More gold
So, as frequent readers of this infrequently updated blog would know, our household are Big fans of cycling both track and road. So it is with no great surprise then that I am over the moon that Australia has won my fave track event, the 4000m team pursuit.

I remember watching this event in the early 1990s/late 1980s and seeing the German team charge around the track like an amazingly well oiled machine....

Now its the Aussies turn. Congratulations Brad, Graeme, Luke and Brett. And an especially big congrats to Peter Dawson and Stephen Wooldridge who rode in the heats (to a world record) but were left out of the Gold medal ride.

This morning I heard that, unlike Swimming, the people who ride the heats for a team event in cycling and miss out on riding in a medal winning team DON'T get medals. How crazy is that!!! SOOOO unfair.....and unaustralian to boot (how I hate that turn of phrase). Message to the IOC - Change this one ASAP!! No way should Phelps get a gold for swimming a heat and watching the final yet Peter Dawson and Stephen Wooldridge miss out after riding a world record time.

In other Olympic news. Are the Australian Women's Eight the biggest bunch of K*^Ts in the world. So Sally Robbins bonked in the final. You can be shattered but don't forget without her you wouldn't have been there....now their behavior has been UNAUSTRALIAN!!!

Why don't companies run browser checks
A competitor to FetchMeMovies is QuickFlix. They are based in Perth and have an up to 10 day, read that again 10 day, turn around on DVDs to the East Coast!!!

Aside from that, which will improve when they build Sydney and Melbourne distribution centers, this is a picture of the QuickFlix web site on my iBook running Safari....why don't people test their sites??

Fetchmemovies Recommendations
Now that the Fetchmemovies cat is out of the bag, I can finally talk about the work that has been my main focus for the last couple of months.

Earlier this year, we inked a deal with Telstra to provide a new recommendations engine and community features to the most excellent DVD rental service Fetchmemovies. Over the last couple of months we've been implementing bits and pieces of it with a few more pieces to go before we are fully running the recommendations and personalisation features.

Its similar to work I have done previously but is different in that it is the pinnacle of the development I have been involved with, integrating the best features and lots of learning to make a system that is tuned very very nicely (personalised recommendations in under 100ms, total CPU on the very modest box at under 8% max), runs all my patented data mining algorithms every night and provides a totally kick arse content management system for their editorial and marketing staff.

All in all I'm very proud of the work I've done and the results we're already seeing.

Do yourself a favor and sign up for the service. Its cost effective and a great way to see lots of new interesting and excellently recommended DVDs.