This is a riot. Just watch these in order.

Daniel Day-Lewis, the actor who made “Gangs of New York” somewhat entertaining has once again pulled of an amazing performance. This is a Paul Thomas Anderson film, the guy that made “Punch Drunk Love”, “Magnolia” and one of my all-time favorites “Boogie Nights”. Remember that scene with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Mark Wahlberg, “I am such an idiot”?

Anyhow, the film was 2.5 hours long and I could have watched it for another 4. It has every element free market capitalists love; competition, greed, oil tycoons and religious nut cases. This movie deserves to sweep the Oscars for everything and was one of the best movies I have seen for a long time.

Spoiler – Don’t read this if you have not seen the movie.

There were a few moments when I thought the ending touched on DiCaprio’s performance of Howard Hughes in the “The Aviator”. Paul Thomas Anderson seemed to touch on that familiarity since both my wife and I made the same comment as we left the film, but Day-Lewis’s acting was so riveting, you did not care and you only wanted more.

It was just my birthday and this year I am psyched with the gift my wife got me. It’s called a Readingpen and I hope it will assist me while reading books.

I love reading books but quite frankly I stumble quite a bit when I come across uncommonly used words and a lot of the books I’ve been reading lately seem to be filled with them. Basically, I never excelled with the English vocabulary.

For years I’ve been telling myself I should read with a dictionary but when it comes down to it I can’t really be bothered. For the number of words I have trouble with I would probably be spending more time reading the dictionary then I would the book.

Anyhow, I’ve sort of overcome this by typically skipping over the words I don’t understand and assume what the words mean based on the context of what the writers are trying to say.

I’ve basically been doing this my whole life and I am sort of getting tired of doing it. I feel I have been shortchanging myself. Also, I have come to learn that one word could change the whole context of a sentence and I’ve probably been completely missing the concepts for many points in many books that I have read over the years.

For a while now I have had my eye on the Readingpen. It’s a cool little gizmo that will allow me to scan a word and it will immediately show me the definition of it. I know that there are other electronic pocket dictionaries but for some reason this product appeals to my techno-geek nature.

This is the first I heard about them. Spokeo is a way for you to track all your friends online “social” activity by using their news reader.

Profy reviews the site by writing

Here’s what’s slightly (okay, a bit more than slightly) creepy about Spokeo, however; you don’t have to invite anyone, approve anyone, or really do much of anything. Getting all your contacts set up is as simple as providing your email address and password, and Spokeo will import your contacts and start crawling the sites to find updates.

Here’s the kicker: you don’t necessarily have to be friends with the people in your contact list in order to see what they are doing on many of the sites. From Twitter tweets to Picasa photo albums (which, quite honestly, I had no idea anyone I knew even USED), whatever people in your address book are doing on the 33 sites, you will have it dumped into your feed.

Check out these social sites you can monitor (many of which I never heard of).

Interesting stunt by Improv Everywhere

Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station.

You’re given the option to verify your site in Webmaster Tools by either creating a meta tag or by uploading a file. I’ve now seen on a few wordpress sites that the meta tag is not being read by Google. Even though the tag does show in the html code and is placed in the right area, Google won’t validate the site.

Easiest thing to do is upload the file but put the validation file in your domain root, NOT your Themes folder. Its quite common to put it in your themes folder but that will not work.