Oscar picks

Ok, I never do this, but here you go - my predictions for Sunday night:


Will win:

Best Picture - Avatar 

Best Director - Kathryn Bigelow

Best Actor - Jeff Bridges

Best Actress - Sandra Bullock

Best Supporting Actor - Christoph Waltz

Best Supporting Actress - Monique

Best Animated Picture - Up

Should win:

Best Picture - The Hurt Locker 

Best Director - Kathryn Bigelow

Best Actor - George Clooney

Best Actress - Meryl Streep

Best Supporting Actor - Christoph Waltz

Best Supporting Actress - Vera Farmiga

Best Animated Picture - Up

Roomba cat

I don't even know what to say about this - and these videos are all over YouTube:

Wake up California

On Wednesday of this week, the District of Columbia began to allow gay marriages to be performed legally within its borders.  This is another major step forward and shows how backward-thinking is Caifornia's Prop. 8, currently being challenged in federal court in San Francisco. 

One of the striking facts in D.C. was that the opponents of the D.C. law tried to obtain an injunction blocking it from going into effect.  They went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roberts, acting on his own on behalf of the Court, issued a three-page order denying the injunction.  A close read of the Chief Justice's order doesn't show that he is prepared to strike down gay marriage bans, but it certainly seems to suggest that the issue is less decided at the Court than one might have thought.  

It's likely the Prop. 8 case is going to end up at the high Court, so this is a bit of an interesting interim result.

Visiting San Diego

I spent last weekend with Sarah in San Diego.  We stayed with Karen's mom, always a nice visit, and had a really good time (despite pouring rain most of Saturday).  It's such a treat to visit Sarah at college and see what a wonderful young woman she has become.


On a beautiful Sunday, we had a great time at the San Diego Zoo.  No matter how many times I visit that zoo, and it's been many now, I never fail to enjoy it.


Here's Sarah (with a little friend peeking out from her bag):

Here are some adorable meerkats that (naturally) stood up to watch their surroundings:

And here is short video I took of a baby gorilla, making a nice comfortable place to lie down:

Such a great zoo!

Premiere of a new TiVo

I used to use a TiVo, for years in fact, before finally switching to Comcast's DVR.  But I've been missing the TiVo, and now they have announced a fancy new model - the TiVo Premiere - and, better yet, a fancy new interface.


Here's the first look:

Kind of bland, but the interface looks and sounds like it will be impressive:

I am going to check this out - if I get one ( it comes out in April), I'll report back here.

Canada's hockey gold - as reflected in Facebook updates

This a pretty fascinating post on TechCrunch - the number of Facebook status updates soared when the U.S. tied Canada with 24 seconds to go in the gold medal hockey game, and then exploded when Canada scored to win the game in overtime!

Here is the graphic that TechCrunch provided:

TC says those two spikes represent 3.5 million status updates.  Quite a lot.

But I was also interested in TC's statement that, while Facebook claims 400 million users, only 35 million are "active status updaters," and they post about 60 million updates a day.  So that means less than 10% of FB's users are actively updating their status, and they each do so less than twice a day.  Seems like a much lower usage rate of Facebook than the public has been led to believe.

A really, really busy web portal

Most people don't like really cluttered web pages.  Sometimes I have seen joke sites, where someone tried to make a site look really busy.  Those can look pretty silly.

But Yahoo Japan's main web portal is a real commercial site, and it is  almost unimaginably cluttered.  You may want to shield your eyes if you click the link - I don't know what they are thinking here.