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You know how when you mistype a URL in your browser’s address bar and the domain you typed does not exist, you get a dialog box telling you that the domain can not be reached? Well, no more. Verisign now offers up a page that gives likely alternatives for your mistyped URL. Go ahead, give it a whirl. If you have an unusual name, type your full name plus a dot com, for example (if you don’t own it yet).

This new service called Site Finder may be a boon for novice web surfers, but for long time net users it may seem jarring. According to this post at WillieGalang.com, it could also break a lot of things.

Yikes! My mug’s on PhilMUG.

Aaahh, that only lasted briefly. The new Powerbook G4 family, announced at the Apple Expo in Paris, catches PhilMUGgers’ fancy.

I share with my brother-in-law a Blockbuster DVD Subscription Pass account, which put simply is a way for us to rent as many DVDs as we like in a month for a set price. My DVD viewing has increased considerably in the past month because of this. The first two movies I rented deal with the Holocaust: Academy Award winning The Pianist and the lesser known The Grey Zone.

You could say The Grey Zone starts off where The Pianist’s boxcar scene ends. The Grey Zone has an unusual cast of indie movie mainstays such as Steve Buscemi and Harvey Keitel (who is also the producer). It also features actors not normally seen in movies of this subject matter, Mira Sorvino and David Arquette. The ensemble speaks in unabashed American colloquial English, which is a departure from forced British accents normally found in historical movies like this. The Nazi characters, however, speak English with a German accent. Being that the movie’s setting is in the Auschwitz death camps, the film is bleak and depressing. I came away from it drained.

I also saw Nicholas Nickleby, a pretty good adaptation of the Dickens novel. It has a colorful cast of characters. Veteran actor Christopher Plummer is in it, as are Nathan Lane, Dame Edna and Alan Cumming. Nickleby’s love interest, Madeline Bray, is played by Anne Hathaway, who appeared in Princess Diaries with Julie Andrews. This makes Nicholas Nickleby the second time she’s worked with a principal of The Sound of Music (which, by the way, has a Nazi occupation subtext as well). Hathaway to me exudes rare beauty found in such women as Natalie Portman and Audrey Tautou.

This evening I watched Equilibrium, a movie about a dystopian world in the not-so-distant future. I would say this movie is a well-made B-movie. It’s been criticized for being derivative with its themes borrowed from The Brave New World, 1984 and Farenheit 451. A comparison to The Matrix is unavoidable as well. But I thoroughly enjoyed it. It takes the John Woo-style of gun battle to a new level. It stars Batman-to-be Christian Bale.

Stumbled upon a couple of Filipino-American blogs worth checking out. There’s Robert Garcia Tagorda’s Boomshock, a blog about politics and baseball. Then there’s The Dubious Biologist, a Salon-hosted blog by BJ De La Cruz, who happens to be, you guessed it, a biologist. He’s also a Macintosh fanatic.

I discovered BJ’s blog quite by accident. Around June and July of this year, I saw a spike in hits from searches on “Filipino Biologist/Physicist.” I never blogged about any such person but my June 2003 archive page does contain the words “Filipino”, “Biologist” and “Physicist.” Out of curiosity, I checked the search engine results and I find a link to one of BJ’s entries where he urges the “person who is still doing the “filipino biologist” search on Google and Yahoo” to stop already. Heh-heh, I could just imagine how much traffic this guy was getting.

Since all search queries originated from the Philippines, and June was the beginning of the schoolyear, I suspect some college professor was giving out assignments to research Filipino biologists or physicists. Or maybe there was some sort of breakthrough in the Philippine scientific field like this discovery of a new parasitic fungus by a Pinay biologist. Who knows?

Update: BJ de la Cruz moved his site here.

Pictures I took at One Infinite Loop (aka Apple HQ) get featured in PhilMUG’s very first e-zine/newsletter! Download it here. Kudos to Ernie and his hardworking staff for putting it all together.