Flecks of… Gray?

I was noticing that there was a website out there that had the same idea as me to make a classic sporting logo out of a foosball man. Truthfully, I think they did a bit of a better job than me, but mine’s been around for almost four years and has already made some shirt offspring, which is pretty impressive.

In your head, why don’t you take this little test with me.

1. If you are standing on the Moon, holding a rock, and you let it go, it will:
(a) float away
(b) float where it is
(c) move sideways
(d) fall to the ground
(e) none of the above

2. When the Apollo astronauts were on the Moon, they did not fall off because:
(a) the Earth’s gravity extends to the Moon
(b) the Moon has gravity
(c) they wore heavy boots
(d) they had safety ropes
(e) they had spiked shoes

Does the second question change your answer to the first question or are you sticking with it?

There’s an interesting story about where this question comes from over at the source page. I asked someone this question and they got the wrong answer due to confusion with the moon and the spaceship that they travel in.

from phys.ufl.edu via digg

There’s a pretty slick looking trailer for a LOTR fan film called, “The Hunt for Gollum“. I don’t think it’s based on JRR canon at all so hopefully it’s able to tell an interesting story. To me, it looks like something I’m going to want to check on when it comes to the ‘nets for free on May 3rd.

Here’s the most recent contestant on the British Talent search show to knock the socks off the audience and judges (youtube). I like the Paul Potts guy a little better because he can barely even muster thinking much of himself, so he’s easy to cheer for. Anyways, another nice one to make you feel good.

via cbc, farawaysoclose, digg, youtube and everywhere else the web touches.

(those are all ‘C’ logos – interesting)

So, my Habs made it in to the playoffs but no further without even being able to muster one win against the mighty Bruins and only leading for something like 25 minutes in the whole series – sheesh. I don’t think that anyone guessed that series’ outcome incorrectly but it would have been nice to be a bit more surprised.

Since I’m a BC boy now, the Canucks have climbed the ranks to my second favorite team and it was great to see them sweep the Blues – hopefully they can carry some of that momentum over to the next round after their nice break. I’m hoping the Flames can make it to the next round also – it would be nice to see them hang around for a little while longer to keep the Canucks company.

All of my least favorite Canadian teams didn’t even make it. I mean, I’d rather have any of these teams than US ones, but if CDN ones have to be shut out, these are the first ones to go.

For those who visit my website proper (not the RSS feed), you’ll probably have noticed that I’ve been adding new movies that I’ve been watching to the front page, just below my first post. This was a feature of the new Movie Rating WP Plugin that I was using, which is awesome.

Problem that I had was that I had 6 years of old movies that I wanted to bring in to this new DB which was about 700 movies. To copy and paste all that information in to this new plugin was time consuming and error prone (I did about 100) until I stumbled upon an easier way to do it.

I had already taken all the information from my yearly movie reviews and put it into a massive csv file that looked like this:

I found an addon (iMacros) for Firefox that you can do scripting/macro’s with and after a little bit of learning I was able to make a script that would read my csv file, copy and paste that information into my Movie Rating screen, save it and go to the next one. Here’s what that script looked like:

VERSION BUILD=6210326 RECORDER=FX
CMDLINE !DATASOURCE movies9.csv
‘Number of columns in the CSV file:
SET !DATASOURCE_COLUMNS 4
‘Increase the current position in the file
SET !DATASOURCE_LINE {{!LOOP}}
URL GOTO=http://matthew.mennoboy.com/wp-admin/tools.php?page=wp_movie_ratings_management
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=NAME:NoFormName ATTR=ID:url CONTENT={{!COL1}}
TAG POS=1 TYPE=SELECT FORM=NAME:NoFormName ATTR=ID:rating CONTENT={{!COL2}}
TAG POS=1 TYPE=TEXTAREA FORM=NAME:NoFormName ATTR=ID:review CONTENT={{!COL3}}
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=NAME:NoFormName ATTR=ID:watched_on CONTENT={{!COL4}}12:34:56
WAIT SECONDS=1
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:SUBMIT FORM=NAME:NoFormName ATTR=NAME:action&&VALUE:Addanewmovierating»
WAIT SECONDS=1

I could have probably left out the WAIT lines as it automatically waited for the page to save before going on to the next entry but I was happy to wait the few extra seconds for some reassurance that all the info would be there in time. The URL line is probably also unnecessary as it reloaded the page every time to put in a new entry but I left it in there. You need to make sure that the date is formatted correctly or else it won’t go in and I also found that the movie rating has to be one number higher than you want it to be (easy enough to set up in Excel).

With the macro in place, it was now able to loop through my csv file and start adding reviews right into Firefox; it took about an hour to put my remaining movies in without any user interaction from me (the best part!).

Now, my Movie Review page has all the movies and lots of the the TV shows that I’ve watched since I started keeping track on June 18, 2002 (almost 7 years ago). Here are some stats about my movie ratings since I’ve been rating…

You can now even sort by rating to see which movies I liked the most (there are 9 movies at 10 stars) and the least (only 2 movies have 1 star).

Hope you like the new Movie Rating System!

from time via digg

Time has a satirical article from a Dad who battled with the decision of if he should circumcise his son or not. He was in the ‘not’ camp, but his wife was for it. Here’s some good excerpts:

A pediatrician told me the sole reason he circumcised his son was so that the kid looked like him. If my son looks at my penis and the biggest difference he notices is foreskin, I have far more serious problems. Plus, if I wanted my son to look like me, I wouldn’t have worked so hard to marry someone better-looking than I am.

So in a few weeks, I’m going to buy some bagels, call a mohel who is also a pediatric surgeon and believes in local anesthetic, and do something that I’m pretty sure is wrong. I have a horrible feeling that all of parenthood is like this.

Sometimes, it’s nicer to just have girls and not worry about these problems – although I’ll have my share of problems with those two anyways…

Instead of using the $40 Quicktax like I usually do to file my taxes, I decided to give the free Studio Tax a try and am I ever glad I did.

Putting all my forms in was just as easy and I was able to even do the deductions for having a home office and using a car for work without any extra difficulty (other than noting that I needed form T777 instead of the T2200 as I was expecting). I liked that I was able to work right in the forms themselves if I wanted to and I also had some helping utilities to enter forms like T4′s, etc.

I was concerned that I wouldn’t get a PDF output of my taxes which is something that I like to keep from each year for my reference, but that wasn’t a problem at all. And with the benefit of being able to file right online with Netfile, taxes was about the same or a bit easier than doing it previous years; and for saving myself $40, count me in for next year!

Julie Jacobson / AP

CBC has a poll asking which of these 4 was the best shootout goal – have a check and make your vote:

Marek Malik’s between-the-legs marvel
Linus Omark’s speedy lob job
Robbie Schremp’s no-ice niftiness
Steve Stamkos’s behind-the-back beauty