Last night was the final of Britain’s Got Talent and here is Susan Boyle doing her song from her audition:

Unfortunately she didn’t win but came 2nd to a dancing group, this came as a suprise to some but she already has record plans in place with Simon Cowell and apparently even a movie – not sure if I would want to see the movie but sure some people might. Seems anything these days gets turned into a movie, maybe there’ll be one on Simon Cowell’s life – would be a laugh.

There was also some controversy during the week – apparently Susan almost quit the show a couple of times and even has some temper outbursts in her hotel foyer. Watch the video to see how Simon addresses these issues at the end.

Not sure what I can say here except that I should be getting myself over to Kommetjie to help, just need a wetsuit… this morning 55 whales beached themselves at Kommetjie and more are supposedly coming.

Currently NSRI people are there trying to help and them and more are on their way so if you are on the roads please give them space.

Here is a photo courtesy of @africanpenguin

*Update – NSRI have asked people to stop coming down to the beach to help as its hampering the rescue.

**Update – ‘Kommetjie’ is currently trending on Twitter.com – here are all the tweets relating to it.

The SABC (South African Broadcasting Company) has been quite disappointing of late, just before the SA Elections the episode of ‘Special Assignment’ was stopped from airing due to its sensitive content on how Zapiro had depicted Zumo raping the justice system. The show was again due to screen this week but again was stopped at the last minute, what the hell aren’t we allowed freedom of speach is the SABC been totally controlled by the Gov and the ANC now?

Anyway, the show was put up on the Mail & Gaurdian Online – see it below:

In a week where the new Nokia Ovi store has been opened and the impending announcement of the new Kumo/Bing search engine from Microsoft the most important news for me was that the EU was pushing the music industry to open up online rights. Question – I hope that applies also to us here in South Africa and not just people in Europe when finally the music industry decides to get with it.

In a comment the EU antitrust regulators are telling the music industry to quickly change their licensing agreements which restricts stores like iTunes from selling the same songs across Europe (and hopefully Africa too!), information from here.

The one real funny bit I found was that some artists had complained about possibly new licences becuase they feel they would be short-changed and miss out on income from increased sales… so would these artists prefer to have lower sales then and take what they can get? As long as they earn money from every song that gets purchased there should be nothing wrong only the percentages have to be worked out.

If the music industry really wanted to combat piracy then stores like iTunes would be able to work throughout the world and not be restricted. If I could purchase the latest episode of Heores off iTunes the day after it aired in the USA that would be great. Don’t know what DSTV would think about that then cause I would need it for would be the sport.

I’m tired of red tape slowing and hampering the online world.

This photo was taken from my balcony in the Marina Da Gama in Muizenburg, Cape Town. Today was an awesome winters sunny day which even got to 26 degrees. I even managed a paddle today which was great, see the paddlers in the 2nd photo (I was going faster!)

Awesome Evening

Sunset Marina Da Gama

So today there is a conference happening in the States and apparently Microsoft is going to unveil the new search engine they’ve been working on. In the early days this new engine was supposed to be called ‘Kumo’ or at least it was called Kumo internally at Microsoft.

But now there are reports its going to be called ‘Bing’ and that they are going to spend between $80 – $100million on promoting it on TV, Radio and online. This is going to be one hell of a launch and onslaught against Google who only spent $35million in 2008 on advertising.

A quote from AdAge:
“People with knowledge of the planned push said the ads won’t go after Google, or Yahoo for that matter, by name. Instead, they’ll focus on planting the idea that today’s search engines don’t work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search (aka Google) really solves their problems. That, Microsoft is hoping, will give consumers a reason to consider switching search engines, which, of course, is one of Bing’s biggest challenges.”

Some people are saying that no matter how much advertising you throw at people it won’t change anything… I disagree and think Bing will gain some ground on Google the big question is how much ground will it gain?

Lets hope it goes better than the launch of the Nokia Ovi store today where there were server problems or their servers couldn’t handle the load on it…

This video was posted yesterday and it already has 311,000 views and thats not even in 24hours – what was this is by the time you read this post? Click here to check but in the mean time do yourself a favour and watch this clip below.

To go along with her success on the show and on YouTube a host of new websites have been launched for her fans:

Susan Boyle Fansites :-
http://www.susanboyle-bgt.co.uk/
http://www.susan-boyle.com
http://www.susanboylefansite.com/
http://www.fansofsusanboyle.com
http://susan-boyle-talent.blogspot.com/
http://www.SusanBoyleWeb.com
http://www.susan-boyle.it
Susan Boyle Bebo Fan Club :-
http://www.bebo.com/WeLoveSusanBoyle
Susan Boyle Facebook Fan Club :-
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid…
Susan Boyle Fans Forum :-
http://z3.invisionfree.com/susanboyle…

In my mind this type of false accusation is close to been one of the worst things you can do, of course I can think of a few other things that are horrific but for these girls to treat this cab driver in such a way and then accuse him of rape because they don’t want to pay the $13 for the ride. Its really really sick…

Basically he picked them up, they smoked in the cab and wouldn’t put it out, they swore at him and then refused to pay at the end of the trip. They then start telling passers-by that he had molested them and called the police, the cab driver then showed the police the video footage and they didn’t arrest him.

If he hadn’t had that footage just image how that accusation could have ruined his life… I hope he gets mega bucks from those chicks because those chicks have serious problems. Reminds me of that movie Atonement, I can’t stand stuff like this.

Funny thing was that the video camera was dangling from the sun visor and there were signs everywhere saying you are being filmed, dumb ass useless chicks!

Here is the news article with actual footage of the useless chicks!

While I was studying and rowing at Rhodes University we really didn’t have too many good feelings for the UCT Rowing Club who were our arch rivals back then… what made it worse was that they were in Cape Town and they would pick up all the castings for rowing adverts.

The advert below paid for the guys rent for the whole year and they don’t even really feature in the advert… and this was back in 2003 or something. I went to UCT in 2004 so just missed it.

So, I had heard some hype about it but didn’t really bother – think I’d had enough from the local Idols!

Anyway, I heard this morning that Kris won and apparently Adam was supposed to win… here is Kris doing Kanye’s Heartless song. Its not too bad, think I still prefer Kanye’s version.

Here is Kanye live with the original version of Heartless, remember Kanye said this was his favourite song and he wished he could watch himself perform it!

I saw Kanye live at the V Festival in England 2007 and Pink followed him, thought Pink was better live. Then again The Killers did perform later and blew everyone else away!