Gno Schitt

This live action portal video is pretty sweet, if this was expanded to a feature film I would sure as hell go see it.

Silly video but put smile on my face..

Never in the history of games have I heard that "We are capping Preorder sales" before a launch. But apparently this game has sold so abundantly well that the initial sales will be capped for Preorders.

I've preordered my digital copy already when it was announced, but I keep a lookout for my boys who may want to join us in the future.

A link to Gamespot

I'm sitting here at my desk at work and can't seem to get it out of my head just how good Lost Odyssey was, not for it's characters, combat and story (which were all great) but one lasting connection I feel. While not forgettable, it's rare that I think of any characters or plot elements from the actual game. I've always thought that the voice work in Lost Odyssey is some of the best to date in any video game but the content holds it back from having a strong impact except in a few scenes that they just nailed in terms of context as well as acting. (Lirum's death for example) But what I find myself constantly thinking back on are Kaim's dreams.

You know you're fucked when the skies are dark with spaceships that poop Sith warriors.

What's this?  An interesting poll where I can once again see how common sense and good taste will prevail yes?

The clear winner from this list is going to be Sherlock Holmes right?  Happy Feet 2 should be dead last with The Twilight Saga down there somewhere.
Ghast!

What the fuck is wrong with people? At least they would rather see the new MI:Ghost Protocol than Happy Feet 2 (seriously), but Twilight? Really?

Who gives a fuck about sparkly vampires when you can see Robert Downey Jr. mix it up with Professor Moriarty!

I'm going to give this new expansion two thumbs up. What's great about this expansion is the focus on carrying a wide array of cards in your hand instead of just piling into whichever supply decks are perceived to be the best in descending order.  Games focusing on this expansion are almost always ended by purchase of the last province.

For people who have all things Dominion, we recommend the following deck that was loads of fun and wealth heavy.  We all managed pretty good scores even with the Jester bringing Curse cards into play.  We built this deck using Cornucopia, Intrigue and Prosperity (because Intrigue has all the base cards you don't need the original Dominion for this build).

Here is our recommended deck:

Treasure and Victory

Copper, Silver, Gold and Platinum (Prosperity)
Estate, Duchy, Province


Supply Piles
Secret Chamber (Intrigue)
Hamlet (Cornucopia)
Menagerie (Cornucopia)
Tournament and the 5 Prize cards (Cornucopia)
Horse Traders (Cornucopia)
Jester (Cornucopia)
Harvest (Cornucopia)
Grand Market (Prosperity)
Harem (Intrigue)
Hoard (Prosperity)

Came across a really interesting thread on the use of story in board games (the linked thread).  Since I know a ton of us play games quite frequently I figured I'd put it to the people for a discussion here.

Q: Does immerssive story in boardgames add or detract from the experience?
JPM: I like the amount of story in Betrayal at House on the Hill and Arkham Horror.  I enjoy reading the flavor text on the cards with a little verve to spruce up the game play.

Q: Does a game feel lacking if the theme doesn't have any flavor text?
JPM: hmm.. it always feel to me like Settlers of Catan is a little light on content, being a pure game mechanic style game.  That said, it's an amazing concept mechanic style game that broke us out of the Parker Brothers/Monopoly/Pay Day/Risk mold.  But it seems like it's not required.

There is this game called Tales of the Arabian Nights which I've played once, and it was almost pure narrative mixed in with some pretty basic adventure game elements.  I quite enjoyed it and would like to play it some more but it was quite long.

There are also games like Dominion which allude to having story elements but really contain none and I love that game too.  What do people prefer?  Do people get annoyed by the presence of heavy story elements in what would normally be a "board" game?

so i'm abit of a fanatic and am waiting and waiting for this game. It is now available for preorders.

You get a headstart time if you preorder. So I preordered.

Preorders now available at www.swtor.com/preorder

This sums this up pretty nicely. However, it unlike facebook doesn't seem to crash on me.

I can only hope that we get something like this in north america. Too bad all the asian countries have the cool tech...

NUFF SAID

Through a series of events I traded my partially dead PS3 for a working xbox 360. (I also picked up another used PS3). For anyone that cares to add me my new gamertag is Technoplunk.

Time to enjoy running through the various xbox exclusives.

God, this is funny. I could watch these two forever, they are hilarious.

This excerpt from the entry on Mulholand Drive (one of my ALL TIME favorite films) should give you some idea WTF the title link sends you to.  Well worth the read, and I also strongly encourage us to watch a couple movies from this list soon.

Pretty much any film by David Lynch belongs on this list, but lets bundle most of them up in with Mulholland Drive, which is possibly his most acclaimed work. Lets face it, barring maybe Elephant Man and Dune, Lynch’s work is uniquely surrealist, and hard to follow regardless of how well you understand his corpus of productions. Lynch has specifically avoided offering explanations of the goings on in Mulholland Drive, instead intentionally wanting viewers and critics to create their own opinions. Non-linear, bewildering, and inter-cut with seemingly unrelated chunks, it’s hard to follow even at the best of times, yet remains a powerful and influential film.

I'm going to Australia...

So I was randomly going through Youtube from E3 coverage. Watched Assassin's Creed Revelations trailer with Tobuscus. And this popped up on related media.

So, I stopped using my iPod touch a few months ago because the battery life was getting depressingly short. As it turns out, I was just constantly adding battery sapping apps to the list of currently open apps. I'm sure you savy kool-aid folks know about this already but I discovered how to shut down a running app today, thereby saving precious battery life.

ONE PART Magnum P.I. (may replace "Private Investigator" with "Politically Incorrect" - either will work for this recipe)
ONE PART Enter the Ninja

Shake sparingly.

RESULT: a WTF'tacular taste sensation.

...a romantic comedy I actually want to see:



No really, you should watch the trailer. All of it.

The incomparable Macho Man has died. Apparently he suffered a heart attack while driving and crashed into a tree.

Dead at 58, but will his legacy live on? Oh YEAH!

... if I was a citizen of Alderaan.

The planet features pretty prominently in the novel "Deceived" which I'm almost finished.  Then onto the audio book for "Fatal Alliance" followed by a bunch of Warhammer 40k material.  Talk about your sci-fi explodogasmas!

I died a little inside after watching this video:



Good thing "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas," unless of course there's a cell phone with a video camera nearby...

"When was the last time you actually finished a game of Monopoly?"

The Sacramento State Jazz Singers perform Jimi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower, as arranged by Bear McCleary in Battlestar Galactica. Better to listen to than actually watch, but really neat none-the-less!

This made me tear up, godam advertising.

Found this fun little video on Gizmodo this morning and it made me laugh.

It also made me want a box of six foot balloons, a slo-mo camera and a cunning plan to drop said balloons onto passerby's. Hopefully without killing and/or maiming them.

About 17 years ago, or so, I did a bunch of music journalism for newspapers in Calgary and here at the U of S and I was given some minor insights into the modern music industry. One of the things that has stuck with me is the record label's insistence on a band being pretty and marketable first, and then being good musicians second. I think Ben Folds nailed it when he sang in Rockin the Suburbs, "Some producer with computers fixes all my shitty tracks."
This all came leaping to my mind when I came across the following old video from waaaaay back in the 70's, where the very ugly and obviously stoned/drunk boys from Dr. Hook do a live set on Shel Silverstein's houseboat. These guys are glued, and at points I'm not sure that anything other than dumb luck and sheer willpower are keeping them upright, yet they stay on their feet, and more importantly they nail the live take!



Wouldn't it be nice if we could get back to the music first, and the brand second, or third, or not-much-at-all?

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Now this is just mean. Some FX dude decided to create a real-life Bert, from Sesame Street.

Now all I can do is imagine him lurking in the alley next to Oscar's garbage can, asking children if they'd like some candy.
Ugh, I think I need to go shower...

This is all of the Royal Wedding that I saw. And it's also the best Royal Wedding video you will see!



"Y'all right geezer?"  LOL

Ever wonder how they get that 'swing' sound into music?



How do those external MIDI keyboards work with a modern DAW like Presonus Studio One?

Hey everyone. I was listening to CBC news and they were talking about this website that they developed through the news section called "Vote Compass". The short of what it is is a quick questionnaire of your views on certain topics, then shows which party you are aligned too. By no means is it showing you how to vote, but if you are unsure on which way you are leaning, this might help. It only takes about 5 minutes.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, even if you don't do this, get out there and vote on Monday if you haven't already.


http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadavotes2011/votecompass/

I counter your political post with BOOBIES!

Actually this is from a fun little article on Gizmodo counting down 14 Thingamabobs for Your Boobs. Worth a watch and chuckle. Then you can go back to the political boobs.

.. he makes some really valid points.

When did Trump become such a fucking clown? I can't wait to see him get torn apart in the real political arena. 2012 is shaping up to be one fuckuva year, you can take that to the bank (assuming there ARE any banks by the end of 2012).

Interesting Un-Factoid: If you look up all the synonyms for "Obama Administration" you find:
disappointment, dissatisfaction, disaffected, failure, lost cause, hopeless, dismay, dismal

(did I miss any?)

This thing is completely nuts. And awesome. And would totally complement my ninja arsenal!

You can send FLAMING mini-bolts!!!!!

Oh wait, no it's not. It's some show called The Change-Up. It stars Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds, and while I'm not sure if I'll ever actually watch the film, I sure am glad I watched the following red-band trailer, cuz there are some classic lines in there, including one about taint that I'm sure will live in infamy for quite some time.

As noted above, this is a Red-Band trailer so if you're watching at work, wear headphones.

Now this is how you do My Little Ponies!

So for those of you are not aware of the pitch that was made to relaunch the Mortal Kombat series, a year ago someone made this short.




The result was the following web series. There have only been two episodes thus far, but they are pretty good. Here are the first two, and well worth the time to watch.

Episode 1


Episode 2

"We were launching hypersonic bricks at Mach 5."
Time to meet the newest entry into the Rail Gun game, a hot topic among defense contractors the world over. This video features the testing of a new gun and dear god the power of the thing is utterly terrifying! You can shoot through an inch of steel AND THEN kill a target up to 7 miles away!!!
I want one...

Via Defense Tech

GUITAR SOLO!!!!
Puns are the lowest form of funny stuff.

Just wanted to share in the celebration of the unveiling of the first public instance of the use of my term 100%ing. I'm a bit disappointed, obviously, with the fact that the subject matter of the article is Pokemon and people who play Pokemon being insane but.... On the plus side, it's in an article (the title no less) by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw so in my mind it's still a win.

Suddenly I feel slightly less geeky...

Mildly NSFW for some suggestive language. So, like, use headphones.

This should be great, assuming that you like the group...

Someone made these and stuck them up everywhere one day. Best conversation ender ever.

I love audiobooks. Thanks to audiobooks I still manage to get through an average of 4 - 6 books each month. Both me and the Mrs. fall asleep to audiobooks every night. They make a walk go by quicker and mindless work more enjoyable.
I know that there are a few Schitt-heds out there who also enjoy audiobooks on their iDevice which is why I thought I'd share this awesome piece of FREE software I recently discovered.
It's called Chapter and Verse and it's the audiobook software you've been looking for.

Using this great little program you can take a downloaded audiobook (usually in mp3), merge the files, convert them to m4b (for iDevices), add chapters, add all the metadata you could want, and merge it all into one nice file ready to be enjoyed.
As an alternate, you may also like the piece of software I used to use before discovering Chapter and Verse. It's called Mp3 to Ipod and while not as feature filled, it is an excellent tool for creating audiobooks.
More questions about audiobooks and related resources? Chuck em into the comments and I'll answer what I can for everybody.
Happy listening!

Oh hell yes!
If you haven't heard yet there is a Spiderman Broadway musical, with music by Bono and the Edge, and apparently it sucks ass. What a shock...
The production has had numerous problems with injuries, the director being fired, the debut being continuously pushed back, and as previously mentioned, a high level of suckage.
How to solve the problem? That's easy, hire George Takei! Here's his audition tape.

He has great insurance!

...You will be after taking the Pierley/Redford Dissociative Affect Diagnostic. It's an odd test with a bunch of glowy, throbbing shapes and seemingly random questions.

I'm not entirely sure that I haven't been reprogrammed into the perfect assassin, so if I off someone important you all now know that it wasn't me doing the killing. Unless it was one of my clients, then yeah, it was totally me.

I love that Bill gets the last word...

I came across these in my internet journeys, they are from a graphic artist that was just playing around with a friend. Originally they had the logo and name of the Smithsonian Museum on them, but then the Smithsonian asked her to remove their name. Too bad real institutes don't have the balls to do ads like these.

I didn't know Weird Al did a parody of American Idiot until today (the day I scared the new Scottish guy by playing Dare To Be Stupid at him Ninja Style from 3 inches away).
But Al did indeed parody the Green Day song, and it's probably one of the better pokin-fun-at-the-canucks songs I've ever heard.

The least common denominator

Journalist H.L. Mencken was a fierce critic of democrazy, arguing that it prevented the better sort of man from reshaping society. In 1920, he wrote:

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men.

As democrazy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

This guy has probably been shot by the time you see this video, so enjoy it for posterity.

TVTrigger is the program that all us TV downloaders have been waiting for. Essentially, the program is a Bittorrent client that specializes in TV shows. The slick interface makes it easy for you to track down your favourite shows from over 3000 options. It provides detailed info on the show, trailers, soundtracks, cast, episode guide and more. Even better, when you choose your favourite shows you can quickly and easily have the program automatically download new episodes for you when they air, so that the show is ready to watch when you are.

I'm still in the process of testing the software out, but first impressions are quite good. I had it downloaded and set-up with 5 different shows within 10 minutes, and it was downloading the episode of Survivor about 30 seconds after I put Survivor into my list of favourites.

Easy-to-use and so-far effective, TVTrigger gets your shows to you when you want them!

This is bloody amazing. Some resourceful dude mashed up a bunch of YouTube videos to create this catchy, jazzy tune. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

I found this conversation between authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath to be extremely interesting about the state of the publishing industry. Some highlights include:

• One of them turning down a half million dollar contract from a publisher to instead self publish


• Monkey/frog rape


• 27 of the top 100 books on Amazon are self published


• New York Times list ignores self published books despite some of them being the highest sellers


• Inability for publishers to release digital copies of older books

Note: this is a long long conversation but well worth the read

There's the age old argument about whether what kids see on TV (or play in video games, yada, yada) will have an adverse effect on them - or not. Well I've long been a proponent of the YES vote. This makes my point nicely, I think.

A worthy song for a worthy actor

Some demented genius took the original Super Mario Brothers and reimagined it as a shooter.



The guy gets bonus points for giving my wife motion sickness.

As i go through my days, Itry to find stuff to bring a smile to my face and others. This one was shared by a friend of mine, and then I saw it on G4.

Work-life balance, says Nigel Marsh, is too important to be left in the hands of your employer. At TEDxSydney, Marsh lays out an ideal day balanced between family time, personal time and productivity -- and offers some stirring encouragement to make it happen.



(Nigel Marsh is the author of "Fat, Forty and Fired" and "Overworked and Underlaid.")

I just wanted to make sure Pseudorequiem knew this ;)

Catchy song. Fun video. Quotable lines: "Lord Voldemort greeted Vader with a fist pound."



Now dance bitches!!

I've just started to get into QR codes a bit.  In case you don't know what they are, they are a visual hyperlink emblem that can be scanned by any modern smart phone/device equipped with a camera and a program for scanning.

I use ScanLife, but I hear that QuickMark is also a good one, as is the one made by Kaywa (they have a service that let's you create your own QR codes, should you need them for marketing material).  All of these apps are readily available from the application store of choice for your device.

I think this is the way of the future.  Soon, URLs won't be used on marketing publication materials, instead the ubiquitous QR code will begin to appear on all media be it print, TV or billboard style.  I even heard that they've been used successfully on the sides of buildings to advertise the commercial space as available with all of the terms/costs.

Grab an app for BlackBerry, any android device, iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad and give it a try:



How fucking sweet was that?

What indeed? Enjoy this odd, well-edited little video...

Last night I had a great experience. I was working on campus and was to set up one of the lecture halls for a guest speaker. I work on campus in the Media Access department (yes, I am the A/V guy). I went to the lecture hall to meet the speaker and set it up to how they wanted it. To my surprise the guest speaker was Bob McDonald from Quirks and Quarks. After setting it up we ended up sitting for about 10 minutes just chatting. It was a slow night and I stayed to watch his presentation which was highly entertaining. After the presentation I felt a bit star struck and got my picture taken with him (notice the shit eating grin I have).



I know that many of you are going to either comment on the fact that he isn't a celebrity (or a large one at that) so why were you star struck, but he had a huge impact on my decision to want to be a highschool biology teacher. It is because of him and one other TV personality, John Acorn, that my passion for science and nature grew when I was a kid. Meeting him made me feel like a kid again, and listening to his lecture really affirmed my decision on education. The short take home from his lecture I would like to share with you, and you can really apply it to all facets. No matter how much we know, or think we know, there is always more to learn. Don't stop questioning or learning.

Thanks for reading, just felt like sharing that with you all.

I've recently been forced to face the truth that it's not the starting of something that is so hard.  Nor is the process of brainstorming good ideas significantly difficult.

The challenge is in the finishing of things.

One of the by products of our fast-food, disposable culture is the unrelenting flood of human waste caused by the unceasingly incomplete.  Time and time again, a great idea or kernel of a fantastic project, is set aside because the creator does not have the discipline (or enough disciples natch) to see it across the finish line.  Some projects suffer death by committee where the creator cannot overcome the resistance thrown up by others.

I'm not pointing any fingers here, I'm probably one of the worst offenders.

After receiving a low disk space warning on my high performance audio project drive, I was forced to take a look at what the fuck was on there.  What I uncovered was pretty fucking terrifying.  Aside from almost 4GB I recovered by removing all of Ruxpin's* older stuff, I was able to dump almost 18GB of project data that I could see now was NEVER going to be completed.

What was all that shit?  Well, a number of the projects were ideas that I had in a flash and thought I better record it, jot it down, or make an audible note so that I could return to it and finish it up later.  Some of them were bare bones re-mix attempts that I lost interest in and decided to abandon, but a very scary number of them (about 30) were songs that were 80% done, or worse, were 98% done (i.e. complete, but with some obvious lazy mistakes in it I had not bothered to fix) and then  poorly mixed down to a master that I then used once or twice in a rush either DJ'ing or burning to CD to give away.  In retrospect, embarrassing.

The decade of 2000 - 2010 is littered with the remnants of my incomplete projects (audio, and otherwise).

Now, many an artist will tell you that no work is truly finished, only abandoned.  I'm starting to think that's a pile of whining narcissistic self-indulgent horse shit.  It's the kind of marshmallow garbage you would expect from people who complain about deadlines, lament the fact that their work doesn't sell**, and flit from obligation to obligation looking for the 'right fit' for their creative talents.  I think it's fair to say that I'm guilty of subscribing to this view when it was convenient (recheck that second asterisk point below to verify this admission).

What I submit to you is this: a public declaration of commitment to complete forces a person to change their view of their work.  I'm back in my studio again, quite a lot actually, because of changes that started before Christmas.  Two things conspired to get me back in here: a deterioration of my general baseline health status (I believe the laypeople call it 'mortality', I was as shocked as you are that I'm so afflicted), and an opportunity to work with a junior film creator in Prague.

I told that person that I would have a couple of pieces of sound work completed for his short film by a certain date, and by god I had to make good on the commitment because HE in turn had a deadline.  I had to wrap my head around the fact that one way or another, this 'product' had to 'ship' (at this point I'll refer you to Seth Godin).  It was energizing.  It was strangely, counter intuitively, liberating.  I didn't obsess about reaching "when it's perfect", nothing ever is, and this is probably where that artist mantra above comes from.  Instead, I concentrated on "when it's done".

So, for the rest of this year, I'm going to try to think about new projects differently.   Instead of enumerating all of the possibilities each project can entail, I'll frame it in terms of the deliverables I can complete in order to call the project done.

On that note, I would like to re-start the conversation regarding Project Unknown, as proposed by LordJim earlier this year.  I believe the best place to start is to get the interested parties together in a room early on a weekday evening, add a few pints and some munchies, and talk about ideas (we will still need one after all).  Very soon after we have put ideas on the table, I think we will need to make a commitment to some kind of deliverable - a point when we can call the project done.  I am uncertain what the shape of the commitment will be, just as I have no clarity yet about the project we will pursue.  Commitment is scary, I'm scared just thinking about being committed to the completion of this because it means work, but I think it's okay to be scared and I want to participate anyway.

I know we have a bunch of creative, hard working, loving, dedicated people around us.  I know we can get something going, and if we get started I'm going to stay committed to figuring out how we can get that something finished.

Of course, I'm also a sometimes douche-nozzle.

* we had just been lazy about moving his old projects off of my machine, he has been working in Logic on his laptop for almost 2 years now, this transition from one place to another is yet another incomplete project in itself, we wrapped this one up now though
** my work isn't selling right now either, and I do complain about it, so I can fairly be called a hypocrite

It all makes sense now.

Be afraid my friends, be afraid...

Came across this and it was an interesting read. It talk's about the trend in Hollywood and gives a nice visual reference that movies are getting worse. There is a neat little interactive graph showing the ratings of movies. I like how they categorize the movies and find that in my opinion that the graph is very accurate.

This new Elder Scrolls game is looking freaking unbelievable. Check out the awesome gameplay footage in this new trailer.



In related, and disturbing, news, Bethesda, the makers of the game have announced a "quest" in which if you have a child born on the release date, 11/11/11, and name your child “Dovahkiin” they'll give you some stuff. I'm sorry but no amount of stuff is worth grief that child will someday endure on the playground. Not to mention the insane amount of therapy you'll have to pay for.

A bit slow during the repeated chorus but the Arnie voice and the content verses are great. I didn't have the guts to watch the linked Shindler's List musical...

If you guys have not seen this yet you need to. the new trailer for Dead Island.

Loved the Civ review. It really made me think about running out and grabbing it. It also made me think about a piece of writing I did in 2001. It's based on many conversations on the subject of gaming which may or may not have occurred ;) Names of people and games have been omitted to protect the innocent. At the time, I didn't really have an audience that I thought would be interested in it. Perhaps I still don't. Things have changed quite a bit in the last 10 years. I know some of you will be able to relate to my ramblings.

Just a few highlights of my gaming credentials: Pong, Intellevision, Coleco, Arcades, ADAM, Amiga (500, 1200, 4000, RIP), handhelds, PC, MAME, Palm, Clie, Playstations, Cell-phone, Mac, Desktops, Laptops, Mini, iPhone... Of course, that's just the shit I've owned or obsessed over. I had friends with coco, Atari, AppleII, Sega, Nintendo, X-box... ad infinitum.

The above list is to add weight to the following;
Nothing compares to Civ!

Keep fighting the good fight.

I think I have found inspiration for my next Super Bowl dance. I am sorry that some of you were not there to see my awesome dance on that painful day that the Steelers lost. However there is always next year.

Give this a watch and let me know if I need to step up my game to compete with the big leagues found bellow.

Pareto did only 20% of the thinking on this, but got 80% of the credit.  What an asshole.  If you've ever heard talk of the 80/20 rule, you should give the linked article a read, good stuff.

Presentation : 8.5

I've the Civ games on and off since the first version was released in 1991 and when I loaded up Civ 4 for the first time, I actually quit two hours in and never touched it again. Things had become too complicated and I found each turn taking way more time that seemed necessary. After playing a bit of Civ Revolutions on 360, I was encouraged to come back to the series for version 5. I'm very happy I did. Civ 5's menu system has been vastly improved and borrows some of the menu systems created for the xbox game to streamline the whole playing process.
City screens are well organized and it's very easy to grab the basic information you need on a turn by turn basis. There are helpful hints abound so gone are the days of forgetting to start production or change your research selection. Similar to Revolutions, "Next Turn" button is overlayed with other activities that require your attention first before the next turn should be started. This system combined with the simplification of the city happiness system made getting into the game easier and allowed me to learn at my own pace while at the same time not feeling like every turn was taking an eternity.

This video is of a Judge in the state of California talking about drug prohibition in the US. It is an interesting listen. Nothing really new, but he presents it very eloquently. The video is 8:43 long, so if you don't want to watch it all, he is in favour of legalizing marijuana. With the points that he raises, it really does make you question why it is still illegal.

The end of the universe in 31 words.

via: Letters of Note

A few years back I heard tell of a great free online money management program that integrated with your bank, investments, etc to provide you with an up-to-date picture of your finance. This handy piece of software is called Mint and, I am very pleased to tell you, it is finally available in Canada.

Mint really does make money management easy. Set-up took me about 15 minutes, and that included categorizing some of the more esoteric transactions from my chequing account. Once set up you get the nifty overview screen, seen above, that let's you know how much money you (don't) have and where you stand in relation to your monthly budgets.
Yep, you can set up budgets for practically anything, and Mint will even recommend budgets for you. It recommended, based on our spending patterns the last few months, about $660/month on groceries, which sounds about right for my household.
Mint also gives you handy hints for saving money, like switching to a credit card better suited for my spending habits, and it has already sent me a couple emails reminding me to pay some bills and a warning about the low balance in my chequing account (that one is destined to be there always). I'm still discovering what all Mint can do for me, but first impressions are that I'm pretty damn impressed and I do recommend this free webapp to everyone, and I urge you to get the iPhone/BlackBerry app to go along with it as well.
One caveat to consider: having all your debt and spending habits put on-screen in front of you in a handy pie chart is a sobering moment, but a necessary one towards an end goal of financial security.

WTF? Selby, get the hell out of my place!

Apparently this refers to some art dude, not our very own Selbonaut. Thank god for that - I don't think I could stand his ego getting any larger.  LOL!

The improved Captain America trailer. NSFW Language.