Category: Miscellaneous

I don’t know if this is true, but I do remember hearing about somebody getting struck by lightning during filming. Anyway here is a transcript of gags, accidents, and bloopers from Mel Gibsons new film. Probably the most interesting:

Take 14

Jesus: My God! Why have you –

[Caviezel is struck by lightning.]

Off Camera: Cut!

A US defense project has followed through with a plan to create “The Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton”, or Bleex, to be used mainly by infantry soldiers and firemen. From BBC News:

“The device consists of a pair of mechanical metal leg braces including a power unit and a backpack-like frame.

More than 40 sensors and hydraulic mechanisms calculate how to distribute weight just like the nervous system.

These helps minimise the load for the wearer.

A large rucksack carried on the back contains an engine, control system and space for a payload.”

Ten terrorist bombs tore through trains and stations along a commuter line at the height of Madrid’s morning rush hour Thursday, killing more than 180 people and wounding at least 600 before this weekend’s general elections. Officials blamed Basque separatists for the worst terror attack in ETA’s history. According to one Spanish Blogger, “As it was in New York, in Spain everything will now be spoken of in terms of ‘before March 11,’ and after.”

Update: The number of causualties has reached over 190. Thousands are inured and according to this MSNBC article a van with detonators and an Arabic-language tape containing Quranic verses was found 15 miles east of Madrid.

I blogged about this problem back in December. IE 6.0 won’t let me view the source code on webpages I visit. The problem came back and instead of just erasing the cache like I did last time, I discovered that I could just lower the amount of disk space the cache was set to store. I’ve now reduced it to 100MB which, when I think about it, should be plenty anyway. Reducing the cache size also fixed the problem I was having with not being able to save .jpg files as anything other than .bmp’s. Only time will tell if this fixes the problem permanently.

You need a premium account to view articles at Salon.Com, but if you don’t have one you can take a few seconds to view an advertisement and get a free day pass. It’s well worth it to read an exerpt from journalist Craig Unger’s new book “House of Bush, House of Saud”. If half the things he writes are true, it’s enough to make you sick. A lot of the things I read in this article were also pointed out in Michael Moore’s new book “Dude Where’s My Country?”

Immediately after 9/11, dozens of Saudi royals and members of the bin Laden family fled the U.S. in a secret airlift authorized by the Bush White House. One passenger was an alleged al-Qaida go-between, who may have known about the terror attacks in advance.

I’ve been meaning to blog Wired Magazine’s Googlemania report for a couple weeks now because I thought it looked great, but I figured I should be quixotic and read the whole thing first to make sure. But then I forgot. Now that I’ve read it, it turns out I was right: it’s GREAT.

I heart Google. I’ll probably write more about this Wired article later, adding specific comments about each sub-story as I find time.

Don’t you hate those compulsory web registration user name and passwords like at the New York Times and The Washington Post? Well BugMeNot.Com has a listing of humanly monitored user names and passwords for a variety of sites. Just type in the name of the site you are looking to access and a username and password will be provided.

A company called Polyphonic HMI has created software they call “Hit Song Science” which is supposed to contain algorithms that determine if a song is likely to be a hit. The company is touting their first attempt at using HSS in the marketplace as a success. For a fee, you can already test your song.

“HSS takes a song that sounds like it might be a hit and makes sure it can be one. With finely tuned adjustments in the mix we can ensure it has the optimal mathematical patterns for maximum market performance,” said Wake who has been using the new HSS technology in his studio for several months. “With that base covered, the odds of success are tremendous.”

“Farm Sluts is a hilarious dark comedy of a man’s journey upon opening that one unfortunate e-mail leading to a neverending cascade of pop-up windows and scantily clad women.

Farm Sluts contains partial nudity, language and untimely random acts of perversion. All Searchlab Shorts are unrated.”

Not as perverted as it might sound, but in some ways much worse. Either way, I found it quite funny.

Then don’t do it. Weird religious ceremonies don’t turn out great at the best of times…

The Masons have had a rough go of it lately. First there was the accidental shooting of a new inductee. The unsanctioned ceremony was only meant to scare the new member, but the shooter was carrying two guns, one with blanks and one with live ammo, and grabbed the wrong one during the ritual.

On Tuesday suicide bombers, which are believed to be Islamic Fundamentalists, blew themselves up at the entrance of a Masonic lodge after opening fire on some 40 people in the private dining hall. Two people were killed and six others were hurt.