Clever advertising
I was standing around Ironforge tonight, about to log out of World of Warcraft, when gnomes started falling from the sky.
"Huh, that's never happened before", I thought.
As it happens, the gnomes were falling in a very particular pattern, and when they landed they died, leaving their bodies on the ground in pre-determined spots. Someone decided to do some very clever advertising, see the screenshot, below:
I took several screenshots inside WoW, and then put them together quite easily using the free, open source program "Hugin". It was pretty easy to use, I recommend it for photo joining (aka stitching).
New Heroes flowchart!
Please see below 
It has been updated as of Season 1 Episode 21, "Now The Hard Part".
A couple of errors were corrected from the previous version also.
Enjoy!
Heroes relationship flowchart
Heroes is an amazing show, which seems to manage incredible plot twists every week, linking old characters in new way.
Quite often the newly uncovered relationships change the dynamic of the plot and you just have to see what will happen next week
I thought it was time to create a relationship flow chart, to visualise how all of the characters are linked together so far.
(Warning: If you're not caught up on the story, some elements in here might be considered spoilers!):
Best burger ever
The following transpired at a Carl's Jr restaurant a few minutes ago, after I got the urge for a late meal:
Me: Hi, I'd like a Bacon Cheese Six Dollar Burger combo please Guy: Sure, medium or large? What would you like to drink? Me: Medium with a coke please.. and can you make that with no mayo? Guy: Sure. Anything else?
A short pause...
Me: Umm.. can you guys add jalapenos to that? Guy: Sure. Me: Great! Umm, how much can you add? Guy: How much would you like?
A longer, stunned pause...
Guy: How about I put some on top and under the beef... and maybe sneak some in under the cheese too
Wow Carl's Jr. Wow.
Two Stargate SG-1 movies confirmed
This was suggested here in my last blog entry, and executive producer Brad Wright has now confirmed in an interview with TV Guide magazine that two straight-to-DVD movies have been given the green light.
More news as we hear it...
Second Stargate movie on it’s way?
Warning, here be spoilers!
On Friday, August 18th, The Sci-Fi Channel aired the 200th episode of Stargate SG-1. The show itself was fantastic, and a must see for anyone who missed it. I won't give anything from the first 35 mins of the show away. Well, except to say the Martin Lloyd is back and making a feature length movie about SG-1, and that most of the episode very closely mimics real life events from the production of SG-1.
In the last scenes of the episode we find out that Martin's movie is cancelled, but the studio wants to continue making the TV series.
In 2003, MGM said SG-1 would end after Season 8, and they would lead into a movie from that. SG-1 obviously did not go away, and the movie was never made. This part of the episode again mics real life.
In the final scenes we have a flash-forward ten years into the future, at the end of the filming of a new Wormhole X-treme episode. Martin answers the phone and then shouts out "Good news everyone, the movie's back on!".
The only thing that can be understood from this, is that MGM has decided to finally go ahead with the production of a new Stargate SG-1 movie.
I cannot find any more information about it yet, but going be the rest of the episode it is hard to draw any other possible conclusions. If you find out what's going on, please let me know!
Phil Gordon comes to Google!
Phil Gordon, WSOP final table, World Poker Tour champion and former host of Celebrity Poker Showdown came to Google on Friday.
We had our annual company picnic at the Shoreline Amphitheater, it was pretty decent. One of the highlights was a 150 person no-limit Texas hold 'em tournament. I don't know how they pulled it off, but they managed get Phil Gordon to come and host it.
This was especially remarkable as Phil had been playing in the WSOP tournament until 4am the that morning. The winner of the tournament walked away with a chip set signed by Phil. It was certainly a great day.
Our new puppy
Ginger went to sleep about a week ago 
Brandy and the kids were incredibly sad, so now we have a new puppy in our house!
You can read about her in Brandy's blog, here.
Net Neutrality in the Senate
The Senate will be discussing it's own version of the telecommunications reform act, which passed through the House last week.
The bill in the Senate differs slightly from the bill that passed the House. The Senate version currently has the FCC doing a study to determine if network operators are deliberately manipulating traffic crossing their networks.
This bill would leave it up to the FCC to enforce their own feeling on the matter, which would likely result in lengthy legal cases lasting years and costing the taxpayer even more money.
That aside, I'm not entirely sure I trust the FCC to be on the consumers side. Many times in the past they've shown they can be pretty unfair to organisations if they feel like it.
It may be interesting to note, that the FCC doesn't have to provide much justification on its rulings when it decided for or against a case.
Scary.
The House is lost, on to the Senate
A little late, but an update as promised.
The COPE act did indeed pass the House, and the net-neutrality amendment was defeated.
The short of the story is, that several representatives argued that a neutral Internet would pass too much of the cost of building tomorrow's networks to consumers.
Here's what I would like to know:
The telecoms companies already charge their corporate customers like Google and Yahoo, based how much bandwidth they use. If they use on average 50Mbit/s, they pay for that. If they use on average 25Mbit/sec, they pay less.
These costs were determined by the telecoms companies. They already know how much money they need from their customers in order to build these new faster networks.
Smart business owners understand that a part of their profits need to be applied to the upkeep of their establishment. Telecoms companies are no different!
AT&T alone expects to save $600m to $800m because of the merger with SBC late in 2005. Their first quarter profits were also up significantly compared to the first quarter of 2005. They also added over half a million new broadband customers, increasing profits there over 14%.
Since the start of 2003, AT&T's stock price has remained at a fairly steady ~$26 average price. During this whole time AT&T has been constantly upgrading its infrastructure, so where has this sudden panic over upgrade costs come from?
Think of it this way: When you bought a top-of-the-line computer 5 years ago it could have cost you $2000. A top-of-the-line computer today would also cost you about the same. The same is true of most things, including the cost of building a faster network. The costs AT&T, Verizon and Comcast talk of are actually the cost they would have to invest in their networks anyway as part of their projected growth.
So you can see why a lot of this seems suspicious.
More this weekend...