Roger Ebert:

Wednesday, July 18, is the 20th anniversary of our marriage. How can I begin to tell you about Chaz?She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she has my love, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone, which is where I seemed to be heading. If my cancer had come, and it would have, and Chaz had not been there with me, I can imagine a descent into lonely decrepitude. I was very sick. I might have vegetated in hopelessness.This woman never lost her love, and when it was necessary she forced me to want to live. She was always there believing I could do it, and her love was like a wind forcing me back from the grave.

Film citric Roger Ebert’s touching love letter to his wife. Excuse me – I’ve got something in my eye.

Centives:

We all think about it several times a day (it’s not just us, right?…right?) How much would it cost to become Batman? In anticipation of the impending release of The Dark Knight Rises, Centives decided to find out.The total bill? $2.8 million to show the criminal scum that the city doesn’t belong to them.

CNET:

With AT&T officially announcing its “Mobile Share” plans and joining Verizon Wireless, there will soon be two options for customers who want to get into a family plan for data services.While these plans aren’t the best deals for individuals, large families or even groups of really, really close friends may want to consider them. That’s because the more people who sign on, the lower the price per gigabyte and user. Of course, if someone is a heavy data user, that person may want to stick with an individual plan, or risk hogging up the total available data for everyone.By and large, the plans are fairly similar.

Dropbox Blog:

As people add more stuff to Dropbox, we want to make sure they don’t have to worry about space.Today we’re happy to announce that our upgrades are getting a huge upgrade! Dropbox Pro now comes in flavors of 100 and 200 GB, but at the price of the original 50 and 100 GB plans. For those of you who need even more space, a brand new 500 GB plan is also joining the posse! If you’re already a Dropbox Pro subscriber, just take a seat and enjoy the fireworks — your Dropbox will supersize itself automatically tonight.

Welcome news for those heavy Dropbox users.

BuzzFeed:

I honestly can’t believe this was approved by such a major company as Toshiba (212,000 employees worldwide). This is 2012, right? Anyway, creatively, the videos are basically lame. The double entendres are lame. The ending jokes are really lame. If you’re going to be sexist morons, at least push the idea a bit. `

` Agreed. If you’re going to be sexist morons, at least put some effort into it. Thanks to Michael Gartenberg

Good Education:

Dying to become a master of Google’s search engine? If so, look no further than Power Searching with Google, a new, free class offered by the tech giant starting July 10th. The course promises to teach users “tips, tricks and tactics” that’ll help you “find exactly what you’re looking for, when you most need it.” Real talk: Even if you don’t spend your time dreaming about how to improve your searching skills, you should take Google up on their offer to teach you.Google’s education program manager Terry Ednacot writes on the Google Blog that no matter what your current searching ability may be—from those of us who have no idea you can use the search box as a calculator to folks who are already masters of Boolean logic—through the six 50-minute lessons of the class, you’ll learn how to use the search function to “solve everyday problems” and help you “find what you need faster.”

You’d be surprised at how much better your search results, whether for school, work or play, will become if you know how to use and access Google more efficiently.

Associated Press:

Tens of thousands of Americans may lose their Internet service Monday unless they do a quick check of their computers for malware that could have taken over their machines more than a year ago.Despite repeated alerts, the number of computers that probably are infected is more than 277,000 worldwide, down from about 360,000 in April. Of those still infected, the FBI believes that about 64,000 are in the United States.Users whose computers are still infected Monday will lose their ability to go online, and they will have to call their service providers for help deleting the malware and reconnecting to the Internet.

It’s unlikely any of you are affected by this issue but it’s easy to do ao quick check. Go to The DNS Changer Working Group site and click on the “Detect” button.

Marketing Land:

After seeing yet another “hands-on” review of the Microsoft Surface tablet, I thought it would be interesting to shed more light on what exactly the journalists who assembled in Hollywood this week for the Surface launch event actually got to do with the tablets. In short, not a lot. Come along as I explain the hands-off reality of what I saw.

Nice to see someone calling a spade a spade. No matter what you’ve read, none of the assembled media got any real “hands on” with the Surface.

Wired:

A team of engineers and two crazy drivers are preparing for a history-making challenge drawn from the daydreams of every child who’s ever crisscrossed his parents’ living room with plastic race tracks: building, and racing on, a human-scale Hot Wheels double loop track, just like the one you had when you were a kid. The “Hot Wheels Double Loop Dare” is set to take place at this month’s Summer X-Games in Los Angeles.Drivers Tanner Foust and Greg Tracey will attempt to race through a 60-foot vertical loop modeled after the new Double Dare Snare Hot Wheels toy, in what would be the first time in history two cars mounted a vertical loop at once.

I have found memories of playing with this track as a kid so I’m looking forward to this stunt. But, just like the Niagara Falls tightrope walker, they’ve had to remove some of the element of danger by using a safety net in case the cars can’t complete the loop. Chickens.

GM Authority:

Last week, Apple announced a host of planned updates to the Siri personal assistant service found in company’s iPhone smartphone and iPad tablet (Siri integration is coming to iPad in the fall). One of those updates, called “eyes-free”, allows an iPhone or iPad user to use Siri without picking up or looking at the device to initiate the feature, which can be used to schedule a meeting, send a text message, add a reminder, find a local restaurant, check sports scores, and perform a myriad of other tasks — all using natural-language voice commands.Today, GM Authority has learned that The General will soon introduce Siri eyes-free integration in its vehicles and the first ones to get the integration will be the Chevrolet Spark and Sonic. While the automaker’s media representatives didn’t provide specific timing details, we were told that we should expect an announcement within the next 12 months.

Parislemon:

I’m just now catching up on the news about the new Microsoft Surface. Reactions seem mixed, tilting slightly positive or at least hopeful. People seem to want to believe Microsoft can pull this off and that’s understandable — competition is good, and right now, the iPad has no competition. My hunch is that whatever tablet Google announces shortly will be more of a Kindle Fire competitor than an iPad competitor. This Surface is a full-on iPad competitor.On the surface — see what I did there? — the thing seems compelling. It’s a tablet that runs Windows, and Office, and has a keyboard. There’s no denying that the keyboard/cover hybrid is a smart thing to try.Two years ago, I think this thing would have been pretty competitive. Today? Color me very skeptical.

Everyone, especially the tech media, should be skeptical about this tablet. Microsoft? Shut up and ship.

io9:

Check out this elegant infographic by Invader Xan, molecular astrophysicist and master of ceremonies at astronomy blog Supernova Condensate. Here, silhouetted in colors that correspond to their present state of operation, you’ll find twenty iconic spaceships and space stations situated beneath the only fictional spacecraft of the bunch: the U.S.S. Enterprise.What’s great about this image is that all the spacecraft have been drawn to scale. This gives you a real sense of perspective.

I love that he has listed the Starship Enterprise as “in development”.

TIME:

It’s one of the many great things about the NHL’s Stanley Cup: Every member of the winning team gets to keep the trophy for a full day. What they do with it is for the most part their business, so long as they stay on the right side of the law.So it’s hard not to watch this video of Los Angeles Kings captain Dustin Brown’s children, Jake and Mason, drinking chocolate milk out of the gigantic trophy’s cup without imagining the gigantic awwwws going up from all corners of the Internet.

There’s great history and tradition that goes along with the Stanley Cup (did you know players whose names aren’t on the Cup won’t touch it or be photographed with it?) and the idea each player gets the Cup for a day to share with friends, family and fans is certainly one of them.