Miss England will competing soon in the Miss World competition.

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As companies fell one by one, they tried all kinds of bonehead tactics, including suing themselves for damages. The once proud Citigroup self-destructed. Ultimately employees bore the brunt of the economic damage. Greed managed to prevail, of course, as Canada’s capital was held ransom by its transit union in the middle of winter, putting even more of the city’s lowest earners out of work.

Even countries failed. However, it appeared no one told Sweden there was an economic crisis (maybe fueled by the success of the Pirate Party?) while Latvia folded. Eventually the DOW recovered a bit – joy!

Technology may be speeding up our sharing of information, but we still like our embattled old newspapers. Not that it matters, since the only news agency worth following is the BBC, anyway.

Remember Illinois Governer Blagojevich? Let’s not even go there. Blackberry got a presidential endorsement worth over $50 million when President-elect Obama refused to part ways with his cherished device – forcing the CIA to build him a specially-secured unit.

Your privacy remains under siege, but no one seems to worry about the implications of airing their private life on the Internet. The prevailing view is that nothing is your fault anyway – in a particularly gross turn of events, an Ohio teen claimed he shot his parents because they took away his video game.

Facebook is constantly in the news. Your friends are worth less than whopper sandwiches – maybe we would value them more if they weren’t all illiterate.

A bunch of unlikely events happened this year. An African-American man became the 44th President of the United States (and he had his job cut out for him right away), and the Arizona Cardinals made it to the superbowl (although Pittsburgh won it, so all is well in the world). Even the Oscars were weak. While we were otherwise occupied, the monkeys tried to take over.

Not news anymore: The world continues to teeter at the edge of an energy abyss and the powers that be continue to squawk about the merits of the data used to arrive at climate change conclusions when we would be all better off if we started to explore green alternatives. We didn’t even trouble ourselves to write an article about Copenhagen – why bother wasting our breath. Even wind turbines are under seige. California is taking the lead in reducing automobile emissions – time will tell whether they are successful in guiding the rest of the world. I help out by cutting my own firewood from trees that are already dead; I’m a light-weight – real environmentalists use only the finest organic wood(!?). In the end it’s not about technology or one-off changes – creating a sustainable world is going to be hard work – we should start sooner rather than later. Look out for the resource land rush.

At least the spirit of discovery was strong. Using the omniscient Google Earth, scientists were not only able to find the garden of Eden, they were able to find the Lost City of Atlantis! (Although, they lost it again with some haste) Never doubt free information, and never question the wisdom of Wikipedia. Not only is Google leading the way in discovery, they’re leading the way in environmental stewardship by switching their lawn care to goats rather than gas-wasting lawnmowers.

The world continues to resist the magnificent western culture; India made waves once again for its anti-kissing stance… why don’t they want to be hyper-sexualized like us? I wonder if their teenagers spend most of their online time lookup up cosmetic surgery. Maybe they just hate long DVD introductions?

The golden age of Hollywood may be over, but Apple’s is just beginning as video gaming’s Renaissance continues. Sony wasn’t doing so well, and found itself trying to explain why we should care about its PlayStation console. The brave new world has us playing against each other online rather than in the same room.

Back to Obama – the man had some great ideas for improving world security and saving lots of money, and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his idealism. We’re hoping 2010 is the year he finally gains traction. How long will Obama cause jubilation everywhere he travels?

With all the coverage in sports, talk of respect and restructuring of the NHL points system (which must have cost Montreal the cup), no one noticed that Cuba’s government shuffled or that the United Kingdom was thinking about letting Catholics reign as monarchs. Wait a minute stop the presses – Michael Jackson died, nothing else matters!

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The American media in particular takes a lot of flak about it’s worship of celebrities when the rest of the world is just as obsessed (I’m thinking in particular of the tabloid journalists in the UK and their constant hounding of royalty, Lily Allen, etc). When Twitter is the most “reliable” source of actual news, I am very worried. (Note: I’m talking about during the week here. It’s a well-known fact that nothing newsworthy happens on weekends).

I was very disappointed to go to the home page of one of my primary news sources today (CBC News) and find not one but six prominent features (four with photos!) about Michael Jackson’s passing. One headline near the top of the page talked about the protests in Iran. No coverage on Congress’ 219-212 passing of the significant American Clean Energy and Security Act!

The BBC (aka world’s best news) was better, but not by much: Their home page was adorned with Michael Jackson’s image only once, above all other news. The US Congress was at position #2. Iran was conspicuously absent.

While Michael Jackson’s passing is of importance to a great number of people, using his image to push print is irresponsible opportunism in a world where clear leadership and strong journalism is needed more than ever. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be reported – I’m saying it should be part of the day’s news rather than all of the day’s news.

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt

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When I try doing that today, I have to bring out those same old games.  Why?  They just do not seem to encourage cooperative gameplay anymore, or even competetive mutiplayer on one TV.  Most games these days want people to play on two seperate systems via an online connection (or occasionally through system linking).  Therefore, in order to play a new game with a buddy we would need two games, two TVs, and two internet conenctions and wouldn’t even be in the same room therefore losing something in the process.

Does this make sense to anyone?  Wasn’t one of the best parts of Mario being able to play with a buddy and laugh at him when his Luigi didn’t quite make that big jump in world 8-1?   If any bigwig gamemakers are out there, please bring coop back.

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Today’s gaming market is split four ways:

1. PC Gaming – Where pirated copies of games outnumber the legimite. Home of the “hardcore” gamer. Dead simple to create games for, since most programmers begin their careers on this platform.

2. XBox 360 – Where PC Game studios make their money thanks to DirectX. This is the home of the “serious” gamer. Also easy to create games for, since much of the discipline required to develop PC games translates to this platform.

3. Wii – Low-powered games that appeal to the mass-market (the “casual” gamer). Relatively easy for development studios to create games for.

4. Playstation 3 – A good Blu-ray player (at $400? sorry, I’ll pass). Nice looking games but difficult to develop titles for. Sony declares this system the leader, naturally.

According to an article by CNET, Sony makes no apologies for creating a system that essentially hurts the brains of anyone who tries to program software for it. The reason it is so dificult is because it requires programmers to understand parallel programming (we will see a lot more of that as GPU processing hits mainstream).

Sony’s plan is for programmers to become more adept at pushing the limits of its hardware over time (say, over 10 years). It’s an interesting strategy that worked well for the PS2, however in today’s competitive climate I would not (if I were a development studio) want to invest that kind of energy into such a marginal platform knowing I had a much larger potential user base in the XBox and Wii markets.

I suppose the flip side is that any title released to the PS3 potentially has a more captive audience since the market is not as saturated.

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DVD transcriptions of television shows faithfully reproduce the original broadcast – introduction and all.  Why is there no option to simply turn off the credits, so we can simply carry on through the show uninterrupted?  I understand that for accreditation reasons they have to have it somewhere… but surely they could simply show the opening sequences once per disc or something?  As it is, after one rainy day I firmly have the ‘Stargate’ SG-1′ theme song entrenched in my mind.

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Apart from entertainment value, I have a hard time taking Wikipedia very seriously. Aside from Stephen Colbert’s ‘Wikiality’ antics (that is, your position represents reality if enough people agree with you), the encyclopedia’s founder has gone on record warning people not to cite his project as a reference source.

Case in point: Germany’s a new minister of economic affairs was the victim of a Wikipedia vandalism (in German, many apologies) claiming that his incredibly long proper name included ‘Wilhelm’ (it doesn’t). Some journalists reporting on the minister’s appointment copied his name from the Wikipedia article – including the false Wilmhelm.

What happens now? If it weren’t caught, Wikipedia would be able to cite those papers as printed confirmation of its own mistake – giving it further self-justification to publish erroneous material. (Note: The article in question has already been fixed)

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I was on a bus today with my buddy and after a few minutes we’d both downloaded apps for our iPhones after seeing it demoed by the other guy.  This made me realise how clever the apple system is – digital distribution, not really fully adopted by most companies, is a key part of apple’s entire business model.  Just look at iTunes and the app store.  In only minutes you can spend money, sometimes only a dollar at a time, and be rewarded with a new software.  I myself, being cheap, have only downloaded the free ones, but imagine how quickly bills can get run up for the pay-to-use software. 

The Nintendo Wii is another perfect example of digital distribution.  They have a large catalogue of games from past system available for generally 5-15 USD; I’d imagine these are cheap to port over, and then relatively free to sell on their existing virtual console network.  That’s practically pure profit.  Naturally I thought, what if Apple did gaming?  How would they approach it?

The Apple iPhone is such an amazing piece of tech – for me it completely reinvented how you use a phone.  Since I purchased it, I’ve used it on a daily basis for e-mail, texting, internet surfing, gathering news, and even gaming.  I hardly ever even use it for the phone.  But think about the market the iPhone has; it already has a gaming base developping in its platform.

If it transferred this to a dedicated console, what would it be like?  Apple has already proven how they can rethink existing markets.  Touchscreens?  Tilting controllers?  Motion sensors?  These are in the iPhone already.  Imagine a console that integrates Apple’s computing systems and software, with the genius of iPhone’s technologies, and combine it with more iTunes distribution.  You could have a real machine on your hands.  Not to mention the ‘niche cool’ factor that Apple has going for them. 

So come on apple, make the iGame.

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