Halloween is coming up and I’m sure all of you geeks out there are just ITCHING to find the right costume to impress your other geek friends. I have therefore decided to share the secret of the Dr. Horrible costume. For those of you who know me and are wondering, no, this is not my costume. I’ll be geeking it up in a completely different costume. So, without further ado, here’s where to get all of the parts for your Dr. Horrible Costume:
The Goggles
After searching all over the freaking place for goggles that will look decent atop your forehead, I found a pair that should work over at Amazon.com (where else?).
The Lab Coat
This one is probably the trickiest. The closest thing I could find is the A001 LOS ANGELES coat from the above manufacturer. I wasn’t actually able to find it for sale anywhere, but if you call them I’m sure they can hook you up with a distributor. If you’re lazy and/or not picky, there are tons of generic lab coats for sale at Amazon.
The Gloves
Nice looking white welding gloves are key to the costume. The pair linked above are nice and will do the trick, but if you want the actual gloves used in Neil Patrick Harris’s costume, here’s what you’re looking for.
The Boots This pair looks perfect. I have no other suggestions, so just swing by Amazon and get these.
Pants
This is probably the least important part of the costume. I’m not saying you shouldn’t wear pants (because you should), but just swing by your local department store and pick up a pair of white pants, then tuck them in to the boots.
The Freeze Ray
Last, but certainly not least, any Dr. Horrible needs a Freeze Ray to Stop….. The World. Swing over to Amazon or your favorite toy store, find a suitable water gun, and spray paint it black.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my tutorial and if you’ve read this and use this costume for Halloween, or any other costume-wearing event, please post pictures here!
Back in the late 90’s when she was elected Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, she was almost recalled because shortly after entering office, she fired the Police Chief and Library Director for not supporting her in her 1996 race for Mayor. She didn’t even have the Republican courtesy to deny and lie: Her official reason for the firings was that they were “not fully supporting her efforts to govern”. (source)
She got away with the above tactic as Mayor, so why not try it again as Governor? Once she got the state’s top job, she promptly fired public safety commissioner Walt Monegan. This time, however, it wasn’t because he hadn’t supported her in her run for Governor. He had the gaul to not follow her administration’s pressure to fire a state trooper - who had divorced her sister. (source)
She actually had the chutzpah to go on some joke of a radio show and heartily laugh at accusations by the hosts that her apparent arch nemesis, State Senate President Lyda Green (a cancer survivor) is a “cancer” to the state of Alaska and a “bitch”. This wasn’t when she was just Mayor, either. This was in 2008, while she was Governor. An op-ed in the Anchorage Daily News referred to her appearance on the show as “plain and simple one of the most unprofessional, childish and inexcusable performances I’ve ever seen from a politician.” (source)
Everyone already knows that Iraq was a war for oil, but any republican running for any big office, especially that of the vice president, should probably know not to admit that. That memo, however, apparently skipped over Sarah Palin. In her words, “We are a nation at war and in many [ways] the reasons for war are fights over energy sources, which is nonsensical when you consider that domestically we have the supplies ready to go.” Where exactly does she want to get those domestic oil supplies? The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. (source)
If you’re think Sarah Palin lacks national security experience, Cindy McCain says you’re wrong. Why? Because Alaska is close to Russia. Yes, you read that correctly, Cindy McCain actually thinks that proximity to Russia makes the governor of Alaska qualified with national security experience. I don’t even know how to react to this, but I guess they’re taking the whole “throw shit against the wall and see what sticks” approach to campaign strategy. (source)
Are there more reasons than these five that make Sarah Palin a crappy choice for McCain’s veep? Of course there are, but these are the 5 that I think will cause the Republicans the most grief. I’ve got no complains whatsoever about John McCain going about his campaigning in a half-assed way without thinking things through or thoroughly vetting important people like, say, his running mate, but he may just want to save the taxpayers money and just call Barack Obama to concede defeat now.
Sure, the term “epic fail” is thrown around the Internet a lot these days, but the following “fail” moment is just too epic to simply make a fake motivational poster style picture out of it. This epic fail appears on a website for a supposedly legitimate business called Orange Label that does web and graphic design. If you take a look at their Icons Development page everything looks straight forward and professional until you look a little bit closer at the top of the page where you see an standard Windows XP-style start bar. If you take a look at what applications the person has open when they decided to take that screen shot you’ll see some standards like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Internet Explorer. Take a closer look at the IE tab and you’ll notice that working on their website wasn’t all they were doing. Apparently, web development and porn go hand in hand. In case the link above isn’t working or the web developer stops jerking it long enough to catch on and fix it, here’s a screen shot of the site in its current state:
If you’re flying in to my former residence of Minneapolis (or, I suppose, St. Paul), you may notice a large billboard off of I-494 when leaving the airport. It is of the larger-than-life John Stewart along with the rest of his Daily Show crew welcoming Republicans to the Republican National Convention. Want to see it? You’ve got two options. Fly in to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, or just look at the picture below.
To be fair to McCain, if I had that many homes worth that much money, I wouldn’t be able to comprehend what is going on in today’s housing market either.
Growing up, I always had macs. From my first MacSE sporting the lightning-fast 8mhz 68000 processor to college when I had a Power Mac running a 200mhz PowerPC 603e processor, I was always a Mac person. Even after that last Power Mac died, when I was exclusively running PCs, I still considered myself a Mac addict while I secretly longed for the day that I would once again have a nice shiny new Mac. Well, several months ago I got a nice new iMac and I love it. Although not new to Mac OS X, I had never owned a computer that ran it, so its taken me a while to feel out what software I like and I have some recommendations. So, without further ado, here’s my top 5 list of freeware applications every Mac user should have:
Adium This is easily the absolute best chat client for Mac OS X. I’m way more fond of it than I was Trillian on my XP machines and I swore by Trillian. Adium supprts just about every chat platform ever right out of the “box”, with the exception of IRC and video chat (supposedly coming soon). I’m pretty sure some of the platforms it supports went extinct along with the dinosaurs, but it still would work with Adium. The dock notifications are awesome, it integrates extremely well with Growl, and the styling, sounds, icon, and just about anything else are extremely customizable, which is fun. Sure, Mac OS X comes with iChat, but this just embarrasses it.
ClamXav Sure, there aren’t many viruses out there for the Mac, but you can never be too safe. ClamAV is an open source anti-virus solution for *nix-based operating systems. ClamXav is the Mac OS X front end for it. Its easy to install, easy to configure, works well, and is well supported. What more can you ask for in virus protection?
VLC I was debating whether or not to list this, because it is available on just about any operating system, but its just too good pass up. It’s a video player that can be both extremely basic to use and extremely advanced to configure, depending on your needs. It plays just about anything and that’s what makes it great.
Transmission Hands-down the best torrent client for Mac OS X. It’s fast, it’s simple, and it’s easy to configure. If that’s not enough, it also has an extremely small footprint. I’ve tried at least a dozen different torrent clients over multiple platforms over the last few years and this is certainly my favorite thus far, no matter what the operating system.
MagiCal This innocent little application does two incredible things that should by all means just be built in to the next version of Mac OS X. It displays a small icon with the month and date next to the clock on the menu bar and when clicked, it displays a small calendar that even allows you to flip through the months. Why this is not just a part of the OS is beyond me, but thankfully MagiCal is available to help.
All of the buzz on the Internet today is zeroing in on a new potential Google-killer called Cuil. Sure, there have been plenty legitimate attempts to dethrone the search king in the past, but none of the start-ups have been run by Google alumni. I’ve had a chance to play around with it and see what it is offering, so here’s the breakdown.
The Good
It looks great. The main page of the site is extremely simple, just like it’s big brother Google, but its dark design really helps it stand out in a crowd of other wannabe Google competitors.
Right on the front page they are brutally honest about the number of sites that they currently have indexed (121,617,892,992 at the time of this post), which is refreshing to see.
Finally, someone rethought how search results are displayed. No more generic-looking list of websites from one to infinity. Pages are listed in columns almost looking like a news paper or magazine. You can adjust it to display 2 or 3 columns and next to many of the listings and image related to the site appears along side the description of the site.
Search suggestions are in-place to help you find what you’re looking for, but I haven’t yet noticed much difference between what Cuil offers and Google’s parallel feature.
Unlike the Big Brother search engines we’re all used to, Cuil supposedly tracks absolutely none of what you do. This is great to hear for those that love their Internet anonymity.
The Bad
Where are the key features that keep me coming back to Google? If they want to become my primary search engine, they’re going to have to integrate image and product search features.
I mentioned earlier that along side most of the search results appears what is supposed to be a relevant image. Problem is, most of the images are in no way relevant or even taken from the site listed.
Allow more columns! I really like how the search is displayed, but for those of us with a wide screen and high resolution, three columns still leaves a huge chunk of white on the right hand side of the screen when I’m searching. I can probably fit 4-5 columns of search results on my 20″ iMac.
Speed. This one’s a throw-away complaint. It’s a bit sluggish thus far, but it’s also presumably getting completely pounded with traffic, so that’s to be expected. To be honest, I’m surprised it hasn’t crashed, so I guess this belongs somewhere inbetween the good and the bad. We’ll see how they hold up once the initial rush dies down.
The Ugly
The algorithm needs desperately to be tweaked. Earlier today if I did a search for “Primakow” a few pages of this site would show up, but not the main page, whereas a search for “Evan Primakow” yielded no results. Already a few hours later “Evan Primakow” brings up a few pages of this site, but mostly random posts and not the main page.
Ultimately, it has a ton of potential. In my opinion the only thing really holding it back is the algorithm. New features will presumably be added and I’m sure even now they’re tweaking the algorithm as traffic flows through. This is the first new search engine in a very long time that really has the potential to compete with the big boys - and I hope it does just that. The industry needs a fresh look and fresh ideas, so hopefully Cuil can live up to the Internet’s expectations.
I went to see Bill Maher perform live at the Riverside Theater in downtown Milwaukee last night. I’ve been a fan of his since he hosted Politically Incorrect and have Real Time with Bill Maher set to record on my DVR whenever its on, so when we found out that he was coming to town, we just had to get tickets.
It was as awesome as I expected it to be. He truly does hold back on TV, even though its HBO. Some parts of the skit were stuff I’d seen him do before, but for the most part it was new. His act is extremely well thought out, original, thought provoking, and above all else, hilarious. There were at least a few times where I was laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes and I left the theater looking forward to the upcoming season of Real Time even more.
If you’re going to an upcoming show or planning to get tickets to it next time he’s in your area, you can expect to look forward to some serious Bush bashing, conservative bashing, religion bashing, and an ton of great laughs. I highly recommend it! Unless, of course, you’re a Republican tight-ass like the couple sitting next to me. The lady next to me spent the entire two hours shaking her head, looking uncomfortable every time he swore (constantly), checking her watch every 5 minutes, and not at all laughing.
Overall? It was definitely worth the cost of the ticket.
If you’ve ever heard John McCain talk about his time in a POW camp in Vietnam, or read his 1999 book, Faith of My Fathers, you’re likely aware of a story in which McCain tells of being interrogated and in lieu of naming his actual squadron mates he lists the defensive line of the Green Bay Packers at the time. Not just any Packer team, but the team that won the first Super Bowl. To be precise, here’s what he writes in the book:
Once my condition had stabilized, my interrogators resumed their work. Demands for military information were accompanied by threats to terminate my medical treatment if I did not cooperate. Eventually, I gave them my ship’s name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant. Pressed for more useful information, I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line, and said they were members of my squadron. When asked to identify future targets, I simply recited the names of a number of North Vietnamese cities that had already been bombed.
This is a story that he not only wrote about in his book, but has told it publicly several times and was even documented in a 2005 movie of the same name. This story has time and time again been a mainstay of McCain’s biography, but has been told by him numerous times to support his opposition to torture, noting that he gave false information under pressure.
McCain, however, must have hoped that no one would catch him playing the game of underhanded politics when, while campaigning in Pittsburgh on the 9th of this month, a local TV reporter asked him what he first thinks of in relation to Pittsburgh. His response? “The Steelers really made a huge impression on me, particularly in my early years.” He then continued blowing hot air out his ass saying, “When I was first interrogated and really had to give some information because of the physical pressures that were on me, I named the starting lineup - defensive line - of the Pittsburgh Steelers as my squadron-mates!”
So that’s how you’re going to play it, McCain? Stabbing your fond history with the Packers in the back? Next time you’re in Wisconsin, I hope one of our local reporters has the chutzpah to throw this back in your face and watch you flop around for an answer.
for sale at Amazon.
