Month: January 2007

Quiet night

Guess everyone’s playing with Vista. Me, I’m going to work on something more productive. Goodnight!

1980s Cops and Robbers

A guest blogquiz from Croptop, who’s more of a classic TV geek than I am… well, maybe just differently geekish. 🙂 In the absence of a scoring scheme I’ll just say one kudo for each distinct fact.

  1. What was the license plate number of the Ferrari driven by Thomas Magnum?
  2. Name Thomas Magnum’s two best friends (both full and nicknames). Bonus: Name the actors who played them.
  3. Name the founders of the Riptide Detective Agency.
  4. Before he saved people on the beaches of California, David Hasselhoff fought for the underdog with the help of a robotic car. Name the series.
  5. We all know what K.I.T.T. stands for. But what does K.A.R.R. stand for?
  6. I might jump from an open drawbridge/Or Tarzan from a vine/’Cause I’m the unknown stuntman that makes Eastwood look so fine. Who am I? (Character and actor, please.)
  7. What was the relationship between Milton C. Hardcastle and Mark McCormick?
  8. Name Rick and A.J.’s mom. Bonus: Name the actress who played her.
  9. Who is Robert McCall better known as? Bonus: Name the actor who played him.
  10. Name the actors who played Walter Nebicher and Automan respectively.

Comments will remain moderated ’til sometime on February 1; I’ll post the guesses and answers to the last quiz later this evening.

P.S. I was only able to get 5 facts out of what I believe to be 20 above.

P.P.S. Yes, I know kudo isn’t a real word. Don’t blame me, I voted for Kang.

Things you might know

Trivia, for naught but glory everlasting (or until my domain expires, whichever comes first).

Miscellany

  1. Who was the third regular host of NBC’s The Tonight Show?
  2. What musician invented the Twinkie-Wiener Sandwich?
  3. Which Group of Seven artist stopped signing and dating his works so they would be judged on their own merit?
  4. Who was Grover Cleveland’s vice president?
  5. What is Gertrude Ederle’s most famous accomplishment?

Sports

  1. Chi Chi Rodriguez is best known for his excellence in what sport?
  2. What footballer is variously known as O Rei and Pérola Negra?
  3. What quarterback out of Boston College is considered to have been one of the greatest players in the Canadian Football League?
  4. What pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays was given the derogatory nickname Mr. Blister?
  5. What multi-series driver had both legs amputated near the knee after a 2001 crash, yet has recently returned to racing?

History

  1. In what year was the iPod released?
  2. In what year did Belgian cartoonist Peyo introduce The Smurfs?
  3. What organization held its first meeting in Flushing Meadows, New York, in 1946?
  4. 2007 marks the 300th anniversary of what British body?
  5. What is the common link between all of the previous 14 questions? (This is an open-book… er, open-web question. Search away, and good luck: you’re gonna need it.)

Comments will be moderated for the next 24 hours or until I remember to turn them back on. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to localize the moderation settings to this post, so the whole blog will be affected. The things I do for you people….

I, Benford

In case you were wondering, the science fiction writer I’m (apparently) most like is Gregory Benford, A master literary stylist who is also a working scientist. I’m not sure how accurate that assessment is, though: The real Greg Benford once took this quiz, and it told him he was Arthur C. Clarke. I’d have preferred Alfred Bester or Harlan Ellison — hey, if Ayn Rand and Mickey Spillane are considered sci-fi writers in the quiz, HE surely qualifies — although I’ve got very little in common with the latter.

Which science fiction writer are you? (via Joe Mahoney)

Half-birthday

For several years I’ve been running a simple half-birthday calculator. Every once in a while I’ll discover that it’s been noticed by a new group of people; the first, I think, was the Degrassi fan forum, and the most prominent by far is the Macmillan Dictionary’s Word of the Week. Until today, though, no one’s ever tracked me down to comment on it.

And that comment raises a valid point. I explain on the calculator page that, unlike some sites, I add half a year, i.e. 182.5 days. (The others just add six months, which means that some people wouldn’t have half-birthdays, notably those with a birthday in late August.) It’s this statement to which Scott replied:

Wouldn’t that mean you’d need an input field for *time* of birth? That half a day you add would therefore change the answer.

He’s exactly right… and now comes the time to ‘fess up to my dirty little secret: I’ve never actually added 182.5 days. Instead, I’ve always added 183. (Some math geek I am, eh?)

Well, no longer. Thanks to Date::Calc the calculator is now (almost) completely legit. I had to make a judgement call on leap years, so if you were born on or after March 1 in the year before a leap year or on or before February 29 of the leap year, you’ll still get 183 days added. A nice side effect of the new math is that if you were born on August 30 of the year before a leap year you’re one of the few who can claim February 29 as your half-birthday; this wasn’t possible before. (If you were born on or near a leap-second, tough — do your own math!)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled (half-)lives. 🙂

Other projects

Haven’t done much blogging in the last few days, but it’s with good reason: I’ve been working. 🙂 It’s fun work, though, and it’s substantially different from the things I do at the day job so it’s a chance to exercise some different brain musculature.

I’ve had two main projects on the go, both similar but each with its own challenges. The one that came up most recently—last night, in fact—is translating a graphic designer’s multi-page PDF mockup of a new website into HTML/CSS. I surprised myself on that one by getting it up and running from scratch within an hour… I’ve no idea how Internet Explorer will mess it up, mind you, but it’s fundamentally done for other A-class browsers. The CSS is a bit of a regression from other sites I’ve worked on, as it’s written for a fixed size instead of being more fluid, but it’s what the design called for.

The other project is True Blue, a redesign of one of the areas on this very site. I’ve had it on my plate for a few years, and have made stabs at it from time to time, but it’s languished, mostly due to not having a good sense of what I wanted to accomplish with it. In the last couple of weeks, however, I’ve started to see some progress. The first breakthrough was finding a legible, attractive, appropriate font; second was tweaking the shade of blue, which is important for a theme that’s named after the colour! With those taken care of, things seem to be falling together a little more smoothly, although I’ve still got a long way to go before I unleash it on the world. For various reasons I want to have it presentable by February 20, which is what’s known at work as a stretch goal. We’ll see.

24 no more

As I proudly announced to Mike today, I’m through with 24. It was all I could do to sit through Monday night’s episode. So far this season has gained snorts of derision at best, but on Monday I actually started getting angry at the writers for putting such inanity to paper, and at myself for putting up with it.

Jack Bauer is dead to me, and this is one he’s not going to recover from.

Ratings and Pan’s Labyrinth

So the MPAA is going to open up its secret/secretive system for rating movies, apparently in (unstated) reaction to this (unrated) film. It’ll be interesting to see their explanations of how films like Pan’s Labyrinth (which I saw tonight, based on Tammy’s recommendation) and Children of Men can get R ratings, particularly given that they’re somewhat lenient towards violence. (Both were rated the much more reasonable 14A here in Ontario, with similar ratings across the rest of Canada and most of the rest of the world.)