Drink This Show

In case you haven’t heard, there is a new movie out called Freakonomics. It is based on the best-selling book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. One is an economist and the other is a journalist. Together they “explore the hidden side of everything”.

I became aware of this book early in 2010 when Lifehacker featured a free autographed sticker, signed by the authors of Freakonomics, in their Deals of the Week. I decided to get the autograph for the heck of it. After it sat on my desk for a few months, I decided I needed to do something with it. I figured, why don’t I just by the book and put it inside? I purchased the book and as soon as it arrived I placed the sticker neatly inside. Then I began reading. This book caught my attention immediately with its comparisons of a school teacher and a sumo wrestler and the comparison of the Ku Klux Klan to a group of real-estate agents. I didn’t have any experience or much prior knowledge about the economics before reading this book but it is not required to enjoy this book. I consider it one of the best non-fiction books of this decade and my personal favorite.

When I first heard about the movie, I became very excited. I was talking to a friend one day while she was browsing iTunes movies and she was listing off the Top 10. When she read Freakonomics I questioned her about it. I said, “That isn’t a movie. That is a book. Are you sure you aren’t looking at audiobooks or something?” She affirmed that she was looking at the movies. I opened up a website on my iPhone that has a list of every movie coming out this year and even next. I scanned the dates until I found it on October 1st. At this point it was still September. I asked, “Are you sure it’s not just a trailer for the movie or a short clip? The movie doesn’t come out until October 1st.”

“It says I can rent the full movie now,” my friend said.

I am baffled by this but I neglect to check it out for myself or do anymore research. Until, I see a post on Twitter by @AOTS that gives a link to an interview of Morgan Spurlock about the movie Freakonomics. I click on the link right away and in the interview, Morgan tells that the movie was released on iTunes and demand prior to the theatrical release just to see what happens. I find that to be a pretty cool idea but I decide I’ll wait to see it in theaters.

The next day I was in my Economics class and I brought it up in conversation. Next thing I know, the girl who sits besides me tells me that she wants to go see it. That brought up two huge surprises. One that she would want to go see it with me and two that she actually knew about it. She had never read the book but she had wanted to. So we decided to go see it the weekend after release since I already had plans for the weekend of its release. There are a couple other people who want to go, so we start making plans. We finally get to the point of decided where we will go to watch it. I pull up the theaters in my area and begin to look but I can’t find anything. Then I start checking for other theaters but still find nothing. I finally decide to search for the movie and I find its website and there is a link to theaters. It is a short list and I scan through it looking for one in Georgia. I find it. It is the Midtown Art Cinema 8. The heck if I knew where that was and I was definitely not going all the way to Atlanta to see it.

After some debate with my friends that wanted to see the movie, we come up with an idea. I happen to have a basement with a projection screen, four theater seats, and best of all, an Apple TV. Yes, that’s right. We have decided to rent the movie. It only costs $7.99 and that is way cheaper than paying for a movie ticket. I figure if my friends each pitch in $2 then it will be paid for and it is a better deal for everyone. This plan is going down this coming Saturday on October 9th, 2010. This post started out in my head as a review but it turned into something completely different. To make up for it, I’ll have a review by the end of next week. Good day.

Now you may have stumbled upon this page and you are thinking this is going to be a movie review…but it’s not. This is actually about the future of the internet. After seeing the movie, I have been wondering about the new possibilities on the internet. I mean, do we already have everything we need or is there more? What new sites will come about in this new decade? Will Facebook and Twitter eventually fall prey to a newer and better social network?

These are the questions I have been asking myself. Right now it seems like everything is perfect and nothing new needs to be created. We go to Facebook to catch up with our friends, YouTube to watches videos of anything and everything, Twitter to read what celebrities have to say, Pandora to listen to free music, Kongregate for free games, and numerous other sites to get all of our media and social needs. What more could we possibly ask for? We may have reached the point to where nothing new can be created but only the old can be made better. That is the way everything works. The car was invented once, we make improvements. The television was invented once, we make improvements. This is what will soon happen to the internet.

The internet is becoming like America. When America was in its early years, there were a lot of small businesses and that lasted up into the last century. Now the majority of things are run by “Big Business”. The internet is just the same, there are several large websites that gather the majority of the traffic on the internet. If you were to ask a random person walking down the street about different websites, they would most likely know the big ones like Google, YouTube, and Facebook. Would they know about Lifehacker, Fluther, or Woot? Probably not. Granted, these sites do get a lot of traffic but not the kind that the big names get. Then when you take blogs made by the everyday person, they barely get any traffic and that is because people spend all of their time looking at videos of cats doing random cute things. The big man is putting the little man down. That even happens on YouTube itself but I’m not going to get into that.

The point of this post is to inspire you creative people out there to come up with a new idea and help change the internet once again. If you think that this is it then nothing new will ever come about. I don’t care if you don’t think you are good enough or if your site looks crappy. Pursue your dreams and be confident. Facebook looked like shit when it first launched but look how popular it is now. Get out there and create something new for me, the world, and most importantly you.

Rock Band has become a very popular video game for the adolescents of today. But what does this mean for the future of bands? Perhaps this video may shed some light on the subject!

Georgia raised Gideon Slife loved Lost so much that he decided to create a poster for every episode everyday.

Gideon started his adventure on February 8th when he uploaded his first poster to his Facebook page. Soon his posters became very popular within his group of friends that he decided to begin uploading them to Flickr. Whithin a few weeks popular blog sites and news papers began to write stories about him and his posters.

Above are only a few of the posters by the extremely awesome Gideon. Check out all of his posters on his Flickr page.

If you would like to buy some of Gideon’s poster you have the opportunity at his online store. He has 5 posters for $15 each plus $5 S&H. Each poster is autograhped and numbered by the artist himself. These posters are a must have for any Lost fan. They are also a great start for any person that would love to became a Gideon Slife art collector. I have already purchased my poster and I’m sure it will become a conversation starter for any situation.

The maker of this video built a robotic arm. His girlfriend’s kitten decides to attack it. One can only guess who wins.

Hey guys, it’s time to talk Apple.

I’m here to tell you how amazingly awesome the new iPad by Apple actually is after reading all the negative press it has received. However, before I tell you how great it is, I want to get some things clear. No, the iPad does not have multitasking capabilities. No, the iPad does not support Flash. No, it does not have photo/video capturing capabilities either. So there you go, those are the CONS.

Now for the PROS.

The iPad has third party support, which means it is able to run third party apps, without the pesky modifications. Which means I can play Papi Missile on a BIG SCREEN!  I am definitely looking forward to that. Also, HTML5, the still-developing next gen version of HTML, is probably the best resolvent for the Flash problem. Although the internet is not fully HTML5 yet, this is a very promising factor for Apple.

The price of the iPad is not cheap, but it is also not over the $1000 price tag that was predicted. The cheapest iPad is $500 and it has 16 GB of storage. A 3G compatible iPad will be available, with which you will need to buy the AT&T $30/month for unlimited data. There is also a 32 GB and a 64 GB version.

So there you have it, folks. The iPad is better than you think. So please stop dissing it until it comes out, and we can see how great it truly is!

Skribit is an Atlanta-based startup for bloggers that need help coming up with interesting topics to write about. Trying to start a community around your writing is hard, but asking for feedback and input is often one of the best ways to get the ball rolling. Skribit’s founders always ran into the problem of finding topics to blog about. They wanted to keep a regular blogging schedule to keep their readers happy but didn’t want to write about the same old stale news and such floating around on every other blog.

All you have to do is sign up for a Skribit account and then set up a simple widget that you can easily paste into your blog or website. Skribit then allows your readers to give a suggestion on a topic they want to read about, and vote on other suggestions that your readers have left. All of your suggestions are stored in unique interface that allows you to easily view all of your suggestions.

But what happens after your readers leave a suggestion? Once you see a suggestion you like, you can choose to link it with your blog post on the subject, and then any Skribit users interested in seeing a post based on that suggestion will be informed of your entry. You can also share suggestions through Facebook and Twitter to provide inspiration for your followers on those services.

Skribit has two types of accounts available for its users. A free account allows you to use Skribit with one blog and get up to 15 active suggestions at once. Skribit Pro accounts let you use the service on an unlimited number of blogs, take in unlimited suggestions and give you the ability to customize your widget or suggestions tab. Skribit Pro is $24 for a year of service, but if you use the promo code ackbar42 by January 27, 2010, you can get Skribit Pro for 50% off. Try Skribit out today!

A French software engineer said on Friday he was claiming a world record for calculating Pi, the constant that has fascinated mathematicians for millennia.

Fabrice Bellard told AFP he used an inexpensive desktop computer — and not a supercomputer used in past records — to calculate Pi to nearly 2.7 trillion decimal places.

That is around 123 billion digits more than the previous record set last August by Japanese professor Daisuke Takahashi, he said.

Takahashi, using a T2K Open Supercomputer, took 29 hours to crunch Pi to 2.577 billion digits.

Bellard took 131 days, comprising 103 for the computation in binary digits, 13 days for verification, 12 days to convert the binary digits to a base of 10 and three final days to check the conversion.

The gear cost “a bit less than 2,000 euros” (3,000 dollars), Bellard, who earns a living as a software consultant in digital television in Paris, said in an email exchange.

“It is a completely standard PC. The only unusual thing is that it has five 1.5-teraoctet hard disks. Mainstream PCs generally have only one 1-teraoctet disk.”

Bellard has placed on his website details of the achievement, including the use of a high-powered mathematical engine called the Chudnovsky algorithm that chewed through the computation.

Extracts of the 2,699,999,990,000-digit outcome have been published so that they can be compared to preceding records in order to gain independent verification, Bellard told AFP.

Files containing the digits are also being offered to any outside organism keen on hosting the record, he said.

Pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, kicks off with 3.14159… in a string whose digits are believed never to repeat or end.

Bellard said he was “not especially interested” in Pi’s digits but more in taking up the gauntlet of writing the software to carry out the arithmetic.

“Optimising these algorithms to get good performance is a difficult programming challenge,” he wrote.

If you like science and comedy, this is the guy for you.

I don’t know if you have heard yet, but Joan Rivers got stranded in Costa Rica recently. The woman at the desk wouldn’t let her board the plane because she had two different names in her passport. Her passport reads, Joan Rosenberg AKA Joan Rivers, Rosenberg was her late husbands name. She was stranded, could not use her credit card, and only had $100. Luckily there was another worker that felt sorry for her and drove her to the main airport.

With stories like this popping up all over the place, it is a wonder as many people fly as they do. Ever since this latest terrorist attempt, airport security has gotten stricter. Many people are being patted down, and do you know who they are? They are just average day Americans with kids that are flying to Disney World, the beach, or to see their families. I don’t mean to be racist, but why must security be as tight for people that check a bag per person, have 5 people traveling, including kids, and heading toward Orlando. In case they haven’t noticed, the latest terrorist attack was suspicious from the beginning. It was one foreign man, traveling by himself, he didn’t check any bags, and barely had any carry-on luggage if any at all, besides the bomb. That is the kind of person that needs to be checked more thoroughly.

When I travel, I carry a laptop, video camera, DSLR camera, and various equipment to go along. When I was going through the San Antonio airport, they had to check my backpack because they thought I had a weapon. I was pulled over to the side and the woman unzipped my bag. She said, “will anything cut me if I stick my hand in there.” What kind of question is that? It turns out they were wondering what my monopod was. They thought it was a bicycle pump. My question was, what the heck would I do with a bicycle pump to blow up a plane?

The point is that born Americans are being treated like terrorists, and yet the terrorists still get through the search. Something needs to change, and it needs to be done now.