve and requires me to set foot in the store to have a “customer specialist” (is that what they call cashiers today? Is “clerks” passe?) scan the coupon to let me know how much it’s worth.

I ventured off to the local Best Buy store yesterday on my lunch hour to find out what I’d won. The nice man at the door shrugged when I asked him where the nearest “customer specialist” was before pointing me at the cashier.

I waited patiently for the cashier to ring up the person standing there, and then smiled as I showed him the coupon.

“I’m sorry; we can’t scan that. I know it says we can, but we can’t. It’s probably $5.”

So screw you, Best Buy. I didn’t spend it that day. I didn’t give you a dime of my money. I’ll try again another day when I have something specific in mind to buy. I wasn’t going to be tricked into buying something randomly for the thrill of possibly winning money.

But if I DO win the big bucks, I’ll buy a camera — if that 300 pound man isn’t blocking the entire Canon half of the display next time I’m at the store.

Sometimes, I can’t win.

Thanks for your false advertising. Next time, I hope you live up to your word, but I won’t be counting on it.

Sincerely yours,
Me

P.S. Next time I go to pay for something at your store, I’m just going to show you my credit card. The limit on it is good. I have my last credit card bill to prove it. But I won’t let you scan it. You’ll have to buy something from me first.

P.P.S. But getting rid of the mail-in rebates was cool.

Get them here.

I own, I think, one album that got any nominations in this list.  (It’s Maroon V’s album, which I really did like a lot.)
Thus, I do not really care about the Grammys, save for the car wreck potential of the telecast.

• Your Flash game du jour: Meltdown. Similar premise to a million other chain reaction type games, but different enough to become addicting. My high score: 155.
• Feel like watching some Muppets on YouTube? Here’s a great list of musical Muppet acts. Includes Elton John, Blondie, Steve Martin, and more.
• If you’re wondering why all the webcomic artists are suddenly pushing you to buy their print collections, I have a guess; The New Cintiq Tablets. They now have a $1000 model. it’s a small screen, but if I were an up-and-coming cartoonist, I’d be all over this. I imagine it has the power to transform some workflows of comic creators, too. I expect a lot of comic colorists might jump on this, too. Mark my words.
• You Park Like A Very Bad Person. Dot Com. (URL is NSFW)
• The Japanese launch of Wii Fit was very successful.

And now for the geekery:

• Regexes are the coolest things in the known universe, but difficult to grok for many. I’m not sure this page makes it any easier, but different strokes for different folks, and all that.
• I love the fact that if you search on my name in Google Books, there’s an actual result! Oddly enough, there’s two — the second one is in Japanese. It’s for Podcasting Hacks, an early podcasting book from O’Reilly that I was interviewed for. I’m still tickled that I made an O’Reilly book!
• In 1897, the Indiana State Legislature attempted to simplify the lives of millions of math students overnight by setting pi equal to 3. It failed. All together now: 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971. . . .
• Here’s some help memorizing the digits of pi.

Just a friendly reminder:

MYTHBUSTERS is on this coming Wednesday, December 12th, on The Discovery Channel at 9 p.m. East Coast time. Set your DVR Of Choice today to find out if the plane takes off!

[Post partially rewritten because the original was clearly influenced by a lack of sleep.  Seriously, it made almost no sense and nobody called me on it?]

DS Game Takes Place of Glucose Monitor | Game | Life from Wired.com

The GlucoBoy, a glucose monitor that lets users play games by plugging it into a GameBoy Advance or DS, could be an important tool for helping children learn to manage their diabetes. […]

The GlucoBoy helps players manage their diabetes by awarding points whenever they perform a glucose test, with extra points given out if the test results fall within specific goals. Points can be used to unlock new games, or can be spent at GRiP (Guidance Reward Platform), a site that offers accessories, apparel, and cards for Knock ‘em Downs, one of the games featured in the GlucoBoy.

If you missed it, go download the latest episode of This Week In Tech right this very minute. Run, don’t walk.

Fast forward to the 42:32 mark, where host Leo Laporte attempts to do an Audible commercial. Problem is, Audible heavily DRMs all the books you download from them. And TWiT panelist Cory Doctorow is a die-hard anti-DRM kind of guy, and not ashamed to talk about it. As an author, his dealings with Audible have been disappointing.

So every time Leo tries to defend Audible, Cory smacks him down.

By the time everything is said and done, Leo’s bailed on the commercial and you’re listened to five minutes of wonderfully awkward podcasting.