The Norwegian director Torill Kove won an Oscar for best Short Film (animated) with “Den danske poeten (“The Dansih Poet”). She have previously been nominated in the same category in 2000 with “Min bestemor strøk kongens skjorter” (“My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts”), but didn’t win any Oscar then.

This is the first Norwegian Oscar since Thor Heyerdahl won in 1952 for his documentary on the Kon-tiki expedition.

You can see her “Thank You cam” speach on Oscar.com.

There is two minor software updates (at least in Europe) for Virtual Console games. I saw this when I went to the Shop Channel.

Mario Kart 64:

“The new version fixes minor error that occurred when the player selection screen was left running for too loong.”

“The new version addresses certain issues that players experienced with the original version of the game relesed in December 2006.”

So it looks like just small bug fixes, but it’s nice to know that Nintendo addresses this problems. I would be nice if Nintendo could fix it so you where able to save ghost data in Mario Kart 64.

This was a big suprise and came out of nowhere. Today Nintendo released the Everybody Vote Channel. On the release day, there are four polls.

• How do you prefer your eggs? (Boiled/Fried)
• Which do you prefer? (Eating/Sleeping)
• You have some free time. What do you do? (Go out and party/Stay home and relex)
• Do you prefer dogs or cats? (Dogs/Cats) (Worldwide polls)

When you participate in a poll, you first select what you like and then you select what you think the final result will be. When the polls are over, you get points according to your votes/predictions. And you can see how tuned you are with the rest of population.
You can have up to 6 Wii voters and there are both national and worldwide polls. You can even write in to Nintendo and sugest and idea for a poll.

So is this usefull? At the moment, no. But it’s fun and free.

Last year The Venice Project started by the men behind Skype. And they changed the name to Joost this year. It’s a per-to-per software, and it will stream different video/TV content. I’m a beta tester and used a while know. It actually work very well. Not all of the channels are that interesting, but some are educational to see.

I just copied and pasted a couple of section from their faqs:
“Joost™ is a new way of watching TV on the internet, which uses new and established technologies to provide the best of both the internet and TV worlds. We’re in the process of making it as TV-like as we can, with programmes, channels and adverts. You can also see some things that we think will enhance the TV experience: searching for programmes and channels, for example, as well as social features like chat. There are many more new features to come!

Currently, channels are like playlists of videos. You can flip between channels, or use the programme guide to choose a channel or a video to watch. The channels start when you play them and not at any particular day or time. If you let them continue they will loop round to the beginning again. If you change channel and then switch back again, you’ll start at the beginning of the programme again. In later versions we will have different kinds of channels, including ones that behave more like ordinary TV channels. Occasionally, you may see an advert.“

It’s still just a beta, but it looks promising. At this time, the program is only open to beta tester. But you can apply for the beta tester program as they are starting to take in more testers.