There was the addition of a 50 Cent verse:

And now The Dallas Observer has collected some famous movie scenes that have been set to Cee-Lo’s masterpiece. The best one is easily the “Shawshank Redemption” version.

[via Kottke and clusterflock]

In less than two games the World Cup has already brought one thing to light. A lot of people don’t understand offside rules. I think it’s safe to dub it the single most misunderstood rule in all of sports, partly because it differs so much from sport to sport.

Football

A player is in an offside position if he/she is in his opponents’ half of the field and is nearer to his opponents’ goal line than both the ball and the next to last opponent. [source]

American Football

A player is on the wrong side of the line of scrimmage when the ball is snapped. This foul occurs simultaneously with the snap. [source]

Hockey

If a player on the attacking team enters the attacking zone before the puck itself enters the zone, either carried by a teammate or sent into the attacking zone by an attacking player. [source]

Rugby

A defending player is offside if he is less than 10m away from the play-the-ball when the ball is played. An attacking player is offside if he is in front of the ball. [source]

Field Hockey

There used to be an offside rule, but it was abolished in the 1990s. [source]

Cricket

This is not actually a rule of offense, but instead is used to describe the formation of players on the field. [source]

One rule, same name, so many definitions.

*No crash means no sugar crash. 5-Hour Energy contains no sugar.

How is that even allowed? That’s like saying “Cigarettes have never killed anyone. *Never killed means shot on the face with a bullet killed. Cigarettes do not contain bullets.” Just plain ridiculous.

So I guess the question is, did these funds know the crash was coming? Or were these funds one of the causes of the crash? The funds in the chart are listed below. My understanding is that there are more funds that follow this pattern, but it seemed like overkill to list them all.

• Eaton Vance Tax-Advantaged Global Dvd.
• Evergreen Multi-Sector Income Fund
• AllianceBernstein Income Fund Inc.
• iShares S&P US Pref Stock Idx Fnd

The video is a little tedious and boring for my tastes, but it’s below.

[via Business Insider]

Since Time’s list is obviously a joke (I can’t really blame them since you need to sell copies by any means necessary in today’s print publishing world) I feel it would be a disservice to America and the world if a real list wasn’t put out. So below, compiled by me and me alone, is the real 2010 list of the 100 most influential people. They’re in no particular order, but are organized by category.

Entertainment

Finance

1. Paul Volker
2. Timothy Geithner
3. Ben Bernanke
4. Henry Paulson
5. Jim Cramer
6. Lloyd Blankfien
7. Shiela Bair
8. Vikram Pandit
9. Warren Buffett
10. Mohamed El-Erian
11. Elizabeth Warren
12. Carlos Slim Helú
13. Lawrence Summers
14. Akio Toyoda
15. Mikhail Prokhorov

Politics

Sports

Technology

1. Bill Gates
2. Steve Jobs
3. Mark Zuckerberg
4. Dennis Crowley
5. Tim Westergren
6. Jeff Bezos
7. Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone
8. J.T. Wang
9. Robin Li
10. Elon Musk

Due to the timing of a recently released documentary by HBO, posthumous recognition goes to Sérgio Vieira de Mello.

Last night I watched a gripping documentary by ESPN titled The 16th Man. It was the newest production from their 30 for 30 series and centered around the release of Nelson Mandela in and the role he and the South African rugby team, the Springboks, played in uniting the country during a time of civil unrest. The show closed with one of Mandela’s more well known quotes:

Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to unite in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination.

The airing of this episode is very poignant. Today on Cinco de Mayo the Phoenix Suns will be wearing their Los Suns uniforms in protest of the the law the State of Arizona passed, effectively setting civil rights back 50 years. As Suns President and GM Steve Kerr said, the Suns want to “make sure that people understand that we know what’s going on and we don’t agree with the law itself.”

The Suns get it.

1. Isn’t it interesting that the web standards crowd (including myself) has thrown their support behind Apple, but moreso just against Adobe and Flash, when the one great thing that Flash offers is what so many in the web standards community strive for… a uniform experience across multiple browser platforms. Not a knock against web standards at all, just an observation.
2. If there is still any confusion about where this goes from here, who wins and who loses, just take one look at Facebook and MySpace. Flash is obviously the MySpace of this showdown, allowing users to take their platform and customize it, make it their own, and create whatever self-destructive, franken-app they’d like. On the other hand there’s Apple, who like Facebook has retained a measure of control over the landscape, forcing participants to adhere to their design sensibilities and effectively saving individuals from themselves. This isn’t the first [or second] time two companies have faced off like this, and it won’t be the last. This won’t make or break either company. But we’d all be better off if it came to a swift conclusion.

In closing I’ll end with a line from John Gruber.

Unfortunately, for Adobe, I mean, they’ve pretty much just gotta suck it.

Sad but true.

But in Adobe Acrobat 9, just cropping the pages isn’t enough. Because Acrobat doesn’t actually crop the page, it just masks out the unwanted portions of the page, but they still remain in the document and can unexpectedly reappear at inopportune times. I can see how this was done with good intentions by Adobe, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a huge pain in my arse.

The document may appear cropped, but a quick peek at the Crop Pages dialog window tells a different story.

There are numerous suggestions on the web and on Adobe’s support website, but none of them seemed to work. The Document > Examine Document menu option seemed the most promising, but even that failed. And it actually created more problems when it removed some transparency masks that were already in the layout.

Then, finally I came across an an actual solution on the site Mac Production Artist. Only problem is, it requires Applescript. Crap. Eventually I resigned to the fact that I had no apparent alternatives so decided to keep calm and carry on. I did a quick search on my machine for AppleScript and found the AppleScript Utility. Except that’s not what I wanted. Next I found the Script Editor application. Bingo. I already had my faux-cropped document open, so made a duplicate of the PDF (just in case) and then I copied the lines of AppleScript from the site and pasted it into the Script Editor.

tell application "Adobe Acrobat Pro"
tell active doc
repeat with i from 1 to count of pages
tell page i
set cbox to crop box
set media box to cbox
end tell
end repeat
end tell
end tell

AppleScript isn't as intimidating as I thought it would be. At least it's not when the script is provided to you.

I hit the Run button, and a few seconds later it was done. Aaaaaaand Boom! Just like that.

Once the script has been successfully run the Crop Pages dialog box is singing a different, happier tune.

It was so simple, that it’s ridiculous to me that Adobe could not include that function in Acrobat itself. Should they include just such a feature in Acrobat 10? Absolutely. Do I believe they will? Probably not. But a guy can dream.

I have an admission to make. I thought Avatar was ridiculous. It sounded way too sci-fi for my tastes. It looked super-cheesy and childish. Boy was I wrong. After reading about how the film came to be and hearing the reviews I started to realize how big this movie really was.

It still took me a while to go see it, I didn’t make it to the theater until last weekend, but it certainly didn’t disappoint. It was nothing short of the transformative experience it was billed as. For most of the movie you lose sight of how absolutely technologically amazing a feat it is. Until every once in a while you momentarily snap out of being mesmerized and for a brief moment comprehend exactly what it is you’re seeing before slipping back into the trance of the story-line, the effects, the scenery, the actors and how they all come together.

Through the entire film, I really only had one complaint. Unobtainium? Really? I know that it’s sort of a tongue-in-cheek reference in the science and sci-fi communities, but would it not have been worth just a little extra effort to come up with something more creative?

Well I guess two complaints. Was the 3-D really necessary? I don’t thinks so. It seems like more of a nauseating novelty than anything else. While it is an amazing technological feat of it’s own, it doesn’t add anything to the quality of the picture, just another buzz-word to put on movie posters. At least we won’t have to deal with it on the DVD.

There’s no doubt that there will be a sequel. What little doubt may have been left at the end of the movie was erased by director James Cameron. Until then, I just need to make sure I pick up a Blue-ray player before Avatar comes out on DVD. I don’t want to imagine watching it any other way.

The first and most significant, in my mind, is TheSixtyOne. The home page is plain, and appropriately asks “ready?” Because what you see after you enter is a magnificent departure from what we’re all used to. At it’s core it’s a great way to discover a diverse collection of new music but now it’s got a whole new skin.

The second is from a well-respected veteran of the web, Simon Collison. Colly, as he’s known, has completed what was a lengthy and arduous exploration of what a personal website can be. The result is inspiring.