So, I’m back from a week in Sydney. The suggestions from the Ask Metafilter community were fantastic, and we kept ourselves very busy. In brief:

Five Neat Things About Sydney

1. Tim-Tams – addictive chocolate-covered cookies.
2. The Currency – bills are colorful and nicely-designed, and made of an un-rippable polymer; plus, no pennies or one-dollar bills!
3. Mandatory voting – vote or be fined. This makes so much sense.
4. The butterscotch souffle at Wildfire – the best dessert I’ve ever had, period.
5. Optional Tipping – like the encore, some gestures are meaningless when they’re mandatory

Five Not-So-Neat About Sydney:

1. Vegemite – I tried it and it’s about exactly what I expected. Blecch.
2. Stupid copyright laws – plus, the Kazaa offices were raided while we were there
3. Australian Cockroach & Huntsmen Spiders (tie) – giant roaches in the streets and giant spiders inside. Eek.
4. Television – lots of American TV, six months (or more) behind the States
5. Kylie Minogue – she’s some sort of a national treasure and completely unavoidable

I’d like to give everyone a sneak preview of my newest and greatest project, currently 19 weeks in development… With a tentative release date of June 13, I’m proud to announce Waxy v2.0!

The doctors say he’s perfectly healthy, and my wife started to feel him move actively in the last week or so. (We’ve picked out a name, but we’re still working out the spelling.) I’m joyous and terrified and wistful and optimistic, often all at once.

Mostly, I’m just excited that I’ll have someone to play video games with!

The Academy announced today that a second screener video was leaked to the Internet, after yesterday’s announcement of the “Something’s Gotta Give” appearance. I commented yesterday about how screener leaks are far more common than the Academy realizes (or acknowledges), but I decided to do some research to back it up.

I compiled a list of every likely Oscar nominee, using these popular 2004 Oscar predictions as a guide. Then, I tried to find downloadable screener copies of every film on the list.

The results might surprise the Academy. Out of 22 films, screeners for all but one were widely released on the Internet. Of those, 10 were leaked over a month ago, and five were leaked over two months ago.

Below you can find a list of the 22 films, with the date they were leaked and links to the NFO files added by the release group for each:

21 Grams (December 11, 2003)

A Mighty Wind (August 5, 2003)

American Splendor (November 3, 2003)

Big Fish (December 24, 2003)

Cold Mountain (January 3, 2004)

Finding Nemo (August 7, 2003)

Girl with a Pearl Earring (November 28, 2003)

House of Sand and Fog (December 16, 2003)

In America (December 15, 2003)

Kill Bill Volume 1 (November 24, 2003)

The Last Samurai (December 24, 2003)

Lost in Translation (December 11, 2003)

Love Actually (January 6, 2004)

Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (only available as camcorder videos)

Master and Commander (December 23, 2003)

Mona Lisa Smile (December 20, 2003)

Monster (December 24, 2003)

Mystic River (December 24, 2003)

Pirates of the Caribbean (September 15, 2003)

Seabiscuit (October 6, 2003)

Something’s Gotta Give (December 25, 2003)

Thirteen (December 2, 2003)

The big question: how did the Return of the King screener avoid getting leaked? New Line carefully released screeners to voting members, but specific details about their methods are scarce. Anyone have any information about it?

At first, I thought the headline on this article was a joke: “Oscar Screener Ends Up on Internet.” It seemed about as likely as “Britney Spears Song Found Online” or “Copy of Photoshop Downloaded By Someone Who Didn’t Pay for It.”

But apparently, the Academy is stating that this is the first time ever that an Oscar screener was found on the Internet. Is that possible? Last year, DVD-ripped copies of nearly every major Oscar contender were available online, with almost all of them marked and tagged as “Screener.” The Pianist, Frida, Gangs of New York, About Schmidt and Road to Perdition, to name a few. This year, files claiming to be screeners of many potential nominees are being routinely swapped via the usual networks.

So is this just more obfuscation from an industry in denial, or is it possible that every one of those downloads originated from other sources?

Also, the liability form that Academy voters are required to sign is interesting:

I agree to ensure that I know, at all times, the whereabouts of all screeners sent to me under this agreement… I agree not to allow the screeners to circulate outside of my residence or office. I agree not to allow them to be reproduced in any fashion, and not to sell them or to give them away at any time…. I agree that a violation of this agreement will constitute grounds for my expulsion from the Academy and may also result in civil and criminal penalties.

Veteran actor Carmine Caridi now faces expulsion from the Academy, most likely for letting his grandkids borrow his copy of “Something’s Gotta Give.”

Joshua points to an unusual social networking project called Socialgrid, that bills itself as “a free dating service using Google, grid computing, P2P (Peer-to-Peer), and a file sharing program.”

The About Us section tells us that SocialGrid is the lifelong dream of one man, Chau Vuong. His main theory is that soulmates exist, and that you can beat the improbable odds of finding them with technology. Chau built SocialGrid to help him find a soulmate to meet his high expectations.

As far as I can tell, you’re assigned a lengthy identification code by the patent-pending Identification Coding System™, which you then place somewhere on your website. Other people can then use the SocialGrid web application to search Google for your coded attributes. Or you can use the patent-pending SocialGrid Search System™, a peer-to-peer Windows client, to search the codes of other people running the client. If the entire system works, you’ll find your soulmate.

No comment on the technology. For me, the entire project is summed up by the “Warning to Copycats & Clones” on the homepage:

We have retained one of the top intellectual property law firms in America. Everything is copyrighted and trademarked. The patent application claims coverage of basically all complex objects, including people, in almost every country. We will marginalize every profit margin. There is no money to made in creating another ID coding system. The world needs only one system. If necessary, we will donate SocialGrid and the patent to Google to insure one standardized coding system. Any copycats and clones will have to answer to Google. Do not compete with us. Join us and become a partner.

Take that, FOAF!