Doug's Sounding Board

I found a number of “B”movies on DirecTV recently in addition to sme good stuff so I have more than I normally do. Nice thing about the “B” movies is they rarely exceed 90 minutes. The Neanderthal Man – I had seen this before. A scientist believes that the larger brain case in neanderthals would […]

Finally a weekend without many planned activities let me catch up on the far overdue weeding. First I got the new weeds in the backyard that grew from the last attempt. Then I moved on to the front yard and managed to get everything but the weeds between the flagstones and the weeds along the […]

 I don’t have a picture because there are only camera phones in the office and none of them can get close enough to resolve the image. I would draw a picture but my poor drawing skills are more likely to mislead. It’s a bright red bug (6-legs), about 2.5-3mm long and probably about 1mm wide. […]

A Knight’s Tale – With the passing of Heath Ledger I learned that I had not actually seen any of his movies. I probably wasn’t going to be seeing any until The Dark Knight later this summer until I saw a movie channel was playing A Knight’s Tale. Aside from names it doesn’t have much […]

1) As I watched them set up the difference engine I pictured a more practiced person setting it up in maybe half the time. Operators being a skilled profession in a world where the machines were completed and used in Babbage’s time. Cities would have computational centers that people send their work to. 2) The […]

Saturday we went to the Computer History Museum to see the opening of Babbage’s Difference Engine exhibit. It’s the second one that’s been built and it’s impressive in person. After wandering through the rest of the museum we arrived at the difference engine in time to see them setting it up for calculation of an […]

I didn’t think about the connection before, but Monday morning when I came in to work the power strip in my cube was dead and one of the bricks plugged into it didn’t survive either. I’m thinking whatever was the fix took out my power strip in the process. Unrelated to that but still odd […]

We went on Sunday and after finding parking and then waiting in line for tickets finally made it to the the stuff. The main hall had the stuff from previous issues of Make and Craft magazines. Having kits for sale for the more popular items was a good idea. The stage was little crowded so […]

The bathrooms where I work are shared among a several offices. The 30-foot journey to relief brings with it a large charge differential so that when you touch the bathroom door handle you get a large shock. Going out the rear entrance has similar issues. Strangely, the reverse trips don’t have the same issue. Over […]

27 Dresses – A fun comedy. I hope Katherine Heigl makes continues with the transition from tv to the movies. She was great to watch and her reactions felt very real even as the situations weren’t very likely. 1408 – I wasn’t expecting much from this and I got a good bit more. John Cusack […]