I've uploaded some new photos for your viewing pleasure; just click on the appropriate link at the top of the page. If that doesn't appease you, maybe an announcement of new iBooks from Apple will. Click here tomorrow after 1PM Eastern time, and you should be able to get all the juicy details...

Microsoft's Entourage, a calendar/contact/email/newsreader that's part of the $600 Mac Office 2001 suite, was supposed to bring me one step closer to the realization of a simple dream -- a single address book shared between my email program, Palm handheld and cell phone. Instead, it's been nothing but a festering sore lining the innards of two Macintosh computers!

When some bad RAM in my old iMac started acting up, it was the fatally corrupted Entourage database that was first to let me know. This database is a proprietary file, meaning that it can't be opened or serviced by anything other than Entourage or Outlook Express. Four months of messages have bloated this piece of shit database into a 250MB file. In comparison, three years of my previous email took up maybe 1/10th of that disk space when using Eudora!

So guess how happy I was when two days ago that 250MB database became fatally corrupted again? Happy enough to come running back to the warm embraces of Eudora, NewsWatcher and Palm Desktop, download the latest AppleWorks update and invite everyone from a certain Redmond-based near-monopoly to suck my cyber-dick...

BLAIR: "As a man, should I be interested in your organization?"
CHRISTINE: "Well, you can come to our parties..."
BLAIR: "Can I join your organization?"
CHRISTINE: "No."
BLAIR: "Are any of your organization's resources available to me?"
CHRISTINE: "No."
BLAIR: "Is there anything you can do for me?"
CHRISTINE: "No."
BLAIR: "So when you start talking, should I just tune you out, because nothing you're going to say is of any value to me?"
CHRISTINE: "Uh, I guess so..."

Here's the best birthday horoscope I could find, coincidentally the only thing I've ever enjoyed reading in the National Compost:

"You exercise control over what ever you do. You are natural star and have pioneering qualities. You have many skills to take with you in whatever you choose to do."

Multi-talented and anal? I'm blushing!

I'm celebrating this special day by stripping my Hell Canada phone service of everything but call forwarding, then routing all calls to my Fido phone. Consider yourself lucky, Ma Bell: If I didn't need a land line for faxes and dial-up Internet, you wouldn't get another dime from me!

It seems that cancer peddlers Philip Morris are givin' some back by airlifting Kraft products into the Balkans. And let me tell you, seeing a tent-full of Kosovo refugees chowing down on sickly orange-coloured KD was enough to make me burst out laughing!

THE GOOD:
It's actually happening! Like it or not, the television world is experiencing a paradigm shift. Forward-thinking broadcasters understand that interactivity provides real time feedback and empowers their audience. The BBC has a new policy to pass on any programming that doesn't also have an interactive component.

THE BAD:
Broadcasters by and large don't understand their new, divergent audience: "How can they watch a show, be on the Internet and talk on the phone at the same time?". Also, successful revenue models for the web just aren't there. And there are rights issues -- specifically, matters of intellectual property and Internet rights are being fought over by broadcasters and pipeline providers (i.e. BCE and Rogers).

THE REALLY BAD:
Jeffrey is the former VP of Alliance-Atlantis; methinks he got his ass fired for being an old media heretic!

Three reasons:

1. The phone's unique features are included at the expense of more basic cell phone requirements, like a clock, or an intuitive address book.
2. Ever try reading your daily horoscope three lines at a time? How about waiting twenty seconds for your phone to connect to the Internet first?
3. The final deal-breaker was seeing the phone as a product placement on Popstars. Would you want to be caught dead with the same cell phone that some dumb-ass teenager uses to hook up her parents/boyfriend/cat to a live studio playback of her piece of shit Britney Spears rip-off? Me neither.

By the way, I've just enrolled my buddy Nate Gallo (see below) in the Popstars Boot Camp contest!

What do you get when you take a slick wannabe paparazzo, give him last year's digicam and send him out into the world to photograph beautiful people? You get Hype Multimedia, or more accurately, a business model that's got a hot date with failure!

Before they start charging for this "essential service", have a look at their Second City gallery. If you squint you can see two of my cast photos on the staircase, and a bit more hunting and clicking will reward you with a souvenir photo of Tracey Hoyt, Sandy Jobin-Bevans and li'l old me...

"So what have you been up to?"

That very question was put to me by the talented commercial director Richard D'Alessio (whose name I wanted to link to his online bio at Imported Artists, but because that site is done entirely in Flash, you'll have to find the bio yourself... Bad website designer!), who gave me a chance to skate around Maple Leaf Gardens and meet Guy LaFleur in a spot for Molson last year. Thinking my reply would falsely indicate my retirement from acting, I instead found out that Richard is in the new media biz himself, working on a site called UnpluggedTV.com.

Score one for nerd school!

Calling all Spambots... You may remember an entry from last month wherein I whined about the junk faxes I was starting to get. The first of these was from the Toronto-based company I listed, but thanks this Government page I've been able to get the particulars of the source; that is, the guy who's continuing to make money from my personal contact info. And here he is:

I'm returning Nate's unsolicited service by registering him at the porn site of my choice for each and every junk fax I get. As for you, dear reader, wouldn't that same info make a snazzy <.sig> file for all your newsgroup postings?