IPTV scores in World Cup

Our TV at home is showing its age. It looks like it's self-imposed a 3-hour-per-day quota. After 3 hours, it will switch off itself and refuse to boot up until the next day. In this World Cup period, which is conceivably the most inconvenient time for this to happen, this means we can only watch 1.5 matches per-day max.

On the night of S. KOR vs TOG, FRA vs SWI and BRA vs CRO, we brought home a small old TV stored away at the office. We checked before we carried it home to make sure it still worked. We got home, plugged in the cable and the cord, and it was on! Great! ... except that the channel up / down buttons were not working. It would only show the Channel 1 while all the World Cup actions were happening on the Channel 5. We couldn't find the remote, which has probably been lost years ago, so here's this small old TV, sitting in the middle of the dining room, with no value to our cause whatsover.

We ended up watching the second and third matches on the internet, live and for free. Given it's the internet, the quality was actually not as bad as I expected. The only caveat was that the mandarin-speaking female commentator seemed less than enthusiastic. Starting from the next World Cup, or perhaps the one afterwards, the quality of free live internet broadcasts may have risen to such a degree that we shall no longer be stuck with Cable.

Welcome to the world of IPTV.

Note: World Cup has stolen my blogging time plus reading time plus half of my sleeping time. This blog will be updated less frequently until this party ends.

Let's get it cracking ...

The wait is over. Let the party begin!

PS3

In another post I mentioned that the Microsoft lost $150 per original Xbox sold. In an article from the latest issue of Fortune, it's said that each PS3, scheduled to debut in November, is poised to be sold at a loss over $200 apiece, despite the $499 price tag (basic version; $500 for enhanced). That will translate into $1 billion of loss for 2006 if it hits the target of selling 4 million by the end of the year.

The potential prize? A share of the $26.6 billion-a-year video-game market. Plus, Sony could populate the world with millions of Blu-ray HD DVD players and thus making it a de facto standard.

An Inconvenient Truth

I've been waiting for quite a while to see Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", which has earned the following comment from Roger Ebert:

"In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to."

From what I've heard, the movie could well succeed in motivating its viewers to conserve and innovate to save planet Earth. I hope it does.

(Thanks to Justin for pointing me to Ebert's review)

Paying dues

In the long history of civilizations, economic and political freedom is a very recent thing, more so than we tend to realize. 99.9% of all men that have lived did not live a single day in a free society where everyone is born with equal right to pursue whatever he sets to pursue as long as his pursuit doesn't intervene others'. We owe it to the philosophers and soldiers and statesmen and all the unsung heroes who have risked lives and spilled blood to fight in the name of freedom, and we owe it to them to pass the torch to those who come after us.

Any way you see it, this is a bargain for us.

Tasmania!

The other day I met a new friend who has just returned to HK after spending 12 years of "exile" in - of all the places in the world - Tasmania! (No, that's NOT a picture of my friend)

Why the exclamation, you ask? Well, she's the first person I personally know who's been to this island featured in one of my favorite books, Jared Diamond's Gun Germs and Steel. What makes Tasmania special is that it was "the most extreme outpost of the most extreme continent." It was part of Australia until 10,000 years ago when the land bridge in between was severed by rising sea level. Those who walked to Tasmania from Australia before the flood would never get to see another thing from the mainland. Tasmania has lost all contacts with the outside world - for 10,000 years - until the Europeans arrived in 1642.

Jared Diamond uses Tasmania as an example to illustrate the significance of small population size and isolation for the pace of development. Here's his description of the state of Tasmania when the Europeans arrived,

"Tasmania was occupied by 4,000 hunter/gatherers related to mainland Australians, but with the simplest technology of any recent people on Earth. Unlike mainland Aboriginal Australians, Tasmanians couldn't start a fire; they had no boomerangs, spear throwers, or shields; they had no bone tools, no specialized stone tools, and no compound tools like an axe head mounted on a handle; they couldn't cut down a tree or hollow out a canoe; they lacked sewing to make sewn clothing, despite Tasmania's cold winter climate with snow; and, incredibly, though they lived mostly on the sea coast, the Tasmanians didn't catch or eat fish. How did those enormous gaps in Tasmanian material culture arise?"

Learn more about Tasmania and allegedly the last Tasmanian Aborigine (the one in the picture).

Golden days of movie-going?

During a family dinner, the TV popped an ad of the newly-remade "Poseidon" which Roger Ebert described as "perfunctory". My brother and I have watched the original in primary school as it was part of the - if I remember correctly - "English literature" curriculum. Dad said he watched it in the theater. His brief description of the experience was not unlike what I've read in today's Ma Ka Fai's column in MingPao. You get the feeling that going to the cinema back in those days is a very different experience from that nowadays. I was trying to ask for Mr. Ma's permission for reprinting parts of it here but I couldn't find his email address. If you do know his email address, please kindly let me know. Meanwhile, let me take the liberty to print the following excerpt:

荷李活流行重拍經典，像把果肉咬光，果核吐進泥土裡，過了一段時間便會再次發芽茁壯，只因土壤營養厚實，支撐得起幾季收成。

於是，《海神號歷險記》又來了，踏入戲院，你有機會重驗塵封了廿多年的悲喜與驚惶。

上回看《海神號》，你幾歲？恐怕比自己的孩子還年輕。好像是在銅鑼灣豪華戲院，伊斯曼七彩闊銀幕，炎炎夜裡，一家老幼在電影院門外買了一堆烤魷魚、炒栗子之類的熱燙小食，走進黑暗，張開眼睛，迎接一場海上災難。

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舊戲如今有了新顏，有若老友回魂，前世今生，你抱著叙舊的心情進場看戲，角色雖已交由不同的人演繹，但你仍然看得津津有味，因為，新戲舊戲以及你自己的戲，三齣好戲同時在眼前閃動，生命本如一場有趣的歷險，你當然看得過癮。