Oscar

For more details, hints, and tips on Oscars prediction contests, read the Academy Awards Prediction Contests page. For the most recent Oscars posts, be sure to check out the Oscars/Academy Awards category page. There, you should find contests, predictions, and results.

Make sure you know who's in the running for each category! Print the official Oscars printable ballot.

81st Academy Awards Prediction Contests:

• Oscars.com
  Prize: Unknown ($? ARV)
• eFilmCritic — Unique method of entry for this one, as you can vote for multiple films in each category
  Prize: 50 DVDs, Robert Osborne's 80 Years of Oscar book, 2 passes to your local IMAX theatre (Est. $1,315 ARV)
• DE Concierge
  Prize: a $100 gift certificate to Burke Williams Day Spa in CA, a $100 gift certificate, and a $100 gift certificate to the Arclight Cinema in LA ($300 ARV)
• The Golden Schmoes
  Prize: iPod Video ($250 ARV)
• the-numbers.com
  Prize: All five Best Picture Nominees on DVD. (Est. $100 ARV)
• web-goddess
  Prize: One pair of Batman and Joker sock monkeys (Est. $60 ARV)
• Scuba.com
  Prize: $50 scuba.com gift certificate ($50 ARV)
• Fort Worth Public Library
  Prize: No Country for Old Men DVD, Two AMC movie passes, 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola Classic, and a box of Orville Redenbacher's Microwave Gourmet Popping Corn (Est. $35 ARV)
• York Daily Record
  Prize: $25 gift certificate to Regal Cinemas ($25 ARV)
• The Augusta Chronicle
  Prize: An entertainment prize package ($? ARV)
• Practicalmadness
  Prize: Store credit or gift certificate ($? ARV)
• PredictTheOscars.com
  Prize: Unknown ($? ARV)
• The Daily Camera and The Video Station
  Prize: Unknown ($? ARV)
• The News Tribune
  Prize: Unknown ($? ARV)
• Box Office Mojo
  Prize: Unknown ($? ARV)
• Variety
  Prize: Unknown ($? ARV)
• Awards Daily
  Prize: Unknown ($? ARV)
• Rochester, MN Post-Bulletin
  Prize: Unknown ($? ARV)

Good luck to you, and have fun! (And if you win a prize, please feel free to share it with me!)

The High-Five Guys hit Hollywood and published a video featuring Robert Downey Jr., Tim Meadows, Mary Steenburgen, Ryan Seacrest, Milo Ventimiglia, Will Ferrell, and others.

Great job, guys. You really deserve a . . . pat on the back, or some other form of congratulations.

If I played the lottery, I'll bet you I'd have the same luck as Donald Peters of Danbury, Connecticut. Peters had purchased lotto tickets regularly for 20 years. According to the AP, on November 1, 2008 Peters purchased his lottery tickets as usual but died of a heart attack later that day while working in his yard.

As you can imagine, his wife did not have the tickets checked for a couple months. When she did, she discovered that the ticket was worth $10 million.

Of course, the article mentions how he "provided financial security for his wife of 59 years and their family" and that he "wins $10M for widow", but any lottery player will give you their true opinion on a topic like this. The man's son, Brian Peters, wasn't afraid to come out and say it: "He'd be very mad, he just passed away and she won a lot of money. He'd say, 'Figures!'"

I was swimming around BzzAgent's Frogpond today. The site lists various websites that you can view, rate, and comment on. If you're a member of BzzAgent, you get credit for these reviews toward your BzzAgent account.

I checked out one link for a service called Kajeet, which is basically cell phone service geared for children. My kids are still too young for cell phones, but I figured I would get a jump on research and take a few moments to see what was currently going on in the "children's cell phone" market.

Phones

Kajeet uses the Sprint PCS network for service and has a small but adequate selection of phones:

• LG LX160
• Samsung m300
• Sanyo Katana
• Sanyo Katana II
• LG Rumor

The phones are currently priced around $50 - $170, with no options for rebates. The only current phone "deal" is that you can get a free Samsung m300 with the purchase of $30 airtime. I suppose your phone choice is highly dependent on how much you trust your child to not lose or destroy a $170 phone. Before buying, you'll also want to be aware where you can purchase minutes or phones at brick-and-mortar stores. I did a search and found results at local Best Buy, Target, and Toys R Us locations, but not all of those retailers' locations showed up on the list. I don't know if their database is incomplete or if only certain locations carry the cards.

Features

As expected with any kids' cell phone service, there are a bunch of nice Parental Control features available:

• TimeManager restricts the cell phone usage by time and day of the week, so you can be sure that your kids aren't making calls during school or in the middle of the night.
  NB: One restriction to the TimeManager is that you can't overlap the blocked times, even if the times are on different days. For instance, if you are trying to block church hours on Sunday morning and you already block the school day on the weekdays, you can't simply add another time restriction for Sunday. Currently, you have to jump through hoops:
  1. Set up a time restriction for 8:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. Monday through Friday
  2. Set up a time restriction for 10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Monday through Friday and Sunday
  3. Set up a time restriction for 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Monday through Friday

  At least an error message pops up when you try to do it "wrong" and walks you through getting yourself set up. It also promises that they are working on fixing that limitation, but in prior experience, you can't count on fixes like that until you see them implemented.

• WalletManager helps you to control who is using the money, and how. This feature would come in handy if you agree to pay for the plan, but make the child pay for any overage charges or minutes usage. Also, if you have multiple children, this ensures that you give each child a set amount of funds, instead of allowing one child to use up all the minutes at once.
• ContactManager allows you to control who your child can contact. One nice feature is that you can set any number as "Always Allow" so your child can still call home if she is out past curfew. You can also control which wallet a call to a particular contact comes out of, so if your child is responsible for their own calls, you can make it so the parent pays for any calls back to home.
• FeatureManager simply gives you the options to allow your child to purchase/use text message, picture messages, ringtones, games, apps, etc.

Another common feature for kids' plans is the GPS Locator option, which will run you an additional $10/month.

Rate Plans

One interesting thing I noticed about Kajeet is how the rate plans work, and pay attention, because (unless I'm missing something) this seems to be biased in the favor of people who pay attention. There are four plans, and as far as I can tell from the website, this is how they each work:

• Pay As You Go: $0.32/day, 0 minutes included
• Basic: $4.99/month, 10 minutes included
• Standard: $19.99/month, 150 minutes included
• Ultimate: $29.99/month, 300 minutes included

Each additional minute beyond the plan costs $0.10/minute.

The Rate Plan "Catch"

What interested me about these plans is that when you buy a "package" of minutes at $4.99 for 10 or $19.99 for 150, you're actually paying more than $0.10/minute, which is the cost for overage minutes. This got me to wondering about how useful these plans really were in comparison to each other. The results may surprise you.



Click the image for full chart

I used Excel to quickly create a spreadsheet that factored in plan costs, included minutes, and the $0.10/minute cost on minutes outside of the plan. As it turns out, two of the plans will always be the cheapest options: The Basic and Ultimate plans. The Pay As You Go and Standard plans will never be the cheapest options for you, regardless of how many minutes you use (or don't use):

• Though the Pay As You Go plan looks free because there are no included minutes, it actually costs $0.32/day, which is $9.60/month for 30 day months (and averaging over $9.73/month across the year). Therefore, the Basic ($4.99) plan is cheaper than that AND includes 10 minutes. The Basic will always be a better option than Pay As You Go.
• Since you're paying over $0.13/minute for the 150 minutes included in the Standard plan, the Basic plan is still cheaper at 150 minutes, with a cost of only $18.99. Since the additional minutes are $0.10 for all plans, the Basic plan remains cheaper.
• So that leaves us with the two useful plans: Basic and Ultimate. The magic number here is 260. At 260 minutes, both plans cost $29.99. Above 260 minutes, you are still within your 300 Ultimate minutes and therefore remain at that lower rate while the Basic plan continues to climb with the additional minutes.

Rate Plan Conclusion

So based on the previous calculations, if you use less than 260 minutes in a month, the Basic plan will be the cheapest. Above 260 minutes, and the Ultimate plan will be your best bet. Keep in mind that we are talking about cell phone plans here — charges and fees abound and can easily throw off these "simple" calculations. One-time credit card refills carry a 5% fee (e.g. $1 on a $20 refill). Who knows what other charges might come with the Basic plan?

Additionally, there are options that give you the first month free on a Standard plan (for an initial savings of $19.99). For low-minutes users, on the 2nd month you will already be better off with the Basic plan if you use 60 minutes or less each month. For large-minutes users, after 4 months at 300+ minutes, you have still paid more money than you would have under the Ultimate plan.

Conclusion

So after summarizing the Kajeet plan, be sure to use due diligence when selecting a rate plan. As with any cell phone plan, take a close look at your service area (Sprint's network) to ensure you get service where you will be traveling. And, of course, be sure to compare with other kid-friendly cell phone plans available in your area!

It's a small step for man . . . a great ram for India.

A CNN article reported that an Indian probe "successfully rammed into the moon" at a speed of 3,579 mph!

The probe Chandrayaan-1 was part of India's first unmanned lunar mission — it makes you wonder who in the world is going to volunteer for their first manned mission!

My review for work is coming up, and I'm jealous. I wish I could list "ramming into the moon" as one of my successes.

Mitch Hedberg was one of the funniest comedians around. His comedy was filled with observational humor such as, "An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an 'Escalator Temporarily out of Order' sign, just 'Escalator Temporarily Stairs'. Sorry for the convenience". Back in June 2006, I blogged a few hilarious Mitch Hedberg quotes.

Unfortunately, Mitch died on March 29, 2005 of "multiple drug toxicity" (O.D.), and I thought we had heard the last of his hilarious ramblings.

This month, however, the Comedy Central label released a new Mitch Hedberg CD titled "Do You Believe in Gosh?". The CD is a live recording from two months before Mitch died and has plenty of material I had not heard before. The CD does have explicit language, but beyond that, this CD is simply hilarious. I certainly suggest you check it out!

Just a small sampling from the CD:

• My belt holds up my pants and my pants have belt loops that hold up the belt. What [is] really goin on down there? Who is the real hero?
• Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus or just a really cool apotamus?
• In Venice, if you're not book smart but you do know what's going on, you've got "canal smarts".
• I taught myself how to play guitar, which was a bad decision because I didn't know how to play it. So I was a [bad] teacher.

Google is giving away $10 Million through Project 10¹⁰⁰ (pronounced as "Project 10 to the 100th"). The money will go to fund between one and five ideas that will help humanity in a great way.

The guidelines are extremely loose for this project: They would prefer submissions in one of the following eight categories: Community, Opportunity, Energy, Environment, Health, Education, Shelter, and "Everything Else" . . . So even if your idea doesn't fit into the seven extremely vague categories, they are still willing to accept it.

Sure, those very basic guidelines are great and leave it open to your own creativity, but what sort of idea are they really looking for? The example Google offers to us is the Hippo Water Roller, which essentially looks like one of those heavy rollers used to even out landscaping, but filled with healthy drinking water. This allows people who have to transport their water supply to easily roll 24 gallons of water at a time, compared with a 5 gallon bucket of water on top of the head.

You can upload an ancillary video to YouTube to help you express or display your idea, but the meat of the presentation must be filled out via the web form. Google has put out a video presentation for their project:

How many people could your idea help?

All you need to do is submit your idea via the website before October 20, 2008. The submissions are reviewed and on January 27, 2008, 100 ideas will be voted on by the general public/Webosphere. The top 20 submissions will then pass to an advisory board, who will choose between one and five ideas, which will split the $10 Million prize equally.

For those looking to get rich from their ideas, you might want to look elsewhere. As the site's FAQ says:

Q: What do I get if my idea is chosen?
A: You get good karma and the satisfaction of knowing that your idea might truly help a lot of people.

The $10 Million is not going to the people who come up with these ideas. The money is going toward the development of these ideas to help make them a reality.

If coming up with a great idea to help the world just isn't your "thing", you can always try to win the $30 Million Lunar X Prize that Google has also posted. For that prize, you'll have to do a lot more than come up with ideas, though. $30 Million goes to the first team to send a robot to the moon, have that robot travel 500 meters along the moon's surface, and receive back video, image, and data transmissions here on Earth. You might want to hurry on that offer, though: 13 of the teams have been working on this since September 13, 2007, so you've got some catch-up to do!