Eric Covener’s Journal

Cool stuff

I accidentally read a spoiler for “I Am Legend”, a novel that is being made into a Will Smith movie this christmas (not the first film adaptation of this movie). I felt really awful after reading it because it sounded like a great gimmick and now I can’t bring myself to read it.

Apparently some of the previous film adaptations either leave out some of the cooler elements or have otherwise been disowned by the author, “The Last Man on Earth” sounds more faithful to the book.

The trailers for the the Will Smith movie surely don’t give any hint about how faithful it is to the book…

Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

The podiatrist points to three subtle quirks on my foot that add up to some extra pressure on the ball of my big toe and suggests that buying more rigid shoes, and maybe adding arch support insoles, might be enough to squash this tiny annoyance that I’ve been kind of suppressing for a while.

Kind of cheesy, the doctor wrote a “prescription” for a specific kind of new balance shoe on some pre-fabricated New Balance prescription sheet.

X-Ray co-pay is probably working its way through the system now….

Via Michelle Malkin:

http://michellemalkin.com/2007/10/24/media-myths-about-the-jena-6/

the crudely constructed nooses were not aimed at black students. Instead, they were understood to be a prank by three white students aimed at their fellow white friends, members of the school rodeo team.

Lots of plot holes and inconsistencies made it hard to buy into the 30 Days of Night universe, but there were a handful of cool things going on in the movie. Unfortunately, 30 Days of Night doesn’t isn’t even a blip on the radar of vampire flicks… the imagery in the trailer was a good sales job.

The best part of the experience was seeing that there’s a sequel to Alien Vs. Predator being released soon, although the trailer was absolutely horrendous.

Japanese Anti Rape/Mugging Dress Transforms Into Vending Machine Disguise

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/10/18/nobel.apology/index.html

“To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief,” he said.

His comments?

“all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really.”

Watson also asserted there was no reason to believe different races separated by geography should have evolved identically, and he said that while he hoped everyone was equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.”

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/10/17/apple.iphone.ap/index.html

I’m a customer once third-party software lets me run the software I want on an iphone…

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/the-absolute-poker-cheating-scandal-blown-wide-open/

What these players-turned-detectives noticed was that, starting with the third hand of the tournament, there was an observer who watched every subsequent hand played by the cheater. (For those of you who don’t know much about online poker, anyone who wants can observe a particular table, although, of course, the observers can’t see any of the players’ hole cards.) Interestingly, the cheater folded the first two hands before this observer showed up, then did not fold a single hand before the flop for the next 20 minutes, and then folded his hand pre-flop when another player had a pair of kings as hole cards! This sort of cheating went on throughout the tournament.

So the poker detectives turned their attention to this observer. They traced the observer’s IP address and account name to the same set of servers that host Absolute Poker,