TV

Running

I went for another run this morning… And I think I did fairly well. Temperature was down a bit which helped I think. This time I went with the cellphone in the pocket but it did not ring. I also had the GPS there and a small radio. The GPS was mostly used to monitor distance to provide a target for me to reach.

Now, I bet you are waiting with baited breath as to how I went. The answer is fairly well. I managed to run 5.1KM in 35m 30s. This is close to the furthest I have *EVER* run, and the longest I have run since August 2000. All in all this is a great result. This means that I was running about 8.6km/h which is not a bad speed either. In the coming days and weeks I intend to increase the speed more than the distance. I should be able to increase distance without too much issue.

I have had a couple of friends suggest going in the City to Surf in the past. I will see how I go… Maybe…

Television

I was looking at BoingBoing this morning and I found an interesting Story about how Dutch MTV station TMF recently held an awards ceremony. This would have been fine, except they got people to vote by SMS for their choice of ‘Artist of the Decade’, and got a percentage of the 70 Euro Cents per SMS. This is normal television these days.

The only problem was that Dutch singer Marco Borsato had already been selected, and the results had been distributed to the media BEFORE THE SHOW WAS BROADCAST. They were found out when one member of the press broke the embargo and released the results. They were totally ignoring the voting – and making money on it. They are now being investigated for fraud. They are claiming that the results distributed to the press were ‘provisional’ based on votes to date.

Logies

Thankfully a show like The Logies that was on last night tends to be a bit more professional with how they do things, employing a chartered accountant to make sure that things are done properly. I went looking at the Logies Web Site for the history of the awards. I found that they were started in 1958/9, and the name ‘Logies’ was suggested by Graham Kennedy after the father of Television John Logie Baird.

You can read more about Baird on the BBC Web Site. I could not find anything about him, or even the history of the event on the TV Week/Logies site. Baird actually invented the first TV system, a device that was more mechanical than electronic, working by using two high speed spinning disks and a photocell for the camera. I would love to see this working… A strange geek project would be to actually build one and see if I could get it to work. [Slight Delay]…

I have just done some research and I have found an interesting page where an old TV technician has built himself a Logie TV. Very much an engineers site unfortunately – and not well presented. But it proves it can still be done.

Desperate (White)Housewives

The wife of the president of the USA did a great comedy routine at the 91st annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Some of this is detailed in the SMH although only a small portion is mentioned. She described herself as a ‘Desperate WhiteHouseWife’… What I saw of the show on the news last night was hilarious. It really was.