Doug's Sounding Board

I just got one of these in change and realized that it’s the first quarter to feature death. It makes it kind of unsettling.

Last night I attempted a version of pad thai, and the result was fairly good. In the first couple batches the rice noodles weren’t cooked enough but it’s hard to know when they’re done. The cooktop can easily keep the heat high enough without even going into boost mode, I can kind of simulate putting the food higher in the wok to not cook as fast by having part of the pan off the cook zone, but the oil splattering mess is amazing.

Is there an iron bottomed wok that is flat on the outside but curved on the inside?

The road the crosses the yacht harbor from 7th Avenue and continuing past where it turns into San Lorenzo as it goes by the Boardwalk is being repaved, which is fantastic news. On either side they have the electronic displays explaining that between the dates shown there will be delays.

On the 7th Avenue side it said “Expect Looong Delays,” but I guess that wasn’t considered appropriate so it was changed to “Expect -Long- Delays.” On the San Lorenzo side it still says “Looong.”

I rented Sonic and the Secret Rings and it is definitely the nicest looking Wii game I’ve played so far. I like how the story is told with lightly animated storyboards. The voice acting doesn’t make me cringe in pain like with older 3D Sonic games.

This was supposed to be the 3D Sonic that most captures what Sonic is like in the 2D games and for the most part that’s true. When you have control you steer left and right and aside from that Sonic runs as fast as he can. Upgrades come later that let you go faster and have better handling. The controls fall apart in the jumping I think. The jump happens on the jump button release instead of on the button press so it lags behind when you wanted to jump. The developers chose this so you could charge your jump for a higher jump by holding the button down, but the higher jump is accomplished in other games by holding the jump button while in the air which I think works better.

Overall it’s pretty good, but I’d probably only get it after it gets discounted to $20 or less.

Thanks to those who brought chocolate and voted. I’m glad to have help in this critical research!

Voted most deadly of the chocolate dishes last night was Black bottom chocolate pie prepared by Shelley. Second was the chocolate mousse brought by Ian.

My arms feel their arm workout from mixing the extremely thick cookie dough. That’s the thickest cookie dough I’ve every worked with.

I ran into a hitch making the Chantico death cake, it turns out Starbucks hasn’t sold Chantico in over a year. Nicole told me that she thought they made it with half-and-half so we got some of that and then I looked it up and found a few recipes for similar chocolate drinks. They used whole milk or evaporated wilk with heavy cream. I decided to go for the half-and half since it’s what I had on short notice and it came out a little thicker than would be drinkable, but not quite as thick as pudding. I decided to go for it anyway. I don’t think it really enhanced the cake portion but the “Chantico” frosting was really potent. I can imagine that with the real thing it would have been impressive but unfortunately this can’t really be duplicated anymore.

This Sunday at 6:30PM at my house, tasting/voting to hopefully begin at 7PM. If you want to bring something that claims to be deadly chocolate here is a good place to look.

My boss, who is about to leave, used to develop video games and he wanted to see the Wii, so I brought it in this morning so he could try it out.

He was having fun with tennis and then he wanted me to demonstrate bowling. I was careful to avoid the conference room table, but in the third frame my hand hit my badge that was hanging from my right hip in its hard plastic case. It didn’t hurt much so I didn’t bother with it, but then I happened to see blood on it a few minutes later. My knuckle took abou t15 minutes sto stop bleeding from the slice.

I know it’s minor compared to what you see on wiihaveaproblem, but I had to share.

Five people, including my boss, are moving on to other things this week. One of the others is the guy who wrote the server component for a small “demo” program that we wrote in December. It was a program that everyone who saw it wanted it, it will never find its way to a consumer. If it had another month to clean it up and treat it like a real product, it could easily have paid for its development. If it could have been turned into a real product that server engineer would have stayed.

It feels like we’re almost at the borderline fo critical mass for keeping everything running.

I was talking to a contractor who is disappointed because instead of working on doing something new for this new project she’s just reshuffling the old stuff into new piles to look new. I know what it’s like to have the excitement when working on something new. I had it briefly this past December for the demo. I’ve been lucky in my career in that I’ve been able to work on three satisfying from scratch projects. Being able to work on a project like that shows you how monotonous the rest of it is. So yeah, this new project is going to start and it’s a from scratch client, except for all the baggage of how the server will feed the client which makes the new client a lot like the old client.

I’m ready for something else.

The crazy cold wind
Makes scooter rides angular
But my hair looks good

Premonition was…. not so good. After awhile you’re wishing for some progress and when you get some progress you’re like “uh huh, sure.” I’m going to go into a few spoilers here….

The moment where it completely lost it for me is when, seeing that she needed to consult someone about premonitions, goes to the local priest. He happens to have a book of premonitions (and other psychic phenomenon?) handy with all the premonition stories and how they ended bookmarked. Then you get the out of place speech about faith. I’m guessing there used to be a lot more with that character, really they should have cut that out completely. While they were at it they could have jumped right to the end.

After seeing how much I was enjoying playing Excite Truck at Julie & Fish’s house Nicole got me a copy. It’s a fun arcade racer with a good feeling of speed like you get in the Burnout series, but it doesn’t have good crashes and it’s all off-road. It lets you go fairly far off-track before you are told you’re going the wrong way or hitting a boundary which lets you do things like fall a hundred feet off a cliff and climb the 70 degree incline back into the race.

It makes you take 5 minutes to run through a very basic tutorial before racing which is probably a good thing but for the impatient it might be a little frustrating. With the basics down you pick up the rest pretty quickly while racing. After 20 minutes of play I picked up everything that was in the later lessons except for the mid-air truck spins. Why do you want to do truck spins? For points. Everything has points associated with it and in head to head races it’s points that determine the winner. Finishing first gives you a bigger bonus though so there’s still incentive to race better. Anyway, totally fun arcade racer!