Month: August 2003

Temptation Island Returns to Fox

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

Zip2it reports that Temptation Island is coming back to Fox on Thursday, August 28th:

As with the previous two editions of the show, four couples who’ve been dating for a while will spend two weeks on a tropical island — in this case, the Caribbean’s Bay Islands. They’ll spend most of the apart from each other and in the company of 14 members of the opposite sex whose goal is to, as the title suggests, tempt them. […]

There’s a degree of schadenfreude in any reality tv show, but perhaps none more in what I like to call Schadenfreude Island. Really, I don’t know why couples agree to go on the show — I can imagine nothing good for their relationship that could come from participating. But, at at least it gives a good laugh for the rest of us :).

Google News Alerts

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

Via the MediaBistro mailing list, I saw a link to this story on C|NET that Google is beta testing a News Alerts program:

People can subscribe to the test Google News Alerts by providing keywords that are related to stories that they would like to receive and their e-mail address at the sign-up page. People can limit their alerts by source and choose to receive them once a day or continuously, as Google crawls the Web. There is a limit of 50 keywords per e-mail address.

The test launch comes a couple of weeks after Google refined its daily news search tools. It now allows visitors to scour headlines by date, location, exact phrases or publication. People can use it retrieve articles from more than 4,500 news outlets on the Web. […]

I already use Google News as my primary news source and I’m looking forward to trying this. If their setup allows it, I may even try subscribing my cell phone to their News Alerts.

Mozilla — Now with Spellchecker!

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

Thanks to bug 56301 being fixed recently, the latest builds of Mozilla now include the spellchecker built right in (it used to be that you’d have to install the spellchecker separately). I’m really pleased about this since it’s not only one less step that I have to go through each day (yeah, I upgrade Mozilla every day), but it also means that the spellchecker’s reliability is now tied to the core Mozilla development (I’ll explain).

When the spellchecker existed as a separate plugin, it had no association with the Mozilla team. So, if the spellchecker stopped working, you’d just be stuck without a spellchecker until the spellchecker guys got around to fixing it (which could sometimes last for months on end). Now that’s it’s integrated with Mozilla, if the spellchecker breaks, the core Mozilla team will work towards fixing it. And, even better, the spellchecker won’t check quoted text anymore either.

Half-Asleep Man Pauses 20 Minutes Between Socks

Ashley Bischoff4 Comments

I enjoyed this News In Brief from the latest issue of The Onion:

Half-Asleep Man Pauses 20 Minutes Between Socks
SANDPOINT, ID—Seated on the edge of his bed, Carl Thompson, 38, paused for 20 minutes with one sock on his foot and the other in his hand Tuesday. “Ugh, tired,” said Thompson, who was otherwise silent from 6:30 to 6:50 a.m. During that period, Thompson stared at the wall and teetered perilously close to a reclining position six times.

I can relate to that feeling from when I used to work for Steamatic. Their office is in Fort Worth (about 45 miles from here), and I had to leave at 7:30am each morning just to get there on time. That made for some tired mornings.

The Shawshank Redemption

Ashley Bischoff5 Comments

I saw The Shawshank Redemption the other day, recorded from TNT on TiVo. I hadn’t seen it before, but I heard it was good and so I set TiVo to record it (and I’m glad I did).

It was actually excellent, and I was surprised to later learn that it was based on a short story written by Stephen King. Had I known that previously, I might have avoided it altogether since I dislike horror flicks (of course, this was more of a drama in any case).

After watching it, I thought for sure that it must have won some Oscars. So, I loaded IMDB to check on its awards only to find that it didn’t get any Oscars. I was puzzled at first but then realized that 1994 was also the year the Forrest Gump came out, winning Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Writing, Best Film Editing, and Best Visual Effects. Yeah, pretty much everything ;).

You’d think that there might be a lot lost between the original R-rated cut and the version of The Shawsharnk Redemption shown on TNT. But, it wasn’t too bad. Reading over the quotes at IMDB, some words were cropped but only the ones you’d expect. And, I also learned that [spoiler] the scene with the warden’s self-inflicted gunshot [/end spoiler] was heavily cut.

All the same, I really enjoyed the movie. But, I’m not sure I’d buy it on DVD — it’s the type of flick that kept me interested because I didn’t know what was coming next. Of course, now that I've seen it once, I know what happens during every scene.

There is one part that confused me. [spoiler] Why did the warden have Tommy shot? (He’s the Gil Bellows character who revealed that Dufresne’s wife was shot by another man.) [/end spoler]