Month: June 2004

Add these to my list of addictions: Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat.

Add this to my list of compulsions: checking refer to see who’s linking to me.

Edit: I’ve now locked everyone out of refer, it was causing some oddness.

A quick observation: it’s annoying when you finish what you were doing—in my case rewriting the archive part of Scatterbrain— and go to leave, only to have WinAmp decide that now would be a good time to put on a good track. Close Firefox, close Thunderbird, song starts to play. What do you do? Turn it off? Sit and listen and do nothing else? No, you blog about the observation until the track ends.

From Pharyngula, the hundred highest grossing movies. Those in bold I saw in the cinema, those in italics I have since seen. I’ve greyed the ones I haven’t seen and put borders on the ones I have on DVD. You should be able to see the release year and box-office take of each movie by hovering your cursor over it.

It strikes me that Harrison Ford is a very successful man.

Also note that Shrek 2 isn’t out in Europe yet.

1. Titanic
2. Star Wars
3. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
4. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
5. Spider-Man
6. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
7. The Passion of the Christ
8. Jurassic Park
9. Shrek 2
10. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
11. Finding Nemo
12. Forrest Gump
13. The Lion King
14. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
15. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
16. Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones
17. Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi
18. Independence Day
19. Pirates of the Caribbean
20. The Sixth Sense
21. Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back
22. Home Alone
23. The Matrix Reloaded
24. Shrek
25. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
26. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
27. Jaws
28. Monsters, Inc.
29. Batman
30. Men in Black
31. Toy Story 2
32. Bruce Almighty
33. Raiders of the Lost Ark
34. Twister
35. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
36. Ghost Busters
37. Beverly Hills Cop
38. Cast Away
39. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
40. Signs
41. Rush Hour 2
42. Mrs. Doubtfire
43. Ghost
44. Aladdin
45. Saving Private Ryan
46. Mission: Impossible II
47. X2
48. Austin Powers in Goldmember
49. Back to the Future
50. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
51. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
52. The Exorcist
53. The Mummy Returns
54. Armageddon
55. Gone with the Wind
56. Pearl Harbor
57. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
58. Toy Story
59. Men in Black II
60. Gladiator
61. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
62. Dances with Wolves
63. Batman Forever
64. The Fugitive
65. Ocean’s Eleven
66. What Women Want
67. The Perfect Storm
68. Liar Liar
69. Grease
70. Jurassic Park III
71. Mission: Impossible
72. Planet of the Apes
73. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
74. Pretty Woman
75. Tootsie
76. Top Gun
77. There’s Something About Mary
78. Ice Age
79. Crocodile Dundee
80. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
81. Elf
82. Air Force One
83. Rain Man
84. Apollo 13
85. The Matrix
86. Beauty and the Beast
87. Tarzan
88. A Beautiful Mind
89. Chicago
90. Three Men and a Baby
91. Meet the Parents
92. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
93. Hannibal
94. Catch Me If You Can
95. Big Daddy
96. The Sound of Music
97. Batman Returns
98. A Bug’s Life
99. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
100. The Waterboy

From BBC NEWS | Entertainment:

The late Douglas Adams, creator of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, will be heard in the first new radio adaptation of his work in 25 years.

He recorded the voice for Agrajag before he died (obviously) so they’re using that recording when they make radio versions of the last three books of the trilogy. They’ve got all of the old cast, except Peter Jones—who played the book—because he is what can only be described as ‘also dead’. I don’t see why this should stop him in the circumstances but apparently it has.

You can get a preview (a 4minute 20second montage) from what may or may not be termed the official site. It doesn’t feature any of Adams’ dialogue, probably because there’s some digital mojo involved in cutting him in that they haven’t done yet. We have to wait until Tuesday 21 September to hear the rest.

I suspect the cat thinks Douglas is just singing to him. Perhaps he is singing to the cat and we just think he’s voicing a character in the new radio series.

Douglas Adams is currently staring in No Sex Please, We’re Amoeboid Zingat-Ularians at the Brantisvogan Starhouse.

Is it exagerating to call this the funniest picture in the world? Maybe. But it is funny.

Amail through Fmail were not successful. Where they failed Gmail will succeed. I described it as the best April Fools joke this year.

The genius of this prank is that it is real. All 1GB each of it is real. And so many people were convinced it wasn’t. Bravo to Google. I think I’ll have me one of those spamtraps.

Well now I have one, thanks to Asa Dotzler, Mozilla developer and very close friend of mine. Okay that might not be true; but I am a little proud that the invitation wasn’t based solely on giving one to whoever asked.

Now I’m off to store all of my emails in about the most secure and reliable off-site backup the world has ever seen. I will be using Cheah Chu Yeow‘s gExodus.

You know the way Douglas Adams—the author, for any hypothetical reader that wasn’t aware of this, of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—was very strongly atheistic?

If you describe yourself as “Atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘Agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god – in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It’s easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously. It’s funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view expressed so strongly.

Isn’t www.hitchhikersguide.org really ironic?.

I had a somewhat easier experience with Vivendi Universal Games than Stephen described. It was probably due to the fact that I had seen his struggle with them so I replaced my usual "your product doesn’t work as expected, I would like it if it did", with the much more effective:

The hoops you make us jump true to prove our legitimacy are bad enough when they work. They are utterly unacceptable when they fail. I expect to be issued with a new [CD] key immediately and I believe I have given you more than enough information to enable this to happen.

which got me a hole in one.

It’s 2:43 and I’m up removing craneflies from my bedroom. I don’t mean to belittle the hardships of others but these things are the worst enemies humankind will ever meet. The spindly-legged Satan-spawn were designed by a conglomerate of evil geniuses with the sole purpose of being as big a nuisance to humanity as you can imagine. It wasn’t a serpent that told Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, it was a daddy-long-legs. They act stupid while you’re awake, flying not only into windows – which I can accept; those things can’t be easy for an insect to see – but into walls too. But they’re not stupid. They wait until you fall asleep and then they finish their one true mission in this world, they cause you to wake up with a bad taste in your mouth and no cranefly in sight.

This particular fiend stole a magazine from me aswell. I clobbered it a few times with a Linux Format I had lying beside my bed (stop sniggering) until it couldn’t fly (hah! that’s what it wanted me to think). Then I ‘encouraged’ it onto the mag and slung it towards the wide-open window (it could find the open slit to get in but mysteriously dodged the gaping window I opened to get it out – like that Dutch navigator who missed Australia on his way from New Guinea to New Zealand). In my attempt to prevent it from flying back in I ended up dropping the magazine onto the roof below and the damn creature managed to climb back from the brink. They are resourceful little gits. But I had the last laugh, I made sure to kill it the second time round. Then I bitched about it on the Internet. And what sweeter revenge is there than that?

The inventor of VD cards, practitioner of disappearing blog magic and generally fun person to read – and apparent owner of two disembodied feet – Meg is almost back from wherever it is she’s been for the last however long it’s been. Which is probably a good thing. It’s nice to know that some people have lives. Gives you something to aspire to.