Via Frequencies: Mr. Clucks – Hurleys New Chicken Shack!.

I just pushed stop on my DVR after a half hour of non-stop craziness from two Finnish man-boys racing across Russia experiencing whatever they can lay their eyes and hands on.

Exploring an abandoned city that was the site of nuclear holocaust, being treated with and then eating leeches, jumping off of St. Petersburg rooftops attached to a bungee cord… The sneak peek of Travel Channel’s Madventures was insane. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about a new television show.

It’s not just that they do crazy things. No. The show is shot with so much energy. Tunna, one of the hosts and the show’s director/cinematographer, is brilliant. His shots are amazing. The programme itself is just really gorgeous. The image quality, camera angles, and editing make the show high-energy and a joy to watch.

Past that, the hosts, Riku and Tunna, are infectious. They are exciting, energetic and funny. I can’t wait for this show to start up in full swing this September. Here’s the opening so you can get a taste of what it’s like:

Check out Madventures on Travel Channel »

My favourite HD channel is, by far, Palladia.

This 1080i music channel is pretty phenomenal. In last two weeks of getting acquainted with our HD programming, I’ve seen footage from countless UK music festivals and Coachella 2006, Oasis in concert, music videos and tonight, All-American Rejects live in concert. All in glorious high definition. I’ve got Weezer live in Japan set to record to the DVR next.

Imagine my surprise to find out Palladia is an MTV channel! An MTV channel that only plays music?? Amazing. They’ve definitely done something right with this channel. It’s fantastic and my favourite.

Yes friends. A group of us on good ol Twitter livechat during LOST every week. Tonight’s episode is rumoured be Miles-centric (which I’m excited about) and should be FAN-tastic.

We’re loving the show this season. It’s been so great. So many questions answered, so much action… just. Awesome.

So, this is a formal invitation, If you live in and Eastern or Central timezone (or equivalent–we had someone in Venezuela join us last week, and we have a chatter from the Great White North every once in a while), come chat with us a few minutes before show start.

I’ll tweet out a link tonight, so if you’re not following me on Twitter, you’d better start!

Hope to see you there tonight! It’s gonna be awesome.

I’ve heard a lot of great feedback from people (even if they’re NOT commenting here) on the new design. Yay! I still like it one full day later, so I guess that’s saying something. And my blog hits jumped from 5 the day before I released it to 175 after the announcement. Not too shabby!

So, other things in life. I have decided to apply to The New School for the Spring. They have a MA in Media Studies available for online study; and though I would miss the on-campus aspects of networking and living in New York, I really need to get on with this or we’ll be stuck in Greenville for a long time. Plus, from what I’ve read, many students think the online program is more intensive, because it forces you to interact with the class as opposed to just showing up.

If that works out I would be starting in January. I’m not exactly sure how long the program lasts, but I’m guessing longer than the SU year-long masters. In any case, I’m excited about the possibility.

In other news, we dropped our standard satellite package with DishNetwork and picked up one of their HD-only packages. It’s saving us about $5 a month and we’re only paying for channels we watch (and some friggin’ sweet ones I didn’t know existed – like Palladia… OH MY GOSH. So good.) and they’re better quality. I’m excited to watch LOST tomorrow night in High Definition. There are only two channels we miss that aren’t in HD yet, and those are IFC and BBC America. BBCA was supposed to release in HD last year, but didn’t. So BBCA, get your act together and give me Top Gear in HD, please.

And also exciting is that Jessica has been unpacking our kitchen! She said it was like Christmas morning yesterday and it made her want to write thank-you notes to people all over again. Most of the stuff we have has been packed away since we first moved out of Greenville about 6 months after the wedding. It’s nice to get all of it out and cleaned. We have awesome dishes that I had forgotten about.

So. That’s the wonderful world of me right now. We need a vacation sometime this year since we’re not moving. Anyone have a recommendation? We need not-too-expensive and preferably someplace with history. That or we could save up and go visit Harry in Yeovil, Somerset, UK. That would be fun. But not so “not-too-expensive”. We’ll see.

Here’s the transcript from tonight’s LOST livechat.

LOST Ep 05.07

We had a great LiveChat tonight on tinychat during LOST. Follow this link to read the transcript:

http://tinypaste.com/99322

My absolute, hands-down favourite media front-end is boxee. The amazing team over there has announced today that they can’t provide Hulu anymore. The reason is content providers.

The content providers have told the television on the internet visionaries at Hulu to shut down access to boxee. To me, as a content consumer, this is a travesty. This makes me mad. This makes me want to stop watching content from these people period.

Some have said they’re going to stop using boxee. I think this is stupid. This makes absolutely no kind of statement. We should be boycotting the content providers, or at the very least bombarding them with complaints.

We, the content consumers, pay the bills for these people. We watch the ads. We are the fan base. We wield the power with them. Let’s get Hulu back onto boxee.

It’s atrocious that these people would disenfranchise their consumer base so flippantly.

I love Chuck. It’s such a great show.