{mosimage}"The dominoes continue to fall as a result of the current Writers Guild of America strike. Although some shows, such as The Office and 30 Rock, shut down almost immediately, other programs keep on trucking because they still have a few scripts in the tank.



The ripples of the Hollywood rift have reached far beyond Southern California. Previous reports about endangered Canadian productions have now been confirmed by the Canadian affiliate of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Among the shows presently shuttered are NBC's Bionic Woman and Sci-Fi's Battlestar Galactica, according to The Vancouver Sun."



Also, I've heard that Supernatural will stop filming in early December and Smallville will continue production through to January 23.

{mosimage}Today, I launched a new web site/tool that I've been working on sporatically over the last week and a bit. So, without further ado, I unveil the Chicklet Maker.



With this site, you can create chicklets (or 80 x 15 buttons) that are quite popular on many web sites. You should actually see a bunch of them in the sidebar of my site.


So, why not head on over and start making some for your site today.

{mosimage}On the weekend, I began what seemed like a weekend of updates, by first upgrading my 3 Ubuntu Linux based machines from 7.04 (Fiesty Fawn) to 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) and then I moved onto updated my 3 Macs from Tiger to Leopard.



Now that it's done, I'm starting to have fun with Leopard. Look out for my full review soon.

{mosimage}The US screenwriters' union has called a strike starting next Monday to demand a fair share in royalty payments from DVDs and new media sales. About 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America are being asked to cease work and set up picket lines.



"Television will see the most immediate impact of a strike, with late night programs hit first. Without writers on staff to create monologues, shows like CBS's The Late Show With David Letterman and Comedy Central's The Daily Show With Jon Stewart will likely go into repeats fairly quickly. Within a month or so, daytime soaps will probably follow suit.



Prime-time schedules would appear relatively unchanged for a couple of months, since a handful of episodes have already been prepared. But if the strike drags on the 2008 schedule will be heavy on reality shows (not covered by the current contracts) and reruns.



Emmy-winning writer, director and producer Ken Levine, whose TV credits include M*A*S*H, Cheers and Frasier, agrees. "It's like if you're a restaurant that's struggling, it's not a good idea to close on the weekends."



Click here or here for the full story.

{mosimage}So, apparently the super, spectacular game blockbuster also known as the DirectX 10 showcase game, Crysis is out off beta testing and ready for public testing in demo form.



Having been rejected from the beta testing for not having a rig up to specs, even though EA didn't take my SLI *kachink* setup into consideration, this game is already bitter for me. And it's just gotten worse ...



I downloaded the double-whopper-sized demo (1.8GB) from Ausgamers using their torrent facility, however, this is where it went wrong. This is now the third game I have tried to download from this service that has turned out to be fine when downloaded but on execution, a file within the installer or self-extracting EXE is corrupt.



The first time, I thought it was my system. The second time, I thought it was bizarre. Now, I know it's not my system and in the future, I'll be downloading from another mirror service until Ausgamers can get their act together.



Anyway, to add insult to injury, I've heard Crysis is tha goods, even on XP (DirectX 9.0c) machines.