Friday, 7 July 2000
4:30pm
y first update written in the day time in a long time. I am here in my office. I've got a little bit
to go before I'm supposed to leave here. I'm kind of bored and we didn't do anything at work today
except have a BBQ so this is what I am doing I guess because nobody else did anything either. In
fact, just about everybody has already left.
 This week has been fairly uneventful. But I
guess the tail end of the weekend is worth talking about. Well, basically, I ended up going to
Viejas casino a couple more times. I don't feel guilty about it because I was going to go to Vegas
this weekend anyway, but I didn't. So to quickly recap -- After winning that money on Saturday, I
set aside the money I took out of the bank and lived only on the winnings. So after two buffets and
a dinner and a couple of beers actualy at the casino, plus two lunches, and two video game rentals,
and three total trips to Viejas, I still came back from the last trip with $72 in my pocket. So I
lived on the whole holiday weekend with only $20 less in my pocket than I did when I came back from
the first trip to Viejas, and with $72 more dollars than I did before I went to Viejas the first
time.
On Sunday, I went with Lawrence. I lost all my
money except for $5 on Let It Ride. But just as we were gonna leave the casino, I put that $5 on a
blackjack table, fully expecting to lose and then just leave. But then I won a bunch of times in a
row and walked out with more than $90 that all came from that $5, all in a span of about 20 minutes.
It was an incredible run, and I bet only $5 a hand the whole time. Lawrence also ended up a winner,
with about $60 in winnings from Let It Ride.
On tuesday I went with Zac and Karen after
spending monday night up at their place. I ended up about even after almost 3 hours of blackjack
play. They dropped a whole bunch of money though. They still had fun, so it's all good.
Since then, I have been trying hard to resist
the urge to go back. It's very addicting, and I'm sure that once I start losing, it won't be so fun
anymore hehehe.
On to the next topic: the CBS show Big
Brother. It sucks. I think CBS had a really revolutionary concept on their minds but the
execution is just horrible. The computer graphics and the music look and sound like they belong on
48 Hours with Dan Rather. The people they chose are mostly unattractive... and they are
boring.
The 24 hour live Internet broadcast is a really
good idea. But showing yesterday's footage on the TV show is a bad idea. Yes, it would be
hard to edit today's footage and show it today, but that would have made this show really cool,
especially for the people who watch on the internet who can see that day's highlights on the nightly
TV show.
Finally, the first show with the one hour
special sucked too. They spent the entire hour showing off the house and talking about each
house-mate's past. It's good to have that stuff, but whose idea was it to have the show end right
when the people get into the house? We didn't see any interaction whatsoever. We didn't even get to
see them exploring the house until the next day's show. How are you supposed to reel in viewers like
that? How can you expect your viewers to want to watch the next day if you end the show right at the
moment when it is about to actually be worth watching?
Anyways, I really think they blew the exection
of the thing. But what else would you expect from CBS whose last hit show (besides the gimmicky
Survivor) was... I don't know what it was, but I'm sure only people over 50 years old were watching
it.
MTV's Real World runs once a week... and
they get barely enough footage in that one week to make a 30 minute show that is slightly
entertaining. Plus, they have live camera men standing there all the time so the people on the show
are always aware of when they are "performing". On Big Brother, the cameras are always on, and they
are everywhere. They don't know when they are on or not. And on top of that, CBS is trying to get 30
minutes of show every day. I don't know about you, but if my whole day today was taped, maybe
about 30 seconds of it would be worth showing on TV, and that was just the part where I hit a crack
and fell off my skateboard. 30 seconds of footage. 10 people in a house. That's only 5 minutes of
footage. Now if you stretch that over a week like on the Real World, you might get 35 minutes of
decent footage. Hey, you got a show! But 30 minutes of footage every day? You will be hunting for
good material for sure!!
I've got a job interview on monday. It's for a
writing job for a website that does not yet exist. Wish me luck :) And if you recruiters are reading
this, yes, I know that days of the week are supposed to be capitalized hehehe.
Anyways, that's it for now, maybe there will be
some more stuff to write about tonight.
|