Captain's Log

First post! (in a month)

So I decided not to post anything in March. I didn't have much to say, since I was ridiculously busy during the middle of the month. So here's a post for April 1st. And no it's not a joke.

Sunny sent me a spreadsheet which had a bunch of frames from movies. You identified the movies by entering the title of the movie into a cell on the spreadsheet. The neat part was that all the people were removed from the frames - they were invisible. It was a neat special effect. The answers had to be exact, which was annoying, because the answer key had some misspellings. The spreadsheet was locked, so you couldn't just go look at the answers, but there ar a number of ways to get around that: 1. You could crack the spreadsheet, like I did. 2. You could use external references to get around the fact that the workbook was locked as Sunny's friend John suggested (i.e "='[moviequiz(blank).xls]Sheet1'!$S$19" in another workbook) 3. or you could just google the answers. You can see the answers here.

After some searching, I found that these images came from a website, FilmWise.com, which has a ton more images like that, which are called Invisibles. The image above was stolen from FilmWise. They put out weekly Invisibles quizzes along with tons of other neat stuff like movie quotes, unique text and visual quizzes, and contests. The site looks really cool, and when I get a chance I'm going to sink my teeth in and find more cool stuff. Also, the people at FilmWise contributed to the game scene it?, which comes highly recommended from Dion. It's a movie trivia game that comes with a DVD full of movie clips used as part of the game. Sounds like it would be fun. They already have an expansion pack out, which is good. My biggest worry about the game is that the reply value would go way down once you'd played through all the questions that use clips.

One more TV related thing to mention is a new show on Fox called Wonderfalls (beware flash-heavy site). It's not the show of the year or anything, but it's entertaining to watch. Since I'm getting lazy, I'll steal some words from Fox's blurb about the show:

There's a good review of the show at the Village Voice if you are interested. The show is neat, quirky, and funny. It uses fast, odd camera movements like Keen Eddie does. The lead actress, Caroline Dhavernas, has an attractive quality I can't quite explain. Most of the critics seem to agree that it's a funny, refreshing show, but the idea of plastic animals talking to the main character could get old after a while. Pretty much all the critics think that the show won't last long in the dead end time slot that is Friday night at 7 central. I think the show is entertaining, and I'm going to enjoy it as long as it's around.