Covering technology events is a breeze, but sometimes - as with today’s #TVNext panel in Boston at Hill Holliday - you sometimes run into a challenge. Today's event is a challenge for me because I've already heard some astonishing facts and it's only 10AM. We now watch TV five hours a day, on average, in America.

Let me paint the picture and then I'll share where that five-hour figure came from.

Do you still have an old-fashioned analog TV that receives broadcasts from an antenna? If you want to watch Fox25 with that setup, you're out of luck. According to a LiveJournal correspondent:

If you have an analog TV and analog Comcast cable service without a converter box, and you turn on WGBH-TV-2 right now, you're going to see something very wrong: video of normal WGBH programming, accompanied by audio of WGBH's continuously-looping Ready for Digital TV special.

The picture says "This TV is DTV Ready" while the sound says, from time to time, "This TV set is not ready for the switch to digital TV in February 2009". Also, the picture is shrunk down and enclosed in a black box.

It’s awards show season, and you know what that means! Time for me to pick the nominees for the Hottest Boston News Woman of the year, and for you to vote on them. We have a good crop this year, so scan/ogle them all closely, and then vote for your favorite at the bottom of the page.

As usual, this year’s winner will receive nothing more than the slightly creeped-out feeling, that people actually vote on things like this.