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In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, I informed you of the online options you had for viewing full episodes of some of your favorite shows on ABC, CBS, and FOX. In this Part 3, I’ll tell you about what NBC has to offer as well as some of your other favorite channels. Strap in because it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
The only rival CBS has when it comes to the sheer amount of programming available online is NBC. Are you a fan of Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien? If so, you’ll be happy to know you can catch up with those late-night leaders right from NBC’s video page. What about shows like The Office, My Name Is Earl, or Heroes? You can watch those too, along with other NBC favorites like Chuck, Las Vegas, American Gladiators, and Friday Night Lights. Like CBS, you can also watch some classic TV programming at NBC’s site as well. There’s The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Buck Rogers, The A-Team, and Miami Vice available for you to watch again or even discover for the very first time.
The quality of all of the videos offered is pretty decent and, except for having to watch a thirty-second ad at the beginning of each episode and several times throughout, the experience is OK. NBC really pushes a service they offer called NBC Direct that allows you to download episodes to your computer to watch later when you’re not connected to the Internet. That’s great and all but if you click on the link while watching Miami Vice, for example, what you get won’t be that episode of Miami’s famous crime-fighting duo. Instead, you’ll discover that you can only use NBC Direct with a few shows. Expect to really only be able to use it to watch Jay Leno and Conan. Overall, NBC’s site isn’t that disappointing but one of its biggest downfalls for me is that they don’t offer any of the Law & Order full episodes or even Saturday Night Live for viewing.

film.com

Photo by Joe Murphy/NBAE/Getty Images
Shooting too many long 2-pointers is no way to get ahead. The Lakers did that in the first two NBA Finals games. Where they shoot in Game 3 on Tuesday (ABC, ESPN Radio, 8:30 ET) will be key.
It’s just as important in basketball as it is in real estate, and the principle is the same. For the Los Angeles Lakers, their struggles in the first two games come down to the simple fact that they’re not shooting from the court’s most prized turf.
The two prized areas for any offensive team are the 3-point line and the area right around the basket. The basket area is valued, of course, because that’s where the easiest shots tend to come, while the 3-pointer has value because of the extra point teams get for the shot.
Look at almost any good offense and you’ll see this is where they get the bulk of their shots. Yes, there are some teams and players that are particularly good on midrange jumpers — we’ll talk about two of them in a minute — but this is almost always the shot of last resort. The first objective is to try to get a layup or a 3; only if that doesn’t work out is the midrange J the weapon of choice.
A look at L.A.’s shot chart form the first seven quarters of this series tells a sobering story — basically, the Lakers are getting very few of those quality looks.
In Game 1, the Lakers were especially egregious in this department. Of their 77 shot attempts, more than half (39) were two-point jumpers longer than 13 feet, an unacceptable ratio that pretty much doomed them to the 88-point effort they mustered. L.A. turned the ball over only eight times, so the stage was set for a strong performance. But they took too many low-percentage shots.

sports.espn.go.com

2K Sports announced today that it would be revealing the NBA 2K9 cover athlete at the pre-game show for game 1 of the NBA finals on June 5. The reveal will come from a 30 second TV spot scheduled to air during the pre-game show on ABC June 5th.
As part of the revealing of the athlete 2K is having a contest for fans of the game that lets them predict who the athlete will be and if correct they could win a free copy of the game and an autographed jersey. Sixteen NBA players are offered on the site as potential cover athletes to choose from.
“We’re extremely excited to offer this online promotion to our loyal community of 2K Sports fans, as we think it’s a fantastic opportunity for us to interact more closely with them through a refreshingly fun and rewarding experience,” said Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K. “The NBA 2K franchise is king among basketball players and passionate fans who know and understand basketball. Revealing our cover athlete prior to Game One affords us a unique opportunity to capitalize on the anticipation surrounding the NBA Finals while simultaneously generating excitement for the release of NBA 2K9.”

i4u.com

DNA tests have confirmed that bones found at a Myrtleford house in March are those of missing toddler Daniel Thomas.
Daniel, 2, went missing in October 2003 while under the care of Mandy Martyn, at the time a friend of his mother Donna Thomas.
A tenant of a house in the northern Victorian town, where Ms Thomas was living when her son disappeared, contacted police on March 18 after she found her dogs playing with a small human skull.
Homicide Squad detectives have confirmed that the remains were those of the missing boy, described by his mother as “a lovely child” who adored animals.
A police spokeswoman said Daniel’s family had been notified. She said investigations were continuing into the cause of the toddler’s death and disposal of his body.
Following the discovery of the remains in March, Detective Senior Sergeant Peter Harrington conceded that police may have missed the bones when the Lawrence Street house was searched five years ago.
No one has been charged over Daniel’s disappearance.
Ms Martyn was babysitting Daniel while his mother was attending a parenting course in Shepparton when he was last seen on October 17, 2003.
Ms Martyn told police she had left Daniel alone for at least three hours while she took her own children to a doctor’s appointment. 
Police have interviewed Ms Martyn three times over Daniel’s disappearance and released her without charge.
A police spokeswoman said today a brief that was being prepared for the Coroner would be delayed and that investigations were continuing.
She said at this stage there were no immediate plans for police to interview anyone over the disappearance.
At the time of the discovery of the bones, Ms Thomas said she hoped they were Daniel’s so she could put her son to rest.
Copyright © 2008. The Age Company Ltd.

theage.com.au

Forty years ago this week during the Vietnam War, nine Catholic peace activists took a draft office in Catonsville, and the nation, by surprise.
On May 17, 1968, the men and women who would come to be known as the Catonsville Nine entered Selective Service Local Board No. 33, located on the second floor of the Knights of Columbus Hall at 1010 Frederick Road, and removed 378 draft files. The files were mostly 1-A records, which corresponded to young men considered available for immediate and unrestricted military service. Together the men and women took the draft files to a grassy patch behind the building where tipped-off reporters were waiting for them. They then set the files ablaze with homemade napalm, recited a prayer, made statements to the press, and waited peacefully to be arrested. This was a “hit and stay” action. Simply put, this means committing an illegal act of defiance and then waiting around for the police to be arrested.
The Catonsville Nine were Father Daniel Berrigan, Father Philip Berrigan, David Darst, John Hogan, Thomas Lewis, Marjorie Melville, Thomas Melville, George Mische, and Mary Moylan. Together and with the help of a support team of about 50 close friends, they made national television, radio, and newspaper headlines. For two of them, Philip Berrigan and Thomas Lewis, it was not their first hit and stay. Nor was it their last.
In 1968, the sleepy suburb of Catonsville was an obscure, mostly white, mostly middle-class enclave that, like most white neighborhoods around Baltimore at the time, had a reputation for being perhaps a little racist. It was so obscure, in fact, that network news anchors reported the incident as having occurred in “Kah-tahns-ville, Maryland.” The location was chosen deliberately. For one thing, the sleepier the town, the less likely it was anyone would get hurt. The particular location of draft board No. 33 also served as a nice thumb-in-the-eye-gesture to not only the Catholic-based Knights of Columbus, which owned the building and rented office space to Selective Services, but also the American Catholic hierarchy.

citypaper.com

Thing 1 was sent home in the latest episode of Flavor of Love and Thing 2 was acting like she just died. The episode started out with her crying for her sister a funeral just took place.
Black was determined to have her first one-on-one date with Flav, so she was ready to step it up in the next challenge. The girls found out that they were going to a radio station (106FM) to be on the Big Boy show. While all the girls were nervous, the one who was the most is Sinceer, who ended up drinking way more than she should.
The idea behind this challenge was to interview the girls so America can call in and tell Flav who should win the date. As soon as the girls were on air, they all started arguing. Big Boy has already told them that there are some large fines they have to pay if they curse on the air, but that didn’t seem to sink in. They were all fighting and swearing and cursing on air, and because of that they were kicked off. When they got back on the air, the callers come in and most of them voted for Seezins. Flav was listening the whole time, and when he came back to talk to Big Boy and the crew, they told him that they think Black and Seezins were the ones to go with. They also pointed out Sinceer’s drunkenness and that she needed to be kicked out of the house.
Flav announced the winner to be Black and Seezins, and they all headed back to the mansion. Flav told everyone to get into their bathing suits and sit outside to chat. Everyone began to talk about how Tree has had a laundry list of shows, movies and modeling to her name. One thing she said that sealed the deal was when she said that some of the photo shoots she had were “ghetto.” Flav hates that word because he feels like anyone that uses it negatively is being racist. The funniest part was that Tree tried to explain herself but kept digging the hole deeper, and she even said it was ghetto again after he explained that he didn’t like that word. Not the sharpest crayon in the box.

starpulse.com

Sixteen Neo Geo games. Low price. Sounds fine.
April 28, 2008 - Surprise! Another compilation title from SNK. The company has been cranking out collections as of late and delivering a lot of old Neo Geo titles to modern gamers. Now, SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1 throws sixteen old Neo Geo titles onto one disc. “16″ seems like a pretty nice number, considering the fact that you’re paying about $1.25 for each game on the collection. I know that Burning Fight and Magician Lord might not be on everybody’s minds due to Grand Theft Auto IV’s imminent release, but I had a pretty good time with Arcade Classics. It wasn’t an ideal experience with a few technical problems popping up here and there, but I had fun.
You should know, first of all, that I missed out on a lot of classic Neo Geo games when they were first released. Thus, I get intrinsic satisfaction out of playing older games that I haven’t had much experience with before. I have a feeling that gamers in the same or a similar situation might feel this way as well. There’s something very appealing about going back to the old stuff and giving it a spin, and that’s exactly what’s happening with Arcade Classics.
A very basic, retro-inspired menu organizes the games alphabetically and breaks down some basic information on the labels like the year of release, game genre and number of players. In case you want the specifics, the exact titles included on the collection are as follows: Art of Fighting, Baseball Stars 2, Burning Fight, Fatal Fury, King of the Monsters, Last Resort, Magician Lord, Metal Slug, Neo Turf Masters, Samurai Showdown, Sengoku, Shock Troopers, Super Sidekicks 3, The King of Fighters ‘94, Top Hunter and World Heroes.
You’ll also notice that every game has a number of “Goals” to unlock. The tasks you must complete to fulfill these Goals are pretty straight-forward, like beating a game on a certain difficulty or going through a stage without using a continue. The rewards for accomplishing these Goals vary quite widely. Some will unlock art for other games on the collection while others will open up move lists for fighting game characters.

ps2.ign.com

SOURCE: This article is excerpted from Secrets of the Rockstar Programmers: Riding the IT Crest by Ed Burns (McGraw-Hill, 2008), with permission from the McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. McGraw-Hill makes no representations or warranties as to the accuracy of any information contained in the McGraw-Hill material, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Ed: Jumping from a really hard problem…You might find my next question easy, but I’m quite certain our readers would still like to hear your answer. When you’re working on an existing system as a maintenance programmer and you make performance optimizations to the code to make it go faster, for example, what are some effective ways to avoid introducing bugs and fostering maintainability?
Andy: That’s a simple answer compared to the Star Trek computer thing. That’s the combination of what we’ve always called a safety net. [It consists of] having the basic technical practices in place of version control so that you’ve got an ability to roll back changes to be able to compare and contrast and test the system at any point in time from before your changes, after your changes, months and months before any of that even started, when it was peak load, whatever, to be able to just dial the old time machine to any point in time and work with the system as it existed then.
And that’s a little bit beyond what most people can do with version control. You roll the system back a certain amount. Suddenly, you don’t have the right libraries to work with that version. You don’t have that same
compiler anymore, so there are some potential issues there, but, ideally, what you want is to be able to re-create the system as it existed at any point in time. That’s on the one hand.

itworld.com

TORONTO, April 2 /CNW/ - With event tickets selling out in record time for UFC(R) 83: Serra vs. St-Pierre 2 at Montreal’s Bell Centre, Viewers Choice Pay Per View is the best way to get a ringside seat and catch all of the heart-racing action. Airing live on Astral Media’s Viewers Choice Pay Per View on Saturday, April 19, 2008 at 10 p.m. ET, UFC(R) 83: Serra vs. St-Pierre 2 will retail for $44.99 and will also be available in High Definition for $49.99, giving viewers a real, raw and action-packed event experience through the superior quality high definition offers.The highly anticipated title bout will feature Matt “The Terror” Serra taking on Georges “Rush” St-Pierre for the UFC(R) Welterweight Championship. A year ago, Serra shocked the world by defeating St-Pierre at UFC(R) 69. Now, after taking out Matt Hughes in December 2007, St-Pierre enters the Octagon(TM) in his home province of Quebec as the Interim Welterweight Champion to face the man who took his title.”UFC(R) 83 is turning out to be one of the hottest events in UFC(R) Pay Per View history, and Viewers Choice is thrilled to broadcast this event live so that UFC(R) fans and Canadian St. Pierre supporters alike can join in the action from the comfort of their own home,” said Bill Custers, Director, Programming and Marketing, Viewers Choice Pay Per View. “We’re also very excited to offer this event in HD. The visual quality will have viewers feeling like they’re inside the adrenaline-packed action of the Octagon(TM).”To mark this special event, Viewers Choice will also offer a “Countdown to UFC 83″ presentation on its preview channel beginning Friday, April 18 at 4 p.m. ET with live coverage of the athlete weigh-ins in Montreal. The coverage continues on the preview channel all weekend long with behind-the-scenes footage, fighter profiles and interviews, and replays of the original event announcement press conference in Montreal.”What better way to celebrate UFC(R)’s entry into Canada than with home-grown favourite Georges St-Pierre,” said Dana White, President, Ultimate Fighting Championship(R). “Not only is this the fastest sell-out in UFC(R) history, but with more than 21,000 fans expected on April 19, UFC 83(R) is poised to set a new attendance record and become the biggest event we’ve ever had. This is one experience fans won’t want to miss.”Other match-ups at UFC(R) 83: Serra vs. St-Pierre 2 include: Travis Lutter vs. Rich Franklin; Nate Quarry vs. Kalib Starnes; Charles McCarthy vs. Michael Bisping; Mark Bocek vs. Mac Danzig; Joe Doerksen vs. Jason MacDonald; Jason Day vs. Alan Belcher; Rich Clementi vs. Sam Stout; Kuniyoshi Hironaka vs. Jonathan Goulet; Brad Morris vs. Cain Velasquez; and, Ed Herman vs. Demian Maia. Cheer On Georges St-Pierre————————–Viewers Choice has also launched a special online campaign that will allow Canadians from coast-to-coast to send Canada’s mixed martial arts hero Georges St-Pierre their best wishes. From April 1 to April 17, fans can visit www.viewerschoice.ca/gsp and write messages of encouragement, support and fighting tips to St-Pierre before UFC 83(R). Viewers Choice will present St-Pierre with all of the received messages prior to the official UFC 83(R) weigh-ins on Friday, April 18 in Montreal. Interview Opportunity with Dana White————————————-Dana White, President, Ultimate Fighting Championship(R) will be in Toronto on Wednesday, April 16 and will be available for interviews. For more information, or to book an interview with Dana, please contact Nicolle Balen at nbalen@tv.astral.com or 416-956-8638. Viewers Choice Pay Per View offers convenient, commercial-free, in home viewing of the latest hit movies, unparalleled live sports and entertainment events on an à la carte basis to cable television affiliates in eastern Canada. Programming on Viewers Choice Pay Per View is offered on multiple channels providing near video-on-demand convenience in both standard and high-definition formats. Viewers Choice Canada Inc. is an Astral Media Pay Per View network (50.1%); Rogers Pay Per View Inc. (24.95%); and NetStar Communications Inc. (24.95%). For more information, please visit www.viewerschoice.ca.Viewers Choice Pay Per View is an Astral Media Television Network. Astral Media is a leading Canadian media company, active in specialty and pay television, radio, outdoor advertising and iMedia. Astral Media’s solid and dynamic presence in the country’s major markets rests on its commitment to offer a unique combination of high-quality, targeted media for all its audiences.

newswire.ca

Chandler High girls tennis coach Roseanne Shaw let a knowing chuckle slip when asked if junior Olivia Li was a quiet person, quickly adding, “No, that’s not a word often used to describe her.”
Truer words have not been spoken. Ask Li a simple question and off she goes, often transitioning into differing subjects before returning to the subject at hand. What’s more, she can do it in either Mandarin Chinese, English or German, all of which she is fluent. In other words, she’s an absolute delight.
“I’ve always been outgoing,” Li said. “My first language was Chinese, but when I learned English, I liked using it and I was really outgoing and tried to get along with everyone. I like to let people know who I am and what I stand for.”
Added Shaw: “She’s very likeable and she can pick up the spirits of anybody. She is energetic and has intensity, drive, determination and she is a great motivator.”
Li isn’t Chandler’s No. 1 or No. 2 player. Those honors go to seniors Ellen Le and Gabby Weiland. One has to go down to No. 4 on the team ladder to find Li’s name, although she and Nos. 5 and 6, Michelle Berbling and Nicki Chavez and sometimes, No. 3 Drew Hutchinson, are the keys to the team’s success.
Those at the top of Chandler’s playing ladder aren’t US Tennis Association tournament players, and as such, they often lose to more seasoned tournament players, so the key to the team’s No. 8 seeding in the state Class 5A Division I team tournament is its depth. Specifically players Nos. 4-6, all whom are undefeated in those spots this year.
“We take pride in that because we’re like a rock,” Li said. “If Nos. 1-2-3 fall, we know we can count on ourselves and then pull the match through in doubles.”

azcentral.com