Warning: squirrels.

Mmmm ... You've got Chicago pizza!

Don't get me wrong.  I adore my friends in Chicago.  My only complaint is that they're not the speediest when it comes to paying off bets.  So, for this year's Super Bowl, Christine and I made a bet of our own.  If the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl, Christine would buy for me the Lou Malnati's pizza that Jeve and Shonnie [names have been changed to protect the innocent] said they would send me if USC beat Illinois in the 2008 Rose Bowl [USC won 49-17]. In the unlikely event that the New York football Giants won, I would buy Christine the Lou Malnati's pizza that Smike MmMichael [again, name changed to protect the innocent] had promised to send her if the Indianapolis Colts beat the Chicago Bears in last year's Super Bowl [the Colts won 29-17].

Of course, the Giants won this year's Super Bowl. I lost the bet.  Christine's pizza is on its way from Chicago as we speak.

On a happier note, Lou Malnati's pizzeria in Chicago delivers Chicago deep-dish pizza, ribs, Vienna Beef's or Portillo's hot dogs, italian beef, Eli's cheesecakes, and more to any address in the continental United States.  Check out TastesofChicago.com for more info.

Fark 2007 headlines of the year

For the past five years I have been a daily reader of Drew Curtis' Fark.com,

a community website ... allowing users to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. Links are submitted by Fark members, which are then approved for posting on the main page ("greenlit") by administrators. All links, approved or not, have threads associated with them where users can comment on the link. (Source: Wikipedia)

In addition to posting links to various weird and interesting news articles and websites, Fark members write pithy, one- or two-sentence summaries that are often more interesting—and significantly funnier—than the links themselves. To see what I mean, check out http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=3301587 to see the winners of Fark’s 2007 headline of the year award.

A few of my favorites:

• Bear attack victim had 'tender heart,' according to friends, family, bear.
• Man who beat his girlfriend with a flashlight charged with assault. Flashlight charged with battery.
• Skiing champion killed after sudden encounter with a tree, the great white shark of the ski slopes.
• CSI team currently at Anna Nicole Smith residence in the Bahamas. After turning on special light that illuminates semen, the house could be seen from space.

The coolest picture of the year

Click to enlage.  Look closely to see why this picture is so cool.

[Update 12/18 -- the black camels aren't camels, they're the camels' shadows.]

Image source: National Geographic

New Google Maps feature: drag directions

Well, the evil scientists at Google are at it again.  They just added a new feature where you click and drag your driving route to create new, custom, turn-by-turn driving maps.  The following video demonstrates this new feature far better that I could:

Chicago by night

Here's a cool website worth a quick visit: http://www.docbert.org/ChicagoByNight/

This is a zoomable, one gigapixel image of Chicago by night from a boat just offshore of the Shedd Aquarium in October 2006.  The cool thing is that you can click the image to drag it left and right [think Google Maps] and double-click to zoom in to an absurd degree [for example, the people in the Congress Hotel need to close their curtains, and you can easily make out the (somewhat blurry) Signature Room if you zoom in enough.]

Watch Frontline episodes online

For the past 23 years, Frontline has been the flagship public affairs series on America's public television network. Frontline presents long-form public affairs documentaries that "fully explore and illuminate the critical issues of our times." In fact,

FRONTLINE remains the only regularly scheduled long-form public- affairs documentary series on American television, producing more hours of documentary programming than all the commercial networks combined.

Now for the cool part. If you head over to the Frontline web site you can watch nearly three dozen Frontline episodes in their entirety, online, free of charge. No, really.

Each Frontline episode is divided into 12 minute chunks, and both high (DLS/Cable) and low (dial-up) versions are available. While you can't actually save the video chunks to your computer without using special stream recording software [which I am NOT going to talk about], the 12 minute chunks are available in both streaming RealPlayer and Windows Media Player formats. Just click on the episode you want to watch, click on the clip you want to play, choose your bandwidth, and you're off to the races.

A few of Frontline's episodes also have links to analyses, interviews, chronologies, discussions, and even teachers guides. Look for the links somewhere on the episodes' homepages.

MIT OpenCourseWare / OCW Search

Tourbus readers know I have been a fan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project for quite some time. Back in April of 2001, MIT announced the ground-breaking, ambitious, and some would say unrealistic 10-year goal of posting the materials for all of its courses online.  Syllabi.  Course calendars.  Lecture notes.  Assignments.  Exams.  Everything. Available to the entire online world.  No charge.

Five years and 1,800 courses later, I’m still a fan. As are several other institutions of higher learning who have followed MIT’s lead and are now posting their own course materials online.  In fact, there are now so many free, online courses that finding the right course for you can involve a bit of cybersleuthing.   

Or you could just go to the OpenCourseWare finder.  If you've used some of the more advanced features inside of Apple's iTunes music store, you already know how to use the OpenCourseWare finder.  And if you've never used iTunes, well ... the OpenCourseWare finder is just like the advanced features inside of Apple's iTunes music store.  :)

Seriously, though, just choose and subtopic in the tag browser and the OpenCourseWare finder shows you, at the bottom of the page, a list of OpenCourseWare courses that discuss that topic.   Click on the course's title to be taken to the course's homepage.  The OpenCourseWare finder doesn't search through all of the world's free, online courses, but it does include courses from

• Carnegie Mellon University
• Foothill De-Anza Community College
• Johns Hopkins School of Public Health
• Tufts University
• MIT
• Utah State University

So, does this mean you can now get a free, online degree from MIT? Not on your life, Chester! While educators are encouraged to borrow MIT's course materials for their own curricula, and while everyone in the world is encouraged to use the OpenCourseWare materials for self-study, MIT has absolutely no plans to offer credit for the online versions of their courses.

Besides, what makes MIT MIT isn't its course documents. Covalent bonding works the same in Cambridge as it does in Irvine, and the second derivative of 2x² is the same along the banks of the Charles River as it is at the confluence of the 5 and 405 freeways. What makes MIT MIT -- and what makes MIT worth $33K a year -- isn't its course documents. It's its faculty. And that you can't put online.

Crackdown guides and maps

As I mentioned back on March 20, I've been spending a lot of time recently playing Crackdown [Xbox 360].  For those of you who have also been bitten by the Crackdown bug, here are a few links to some online guides and maps that may be of assistance:

• Crackdown guide
• Crackdown maps
• Achievement guide
• Agility orb locations
• Hidden orb locations
• Individual hidden orb locations

The US interstate subway map

About two months ago, Chris Yates created a wonderful map showing the United States interstate highway system in subway map format a la Harry Beck's world-famous London Underground map.  Unfortunately, Yates' map included more than a few inaccuracies. The pseudonymous Gochi Sanfrid [which, if you pardon the obscure Dave Barry reference, would make a wonderful name for a band] took a stab at fixing those errors, and the result is worth a look.

Like the London Underground map, Yates' and Sanfrid's maps are not drawn to scale.  And for some reason that escapes all logic, both Yates and Sanfrid chose to save their maps as JPEGs instead of GIFs.   [Remember: JPEGS are for photographs, GIFs are for screen art -- like these maps.]  But both maps are fun, and that's all that matters.

Special thanks to the J-Walk blog for posting Yates' original map.

Adobe Apollo alpha preview

Back in the mid-1990's, Sun's Java programming language held forth the promise of cross-platform programming.  Write a program in Java and it would [or at least should] run in Linux, Apple OS-X, and even Windows XP or Vista.  Unfortunately, [in my humble opinion] Java never lived up to its promise.

Project Apollo is Adobe's stab at "a cross-platform system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop rich internet applications."  What does that mean in English?  Well, here's what Mike Downey at Adobe had to say at the recent Demo 07 conference:

Via Adobe

Notice how Downey's eBay demo didn't require a web browser [except to download eBay's desktop application]?  Adobe Apollo lets developers write Web 2.0 applications that can run outside of a web browser.

To learn a little more about the nuts and bolts of Apollo, check out Mike Chambers' free Apollo Alpha Preview training movies at Lynda.com.  [Full disclosure: I am a Lynda.com author.]

Folks, if Apollo works as well as I think it's going to work -- and not everyone thinks it will -- we could be witnessing the start of the second great internet revolution [the first revolution being the universal adoption of graphical web browsers in the early to mid-1990s.]