Retweeted by @RobLowe

I know what follows isn’t a big deal, but if I can’t geek out about this, then what’s the point of being on Twitter?

So Sunday evening, I saw this tweet.

I’m still bitter about the Browns leaving Cleveland to become the Ravens, so I replied as follows.

I then went to bed because that’s what you do when you have a three-week-old. When I woke up this morning, I saw this.

Call me silly for being so excited, but after five years on Twitter, it’s my first retweet by a celebrity. Also, I just finished reading his autobiography a couple weeks ago, so my Rob Lowe fandom is at an all-time high right now. (Yes, that includes how much 13-year-old me loved him in Wayne’s World and 25-year-old me loved him in The West Wing.) If you haven’t checked it out, Lowe’s autobiography Stories I Only Tell My Friends is great for anyone who likes Lowe or the entertainment industry. I highly recommend the audio version since Lowe narrates it himself.

What I Learned from Moneyball

Here what I learned:

The majority of people in Rogers, Arkansas who go to the 4pm Saturday showing of Moneyball on the second weekend are not the least bit interested in David Fincher’s upcoming English version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig. I seemed to be the only excited one in the theater when the latest trailer played.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on TSOYA

Awesome interview. NdT is super-intelligent, yet amazingly down to earth. What he wants most is for America to dream big again, like we did during the space race of the 60′s.

Thanks for the heads up Amazon

P126

I am a huge Amazon fan. I’m a charter Prime member and I spend thousands of dollars a year on the site.

So why in the hell would they wait two days to send me an email about the new Kindles? I’ve actually purchased two other Kindles and have the app loaded on eight devices. For a company that usually knows me so well, they seem to have missed on this one.

#kindlefire #amazon

Simplify with ifttt.com

P119

When I signed up for Posterous, I was looking for a way to simplify the way I update Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and my blog at nerd.is. It has definitely helped, but unfortunately it’s only a partial solution.

I had written off finding a better solution when I heard about ifttt.com. It is awesome. You create tasks based on linking one service to another, with dozens of popular services to choose from. There are thousands of possible workflows, most of which are highly customizable. I setup a few basic tasks to start off, like handling stories I star in Google Reader, and one that lets me text notes to myself that get aggregated automatically with timestamps for later review. With winter coming, I also setup a weather alert that will automatically text me when it starts snowing at my house since I work 20 minutes away and the roads get bad quick.

Those are just a few examples and believe me they are the tip of the iceberg. There are even a bunch of ready made “recipes” for tasks so you don’t have to start from scratch.

The site is in beta, so don’t expect it to be bulletproof, but it’s 1000 times better than doing this stuff manually.

#ifttt

The Lovely Bones or Apparently Everything is Better with CGI

We started watching The Lovely Bones 25 minutes ago. When it started and I saw that Peter Jackson directed it, I wasn’t sure why. Now I know. In the critical scene where the girl meets creepy neighbor man in the cornfield, a note she has gets blown away by the wind. When the note blew out of her hand, I was worried that they wouldn’t be able to shoot a scene with her chasing her note across the field as the wind blows it away. Fortunately, Jackson’s crack team of animators at Weta Digital were able to create a CGI piece of paper and add it to the scene digitally. Bullet dodged.

Seriously filmmakers – we can’t even blow a fucking piece of paper using practical effects now? Barf.

The Inspirational Book I Made for Graduates

When my brother Brandon graduated from high school in 2008, I decided to make him a special present. I created a book of inspirational quotes instead of buying one of the cheezy ones I saw at Borders. For the title, I took one of his favorite quotes. I never got around to making “You Suck At Life” available to the public–until now. I plan to make a second edition at some point, but for now this will do.

You can find the book at: YouSuckAtLifeBook.com YouAreCrap.com or GraduationQuoteBook.com