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The streets are wet with the rain from last night, and the air is filled with a small mist, your fog, which makes 3 PM look like 6 PM.

The History web site has been going smooth with no problems so far. The real test will come when the students start using it daily in less than 3 weeks.

I saw Paycheck. If you can avoid it, you should. Go watch Lord of the Rings again, or Big Fish. I have not seen Big Fish, however, people seem pleased with it.

As I mentioned before, Paycheck was expected to be a good movie, with John Woo probably curbing out any bad acting. However, it seems that some of the flaws in the movie script itself resulted in lots of bad acting, and thus we are left with a movie that is on the borderline of being either good and bad.

Paycheck has so many flaws, it would make you angry in the middle of the movie since you could have done something better than go and watch the movie in this holiday season; restaurants were raving. The FBI seems to smoke in their own building, and then get surprised to see a smoke detector in the interrogation. Ben Affleck needs to get out of only one locked door on a high rise FBI tower to get to the bottom floor. No other security measures stop him from getting out of the building.

The time lens is supposed to see through the boundaries of the Universe. However, it is inside a small closed bunker and the only thing it can see is the palm of your hands.

Newton never talked about time travel in negative terms. He only said “You need infinite amount of energy to travel faster than the speed of light.” John Woo, please focus on the success of Face Off to come up with something good, not to mimic the explosions.

Uma Thurman keeps the movie going at scenes where you might doze off to sleep.

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My whole day was busy finishing coding the History web site. The web site is finally online and is functioning well so far.

Someone recently tried explaining to me that a standard compliant web site will not use PHP, and will only use HTML and CSS along with Javascript. Javascript is definitely not the standard, and PHP is not related to HTML and CSS compability at all, when it comes to coding. You use HTML and CSS for displaying and managing the content, and you use PHP to create the dynamic content.

I wonder what would have happened if Bill Gates starts talking about Philosophy and Arnold starts talking about knowledge.

Once again, Merry Christmas.

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Tom Cruise got nominated for best actor for The Last Samurai.

Paycheck is coming out with Ben Affleck this week. Some of his only good acting was shown in Pearl Harbor and The Dare Devil; Paycheck may be good, since John Woo would surely straighten out any non-acting material from his movies [though some of his recent movies may prove otherwise].

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is in the top three movies of all time, according to IMDB users. It has also been nominated for 4 Golden Globe Awards, including “Best Picture.”

Image of Lord of the Rings in the top three pictures of all time on Imdb.com - Image type - Gif Image. File Size - 40 kb. Dimensions - 913×641.

The above image reminds me; Amazon, as of today, has taken off the holiday visitors statistics.

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I recently started a domain transfer from enom over to Godaddy, on the day the domain was supposed to expire. Customer support said that the transfer would not happen as the domain has expired, and that I should renew it at the current registrar. However, the domain has been renewed correctly and transferred [a domain gets a year added to it whenever it is transferred].

Tip of the day : A domain name can still be transferred on the day it is expiring, even if the process continues onto the next day or next few days. Go ahead and start the domain name transfer, even if it is the last day. Your new registrar should refund you the transfer fees if the transfer is not completed successfully.

Also, if you do not try to transfer and renew the domain name at its current registrar, you will have to wait 60 days before you are allowed to transfer the domain name. This rule applies to each and every domain registrar.

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<%image(20031222-amazonvisitormeter21updated.jpg|162|73|Amazon.com Stats late December 20th, 2003)%>

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This is a splendid movie, and probably the best movie that converts a story from one form [the book] to another [the big screen]. You should know that The Hobbit was written to be read as the story along with The Lord of the Rings. You can also The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Boxed Set.

The Guardian posted its review of the best bogs it considered to be present in UK. That resulted in the following:

<%popup(20031221-canihavemygiftnow.gif|1152|838|The Guardian may affect Christmas for some - maybe)%> - Dimensions - 1152×838 ; Size - 41.4 kb ; File Type - GIF Image.

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I will be going to see Lord of the Rings - Return of the King around midnight.

It has been one the most hectic and busiest day of this whole year today, so far. The computers at the library nearby seem to prohibit you from opening any Word document, which is strange. Most of them have “special” computers which only have Microsoft Word on them. Maybe they want you to focus on writing instead of browsing. Speaking of which, Microsoft Office Online gives you the following nice warning.

<%image(20031219-microsoftonline.gif|768|187|Unsupported browsers for Microsoft Online Site)%>

Is it not better to write standards compliant code instead of making users download additional software? I am using Mozilla Firebird at the moment along with Internet Explorer for sites like above which do not display some dialog boxes among other things in other browsers.

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However, there are some fundamentally new changes that will come with the adoption of such a bill. The biggest change would be to require each consumer, or at least advise them, to reply to “spam” emails to let the sender know that they are not interested in getting diamonds from Nigeria anymore. However, this is exactly the opposite of what users have been trained to do over the past several years; to delete all spam email and never to reply. Generally, the main assumptions, for a good reason, is that once a reply is sent, the spammer or the spamming bot will know that the email address is valid and that a “live human” is on the other side. This enables the spammer to mark that specific email as verified, and send more emails to it. Even more interesting, those verified emails are sold off in email lists.
The last such major legislation was a in the Clinton administration in 1998 with a law banning Web sites from collecting personal information from children under 13.
Why not prohibit the companies that deliver “targeted solicited” mail from doing so in the first place? The law firmly denies, even if it indirectly, the consumers to sue the spammers. That means anyone can spam you, and if you complain to them, they simply delete you from their list. If not, then you can take action by complaining to the government. The first strike does not get you out of the game anymore.
More information on this bill can be read on the government site for the spam bill itself. This specific section may be of specific interest to almost everyone outlining what is spam and the rights a spammed user has.
“A bill to regulate interstate commerce by imposing limitations and penalties on the transmission of unsolicited commercial electronic mail via the Internet.”

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I just posted this somewhere else on the internet:

[em]

Wal-Mart is using this holiday season as a good opportunity to take an aim at one of its competitor:

Online article #1

Online article #2

Online article #3

Since Wal-mart is selling below its cost price on all the toys, it is taking a direct aim at Toys R Us, which recently announced plans to shutter its stores recently.

[/em]

Amazon may be hit, in part by such price slashing on toys by WalMart also, since it has a three year deal with Toys R Us. Yes, where is that meter? A replacement has been put on the main page by Amazon, however. It is the number of holiday shoppers coming to the site in the past 60 minutes.

<%image(20031216-amazonvisitormeter.gif|181|300|Amazon.com Visitor Meter in the past 60 minutes)%>

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