Burning Lemons

Off to the cinema this weekend with a selection of friends and suddenly unsure what to see. All this year there have been a collection of astoundingly mediocre movies rolling off the Hollywood conveyor belt and suddenly 3 great films come along at once. So will it be Juno, No Country for Old Men or There Will be Blood. I’m not sure as there will be under 12s with me (though they can pass for 12 easily) Juno sounds the safest bet but it is unlikely that he would find a movie about someone being pregnant and giving a baby up for adoption particularly interesting. Any suggestions in the comments please! 

Well we’re now just under 30 minutes away from the first results in the super Tuesday poll in Georgia. The latest I’ve heard is that the race for the Dem nomination is way too tight to call, thankfully Barek Obama is managing to pull slightly closer to Hillary Clinton. On the GOP side John McCain could well seal it up tonight. The most important thing to remember here is that the polls can go very wrong. In the NH primary Barek Obama was forecast to win by 10-15% and Clinton ended up taking the race with a 3-5% margin. I’ll have more later but if you’re looking for coverage I wholeheartedly endorse (groan) Al Jazeera English: if you don’t get it on TV (in the UK it’s on Sky 514) watch it online at http://Jalipo.com

I know nothing about NFL so I have no idea why I am so excited about my first reason to stay up late to watch stuff coming out of the US this week (the second being Super Tuesday which I will start covering in way too much depth very shortly).

From what I can make out of this this one isn’t going to be that great given that the New England Patriots haven’t lost at all this year, a stunning achievement in any sport. However being the clueless newbie I will of course be cheering for the New York Giants leave support, abuse and lectring over my decision in the comments.

Enjoy the game!

 Update: Clearly it was my rining endorsment in this post that caused the New York Giants to win so well done gentlemen

The entire tech community was shaken today by the news that a long running rumour has actually turned out to be true! Microsoft has offered $44.6 billion dollars (more than the entire GDP of Kenya or Luxembourg according to the CIA World Factbook) to buy “rival” internet company Yahoo!

Many people have claimed that this will almost certainly be blocked by regulators but since Yahoo isn’t doing great and Windows Live (despite being pretty ok in my opinion) has totally failed to catch on. MSN/Live is solely reliable on it’s popular MSN IM protocol and Yahoo’s only good decision of the last 5 years was buying flickr. Google on the other hand has had significantly fewer mistakes GMail has grown incredibly quickly, the core search business remains really strong, Google Docs is catching on (slowly), everyone seems to have Google Desktop (though no-one uses it to search) and Picasa does quite well. Vista hasn’t done well for Microsoft and no-one seems to use Office ‘07 nor has the Zune and no-one I have spoken to really likes the new hotmail and Yahoo has basically done nothing, well it’s done lots but only the core service of Mail still does any good.

So the deal could either kill them both by combining two companies with weak product development or perk them up by combining two companies with good core products and good cash reserves for future devlopment.

Dull bit: Just to clarify Microsoft has only made an offer and Yahoo! is yet to accept or decline it