Ryan. Although Ryan had no players left for four weeks, he still managed to win. Here are the final point totals:

Ryan 140 points
Nicole 132 points
Aubrey 122 points
Marla 107 points

The finals points for each player were as follows:

Todd 44 points
Jean-Robert 35 points
Amanda 33 points
James 33 points
Frosti 30 points
Courtney 29 points
Erik 28 points
Jaime 24 points
Sherea 20 points
Ashley 18 points
Denise 17 points
Aaron 14 points
Chicken 11 points

And Aubrey came the closest to picking the winner when she picked Amanda.

Surivors and their points:

Only survivors who are on RyeBlog teams are included in this list.

RyeBlog leaderboard:

Surivors and their points:

Only survivors who are on RyeBlog teams are included in this list.

RyeBlog leaderboard:

Survivor China is here!

Survivor starts tonight, and as always RyeBlog has some competitions based on it. This year, Survivor the show will be slightly different - and understanding these differences may influence how you play the games on RyeBlog.

According to Mark Burnett:

We got rid of exile island. We still have a hidden immunity idol but it is right under their noses.

According to the wikipedia:

In lieu of Exile Island, the game gives the tribes the ability to kidnap a player from the opposing tribe as part of winning a reward challenge; the kidnapped player remains with that team through the next immunity challenge and will receive a clue to the location of an immunity idol at that camp.

Competition #1 - Pick winner based on pictures alone

How to compete:

1. Go to http://www.cbs.com/survivor/
2. Use your mouse to learn the names of the different faces on the top of the page.
3. Use your intuition to pick a winner based on their picture.
4. Post your winner here in the comments.

Tiebreaker:

• Pick the 2nd place person based on a picture alone

Competition #2 - FANTASY SURVIVOR

For this competition, you pick five people and you get points based on what happens to those five people throughout the show. You can look over the scoring categories before picking the five people, or you can just pick five random people. Sure, it might come down to 99% luck - but so does Fantasy Football and people still like playing that!

Scoring:

1. Each vote cast against a member of your team gives you 2 points.
2. If the team your survivor is on wins immunity, you receive 1 point.
3. Each week your survivor is on the show, you get 1 point.
4. If a survivor wins individual immunity, you receive 5 points.
5. If a survivor is “kidnapped” by the other tribe, you receive 1 point.
6. If a survivor goes home for a self-inflicted injury, you receive 5 points.
7. If a survivor goes home for a pre-existing medical condition, you lose 5 points.
8. If a survivor goes home because another survivor attacked him and mortally wounded him, you receive 15 points. The survivor who does the wounding receives 20 points.
9. Any survivor who takes home a car as a prize loses 2 points
10. Being in the final vote gives you 5 points
11. Each vote cast FOR your survivor in the final vote gives you 1 point
12. The overall winner of survivor receives 10 points

To Compete:

1. Pick a team of FIVE survivors.
2. Post your “team” here in the comments.

Strategy:

You should notice that votes cast against your survivor gain you points. So factor that into your team. A valuable player would be one that gets you the most points over the course of the show. Someone who gets votes against him every week but manages to hang on regardless is valuable… Also, someone who is stupid and cuts their leg off will get you a lot of points - so they will also be valuable - BUT - a fat slob who goes home because he can’t hack it will lose you a ton of point.

Your team of 5 must be unique. If someone else has already picked those 5 survivors, you MUST pick at least one different person. This will avoid any potential ties.

Make your predictions / picks now!

Now that Lost is back on the air, you might want to stock up on some Dharama Initialive Rations. For some of us, that’s as easy as walking outside every once in a while and picking them up off a pallet that drops from the sky. For others, it can involve a little craftwork.

Fortunately, you can download a Dharma Initiative PDF label that will help you make your own rations out of store-bought materials. I can’t think of a better use of time than this.

It’s that time of year again

Survivor is about to kick off a new season. Mark Burnett appears to have his mind fixated on this “Have’s versus have-nots” theme that he is using on The Apprentice: LA, and now the same theme will carry over to Survivor.

To be honest, I couldn’t be more bored of a show than Survivor. Sure, I’ll watch it - but I sincerely hope they change something about that immunity idol. Yul and Becky were about as exciting as wheat bread and unsalted crackers. Thanks to that idol, they were on way too long.

Gameplay aside, it’s time to make two predictions for this season…

1. Based on Pictures Alone, predict the winner.

Go to http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor14 and look at that flash thing - or you can save yourself time and go to the un-official survivor site at http://www.survivor.com/ and they have them all posted on one page. Come back here, and in the comments, predict who you think will win in the comments.

2. Based on Pictures Alone, predict who has the personality closest to your own.

This is the interesting one. Sure, nobody who is entirely sane will volunteer to leave their job and go live on an island for a month or so with other crazy people for an insignificant chance to win a lot of money. If you are reading this blog, it’s obvious that nobody on Survivor is exactly like you - but of all of the ‘castaways’ there is probably one who has a personality closest to your own.

Maybe it’s only one aspect of their personality, so you can qualify it:

For instance, lets pretend your name is Pace and you see the picture of Boo and think he has the same intellectual prowess as you. You could say in the comments “For personality, I think Boo and I think alike. I don’t think he has the same moral constraints as me, but I think he’s just as smart.”

This last category will make for some interesting viewing as, inevitably, we will pick people who we think have “personalities closest to our own” that end up to be total loons.

This is not meant as a comprehensive set of hardware recommendations for MythTV. There are many other sites you can easily google to find that kind of information. This is soley focused on building a MythTV box on-the-cheap using Black Friday sales.

Introduction to MythTV

MythTV is a free open-source DVR package. In addition to the basic features such as pausing and rewinging live TV, MythTV does things that other more expensive DVR systems either don’t to or don’t do well. Here are some things MythTV can do for you:

• Pause Live TV
• Rewind Live TV
• Picture-in-Picture*
• Watch a show while recording another*
• Automatically skip commercials
• Back up your recorded TV onto DVD’s
• Enable any computer on your network to watch live TV
• Enable any computer on your network to watch recorded TV
• Listen to music
• View slideshows of your digital photos
• Browse the web
• Play vintage NES and other games
• Rip DVD’s to your hard drive for safe backup and later viewing
• Re-encode your LiveTV recordings to go on your iPod
• Let you schedule your recordings from a web interface
• Record HDTV signals
• Tons of other stuff

* depends on your tuner. you need two tuners to do things that involve two channels, or an HD input source for HD stuff

Building a MythTV Box using Black Friday Sales

The basic MythTV setup I’m going to recommend is one where you have a backend and a frontend on the same machine. There are other ways of setting up a backend, but this way is an easy way to get started.

(more…)

I highly doubt this is real, but it’s still kind of funny.

It’s that time of the year again! Time to pick the winner of this season of Survivor based on their pictures alone!

To play - go to Segregation Central The CBS Website and look at the picture of all 20 contestants standing (or kneeling). To identify them, you can mouse over the bar at the top of the page…

How to Play:

1. Look only at the first page pictures on the Survivor site. (Yeah, I know, I’ve bent the rules and let people use the information pages… but this time since CBS doesn’t have some lame animated page – pictures only)
2. Make your prediction
3. Post your prediction here as a comment

When the season is over, you will score 50 points for having guessed the correct winner.

BONUS POINTS

Since Survivor is trying to generate buzz by creating some “seperate but equal tribes” - in addition to your prediction, please provide insight into racial stereotypes by predicting these things for the portion of the game that is going to be played segregated…

Answering these questions correctly will each score up to 5 points for you (some questions will have partial credit available):

• What ethnic group will win the highest number of “physical” challenges.
• Which ethnic group will do best at the memory challenges?
• Which group (or groups, if you think they will boot two out from the start) will be the first to loose a tribe member?
• In what order will the ethnic groups be completely wiped out?
• What ethnic group will the person who holds onto the immunity idol the longest be from?
• How many episodes will it take before we hear a racial slur (or hear a bleeped out reference to one)?

Disclaimer: I reserve the right to cancel this contest if Cerie in any way appears on this season of Survivor - because I will no longer be able to judge the show due to my lighting my TV on fire in a fit of uncontrollable rage.