Yes, it is true. I am a sucker for movie promotions granting free stuff. Today, I got 2 exciting things.

The first was a cryptex as a result of being one of the first 10,000 to complete The Da Vinci Code Quest on Google, a joint promotion for the upcoming Da Vinci Code movie and for Google's personalized homepage, which I already used. As there's only 10,000 of these, they're going for around $60 on ebay right now.




The second item was from the Airplane: Don't Call Me Shirley! Edition DVD that I got a while back. There was a free mini inflatable Otto the Pilot offer that came with the Airplane! DVD, which I obviously could not pass up. (I see one going on Ebay for $30) And of course, true to the movie, they put the inflation tube on his belt.

This morning, an alarm clock snafu made me wake up late. I was instantly reminded of a Seinfeld episode, and an exchange between Jerry and Jean-Paul:

Jerry: (pause) So what happened? The snooze alarm, wasn't it?
Jean-Paul: Man, it wasn't the snooze. Most people think it was the snooze, but no, no snooze.
Jerry: AM/PM.
Jean-Paul: Man, it wasn't the AM/PM. It was the volume.
Jerry: Ah...the volume.
Jean-Paul: Yes, the volume. There was a separate knob for the radio alarm.
Jerry: Ah, separate knob.
Jean-Paul: Yes, separate knob. Why separate knob?! Why separate knob?! (frustrated)
Jerry: Some people like to have the radio alarm a little louder than the radio.
Jean-Paul: Oh, please, man, please!

Why do alarm clocks have so many stupid quirks and points of failure? In order to set it, you have to enter the time for the alarm. This alone can sometimes be a challenge. Some clocks wear down quickly and it becomes difficult to hold the button down so it stays on the alarm time while you're setting it. Even better, I had a clock where if you weren't on the alarm, hitting the hour button would actually increment the clock hour. So if I didn't jam (and hold) my thumb down hard enough on the "alarm set" button, I'd start changing the current time. Once you finally do that, you have to make sure to slide the switch to turn on the alarm, or you set it in vain. The clocks where the alarm automatically turns on because you're changing the alarm time are nice. And don't forget to adjust that volume! It's kind of useless for an alarm to go off with no audible sound. I have never seen a Seinfeld clock with 2 volume knobs, but it sounds like more potential for disaster. And someone needs to put together some kind of snooze standard. Everytime I get a new clock it's a toss-up. Will it snooze 5 minutes? 10 minutes? A day and a half?

Next time I'm getting a wake-up call.

I loved the original Mission: Impossible movie. It was cool in the way that it had such an intricate plot with deception and betrayal. It quickly became one of my favorites. Watching the trailer for the sequel, it was immediately apparent that there was a change. Everything looked more "Hollywood." Bigger explosions, elaborate camera shots, etc. The plot of the second movie was allright, but not great.



When I first heard about the third movie, I was fairly certain that the third would be just like the second, if not even more over the top and even less about the plot. Then I saw the trailer, and it was confusing. On the one hand you had the anticipated "over-the-top-Hollywood" shots like a missle causing Tom Cruise to slam into a car (which of course he just shakes off). But on the other hand, you had Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the villain. Intriguing. I expected it would be mildly entertaining. Turned out it was better than that. (***Mild spoilers ahead!***) The process of creating (and wearing) the mask was awesome, the plot was interesting, and the action was intense. Certainly it was more ludicrous in many ways, but it was better than the second movie. I'd recommend it.

dave submitted a story about a guy who won't finish college.

Despite his 12 years as an undergraduate student, Johnny Lechner realized something was missing from his academic record: He'd never studied abroad. And so the 29-year-old perpetual student who was expected to finally graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater withdrew his application for graduation Monday, five days before commencement.

"I realized that if I went one more year, I could study abroad," Lechner said. "That's one thing I haven't done."

Lechner's extended academic career has made him a celebrity of sorts. His never-ending student life has been featured in newspapers and on network television shows, not to mention campus publications across the nation.

By this spring he had completed 234 college credits, or about 100 more than needed to graduate, and was taking seven more.

That qualified him for the so- called "slacker tax," instituted this school year by the UW Board of Regents to help cover the state subsidy for students who stay long past the usual four or five years to earn an undergraduate degree. It calls for students who exceed 165 total credit hours or 30 more than their degree programs require -- whichever is higher -- to pay double tuition.

Lechner said he didn't start out to be a long-term student, but it just developed once he realized how much fun he was having at college. Had he graduated, he would have earned a liberal studies de gree in education, communications, theater, health and women's studies.

Michelle Eigenberger, an editor at the Royal Purple, the campus newspaper, said Lechner may have achieved celebrity status, but most students are tired of it. "It's getting old," she said. "For the sanity of the rest of the campus, we want him to get out of here."

Yeah, and if he had one more year after that, he'll have to take out his dentures before doing keg-stands. And he can tell all the frat boys stories about how when he was a freshman he used to walk to classes uphill...in the snow....for 30 miles...with no shoes.

In local Tampa news, a man hit a cop car because he was distracted by his bowl of cereal.

Pinellas County deputies say a man eating a bowl of cereal while driving accidently hit the back of a deputy's vehicle last Friday in Seminole.

Lance Kocses faces charges for failing to yield the right of way. Accident investigators say Kocses was eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes and was distracted.

Deputies say Kocses was northbound on Seminole Boulevard near 117th Drive in his Toyota Tacoma when he hit the deputy. Deputy Nick Lazaris, who was in his cruiser at the time, was not injured. Damages to both vehicles will probably reach $5000.

Only in Florida.

dave submitted a funny story about how a Schaumburg pitcher was traded for 60 cases of Budweiser.

Yes, you read that correctly. In recent days, a right handed pitcher by the name of Nigel Thatch was traded for sixty cases of Budweiser beer. If you don’t believe me, then have a look for yourself.

The first question that came to my mind was, "Bottles or cans?" Seriously, that would adjust the value of the trade to some degree.

Before the exchange, Thatch was a pitcher for the Schaumberg Flyers in the Northern League, an independent baseball league that also features other teams such as the Calgary Vipers, Edmonton Cracker-Cats, Fargo-Moorhead RedHawks, Joliet Jackhammers, St. Paul Saints, Winnipeg Goldeyes, among others. Furthermore, there are a number of recognizable Major League baseball names that have also participated in the independent Northern League at some point during their careers. Among that list of players include J.D. Drew, Kevin Millar, Rey Ordonez, Darryl Strawberry, Jeff Zimmerman, Matt Duff, Tim Byrdak, and Luis Lopez.

Do you realize the significance of the trade, and why it happened this way? Thatch was not only a pitcher for the minor league Schaumberg Flyers in the Northern League, but also an actor. In fact, you would most recently recall him as "Leon" in a series of commercials for Budweiser beer.

If you still are not sure who I am referring to, let me try and jolt your memory some more. One particular amusing line from one of the commercials is as follows: "Leon, there is no 'I' in team" stated the reporter. Leon replied, "Yeah, well there ain't no 'WE' neither".

Actually, the main reason for the bizarre exchange was apparently due to the fact that the Schaumberg Flyers baseball team has a partnership with Anheuser-Busch, though I'm pretty sure the fact that Thatch has also acted in Budweiser commercials assisted as well.

Nigel Thatch was moved over to another independent baseball league, that being the Golden League. Thatch will now be in California playing for the Fullerton Flyers, which will be significantly closer to Hollywood and Los Angeles, allowing him to not only further continue to focus on baseball, but also continue his acting career on the side.

Leading into Nintendo's unveiling (finally!) at E3 tomorrow, there's an awesome TIME article on the Wii - Nintendo's next console - and what you can do with it. Reportedly, the sensors are responsive enough to apply spin to the ball in tennis if you swing the controller like you would a tennis racket. This console is going to be awesome.

It's a remarkable experience. Instead of passively playing the games, with the new controller you physically perform them. You act them out. It's almost like theater: the fourth wall between game and player dissolves. The sense of immersion-the illusion that you, personally, are projected into the game world-is powerful. And there's an instant party atmosphere in the room. One advantage of the new controller is that it not only is fun, it looks fun. When you play with an old-style controller, you look like a loser, a blank-eyed joystick fondler. But when you're jumping around and shaking your hulamaker, everybody's having a good time.

Here's a link to my rundown of the controller details from last September.

For the second time, some videos I embedded from YouTube got taken down. YouTube may not have had a choice in both cases, but they could do a better job of inidicating a video is taken down rather than indefinitely displaying "Loading..." on the embedded player.

The first time the video was the now infamous "Lazy Sunday" SNL video that spread across the internet like wildfire. NBC made YouTube take down the video to ensure they were the only ones providing the video online.

Now, as reported in a New York Times article, C-Span has made YouTube (and iFilm) take down the video clips of Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which have been the subject of much controversy. They did this to provide the video themselves at c-span.org, and also to sell DVDs of the event. However, they also made a strange move:

And C-Span gave permission to Google Videos to carry the Colbert speech beginning Friday. The arrangement, which came with the stipulation that Google Videos provide the entire event and a clip of Mr. Bush's entire routine as well, is a one-time deal.

But Julie Supan, senior director for marketing at YouTube, said officials there were stung by C-Span's behavior, because, she said, the site had helped fuel momentum for the Colbert clip.

"This was an exciting moment for them in a viral, random way," she said. "To take it down from one site and uploading on another, it is perplexing."

She also noted that YouTube had tried to make a similar deal for the clip that Google Video eventually made. "Google will stop at nothing to try to win over the community," she said.

Why would they make a deal with Google Video over YouTube? It made sense to take the video down from YouTube if C-Span was looking to profit from it themselves (through advertising and driving traffic to their site), but you simultaneously alienate the people who made the clips big in the first place. And how hard would it be for YouTube to make it apparent a video was taken down in the embedded player? I've always thought twice about embedding YouTube videos (not just because they can get taken down, but they can slow the page's load time), but it's ridiculous to see that several old posts now have dead embedded videos.

dave submitted a Washington Post story about Rolling Stone magazine's $1 million cover.

Rolling Stone magazine celebrates its 1,000th issue this week with a burst of rock 'n' roll excess: a glitzy Manhattan party with the Strokes as house band and a 3-D cover that mimics the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" sleeve and cost nearly $1 million to produce.

The 3-D cover is pure Wenner. Much like Beatles fans pored over the pastiche of faces on "Sgt. Pepper," he wants readers to study his cover for their own cultural reference points. There's Chuck Berry duck-walking, Madonna grabbing her crotch, Bono with a microphone and even _ upon very close inspection _ Waldo.

Wenner believes it's the costliest magazine cover ever. He denies with an expletive reports that the magazine's publisher, Steve DeLuca, left in February because his boss was pinching pennies on the party.

The issue is clogged with details like Wenner's favorite cover (Annie Leibovitz's portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono taken hours before Lennon was shot) and the most memorable cover headline ("He's Hot, He's Sexy and He's Dead" about Jim Morrison). Mostly, it's a nostalgic look at a time when the magazine spoke for a generation and an art form.

The end of the article also contains a great exchange between Rolling Stone and Blender magazines:

No other music magazine "has put a glove on us editorially," Wenner said.

"Our competitors _ God bless them all _ you can't think of one memorable article, interview or issue they've ever done, whereas Rolling Stone keeps knocking them out of the park," he said. "Can you think of one great Blender issue?"

Retorted Craig Marks, Blender editor in chief: "Of course I can. How about the issue we did featuring the pampered offspring of such baby boomer legends as Art Garfunkel?" he said. "Oh, wait. That was Rolling Stone. OK, then, how about the one where we broke the news that Jim Hendrix was still dead?

"Shoot, that was Rolling Stone, too. Perhaps if Jann wasn't so busy reliving his magazine's bygone glory years, he'd realize that music fans _ not to mention contemporary superstars U2, Gwen Stefani and Coldplay, among many _ have long ago turned away from their dad's publication and instead turned to Blender."

Marks wouldn't talk further about his competitor unless it was for an article that equally discussed Blender's fifth anniversary.

Blender clearly rattled Rolling Stone at the outset. While "it hasn't proven to be real competition," Wenner said, he admitted to stealing ideas like running more and shorter music reviews.

I saw a story over at Search Engine Watch Blog about ask.com's rebranding campaign now that they've dropped Jeeves. It mentioned that in the next round of advertising, Ask is going to emphasize their understanding of "concepts" which other search engines can't. For instance, searching for "pimped out cars" will yield results that contain not just those keywords, but other results that also include words like "tight" and "phat."

I also recall how back in the day the big emphasis with Ask Jeeves was in their ability to answer searches posed as normal questions, such as "Where is Fort Knox?" I decided to check out how some Ask results stacked up to Google.





It looks like Ask has managed to provide more relevant results by searching on related queries and displaying them along with other results. The "Narrow Your Search" and "Expand Your Search" sections on the top right of the results page also seemed to contain highly relevant searches that could help you find exactly what you're looking for, and this is a nice feature.

Next I tested the ability to answer questions, a feature that all of the major search engines seem to be trying to solve.






This was by no means exhaustive, and obviously I was picking terms to emphasize the features that Ask has been touting. However, it is interesting to see someone coming up with some more relevant results than Google on some queries. Ask has innovated by searching for related terms, though it'll be interesting to see if this ends up cluttering results with irrelevant entries. They also seem better at recognizing and highlighting answers to questions.

It should be noted that Google has not been stagnant on the search end either. Besides their ongoing algorithm improvements, their OneBox results have gotten a lot better, especially with different tie-ins to travel websites, job listings, and much more.