Weather.com has an excellent forecast for those Chicagoans/Midwesterners that hate the sun and warm weather:

Looks like Colbert and Conan have been fighting back and forth over who created the success of presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, and then Jon Stewart got pulled into the fight and claimed that "Colbert made Huckabee. Conan made Colbert. Jon Stewart made Conan...Jon Stewart made Huckabee!"

The whole thing is absurdly hilarious, and 8 and 1/2 minutes long. You can find the video here because their video link doesn't work right.

A ship forced to drop anchor off the coast of Egypt because of bad weather ended up accidentally cutting two undersea cables that provide internet capacity for 75% of Asia. The accident is proving troublesome because it takes a while to send repair ships to the site and make the repair, and the resulting crippled internet is causing trouble for businesses, particularly outsourcing companies that rely on the internet for business. The internet's routers will gradually find new routes using other cables (i.e. from the east instead of the west of Asia) but this takes time and the resulting speed can be significantly slower. To me, it's incredible to see how fragile a large part of the internet can be, even though I read in some article from a USA perspective that they're not worried about such a thing over here because most of the content is produced/hosted here. But that's pretty short-sighted considering the amount of content produced overseas, and again the outsourcing issue. The US companies that are outsourcing get hit by the lack of connectivity overseas.

I suppose it would be expensive if it's even possible to protect such a long length of cable, but it's still surprising to see how much damage a single ship can do.

I just came across a hilarious video which led me to another video and suddenly it's an F-bomb themed post. Obviously, these are quite NSFW so view at your own risk!

First off, this apparently aired on Jimmy Kimmel Live last night. I've grown pretty tired of Sarah Silverman's small number of jokes (her act is just: I'm crude and I have funny songs) especially after her show on Comedy Central really played it out, but this is hilarious. There's another version on YouTube with the intro where she sets up the clip for nearly a minute, but it didn't have anything funny, so here's the version that jumps right into the video (the longer, crappier one is here).

I'm F--king Matt Damon

Thanks to YouTube's related videos, I then found The Departed, The F'--king short version, which basically compiles all the F-bombs (and some other profanities) from the movie. But it does include a few longer clips and the result is quite funny (this one is not only NSFW, but it's also full of Departed spoilers, so if you haven't seen it yet, go watch it because it's great!).

The Departed F--king Short Version

If you check out the related videos on that last one, there's actually a whole bunch of F'n short versions of different movies.


There's a strong parallel between the first video and the song Matt Damon sings in Eurotrip:

Matt Damon sings Scotty Doesn't Know

Timmy: "Did, did you just double dip that chip? That's like putting your whole mouth right in the dip!"

George: "You dip the way you want to dip, I'll dip the way I want to dip," *aims another used chip at the bowl*

Apparently that scene was enough to get Clemson University to do a study of germ transfer from mouth-to-dip, and it turns out that Timmy was right.

Instead the results, to be published later this year in the Journal of Food Safety, found that it is a little bit like putting your whole mouth on the dip. On average, three to six double dips transferred about 10,000 bacteria from the eater's mouth to the remaining dip.

"Each cracker picked up between one and two grams of dip. That means that sporadic double dipping in a cup of dip would transfer at least 50 to 100 bacteria from one mouth to another with every bite," McGee wrote.

There's some Superbowl food for thought :)

First off, this whole interview was hilarious...Stephen interviewed "friend of the show" Debra Dickerson for some perspective on all the hoopla surrounding the South Carolina primary and having to choose between voting for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, being a black woman (the media has been blowing that out of proportion while implying that nobody is looking at the actual issues, which is stupid).

But the best part by far comes in the last 45 seconds of the interview:

Best quote: "Even you can't take you sometimes."

It's bad enough he works at Faux News, but John Gibson is a complete douchebag, and I can prove it to you in just 2 videos.


First, he made fun of Jon Stewart's 9/11 monologue from The Daily Show (starts 1:45 in):

Now, he made fun of the death of Heath Ledger on the same day:

Here's Keith Olbermann calling Gibson the worst person in the world for each incident:

I first heard this on the radio and was really surprised...apparently Heath Ledger died of a possible overdose on prescription sleeping pills this afternoon at the age of 28.

It just seems so random and is kind of surreal considering how excited I am to see him as the Joker in the upcoming Batman movie (which is already finished shooting).

Ledger as Joker

Ledger has a daughter, Matilda Rose, born in 2005 to his then-girlfriend, Michelle Williams, who played his on-screen wife, Alma, in "Brokeback Mountain." The couple have since separated.

"He was just so respected in the industry," said Kim Serafin, senior editor of In Touch Weekly. "It's just horribly tragic. He was just a fine actor and a good person, so this is horribly sad and very unexpected."

TMZ also has a developing story on this.

Underwhelmed, is my overall reaction. If you haven't heard the news, Apple's MacWorld 2008 took place today, and there was a bunch of hype in the Mac community (as usual) about what would be released. Speculation covered everything from a super-thin MacBook Air notebook to movie rentals in iTunes.

It turned out most of the speculation was correct, but with each new product/update, I couldn't help but think of several shortcomings (but I'll include the benefits to show the flipside):

• Time Capsule
  Basically a hard drive used wirelessly to store Time Machine backups, at $299 for 500GB and $499 for 1TB. Because it's much harder to make your own backups to a drive that's half the price. (Sure the 500GB MyBook I linked isn't wireless, but you can just connect it to a single computer and share it over the network with all your machines)
  
  
• iPhone Updates and iPod Touch Apps
  They first unveiled some new features for iPhones (I still don't know how 4 million people plopped down $400 + the cost of a 2-year AT&T contract for that thing) like mapping with location determined by cell towers and WiFi hotspots. Also there's now 9 customizable homescreens. But iPod Touch owners get to upgrade and get 5 new apps: mail, maps, stocks, notes, and weather for another $20! Seriously? They had to charge more for that? Lame.
  
  
• iTunes Movie Rentals
  This sounded like it could have some potential. They actually got all the studios on board with it. And it's $2.99 for old movies, $3.99 for new releases. Not terrible, but not really that great either...a subscription service (ala Blockbuster, Netflix) is still a significantly better deal. And Amazon Unbox charges the same amount or less (i.e. Batman Forever is $1.99 for rental, and those can be downloaded to your Tivo as well) and also has the same expiration rules on rentals (start watching within 30 days, and once you start it you have 24 hours to complete it). HD rentals cost $1 more, so $3.99 for old movies and $4.99 for new releases. I wonder how many people would pay the extra for HD, especially considering if you're watching through a computer, the difference between the DVD-quality stream and the HD one is really going to be very small. I also wonder how this whole service is going to hold up, given that not a lot of people have blazing fast internet connections. Are people going to get stuck at "Buffering..." screens?
  
  
• Apple TV Upgrade
  
  Finally, an announcement that I was impressed with! The new version of Apple TV now does not require a computer connection as the first version did. And they lowered the price from $299 to $229. Combining this with the movie rentals news, they should be pushing a lot of these out the door. And it will still sync with other Macs for music, pictures, etc., as well as some new features like Flickr integration. And yes, existing Apple TV owners get the upgrade free.
  
  
• MacBook Air, as described by Engadget:
  

  The 0.16-inch thin MacBook Air -- a laptop so thin it fits in a manila envelope. The new machine features a full-size keyboard and LED-backlit 13.3-inch display with built-in iSight, and the new larger trackpad supports multi-touch gestures. Just like the iPhone, you'll be able to pan around, pinch to zoom, and rotate with two fingers, and move windows with a flick. Apple got the size down by using the same 1.8-inch 80GB drive that's in the iPod classic, but you'll be able to order a 64GB SSD instead. The Air eschews optical media, but there's a separate external you can snag for $99 and Apple's also announced a feature called Remote Disk that'll let the Air get data off the optical drive in any PC or Mac running the Remote Disk software. Pricing starts at $1799, and the Air will be shipping in two weeks.

  That description pretty much covered all the details. I don't know why you'd spend so much money to have the thinnest notebook when it's not as small as cheaper 12-inch notebooks with similar specs. What's the purpose of it being so thin? I guess the cool factor justifies another $600. The multi-touch trackpad is an interesting idea, but I really don't see what the practical uses of it would be. How often do you need to spin pictures or maps around on the screen? I do have to say it gets some impressive battery life for such a small notebook though.

I do have to admit that MacBook Air looks pretty damn sleek though:

It's hard not to get swept up in the excitement of the presidential race, though I'm glad I didn't pay much attention to the pundits and their commentary, both on Hilary's struggle before the New Hampshire primaries (a bunch of stupid, baseless hype), and then on her crying affecting votes (in my opinion, equally stupid).

At any rate, I decided to first check to see if I was registered to vote because I thought so but wasn't 100% sure. Fortunately, those living in Cook County will find it easy to check via their "Am I Registered?" website. Now if you're not, you've missed the deadline to register for the primaries. But worry not! There's something called grace-period registration that still lets you sign-up until Jan. 22nd, but requires you to jump through a couple of hoops (bold emphasis is mine):

Grace-period registration and voting

Wednesday, January 09, 2008 - Tuesday, January 22, 2008

At the Cook County Clerk's main office:

There is only one way and one place to register during the 14-day grace period. Unregistered voters must sign up to vote in person at the Clerk's downtown Chicago office: 69 W. Washington St., Room 500. You must show two pieces of identification to register.

Grace-period voters must vote absentee. You can: 1) vote in person at the Clerk's downtown office immediately after signing up to vote; or 2) receive an absentee ballot by mail that you can complete at home and return to the Clerk's office before Election Day.

Grace-period registrants are not allowed to vote at the polls on Election Day or vote at any early voting site.

Here's the hours and address of the Cook County Clerk's office:

69 W. Washington St., 5th Floor, Chicago, IL 60602
Hours: 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday - Friday
Call: (312) 603-0906