Richy's Random Ramblings – Page 128 – Random ramblings and ravings of Richy B

Movies: Charlies Machines

July 23, 2003

The Terminatrix Last night I watched the new “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” movie (not yet on general release here in the UK, but it premiered on Monday) and the night before I watched “Charlies Angels II: Full Throttle“. So, which did I prefer and why?

Well, I’ve watched the original Charlies Angels movie and Bill Murray – a 53year old white guy – played John Bosley (usually just referred to as “Bosley” in the opposite way it’s always “Charlie” and never Mr.Townsend): however Bill Murray didn’t want to work with Lucy Liu (playing Alex Munday) again so he was replaced by Bernie Mac, a 45 year old black guy playing “Jimmy Bosley”. Close enough in the names for you to think they were family members, but… erm.. Secondly, apart from the “Can’t touch this” dance sequence around 15minutes in there was nothing memorable about the whole movie (well, the singer “Pink” was in the biking scene – but if you’ve seen her music video you’d have expected that: oh, and the fact that in the credits I discovered that “The Thin Man” was played by Crispin Glover – aka “George McFly” from the original Back To The Future). Oh, I also recognised Luke Wilson from “Blue Streak”).

A few other things kinda niggled me about the movie: sometimes it was the small things – like Alex carrying a 36-42″ TV (and holding it for some time) but with the screen away from her (have you tried carrying a large TV like that?), the plot being a bit silly (rescuing two rings that containing all the details of every person in the “witness protection programme”: erm, what happens where a new witness needs protecting?), and the fact that John Cleese was in it (playing Lucy Liu’s father) as more of a “long running throwaway joke” where he’s made to think the Alex is some sort of call girl/working girl. Oh – and those extremely good binoculars on the beach scene where they can see a scar on a surfers knee over 60ft away…

So after I’ve decimated Charlies Angles II, what about Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines?

Guess That Movie: LXIII: Murder By Death

July 23, 2003

5 Comments

Guess That Movie Round 63 Yes, after a unscheduled hiatus (more about that later), the Guess That Movie competition is back! Yes! Now you two can win prizes by correctly recognising the movie a screen shot has been taken from.

Kymberlie R. McGuire correctly recognised Guess That Movie 62 as being from the movie “Sweet and Lowdown”, but will she guess this one correctly (it’s “prize giving time” after this one by the way everyone!)

The rules: Just leave a comment with your name/alias, email address (for the prize givings) and the name of the movie you think this screen shot is taken from. If you guess that movie correctly, I’ll award you some points. Points start at 100 per image and decline over time (after the first 12 hours it goes down by 10 points, then down a further 10 points every 24hours after posting) – oh and wrong guesses have a 5 point penalty. But what good are points? Well, get 500 points and you can claim a £5 Amazon gift voucher/certificate for the Amazon store of your choice (£5 will be converted into the appropriate currency at the exchange rates displayed on xe.net at the time of claim) – so you can get free books, movies and music just by playing a simple FREE guessing game!

A: Murder By Death. Correctly guessed by Antgrad

Snippet: Blogging Posts: Full Throttle

July 23, 2003

1 Comment

Just a bit of advance warning for y’all: within the next 6 hours there will not only been another very long awaited “Guess That Movie” image BUT there will also be a movie review type thing AND a joke post AND (if I get time) a personal post!

Yep: I’m going to be blogging again 😉

Blog: So How Did I Do It?

July 19, 2003

Comments closed

Some of you may have noticed that my Blocking Free Email Domains post appeared, then reappeared as “Post deleted” and then reappeared properly – and I think an explanation is in order.

Basically, that post lists over 12,000 domain names that provide free email addresses (i.e. like Hotmail and Yahoo) but the content management system I use for my blog – MovableType – doesn’t accept posts over a certain size (no, I’m not sure what the maximum post size is: all I know is the domain name list got truncated mid-way through the “d’s”).

So how did I work around it? Basically, I uploaded the body of the post (which includes the list of domain names) into a “storage/holding/cache” area of the blog’s webspace (which also holds things like cached adverts – the mini “guess that movie” sidebar generation system etc etc) and then just used a PHP include_once command to make the list appear “inline” of the post.

However, if you do do this yourself, there is something you should be aware of. It’ll break your site’s search functionality (including the auto-highlight functionality provided by MT- Ref Search) – not a major biggie, but something you should be aware of.

Techy: Blocking Free Email Domains

July 19, 2003

6 Comments

Ever had to block “free” email address domains (such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Mail.com etc) but couldn’t find a source of the domains used? Well, since I needed to do a very similar thing – I managed to get a little list compiled: it’s only got 12,302 domains on it, so it’s not too comprehensive yet and it doesn’t really cope well with the “free subdomains” systems (you know the anything@yourname.example.com style free addresses), but it’s a start.

If anybody has any more contributions to the list, please feel free to add them as a comment – or, if you’ve got a really long list and don’t want to bother merging them/checking them against the list here – just leave a quick note and I’ll contact you about it.

(For those of you reading just the “summary” of this post – you’ll have to read the full article for the long list of domains):