Rented a car for the day. We got the absolute last car on the lot : BMW 323. Nice upgrade from a Ford Focus.

Investors can soon make bets on movie box office – latimes.com. Cantor Fitzgerald is opening a futures market to bet on box office returns. too bad that “make better movies” isn’t a better way to manage risk.

OK Go Ditches Label Over YouTube Embedding Rights | Dan’s FC Blog | Fast Company. that is one badass rube goldberg machine. via ram.

Why A Salad Costs More Than A Big Mac – The Consumerist. nice infographic of subsidy versus nutrition.

envato

“We started in 2006 with a simple idea – make awesome websites”. I think Envato is living up to their ideals. Every single one of their sites is well designed and usually has great content. I had no idea a single company made Tuts+ (a series of websites which does tutorials and how-tos for things like Photoshop, Illustrator, 3d design, Flash, etc) and Freelance Switch (a site about being a freelancer).

What makes me point them out today is that I came across AppStorm.net which is comprised for 3 sites focusing on web, iphone, and mac apps. Again, the content on each site is top notch. I just spent the last hour reading reviews for all sorts of slick looking apps that I’ve never even heard of.

It’s great to see a company doing such a wide variety of content based sites (and even charging for their premium content on Tuts+). I highly recommend you check them out (if you’re a nerd or a designer).

amazon in canada

Amazon.com has applied to open and run its own fulfilment center in Canada. Currently, Amazon outsources all inventory control and delivery to Canada Post because of existing rules on foreign ownership of “book publishing and other cultural industries”. For those who don’t know, Amazon.ca has a very limited item selection compared to Amazon.com and pricing is higher. There’s also no fancy features like Amazon Prime. According to a Globe & Mail article it looks like the Harper government might approve the application. Unforunately, both book publishers and book sellers aren’t crazy about the idea. If Amazon lost its application the only winner would be Chapters/Indigo (which probably owns 90% of the bookstores in Canada) and places like BestBuy.

Personally, I can’t wait. Online retail in Canada is a certified wasteland. The only exception to that is Well.ca.

Jim Flaherty blasted for $3,100 flight – thestar.com. He took a private flight to London, Ontario to do a photo-op at a Tim Horton’s and talk about controlling government expenses. How many press conferences does the government need to do at Tim Horton’s? And there wasn’t a Tim Horton’s in Ottawa available?

What If Everybody in Canada Flushed At Once?. a graph of water consumption in Edmonton during the gold medal hockey game. people were really holding it until intermission.

Building a Better Teacher – NYTimes.com. this is one long article. interesting stuff about the lack of training teacher’s receive.

Four Seconds – thestar.com. a frame by frame breakdown of Crosby’s gold medal goal.

Top 20 Nginx WebServer Best Security Practices. that is a crazy list of stuff.

Garage TV – LogoRama. “In a world made up entirely of trademarks and brand names, Michelin Man cops pursue a criminal Ronald McDonald.” This is nominated for the best short animated oscar and is quite amazing.

first full day in the new office @formandmethod. sweet.

Can u guess which house belongs to elephant man? | TweetPhoto. from Diplo’s twitter feed. I suspect he means the musician and not Joseph Merrick.

Stately Dutch MILF Magnet $300 – Craigslist. this is probably the best bicycle for-sale ever. via wes.

Mom Sells Old NES and 5 Games — for $13,105 – Collecting – Kotaku. this mom must have gone nuts when she her ebay auction go from 9.99 to $13K.

Notes from a production MongoDB deployment « Boxed Ice Blog. horizontally sharded and replicated across datacenters. that’s pretty damn big.

Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com. an interesting visualization for the difference between first and last.

It’s not every day you can park in the middle of College and Yonge http://yfrog.com/1ep6guj

i can’t believe how loud the streets are. i’m on the 34th floor and i can hear people screaming in my apartment