Usually, flying videos are taken from cameras mounted in the cockpit with the pilots or mounted on the nose. Gadling featured a video taken with a camera that was mounted on the nose gear of a 747-200, which is definitely worth watching.
A colleague asked me about pop-up website surveys that some websites have. Every nth visitor is presented with a popup window when they visit a site that asks them questions related to their visit. She didn’t like my answer of “annoying” in response to her question of “what are they called?”, so I did some Googling to see if there was a formal name and came across a page at SiteExperts.com about them.
Ironically, their page about pop-up surveys tried to pop something up that Firefox stomped on:
There’s an ad for Excel gum that been on tv here in Canada lately. Two guys are sitting on the couch, watching tv. One guy has a big red maple leaf outline on his face, which the other guy asks about. The first guy replies “what better way to show one’s support than by having a giant red maple leaf on your face?”. The other guy comments that Excel gum has put a maple leaf on each piece of gum. The first guy responds “which would you rather have? A small red maple leaf on a piece of gum or a big red maple leaf tattooed on your face?”. The second guy responds “That’s a tattoo? Dude, I have to be honest – I’d choose the gum.” (Well, duh, right?)
So, no one would really tattoo something like a big red maple leaf, a bunch of stars or …. Oh, wait… there was that girl who had a bunch of stars tattooed on her face a few months ago.
Ok, but no one in their right mind would have fake glasses tattooed on their face, right? And they definitely wouldn’t upload a video of it to YouTube, right?
Whoops… wrong again…
Journey of the Sorcerer by The Eagles is probably best known as the theme of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. The original version features a banjo and runs 6:40, which is a bit long for a theme song, so an abridged version was used as the theme for the THHGTTG radio series produced at the end of the 1970s. Journey of the Sorcerer has been used in every version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide since then, whether radio series, albums, or movie.
And then there’s the Mario Paint Composer version…
The premier of the next series in the Stargate franchise, Stargate: Universe, aired last night on Space. The premise is a group of people consisting of military-types, scientists, and bureaucrats who end up on an extremely old spaceship that travels faster than the speed of light, millions of light years away from Earth, after escaping via a stargate from a military outpost that came under attack. Rather than dialling a stargate address in the Milky Way galaxy, the lead scientist dialled a stargate address that had an extra character in its address. This nine-character address took them to Destiny, the spaceship, which was created by the Ancients thousands of years ago.
Being an extremely old spaceship, there are a number of “challenges” they’re going to have to deal with. First and foremost: the life support systems in the ship are not exactly in the greatest condition and there are a number of rather inconvenient holes that are slowly venting what remains of the atmosphere into space. They have extremely limited supplies of food and water. The lack of a proper doctor to look after the people who were injured in the evacuation is going to tax their medic.
And, of course, there’s the lead scientist who wants to explore for the sake of exploring. There are hints that he may have other motivations, too.
One of the character finds himself thrust into the world of the stargate after solving some thousand-year old mathematical puzzle that the military had embedded in a video game to identify geniuses, similar to how the government tested the security of a new encryption scheme in the movie Mercury Rising.
I thoroughly enjoyed the premier and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series. The actors were brilliant, the characters were real, the sets and effects stunning, the cinematography superb and Joel Goldsmith’s music was perfect.
Commenters over at Joseph Mallozzi’s blog appear to like the new series, too. (Joseph is one of the consulting producers and writers of SGU and has been teasing his readers over the last few weeks with pictures from the series.)
A good friend of mine who has been dis’ing bloggers, and blogging in general, for years has come over to the dark side. You’ll find a link to his new blog, A Moment in Exmortis’s Mind, in the rightside column and also on my Ottawa Blogroll page.
Be sure to go and harass him. Lots.
– Smakendahed of Random Ogre Thoughts
AKA Keeper of Maps, I'm a geocacher who lives in Ottawa, Canada.
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