Happened upon F*ck Yeah Headlines in my travels through the interweb tubes, and just HAD to share. It’s pure comic genius.

Each weekday I find a headline on a major news site, and illustrate it without reading a word of the story.

-Eric Wedum

Yesterday at the gym was leg day. I saw a couple of powerlifters chatting near the squat rack that I wanted to use so I mosied over and asked if they were actually using it. One dude said he was about to do some “safety squats” and asked if I wanted to join him. I said “uhh… sure… what’s a safety squat?” The powerlifters chuckled and one dude went to the back room to get a weird bar that I’d never seen before. When he came back I commented “I feel like I’m about to get a free lesson!” and I was right, he went right into explainy mode.

Basically the safety squat is a cross between a regular squat (where the bar is on the traps just behind your neck) and a front squat (where the bar rests on your front shoulders). Because of its shape the weight ends up being pretty much in the center of your body. In the picture there, you basically put the bar on your neck and there are two handles that come forward. The point of the safety squat is to basically point out to you where your deficiencies lie. If you are too far forward it will force you to work your back, and you can feel where you have to pull it back. If you are too far back it will force you to tighten your abs like crazy to pull yourself forward. It’s the most specialized exercise I’ve ever done for pointing out your foibles since the weight is in your middle. Once you move in that sweet spot the exercise isn’t very hard at all.

I ended up doing a decent weight and doing decent reps, the powerlifter dude was impressed, which made me feel pretty good that I’ve been doing my workouts properly all along. I forgot to ask if he’d mind if I used the bar even if he wasn’t there, I was too busy contemplating what I was learning.

Today my legs hurt about as much as normal, which is to say I’ll probably be grunting up and down every stair in the house and using my arms to lift myself out of chairs for the next couple of days. Apparently safety squat translates into a better normal squat, but a normal squat doesn’t necessarily make you better at safety squat, which I can see, since there’s more “play” in normal squat and you can get away with a worse form.

Next time you’re in the grocery store just stop and observe the people.

There are people meandering about, oblivious that they’re in anyone else’s way even though they leave their cart in the middle of an aisle to walk ten feet away to ponder which flavour of chips to purchase. People who bang into one another, or slam their carts into other carts or can barely maneuver their carts around the checkout without hitting 3 walls. They stop to talk to a friend and stand right in everyone’s way for a good five seconds before noticing “oh hey, I’m standing right in your way!” and then barely move so you have to perform some amazing acrobatic feat to get around their fat ass without touching said ass. They leave the store and walk on a very high angle across the parking lot, forcing a car or three to sit there and stare at them for a good fifteen seconds. They get to their car and put their stuff in their trunk.

THESE PEOPLE ARE DRIVING CARS!

These stupid, oblivious idiots are driving around your city, probably too fast. They leave the grocery store to go vote…. sigh

You heard it here first! Just kidding, you probably didn’t.

You better go out and buy it or you’re totally not going to be the hipest hipster on the block. Seriously you may as well just throw out your hipster glasses and boots because nobody will notice you anymore anyhow. The thing is the same price as the iPad1, which should make you feel very ripped off if you spent money on one within the last month.

How well was steve jobs received at the company’s press conference?

Apple guru Steve Jobs received a standing ovation at the company’s latest press conference. As expected, the company announced the new generation of its popular tablet computer, the iPad.

When is the damn thing (iPad 2) due out, and equally as important, will the iPad 2 be 33% thinner?

The iPad 2, due to his the U.S. market on March 11, will feature some changes to the original’s design, including rear and front facing cameras for video. It’s 33% thinner than the first generation and Jobs says the iPad 2 is thinner than the iPhone 4.

BUT WHAT COLOURS ARE THE IPAD 2?

Apple will offer it in both black and white, with the white model shipping from day one.

Is the iPad 2 full of chips and HDMI’s and 1080p’s?

It will also feature the new A5 chip, which Jobs says will make graphics up to nine-times faster over the original iPad. The iPad2 will have HDMI out via a $39 cable. Output will go up to 1080p and allow for mirrored video output.

How do I carry the iPad 2 around? If there is something to carry the iPad 2 around with, what colour and construction are they?

The optional case for iPad has been replaced with a magnetic cover that can be folded into a stand for the device and has a microfiber cloth that can clean the screen. It will be available in leather ($69) and polyurethane ($39) in multiple colors for each.

How many dollars will this cost my mom to buy the iPad 2?

Apple says pricing will remain the same for the iPad 2. The company will offer 16GB ($499 for WiFi; $629 for WiFi+ 3G); 32GB ($599 and $729); 64GB ($699 and $829).

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/02/live-from-apples-ipad-2-event

They can be real jerks.

I got it into my head a couple of months ago that it would be super awesome to be able to play movies on my big flatscreen tv. To that end I ordered a 12 meter HDMI cable from dealextreme.com for about $40. It finally arrived a few days ago (took about a month to get here, but it’s ordered from the states, shipped from hong kong, and it’s cheap as hell, that it showed up at all is awesome).

I recently had to move the computer off the kitchen table and into the office. The office computer is now a good 11 meters away from the tv, so the cable worked out awesome.

I downloaded the latest nvidia drivers (cause I was probably two years behind) and messed with the video settings for a while and managed to figure out how to get my videos to play on the 2nd monitor (at this point, sans sound). The trick is to turn on “dualview”, which is basically the two monitors are independant, and are theoretically adjacent to each other (in my case they aren’t, the tv is miles away from my monitor, down the hall, around a corner). So when I turn on my video player I have to drag it off my screen to the right, and then hit alt+enter to full screen it. I ran out to the living room a few times to figure all this out. My legs are tired.

The hardest part was getting sound to output over the hdmi cable, which I’ll get into now somewhat as a personal reference and maybe for the interwebians of the universe to discover and find useful. The first problem was that I couldn’t remember what my video card is, so I rummaged around in the junk closet for a while until I found the box with the manual. It’s a nvidia 9500 GT. The manual had 2 sentences on how to connect to a tv, step 1: connect the provided S/PDIF connector to the graphics card. Step 2: connect the S/PDIF cable to the motherboard. HOLY CRAP THAT’S SO EASY! I managed to find the tiny cable and was off to the races, because I really wanted to see a racing movie on my tv. The problem with the S/PDIF thing is that there was nowhere obvious on the motherboard to plug in two tiny pin cables. After about an hour of googling I eventually figured out what motherboard I have, an M2N-SLI Deluxe. I managed to find the manual for the thing on their site, and it talked about S/PDIF a bit, but it was a 4 pin cable connector, and I only had 2 pins. After searching around the interweb for a while and finding nothing I decided to just stick the tiny cable pins onto the pins that I thought would work onto the motherboard. No love, I could get video on the tv but still no sound. After a bunch more googling and searching and finding nothing I decided to mess with my sound settings and switched my sound output device from Logitech USB Headset to Soundmax HD Audio. I tested it out and IT BLOODY WORKED! Flawlessly! The video looks great (my video card outputs to the native 1080i resolution), and the sound is full of oscillating air compressions!

Pretty much daily some retard registers on this blog. There’s no reason to register, users can already post comments on any article as long as the article was posted within the past 20 days (after that time the commenting is locked) and a user must also have a previous comment approved by me, then all future comments immediately are posted. I just never post so all the articles are locked. So here’s a note to you dumb spammers, registering just lets me know what to block and doesn’t get you anywhere. The only person you would be spamming is me, 1 person, so the effort vs reward is not that much.

Credit Alert’s Main Page:

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CREDIT ALERT® is an invaluable service that helps you understand your credit rating and protects you against credit fraud and identity theft.

I canceled with Credit Alert® on December 31st because they were going to start charging $20 a month, up from $15 dollars a month. Nice 25% increase. This outweighed the benefit for me so I called them up and canceled.

A few months later I notice the charge was still appearing on my list of payments. On April 7th I called them again, and after spending an hour on the phone I was assured that it was definitely canceled this time and that my last payment would be reimbursed (even though they had charged me three times).

Now I see that they actually have been charging me since then at $20 a month payment. Boo for me not noticing that I’m being charged for this every month on my VISA. Boo for them and some either: shady business practices, severely incompetent or lying staff, or completely laughable internal systems.

I called them again, at the cost of yet another hour, and this time apparently it will be canceled for realsies! Hurray! A supervisor will be calling me regarding my reimbursement within the next 48 hours. If I don’t get reimbursed for all these months I’m going to be curling my lips in a downward fashion.

UPDATE: Credit alert called back, reimbursing me $192. I can stop bitching about them FINALLY.

11 years later they FINALLY come through on their promise!

Here is a map of the gulf oil spill so far: