Year: 2005

Scoville scale

Somehow I ended up reading about chili peppers. Apparently, there is a special measurement scale – Scoville scale – which measures how hot the pepper is. The funny thing is that it wasn’t based on any machines or some highly controlled lab environment. Instead, it used the simple human tounge. Yes, that’s right – a few guys were tasting the mix of pepper, sugar and water. Sounds very unscientific, but it is actually not. Human tounge is a very sensitive tool and can feel very small amounts of the pepper.

Anyway, if you want to read about it yourself, there is a good site about chili here. It has plenty of information about chili peppers. One can learn the structure of the chili pepper, find out what is the hottest part of it, how peppers are used in medicine, how the “heat” thing works, and, most importantly, how to help oneself quickly to get rid of the burning in the mouth.

Additionally there are a couple of nice resources here and here. These will complete the education with receipts of the food to cook with peppers and tips on how to grow some peppers of your own. And, in case I missed anything, the Wikipedia article should complete it.

Trend

I’ve noticed a trend: every time I accidentally pull the power cable out of my monitor, I say a brief “A!” and exactly one swear word. The swear word wires based upon what I was doing, how long it was since the last ‘Save’ operation, what time of day it is and how tired I am.

Vestnik Kipra RSS feed

I have wrote a script to generate an RSS feed for Vestnik Kipra aka Cyprus Advertiser. It will be regenerated every hour. In case you want any changes to the look and feel of the feed, here is the script source (Perl file).

Windtalkers

Finally I watched “Windtalkers” on DVD. Once I have missed it in the cinema due to a poor and boring theatrical trailer, I wanted to rent in on DVD, but never had the nerve to take it, preferring other films.

This movie turned out to be different from what I expected. It was good in those areas which I was expecting to suck, and bad in those that I was expecting to shine.

There were plenty of war scenes and they were almost properly done. Lots of gun fire, explosions, and battle action and of these were at a loss without any strategy. It gets boring to watch a bunch of guys firing a bunch of guns and running all over the place. There was no clear distinction between allies and enemies. There was no clear distinction of a plan. Targets weren’t clearly marked for the audience. All the attention was given to soldiers, their ammunition and the scenery of the battle field. Airplanes and ships were mentioned briefly, each with their own impressive shots. But again, no attention to what and where they were doing in connection to the battle field.

There was some good acting, but not by Nicolas Cage. In fact, everyone else did better than him. His character appeared very shallow and faceless. One of Cage’s worst roles that I have seen.

Plenty of good photography and sound effects. I haven’t noticed any music except for that played by the characters, so I if it was there it must have been very good and natural. Plenty of good photography. Oh, I’ve mentioned it already, but it was really good.

Overall, I’ll give this movie a firm 6 out of 10.

Lemmings

A game of lemmings done with DHTML is here. Really cool and pretty addictive. I had to stop after the level 7, otherwise I would have spent the next 3 days playing it.