Author: Synetech

☐ Girl Ghost Haunting a Well

Synetech 1 Comment

I remember seeing a movie when I was young which I am fairly sure was a Disney movie (possibly because I remember seeing the Disney logo, or perhaps just because it was on a Sunday night when Disney movies usually aired).

I remember that it was basically about a girl who had fallen down a well (which from what I remember was inside a barn) and died, and now her ghost was haunting the farm. She was harassing a boy who eventually solved her death which I guess must have set her spirit free. I remember that her ghost glowed a bright green.

It was pretty creepy and I still feel chills when I think about it. I have seen descriptions of a couple of movies that are good candidates for this movie, but have not confirmed it. What movie is it?

☑ Auto-Incrementing Build Version Macro for VS.NET (2003)

Synetech 2 Comments

A few years ago I added a macro to my installation of Visual Studio 2003 to automatically increment the build number whenever I re-built the project. It worked just fine, closing any resources if open, without the warning about the resources being opened outside of the dev-env, and without having to move the version block to an RC2 file.

I recently had to repair my installation and have lost that macro. I have searched everywhere and cannot for the life of me find it. I have checked my drive to see if I can find the file to reinstall it, but the only candidates that it could be turned out to not work. The Internet has likewise proven fruitless. Most of the available ones are now for VS2005 and VS2008.

Does anyone know of a VS2003 macro that closes open resources and automatically increments the version number in the RC file on building?

☐ Unknown Fairytale Movie

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I remember a movie I watched a bit of when I was young (early to mid-80’s) but cannot seem to figure out what it was. It was an animated kid’s movie similar to The Last Unicorn and Flight of Dragons. I always thought it was The Dark Crystal, but I recently saw that and now know that it was not. I only saw a little bit of it so I don’t have much to go on, but the part I did see was mostly a pale yellow and had some sort of creature (sort of like the Skeksis from Dark Crystal) scouting on a cliff, observing the movement of their army through a narrow-ish passage through the mountains. I also remember a sense of it being a popular, new movie that everybody was seeing at the time. I considered the original Lord of the Rings and Hobbit as well as The Secret of Nimh, but it is not those either. I also don’t think that it is Black Cauldron because I recall it being less cartoony; darker and more grotesque like Dark Crystal or Labyrinth. And yes, I considered the Neverending Story series, Legend, The Princess Bride, Krull, Ladyhawke, and Willow; it’s not those, it’s definitely animated. What movie could it be?

☐ Are Al-Qaeda Hypocrites or Just Stupid

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If Al-Qaeda performs it’s terrorist actions to protest capitalism and combat the rich, then why do they do things like bombing buses? Don’t they realize that buses are used primarily by the poor and working/middle-class? Most rich people use cars, even in congested cities like New York. People like those that Al-Qaeda purports to be against aren’t being targeted, the people that they claim to be good are the victims. What gives, surely there are more apt targets?

☐ Why Wait to Degauss Again?

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Why does pretty much every document that mentions the deguass function of monitors tell you to wait about 15 minutes before degaussing again? Does this mean that you must also wait around 15 minutes before turning off/on a monitor that automatically degausses when turned on.

Speaking of degaussing, what happens if a monitor is exposed to a magnetic field that is stronger than that created by the degaussing mechanism? Do you need to use a more powerful, external degausser, or will it be fixed over time because the degausser reduces the deviation by a bit each time it runs, until the deviation is within the degausser’s normal fixable range?

☐ Solar Cell Superman

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If Superman is solar-powered (he draws his super powers from the yellow sun of the Earth), then how does he retain his powers at night?

Is he like a battery, where he stores excess during the day and runs on that at night? If so, then what happens if he does too much at night? Will he burn out and become like the rest of us until the sun comes up again? What happens if he goes on vacation and just lies around in the sun all day? Does he build up so much power that he explodes?

☐ Too Tough For SNL Hosts

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Could somebody please explain to me why almost every Saturday Night Live host is always looking off set when they perform in a sketch? It’s horribly obvious they are looking at the cue cards, and sometimes, they don’t look anywhere BUT the cue cards.

They are supposed to be professional actors who have to memorise lines, rehearse, and so on just the same as the SNL cast do. Why then do they all constantly and continuously read the cue cards? Do they not remember ANY of their lines? Is it that they are unable to learn them in only a week? Did they not go to rehearsals?

I don’t understand why they are so dependant on the cue cards when they are doing exactly what they are trained for: acting. Perhaps the rigors of a weekly sketch comedy show are tougher than those of a long movie production. If this is the case, then going in the other direction (sketch comedy to movies) should be a piece of cake.

☑ Reading Error Term

Synetech 2 Comments

I remember a fascinating (and fun) section in one of my Psychology courses in University. It was about language, specifically reading (that’s why I’m certain it was in my Psychology of Language course) where we learned about errors in word recognition. Some of the errors we learned included the alteration of the first letter of a word. For example reading Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos as Tales of the Mthulhu Cythos. I remember there being about four different ways that such a thing can occur, including moving a letter forward to another word, moving a letter backward, and switching a word. I strongly remember one of these using the term perseveration although the term perseveration clearly is incorrect since it means something completely different. I am fairly certain that it started with a “P” and had something like “serv” in it.

Does anyone know what I am thinking of?