Make your picks, and think as little as possible please.

Because Survivor doesn't even bother making up exotic names for where it is anymore

It’s time once more to pick the winner of the upcoming season of Survivor based only upon your gut instinct and their bio picture.

In addition to picking the ultimate winner – something our readers have proven very capable of doing – you can also make some wild predictions.

Here was one prediction that came true last season:

JT will win! Coach will slay a physical dragon and eat its heart on live TV at the finale.

Ok… well… maybe only part of that one came true – but you get the idea.

Here is the link for the CBS Survivor Season 19 Bio Pictures to get you started. Enjoy!

If you want two chances to win, you can also go over to Pace’s blog and vote there. (I guess he got sick of waiting for me to put this post up)

Note: Actually thinking about this, reading bios, or doing anything more than looking at pictures and picking the winner with the kind of thought that a pigeon puts into picking a french fry to eat is considered cheating.

Survivor Tocantins: The Brazilian Highlands

It’s time once more to pick the winner of the upcoming season of Survivor based only upon your gut instinct and their bio picture.

In addition to picking the ultimate winner – something our readers have proven very capable of doing – you can also make some wild predictions.

Here was one prediction that came true last season: 

Bob will win the entire thing. On the survivor finale / reunion show, he will create a major stir when he appears in his normal hair and makeup and reveals to the world that he is actually Anderson Cooper.

Ok… well… maybe only part of that one came true – but you get the idea. 

Here is the link for the CBS Survivor Season 18 Bio Pictures to get you started. Enjoy!

As a bonus category – of special interest to all of Pace‘s friends at VitalSmarts – you can also make a prediction of the “Castaway you predict is in most need of Crucial Conversations Training.” (Which is obviously a subjective category, so I will just randomly pick the winner on this one)

Surivor “Gabon” starts tonight next thursday. It will be the first season of Survivor broadcast in high definition – which sounds great until you realize that in every episode of survivor at least 10% of the available screen real estate consists of blurred-out boobs and butt cracks. I guess the nature scenes where they juxtapose animals eating each other with castaways talking strategy might better in HD. (I know I can’t wait to see a spider eat a big bug in HD).

Surivor “Gabon” starts tonight next thursday. It will be the first season of Survivor broadcast in high definition – which sounds great until you realize that in every episode of survivor at least 10% of the available screen real estate consists of blurred-out boobs and butt cracks. I guess the nature scenes where they juxtapose animals eating each other with castaways talking strategy might better in HD. (I know I can’t wait to see a spider eat a big bug in HD).

Rather than do a full-on fantasy survivor this season we’re going to go back to the old tried-and-true “pick the winner based on pictures alone.” For bonus points, you can make wild predictions about individual castaways as well. 

To view the contestants, visit CBS’s website and go to the “survivor 17 bio page”

As always, post your entries in the comments. 

Here’s an example of a proper entry:

“I predict that Gillian, despite her arthritis and dementia, will win. I also make the following wild predictions:

Danny is lazy, and his laziness will contribute to his downfall.

Jessica will sleep with at least one guy on the island. Probably Randy. This affair will end his marriage, but will launch his career as a reality-show circuit star. He and Jessica (Sugar) will eventually have their own show on E.”

The more bold and crazy the predictions, the better. If the predictions come right, a wild and crazy prediction will be worth as many points as guessing the winner of the show.

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!

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.

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.

Hardware requirements vary depending on what kind of video signals you are going to capture (hd or standard definition tv) and what you are going to use for a capture card. Some cards such as the popular Hauppauge PVR-150/250/350/500 series are hardware encoder cards that take very little CPU power to encode a signal straight into MPEG-2

First Purchase – a Tower to house the MythBox

For this, look for a Celeron D or high-Ghz Pentium 4. There are plenty of options this year in this category.

Option 1: Best Buy’s Box

Best Buy has an eMachines computer on sale for $200 that includes a 15″ LCD screen. This screen will not be of any use to you unless you have no TV already. The specs on the computer, however, are more than adequate for a good backend/frontend.

Option 2: Circuit City’s eMachines box

Circuit city has an almost-identical box for an almost-identical price. The difference is that in the Circuit City one you get a 17″ CRT screen. So the deciding factor here is which useless monitor you have more of a use for… or which store is closest to you. Chance are – you can give the monitor to some kind in the parking lot if you already have one at home you can use for initial setup.

Option 3: Wal-Mart’s “secret sale” item

Wal-mart has a “secret sale” listing a “Computer Tower with Keyboard and Mouse” for $150 (one per customer). The lack of any specs on the computer make it a crap shoot, but if it has a couple PCI slots and at least an AGP slot then it should work… 256 Megs of RAM will work, but 512 or 1 gig is certainly better.

Option 4: Comp USA’s $300 machine

CompUSA has a “$99″ machine that is really $300 unless you are feeling the urge to get a Motorola POZR V3 and a new cell phone contract. The CompUSA one has an AMD64 Althlon processor which makes it have more “curb appeal” to your average geek… but it isn’t really that much better than the other options. The benefit of this computer is that you can get a capture card in the same store at the same time.

Summary of CPU options any my recommendation

My recommendation to the gambler out there wanting to get things on-the-cheap is to go for the WalMart one and see if it is any good. You will then not be paying extra for a monitor you don’t need. My next-best-bet would be to go to Best Buy or Circuit City. (Whichever one has the shortest line at 5am would be the one I would pick)

Capture Cards

Digital Cable capture card

If you have digital cable, and your cable provider abides the US law – then you should have firewire out on your cable box. Check for that, and if you have it, then your “capture card” is just an old 1394 or “firewire” PCI card. If your motherboard has it, you are already set.

If you don’t have digital cable, there are a couple of options.

Standard-definition cable capture cards

Here, you have two options – hardware encoding or software encoding. Hardware encoding uses hardly any CPU power at all. Some cards, like the Hauppauge PVR-500, have dual tuners on a single PCI card. This is convenient if you want to add more tuners but save on PCI card space. (Nobody has a black friday sale on the PVR-500 though, so if you want that go froogle it or see if you can find what you want on eBay.

Option 1: PVR-150 from Amazon

Amazon.com has a black friday sale on the Hauppauge PVR-150 for $58.00 – which would give you a hardware encoder card. Buy two of them if you want dual tuners for PIP and recording two shows at once… etc.

Option 2: WinTV-Go PVR from CompUSA

This is a cheap deal for you. It’s only $15 for the card. It doesn’t do hardware encoding, but it does work in Linux using the bttv drivers.

Summary

Get the cheap card from CompUSA to get you started, and then get the hardware encoder ones once you get your feet wet with MythTV.

Other nice things

Wireles Keyboards are on sale all over the place. You can get a nice setup for around $20 on black friday. I recommend the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop for $20 at CompUSA. You probably want to check out the latest deals at CompUSA and see what else you might want to pick up when you are there.

TV-out

You also want a card that supports TV-out and XvMC. There are a few on sale, but the one I’d say is just grab the FX5200 from CompUSA for $50… If you shop on newegg you can find a cheaper card, but it’s not technically a black-friday deal so I can’t really suggest it here

Summary – the sub-$300 MythTV setup

Here’s the cheapest functional mythtv setup, (assuming Wal-mart’s computer doesn’t suck too bad)

• Computer from WalMart – $149
• Tuner card from CompUSA – $15
• FX5200 from CompUSA – $50
• Wireless keyboard and mouse $20

Total price: $235
Then go google “Fedora Mythology” and learn everything you need to know on how to actually get it all installed

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

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.

The end result: A guilty laugh or two.

I would say some of the humor is “dirty” – but obviously since everything has been bleeped out your mind is left to fill in the blanks. Make of it what you will.

After TiVo found and recorded a few episodes of “Hogan Knows Best” – we were hooked. It’s like the Osbornes – minus the drugs, minus the profanity, minus the annoying gothic kids, and minus the subtitles (you can actually understand these people.) It’s interesting to watch Hulk Hogan manage his two teenage children… but that’s not the point.

The point is this… Here’s how Rhett seems to be most comfortable these days. This is how he will sleep, and how he will naturally pose when he is loafing around…

I guess we should be happy we haven’t been watching too much Spongebob or who knows what he would be posing like.