.::REALITYRECALL::.

Apparently, the $300-$500 million budget paid off. Right now, with over $1 billion in worldwide sales, Avatar is the third highest grossing movie of all time. It could even take down Titanic‘s $1.8 billion record. [Inquirer via Techie via boingboing]

Defenceman Marco Scandella and his teammates made sure that Canada advanced to its ninth consecutive world junior tournament final with a 6-1 victory against a determined Switzerland team at Saskatoon’s Credit Union Centre on Sunday, setting up a date with the United States in the gold medal game.

First things first.

Dion Phaneuf and Craig Conroy didn’t participate in the skills competition. Both are banged-up (but both were on the premises). Cory Sarich, for what it’s worth, did take part Sunday afternoon.

No official word on any of the injured chaps.

Now, here’s how the skills contest went.

==

FASTEST SKATER

* Freddie Sjostrom — 13.589

* Mark Giordano — 13.958

* Nigel Dawes — 14.043

Note: Curtis Glencross, a two-time winner in this event (last year with the Flames, the season before with the Oilers), took a pass, citing a slight injury.

==

SHOOTING ACCURACY

* Staffan Kronwall — five pucks (to hit four targets)

* Jarome Iginla — six pucks

* Nigel Dawes — six pucks

===

HARDEST SHOT

* Jarome Iginla — 102.3 mph

* Curtis Glencross — 100.1 mph

* Robyn Regehr — 98.1 mph

===

BREAKAWAY RELAY (on Curtis McElhinney)

* Robyn Regehr — 2 for 2

* Nigel Dawes — 2 for 2

* Jay Bouwmeester — 2 for 2

===

The Flames, quite possibly with reinforcements, leave Monday morning for Nashville.

A new group of Windows Live Messenger Wave 4 screenshots have been revealed by livesino.net, a month after Neowin originally posted the first screenshots. Since our previous post, the Windows Live team improved on the Windows 7 taskbar integration, adding in quick status markers for available, away, busy and appear offline. Windows Live Messenger Wave 4 will come with tabbed conversations, much the same way Internet Explorer 8 works. One other noticeable change is the 'x' close button at the bottom of users' chat windows, possibly allowing people to hide the advertisement. Other changes are in the "Select an Emoticon" menu, with a rearrangement of icons with Winks now included.

Read full story…

Hockey fans are buzzing about allegations that members of the Edmonton Oilers refused to pay the full cost of a nearly $17,000 night out at an upscale Calgary restaurant.

Everyone is clamoring about tablets these days—ourselves included—so it's not too surprising that Google and HTC are set to join the fray. They are reportedly working together on a Chrome OS Google Tablet.

Smarthouse, an Australian publication, reports that HTC and Google have been collaborating “for the past 18 months” and have produced “several working models of a touch tablet,” including one outfitted with Google’s Chrome OS. We wrote why a Google Tablet would be a good idea last month, and with the Apple Tablet discussion reaching a fever pitch, it’s harder and harder to get excited about a Chrome OS netbook from Google.

Having collaborated on the Nexus One, a smart phone that impressed us with its design as well as its hardware, HTC and Google partnering on a tablet seems like a promising prospect. But will it “compete head on” with Apple’s tablet as Smarthouse claims? Probably not.

From what we know, it seems like Apple is putting as much effort into their tablet’s content as they are into the gadget itself. We’ve written extensively on how an Apple tablet could redefine newspapers, textbooks, and magazines. In the last case, we’ve already salivated, more than once, over concepts for how magazines might evolve in a multi-touch future. Add that to Apple’s recent acquisition of Lala, a move that likely points to a cloud-based future for iTunes, and the reports that Apple is trying to secure TV show subscription packages for the iTunes store. Admittedly, not a whole lot is certain about Apple’s tablet. But you start looking at all of those pieces and how they might fit together around one device, you can easily envision a gadget that is focused on streaming the stuff you read, the stuff you listen to, and the stuff you watch.

It’s hard to foresee a future in which a Google Tablet tries to go head to head with Apple on the content level. That’s not to say, however, that there aren’t some compelling things that could be offered by a Google tablet. As the launch of Google’s Chrome OS made clear, they’re looking toward a future with a multitude of devices that can access the Internet quickly, cleanly, and cheaply. A Google Tablet could be just the thing to realize all of those goals. When we tried out the JooJoo tablet, we saw how a well-designed tablet for consuming web content could provide an engaging experience. A Chrome OS tablet by Google would likely work the same way, keeping typing to a minimum and offering a literal hands-on web surfing experience. [Smarthouse via Business Insider]

Windows: Windows 7 install discs are edition-specific—if you've got a valid license key, you still need the right disc for installation. The ei.cfg Removal Utility, however, lets you create a new, universal installation ISO for Windows 7.

Although your Windows installation disc may say "Home Premium Edition," it still contains the other versions (such as Pro or Ultimate) on the disc—it just has a very small file called ei.cfg that tells the disc what version to install. The ei.cfg Removal Utility creates a new ISO of your install disc that ignores this file, thus letting you choose what edition you want when you start the installer.

While this tool is especially useful for computer technicians who have to install Windows a lot, it's also nice to have for those of us that tend to lose discs often—especially in this day and age of emailed product keys. Now, if you need to reinstall Windows but can't find your disc, you can just borrow a friend's—even if it's an edition that's different than yours. You just need let the installer know which edition matches your product key (Note: Your disc still needs to be the same kernel as your key (i.e. 32 or 64-bit).

The ei.cfg Removal Utility is a free download, Windows only, and requires a Windows 7 install disc to use. Thanks, Cody Ryan Harrod!

It’s now illegal to talk and text while driving in British Columbia, but tickets won’t be handed out for one more month.

Brandon Kozun scored the winner in the third round of the shootout to lead Canada to a 5-4 comeback victory over the United States at the world junior hockey championships in Saskatoon on New Year’s Eve.

Partygoers will be treated to an extra full moon Thursday night, but don’t expect it to actually be blue.

USB 3.0 has been highly anticipated — and now, it’s finally here. Sort of. Find out about its availability, specifications, benefits, and limitations

Russia is considering sending a spacecraft to a large asteroid to knock it off its path and prevent a possible collision with Earth, the head of the country’s space agency said Wednesday.

Veteran defenceman and B.C. native Scott Niedermayer will serve as captain of the Canadian men’s hockey team at the 2010 Vancouver Games.

Windows only: Image resizing tools are a dime a dozen, but free utility Shrink Pic is actually an extremely clever original: Instead of requiring manual processing, it runs in the background and automatically resizes images whenever you attach or upload them.

A perfect tool for frequent Facebook uploaders, for example, Shrink Pic works with a number of applications (most browsers, Outlook, Thunderbird, Skype, and MSN Messenger, to name just a few) to monitor when you upload, attach, or send pictures via IM. When you do, it automatically resizes the images in the background based on user-defined settings, then uploads the smaller image (so you don’t have to wait several minutes for an upload to complete just to have it severely compressed at its destination anyway). It can even resize multiple photos in the same upload. The speed at which it resizes and the quality of the compression are nothing to sneeze at, either.

Shrink Pic saves the resized images in a temporary directory, so your originals are never touched—just copied. You can use any kind of compression level you want, as well as choose from 5 different photo types to check for. If you want to disable it, all you need to do is uncheck an option in your system tray—and re-enabling it is just as easy. You can even install a portable version to a USB drive, so you never have to resize images again—not even at other computers.

Shrink Pic is a free download, Windows only.

A complete list of thumbnail sketches detailing each member of Canada’s Olympic men’s hockey team competing in Vancouver.

Calgary Flames goalie Miikka Kiprusoff was among 23 players named to Finland’s Olympic hockey roster on Tuesday.

The number-one smartphone platform in the US, BlackBerries had apps years before the iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye. What BlackBerries have never had, though, is an easy way to discover and install those apps. So we dig deep through the limited number of blackberry apps on the web and present the top 20 free apps.

Like millions of others, I saw Avatar last weekend. I loved it—despite the 3D, not because of it. Admittedly, my seat was shitty and I wear eyeglasses, but if the experience isn't guaranteed, 3D will fail. Updated

Even after arriving 40 minutes early and waiting in line, the only undefended territory left was right up in front. You may say you’d have stormed out and demanded a refund, but due to work and parenthood, I get a chance to see about three movies per year in the theater, and those have to be slated well in advance. If I didn’t see Avatar at that time and place, I'd have had to wait for it to show up on Blu-ray—or at least wait till after CES. And hey, at least the seats reclined way back, to avoid the stiff neck.

I have endured movies in the front row before, and yes, it’s annoying. You can’t take it all in, you have to look around. But when you add 3D glasses into the mix, it’s not just “annoying.” It’s “cerebrally disruptive.” Any shift of your eyes has to reorient your brain, and since you’re constantly shifting your eyes, you get a series of fleeting illusions combined with a lot of image jolts and jerks. Taking off my 3D glasses, I realized that the typical crappy front-row experience would have been peaceful and easy by comparison. Get this straight: Front row for 3D is 10X worse than front row for other movies.

There was another problem. I was wearing 3D glasses on top of my own glasses, which I need to see. I am not the only person in the world who chooses to wear eyeglasses instead of getting contacts or Lasik surgery. You’d think the 3D industry would plan for this sizable segment of the population. But the light playing between my glasses and the Dolby 3D glasses created weird holograms, floating text and images. I thought at first it was Cameron pulling a JJ Abrams and throwing a bunch of lens flare streaks into the mix, but no, if I adjusted the relative position of the two glasses, they images would move or disappear, at least momentarily. It was reflections of the movie projection bouncing off of my glasses and back onto the inside of the 3D glasses.

An LA Times story mentioned that Dolby 3D glasses were particularly ill-suited for people who are already wearing eyeglasses—hopefully other 3D providers are smarter when it comes to their four-eyed little friends.

As you can tell, I was encumbered with a lot to worry about besides the film, for which I had paid $15. I managed to sit through it all, and am glad I did, for the sake of having seen Avatar. It was great, and what I got was worth, say, $10 of the money I spent, a testament to Cameron’s abilities as a filmmaker, no doubt.

So I don't blame Jim for deliberately making me suffer. All the reports from people who got good seats—including our own Mark Wilson—say that the experience is the best use of 3D ever, and I admire Cameron for pushing the limits. (And also for releasing a 2D version at the same time.) I will say that, like good music producers who listen to a near-final mix from the crappiest boombox they can find, Cameron should be aware of how miserable the 3D experience can be. But he’s a busy man, and probably didn’t get a chance to sit through two-and-a-half hours of blue people, from the shittiest seat in the theater.

The theater management, a financially challenged group if there ever was one, are probably most to blame. They need to sell as many tickets as possible, and they’re not about to tape off the front section. But they should, and there’s a precedent for this. To get IMAX certification, theaters rip out some of their seats, reducing the capacity but enhancing the experience. Even though people have criticized IMAX certification as BS marketing, they got results. (I recall something similar a few years back with George Lucas, who used his influence to make sure only the best theaters could show his movies via digital projection.) You would think that Cameron, Fox and Dolby could combined their might to ensure theater-goers a uniformly baseline enjoyable experience—especially in light of the more strenuous technical and physical requirements of watching a film in 3D. Alas, they simply couldn't.

Or didn’t. When your goal is to rake in over $200 million in two weeks, you can’t be bothered with little things like the asshole who got stuck sitting in the front row.

Yeah, I said it, and you're thinking it. I'm to blame for not marching out, voting with my wallet so to speak. This is America, and corporations have the right to con us, because we have the right to complain. If all the theater, and Fox, and Cameron, and Dolby, and Hollywood as a whole wanted out of me was $15, they got it. (Don't spend it all in one place.) I don't complain in restaurants, I just don't go back. If something cheap breaks on me, I may not call the 800 number on the back of the box, but I sure as hell don't buy another—or anything from that brand. Next time there's an event movie like this, I may skip 3D altogether. Me and every other poor bastard with a pair of eyeglasses and somewhere to be other than the theater two hours before showtime.

Do all you can to guarantee me an experience, and I will gladly pay for it. But leave me to understand that there’s only a 50/50 chance I’m even going to like it, and you can play at-home proctologist with those 3D glasses, cuz I won’t be needing them.

Update: Apparently at least one theater chain is willing to take a fiscal hit in order to serve a better experience to moviegoers. A Giz reader named Garth just sent me this hopeful note:

I went to go see Avatar IMAX 3D on Saturday at the Regal 16 in Escondido, CA and they had blocked off the first three rows in front and the three seats on the extreme left and right of the front section with specially made seat covers that read “Not for 3D viewing.”

Good for Regal! And thanks again, Garth.

Note: The top image is an artistic rendering intended to represent the author’s general frustration, not of the specific technical problems he experienced during the viewing, which can’t be reproduced in a still shot.