Big Ern's "Kneel Before Zod, Son of Jarel!" Locks of the Week

Three weeks, nine picks, zero losses (and two pushes). Boo ya.

This week's picks:

• New England (6-) at Indianapolis
• Dallas (-3) at Philadelphia
• Tennessee (-4) over Carolina
  

Last week: 3-0
This year: 13-7-3

Weekly Links

Weekly Links

For more, go to: http://del.icio.us/villagerwithwheel

• [Travel] A CLIF bar and a Vitamin Water: $6 on American Airlines

• [HowTo] Hack Attack: Getting good with Google Reader

• [Bittorrent] File Sharing Protocols to Diverge Next Year

• [Finance] 10 Smartest Ways to Live Beneath Your Means

• [Finance] Cash windfall can lead to downfall - EagleTribune.com, North Andover, MA

• [Freakonomics] The Economics of Mosquitoes - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

• [Health] Mind Hacks: Sleep Deprivation Amplifies Negative Reactions

• [Health] Why Are Women More Likely to Be Obese Than Men? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

• [Lifehacks] 5 Reasons Why You Should Simplify What You Say, and How to Do It

• [Lifehacks] 8 Little-Known Ways to Think More Effectively

• [Personal Relationships] How to Argue Productively

• [Science] Al Jazeera English - News - Aids Virus 'Traced To Haiti'

• [Science] Race Linked To Happiness And Recovery From Negative Events

• [Science] Right Versus Left Brain: What Does the Spinning Dancer Teach Us? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

• [Sleep] Neatorama » Blog Archive » Eleven Days Awake

• [Web] Where to Hear Music for Free Online [Digital Music]

• [HowTo] Make Your Toilet Flush Less Water [How To]

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A Hot Date with Miro

Now that you've used Todoist to get all your pending tasks done (or at least catalogued) and Mint to sort out your fiscal world, it's time to sit back and relax.

Unfortunately, Comcast is evil and you're not eligible for Verizon FIOS. What's a girl to do?

I plan on sitting down tonight with Miro (formerly the Democracy Player) to see what is has to offer. It appears to provide everything an upstanding intellectual (well, intellectual property thief) could want in a video player:

• High-Def content
• DRM-free
• Thousands of channels
• RSS access
• YouTube
• Support for all kinds of oddball video formats
• Privacy (if you take their word for it)
• Open source GPL hotness
• Something called The Midwest Teen Sex Show

I hope to post a review tomorrow.

Is this a good deal or not?

Help me out here, while traveling through the metropolis known as Cincinnati, I came across one of Elroy's favorite joints (have you had the Cobb Salad yet?).

Does this mean if you don't eat with your hands it is $5.99 extra? Are these items on redneck Christmas lists? I can see it now "Honey, what I really want is a Knife and Fork from Bob Evans this year!" I would expect to see this in Kentucky, but Cincinnati? Come on!

Now, notice there is a missing period, boys don't get scared, I mean the punctuation mark! Is it $5.99 or $599? Either way, I hear you can get a good fork downtown for $5.

And what, no spoon for that amount of money? Anyone who has registered for a wedding knows you can get a whole place setting for around $3o bucks and you aren't paying for it, someone else is.

So my advice is, the next time you're at Bob Evans eating a Cobb Salad, ask them if you can save $5.99 by eating with your hands.

And remember that $5.99 is like $6.01 Canadian these days...

Maxim's Least Sexy Women

Earlier this week, Maxim released its list of the the world's top five unsexiest women. At number five was Britney Spears. Singer Amy Winehouse, Grey's Anatomy's Sandra Oh and Madonna round out the two,three and four positions.

Finally the winner of this dubious award goes to Sarah Jessica Parker.

Personally, I could careless who is or is not in this very subjective list. I was surprised by the couple names that I actually recognized but even more surprised that people would come up with such a list. I guess that is a potential price that comes with fame.

Adult Halloween Costumes...

I'm not sure how I feel about adult humans dressing up in full regalia for Halloween.
I will admit I'm not a huge fan of Halloween. I never was a big candy eater, so I generally gave almost everything from trick or treating to my two younger sisters.

But, is it sad that grown people wear costumes on October 31st? I guess if they have kids, perhaps they are trying to encourage their children? (Which is another issue in itself)
I'm all about being a kid at heart, but putting on a big pumpkin costume or full snow white outfit as a middle aged individual?

Or is it worse to not dress up but instead to wear a shirt with "Halloween" and glitter on it? Or something similar...perhaps a ghost or a goblin or "Boo!"...

Personally, its not for me.

Although I really like this guy's costume....

Snitter

Since I know all of your are using Twitter after I previously spoke of its usefulness, I want to make sure you are all using Snitter.
Snitter is a great windows client for Twitter built on Adobe's AIR. AIR is an effort to bring internet applications to the desktop.

Snitter gives you all the features of the twitter website, but gives you a much better interface. It does direct messages, replies, favoriting, creating tinyurl's, a transparency feature, and much more.

My favorite part of Snitter is the Growl-like pop ups when new tweets arrive. As I saw one tweet earlier today state, Snitter really does improve your speed reading when it pops up 5 messages at a time.


As a side note, Twitterrific is a great client for you Mac OS X users. If I used OS X on a daily basis, I'd be all over Twitterrific.

Movember

In a few days, October will turn into Movember.
Yes, I said Movember.

What is Movember?

"Movember (the month formally known as November) is a charity event held during November each year.

At the start of Movember guys register with a clean shaven face. The Movember participants known as Mo Bros then have the remainder of the month to grow and groom their Mo (Australian slang for moustache) and along the way raise as much money and awareness about male health issues as possible."

In this case, all money donated goes directly to prostate cancer.

Baraka, our recently highlighted biggest fan, is participating in Movember. His take on it:

"I’ve been presented with the opportunity to do something good for the world and look like a total douche bag at the same time."

So, if you want to support Baraka in his pursuit to look terrible, please go to the following link and donate some money:

Sponsor Baraka

If he allows it, I will post pictures of his growth throughout the month.

Feel free to leave suggestions for the type of "Mo" that Baraka should grow in the comments...

Organize your life...

My Twitter feed alerted me to a post by mashable.com about 100+ ways to organize your life.

I'd encourage you to check it out if you like to manage lots of your life via the web.


I will highlight several from the article:

• Todoist - previously mentioned by Zach and my preferred online task management site (we both use it and pay for the premium features)
  
• Remember the Milk - another good online task management tool
  
• Monkey On Your Back - attempt to organize others by sending them e-mail reminders
  
• Knotler - create free, online, mobile shopping lists
  
• Fitness Journal - track your fitness goals and progress online
  
• Chore Wars - the World of Warcraft for chores
  
• MyHomePoint - organize everything at your home
  
• BrainCast - record messages for yourself and send them to your PC
  
• Our Wedding Day - online wedding organization
  
• Planypus - organize your social life with a wiki
  

Marine Corps Marathon 2007

On a personal note, this weekend I was proud to cheer on my future wife in her endeavor to run the Marine Corps Marathon.

There were quite a few people running. It is the fourth largest marathon in the US and the seventh largest in the world. Here's a link to the results: 2007 Results

Also, I am happy to report that she met my personal goal for her (although it wasn't her goal), to beat Oprah's time.
Oprah ran the marathon in 4 hours, 29 minutes and 20 seconds. Meredith beat Oprah by a little under 3 minutes. Take that, richest woman in the world.

If Meredith runs it again, my goal for her will be to beat P. Diddy's time. He ran the New York City marathon in 4 hours, 14 minutes and 54 seconds.

Here's a link about the Oprah/P. Diddy marathon rivalry: LINK

Needless to say, I am extremely proud, impressed, and in awe of my bride to be's achievement. I don't think I could ever run that far at one time.

Weekly Links

Here are some links from the past week.

For more links from our delicious account:
VillagerWithWheel

• [Celebrity] Charts And Graphs: What Do Celebrities Blog About?

• [Health] Debate: Health Problems Related to the Geek Lifestyle - Tech-Recipes.com

• [Odd] Well, you don't see something like this every day | Oddly Enough | Reuters.com

  Please read this one...

• [Science] Right Versus Left Brain: What Does the Spinning Dancer Teach Us? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

• [Tech] More than 100 times faster than WiFi? | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

• [Tech] Slashdot | Note To Criminals — Don't Call Tech Support

  Idiot.

• [Wal-Mart] Wal-Mart (WMT) buys balance of Japan operation

• [Web] Comcast traffic blocking: even more apps, groupware clients affected

  Even censoring Lotus Notes! Good thing I don't have Comcast.

• [Web] Linking into the market for ministry - Los Angeles Times

  I did a blog post about GodTube a while back.

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Big Ern's "If it ain't broke..." Locks of the Week

Maybe I've got this crazy league figured out. Or maybe the Patriots are a freakish gambling anomaly too good to last much longer. We shall see.

NEW ENGLAND (-17) over Washington
Indianapolis (-7) over CAROLINA
Buffalo (+3) over JETS

Last week: 3-0
This year: 10-7-3