A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

In an attempt to attract youth to the province, the Saskatchewan government in May will launch a new ‘wireless hotspot’ program in four of the province’s cities - Saskatoon, Regina, Moose Jaw, and Prince Albert. As exciting as this sounds I really hope the service is top-rate. Nothing will be more frustrating if one has to constantly battle with dropped connections, or really poor bandwidth in the hotspots.

I’m not sure this is going to retain or attract youth to the province, but it is definitely a step in the right direction. Major props to Lorne Calvert and the NDP government. I’ve included the article from the Star Phoenix for your reading pleasure.

Free wireless Internet to be offered in city
By Janet French of The StarPhoenix

It’s time to add the phrase “wireless hot spot” to your vocabulary — Saskatoon is about to be covered in them.In a move the Saskatchewan government hopes will attract and retain young people in the province, a new free wireless Internet service is set to launch in May in four Saskatchewan cities.

“I think it just opens up possibilities,” says Victoria Morris, one of the facilitators at the province’s first youth summit held three weeks ago. “If you’re at the Broadway Roastery or you’re in a park and you want to check your email or you want to surf the Internet, you have a place to do that.”

Free wireless Internet access was one of the recommendations emerging from the SaskatchewanYouth Summit, Morris said. Although the service is one of many changes youth are looking for, they’ll be excited that government heard their voices and took action, she said.

On Monday at the Broadway Roastery cafe, Premier Lorne Calvert and Andrew Thomson, the minister responsible for information technology, announced the province will provide free wireless Internet access downtown, on university and college campuses and in trendy areas of Saskatoon, Regina, Moose Jaw and Prince Albert.

Once the government spends $1.3 million installing wireless transmitters the size of coffee cans on light standards and telephone poles and a central antenna within each coverage zone, people with laptops and other wireless devices can surf the web and read e-mails around Saskatoon. Socalled “hot spots” where people can connect to the Internet will include River Landing, downtown, the University of Saskatchewan, the Kelsey campus of the Saskatchewan Institute for Applied Science and Technology (SIAST) and on and around Broadway Avenue, north of Eighth Street.

Being a huge film fan, I always look forward to the Academy Awards each year. I usually do a pretty good job of seeing most of the movies prior the the show, but this year I didn’t hold up to my usual standards - I just didn’t get out to the movies as much since I’ve been back in Saskatoon (but probably still way more than most normal people).

This year Curtis and Nikki watched the awards show with me, and we decided to fill out the ballots for each category, picking who each of us thought would win. There was nothing at stake other than our honour and bragging rights. I went into the match with a pretty decent knowledge of what films were creating the most Oscar buzz, and I felt this was going to give me the leverage to take the competition.

Curtis and I started off neck and neck during the early portion of the show, while Nikki must have thought we were watching the Grammy Awards, based on her score throughout the evening. About mid-show my vast film knowledge started to really shine as I pulled away from the pack. As the night wrapped up, I ended up with 50%, correctly predicting 12 of the 24 awards. Curtis ended up with a respectable 9 correct, and Nikki brought up the rear with 5 out of 24.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the awards show and I felt that Ellen did a solid job of hosting - she’s a funny gal. I was happy that Al Gore got the Oscar for ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ - that documentary was a real eye-opener and will hopefully start to get the ball rolling on some new environmental policies - and it may be what Al needs to make a run for the 2008 Democratic nomination. It was also good to see Martin Scorsese finally get the directorial nod for ‘The Departed’.

NBA All-Star Weekend hits Sin City this year, and as if the glamour and excitement wasn’t enough already, the NBA is taking this year’s festivities to the next level. The All-Star Saturday Night and All-Star game which are slated for this Saturday, February 17th and Sunday, February 18th, respectively will be breaking technological boundaries as it will be the first live sports events to be broadcast in High Definition 3D. Yeah, you heard me right - 3D.

Now before you get too excited, the broadcast is only going to be available to special guests of the NBA at Vegas’s Mandalay Bay Hotel since the NBA is saying it is an “experiment”. Either way, it’s a pretty cool concept and may be the first step in delivering this service to regular Joes around the world. Here’s an excerpt from Variety.com explaining the process.

Technology company Pace has designed five 3-D HD camera systems that will cover all of the action at the Thomas and Mack Center. The Pace blueprint calls for two HD cameras to be built in to each of the five systems, working together to transmit the 3-D images. Invitees will need glasses to get the full 3-D effect.

A special director will take charge of the 3-D coverage, said Steve Hellmuth, senior VP of operations and technology for NBA Entertainment, “but the widescreen depth of field is so immersive that there’ll be far fewer cuts than in the standard-definition version, and the cameras won’t have to move as much.”

Hellmuth bills the experience as “about as close as you can get to having courtside seats.”

This technology might be exactly what I need to get back the feeling of watching a Raptors game at the Air Canada Centre that I miss so much….without having to pay $8 for a hot-dog.

You can read the full article at Variety.com here. Engadget also covered the story here.

“Myself. I ride for myself”. Some of you may remember the BMX themed movie from 1986 called Rad. It was one of my favourite movies as a child, and was one of the main reasons why I got into BMX at the time. For those of you who have never seen this movie (or heard of it, for that matter), I’ve provided a brief synopsis that appeared on the back cover of the VHS release.

Cru Jones is the best BMX biker in Cochrane. He’s got the talent to become the best BMX daredevil in the world. As the local paperboy, he jumps, spins, twists, and flips his bike with amazing ability. Bart Conner is the best BMX biker in the world, and he’s in town to race for the $100,000 HELLTRACK competition, the most grueling BMX race in history. Cru wants a hot at winning the title, but his mom, Talia Shire, insists he take his college entrance exams which fall on the same day. For the first time in his life, Cru has to make his own decisions. He decides to go for Helltrack, but Jack Weston the race promoter, has a dirty scheme for keeping the local whiz kid out of the race and away from his prized champion. Only the gorgeous Lori Loughlin, a member of the opposite team, can get Allen on track for Helltrack! And teach him a few other things while she’s at it!

I used to have a copy of this movie (actually a copy of a copy of a copy) on VHS that I probably watched well over a hundred times. Many of the hot BMX pros of the time were in the movie as stunt doubles, and many also had bit parts. I spent many hours trying to mimic the tricks that they performed in the movie. Over the past five years or so I have been trying to buy this movie on DVD (or even VHS) just so I could experience its magic again. It seems you can’t even find it to rent anywhere.

As it turns out, the movie has been out of print for sometime, and is no longer available from Embassy Home Entertainment. With such news there wasn’t much I could do - I had hit a wall. Then out of nowhere, my buddy Kipp instant messages me with a trivia question asking me what movie this quote was from.

“Myself. I ride for myself”

Since I was able to recite this movie line-by-line at one point in my life, it was an easy question for me to answer. I replied, “Rad”. Then after complaining that he too can not find the movie anywhere, Kipp informed me that there was an online petition to get the movie released on DVD. I immediately signed it even though I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to have any real effect.

But just in case, I urge you all to sign the petition here. You never know. And if the petition does actually work, all I can say is, “Hulk Hogan, eat your heart out!”

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve completely revamped Naids’s Nonsense. Microsoft’s Live Spaces served me well for the last year or so, but there was just too many things I wasn’t happy with. I’m not going to get into the details, but I’ve moved over to my own web hosting service on Dreamhost. The blog is now powered by the newest version of WordPress (2.1).

So what does this mean for my readers? Not much. I think the site looks a lot cleaner, and loads a lot faster. If you’ve subscribed to my feed using :

http://feeds.feedburner.com/NaidssNonsense

you don’t need to do anything - this is still the active address. If you are using the Microsoft Live feed address :

http://hemantnaidu.spaces.live.com/feed.rss

you should update it to the FeedBurner one now. If you don’t, you’re not going to receive notifications when I make updates. And if you just visit the site without using any of this confusing ‘feed’ stuff, you can still use :

http://www.hemantnaidu.com

which just redirects you to :

http://blogs.thinkingh.com/hemantnaidu

That’s all I wanted to say. Consider yourself upgraded to Naids’s Nonsense v2.0.

Thanks for visiting the official web log of Hemant J. Naidu. I’m a guy living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. I work as a software developer for a world-class technology company where we are always developing cutting edge solutions. I love my work and am fortunate that I enjoy going to the office everyday.

Interests of mine include technolgy, films, music, cooking, wine, golf, and basketball. I also love photography and videography, and have a passion for world politics. When I’m not on my computer or watching the news channels, I can be found killing some time reading non-fiction books or playing some Xbox 360.

If you like what you read, you can subscribe to this blog using this URL in any feed aggregator. I highly recommend Google Reader.

I also write reviews for all of the films I watch (which is a lot). Since I was always being asked if I’d seen any good movies lately, I decided to start documenting my opinions as I watched them. I also figured this was a good way to keep my creative juices flowing. You can visit the site at Film Muser, and you can subscribe using this URL.

Subsequently if you’re interested in checking out my technical blog, it can be viewed at Let’s Get Technical, and you can subscribe using this URL.

I also suggest that you take note of the links to the right. These include blogs of my friends’, my flickr photos, as well as the links to my previously mentioned sites. Just below the links section are my shared news items. These are links to current news stories that I have found interesting. They are updated in real-time throughout the day.

It was my nephew Jayant’s third birthday on Friday, and his party was scheduled for Saturday afternoon. I thought this was a good opportunity to take an extra long weekend so I booked Friday and Monday as vacation. I drove out to Wilkie Friday morning to pick up my parents and we arrived at my brother’s place in Sherwood Park mid-afternoon.

The weekend was fun and it gave me a chance to visit with my brother and his family - I hadn’t seen them since the summer. Most of the time was filled with playing with my nephews and playing Xbox 360 (mostly Gears of War) with my brother. The party was also a good time - not a huge event, but just a few of my brother’s and sis-in-law’s friends.

My parents and I left Edmonton around 12:30 Sunday afternoon after the Raptors game, despite my father’s objections. He likes to leave early, but I was driving so I was the boss. The drive was enjoyable, and even more so since the Raptors blew out the Los Angeles Clippers (all you nay-sayers should act early, because the bandwagon will fill quickly).

I was planning on staying the night in Wilkie, but I decided to just drop my folks off and drive straight through to Saskatoon. I thought I would use my day off on Monday to take care of my passport stuff. I rolled into the passport office around 11:00 am, and finally was out of there around 2:00. It wasn’t as busy as it was a week or two ago, but three hours is still long. It was quite the setup - waiting in lines to wait in other lines. Once I actually saw the Examiner, I spent maybe three minutes with him. I do feel bad for people who waited in lines as long as I did, and then were told their forms were inaccurate, or they were missing certain documents, but I think a lot of them just didn’t read the instructions. People were showing up without a guarantor’s signature, passport photos, etc. Luckily I took the thirty seconds to read the instructions.

Anyway, I took some photos while in Edmonton and you can see them here. Enjoy.