From GameSpot :

Thanks to a reported dispute over an upcoming THQ game, a group of Ultimate Fighting Championship fighters are about to discover if the only thing tougher than going into the Octagon is being locked out of it.

According to Yahoo! Sports and Sports Illustrated, welterweight contender Jon Fitch was cut from the mixed martial arts organization yesterday, and UFC president Dana White wants nothing more to do with the fighter or his fellow American Kickboxing Academy members. The dispute reportedly centered on licensing agreements for the upcoming UFC game published by THQ.

According to Yahoo, Fitch said he didn’t want to sign away his name and likeness rights in a lifetime contract for the game. He said he tried to negotiate a shorter term agreement, but the UFC refused to change its terms.

“I’m more than willing to work with them, but I don’t see why we have to give up our whole lives for this,” Fitch said. “Why not a time limit? If we did a 10-year deal with them, is that that unreasonable? I don’t understand how this happened, honestly. It’s tough.”

As of press time, a THQ representative had not returned a request for comment.

I agree 100% with Jon Fitch’s refusal. It’s crazy for them to ask for his name and image rights for the rest of his life. I’m actually surprised he’s the only one causing a fuss about this.

What happens if a fighter signs away his name and image rights and then leaves the UFC in say 5 years time. If they went to a different organisation to fight (for example K1), their name and image likeness would still be owned by the UFC and I doubt they would just hand it over for free.

I have nothing but respect for what Dana White and what he has done for the UFC. The UFC was fading away and was going bankrupt when he took it over and is unrecognisable from what it is today. But this kind of thing is disgraceful. It’s the kind of thing Vince McMahon from the WWE would do (and has done).

Hopefully they reinstate Fitch as it would be crazy to lose a great figher over this.

Here’s a preview of some of my favourites.

The Ninja theme is currently my favourite. I just can’t seep past having shurikens instead of normal stars. Yes, I’m easily pleased!!

I recommend checking it out if you use Gmail

Click on the image to play

I’m a big Call of Duty fan so it’s going to be hard to get any work done over the next few days.

Before it was just a basic messenging service but now there is less need to leave the browser and go and use skype. You can download the browser plugin for it at the link below.

Link : See and hear family and friends right inside GoogleMail

It was still enjoyable and it did have one thing Casino Royale didn’t have, namely Olga Kurylenko. I recognised her during the middle of the film as the lead female in Hitman.

Hitman was a film adaptation of the video game which was made last year with Timothy Olyphant as the lead and Dougray Scott as lead support. The film was given average to poor reviews but I really enjoyed it. I cannot understand the criticism that the acting was wooden but that was the way the character was in the game too. Again, I recommend watching it if only to see the gorgeous Olga Kurylenko.

Some other films I’ve watched recently :

• Tropic Thunder - Really funny. If you’re a Ben Stiller fan and enjoyed Dodgeball and Zoolander, you will enjoy this. Robert Downey Jr is great too as the method actor who gets surgery to make himself look African-American.
• Step Brothers - A bit predictable but has some hilarious parts and was much better than Will Ferrels last effort Semi-Pro.
• Red Belt - A film about jujitsu. Starts off well then steers towards the mondane. If you enjoy the UFC or are interesting in grappling you may enjoy watching it as it does have it’s moments.
• Street Kings - A CIA drugs thriller starring Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker and Hugh Laurie. It was directed by the same guy who wrote Training Day which you will probably realise it when you watch it. A good film though and worth watching.

Talking about Training Day, if you have seen the film you’ll enjoy this hilarious impression of Denzel Washington.

Apart than Entourage, I don’t really watch much TV. Though I do watch a lot of films and sometimes put them on in the background when I’m working so I may do some more movie roundups in the future

I was getting vertigo just watching them!

1. When you start to type in a URL in the address bar FireFox it starts showing you previous sites you have visited. This is quite helpful but sometimes it can get crowded with sites you don’t plan on visiting again. You can remove sites from the address by pressing Shift+Delete.
2. When you are viewing a webpage you can change the size of the text font by holding down Ctrl and spinning your mouse wheel ie. Ctrl+(Spin-Wheel-Mouse)
3. You can do a quick find for text on a page by using /. All you do is type / then then keyword you want to search for.
4. When you right click on an image you can select ‘View Image’ to visit the exact URL of where the image is stored. If you hold down Ctrl when you select ‘View Image’ it will open up the image in a new tab.
5. If you enter a word into your address bar and then hit Ctrl+Enter, FireFox will then enter the www. before and .com afterwards. So for example, to visit Yahoo you would enter yahoo then hit Ctrl+Enter.

Some more basic quick keys :

• Ctrl+N - Open new browser window.
• Ctrl+T - Open new browser tab.
• Ctrl+Shift+W - Close browser window.
• Ctrl+W - Close browser tab.
• Ctrl+F - Find a word or phrase on the webpage.
• Ctrl+D - Bookmark page.
• Ctrl+K - Start a websearch (puts cursor to search box at the top right hand side).
• Ctrl+U - View page source.
• Ctrl+R - Reload page. You can also use F5 to do this.
• Alt+LeftArrow - Go back a page. You can also use the Backspace key to do this.
• Alt+RightArrow - Go back a page.
• Alt+Home - Go back to your Home Page

If you have any cool FireFox tips I’d love to hear them

I checked on the web and it seems that thousands of other people have the same problem. However, there seemed to be dozens of different solutions and the first few I tried didn’t work.

Eventually I found a codec pack which seems to have fixed it. All you need to do is download a codec pack called codecs6030_allin1.exe, install it and then restart firefox. My laptop uses Vista so if you have a different operating system it may not work but I’d give it a try anyways.

Good luck

Kevin