Doug's Sounding Board

Failure to Launch – Not quite the typical romantic comedy. Yeah it has the same overall formula, but the situation is unique and that makes the whole thing pretty fun to watch.

Clerks – I watched this again this past weekend with someone who had never seen that. I’m not sure how they came to be in that situation but it was still great watching the movie again. I was more aware of nervousness of the one-scene actors this time.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest – This movie was just fun from beginning to end. Good humor, good action, and fun characters to watch. I’m looking forward to the third one in May 2007.

Clerks II – I’ve been waiting for this movie for a long time and after seeing it I am very satisfied. Kevin Smith has a talent for dialog and for making you laugh at things you wouldn’t laugh at otherwise. It seems like Kevin Smith has fully let go of making the actors say the dialog in the rhythmic pattern he has in mind which is probably for the best. Also, Jason Mewes no longer seems wooden in front of the camera like he would in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.

We didn’t get the tv room finished or the shed, but good progress was made on both. A good reason for the slow speed was that the tv room is where we stored pretty much everything during the remodel. Now I have a number of things to unpack and find new homes for and that is how I came across the trophies. These are things that go back to junior high school bowling. I’m not going to be displaying them anywhere so I decided to take pictures of them before they left the house.

About 5 days ago I started catching up on about 2 weeks of people’s posts. After a few days of not seeing many I realized I wasn’t signed in.

Entertainment Weekly is fading away and I won’t renew when the free subscription ends. What used to sometimes top 200 pages is now down to about 80. It going away isn’t really a bad thing.

The bathroom is complete. The kitchen is complete aside from the down-draft blower and under cabinet lights. The living room is set up again. The library is set up with books in place. The office is mostly set up. The laundry room is set up enough. Tomorrow we tackle the TV room and find homes for the rest of the stuff.

House pictures tomorrow.

After 3 weeks of no gophers, a new one moved in. I haven’t used the gopher repellant yet because I need to pull weeds to get to the dirt level.

I kind of have three bosses at work now after a re-org. I work on the client team so I have the client team manager. I work on the core project so I have the program manager. I work on the customer’s version so I have the project manager. Now instead of one meeting a week I have 3 and maybe 4 (as needed). As we get more projects and don’t hire other people I can see that the number of meetings will soon require a full day of meetings. I always wondered how managed to have 3 bosses and now I think I know, bad re-orgs.

I think it’s time to organize the shed too.

Saturday we tried to go to Sacramento to Nicole’s brother’s BBQ, but after 2 hours and only getting 80 miles and hearing that traffic was the same the rest of the way we gave up. On the way back home we decided to get lobsters to compensate at 99 Ranch Market so we got two 1.5 and 1 3lb lobster. Yum!

Sunday we emptied the office and the other bedroom which took about 6-7 hours since this is where everything has piled up during the remodel.

Monday we primed the office, painted the bedroom, and then painted the office. We also got baseboards for the bedroom. Mmmmmm fumes.

Tuesday we painted another coat on the two rooms so now they are done and a lot of things that had no home can finally go where they belong.

Oh yeah, we can use the shower in our bathroom now that they installed the shower glass. Unfortunately there are scratches on the shower glass so they are bringing us another one in two weeks.

Why are digital certificates so difficult?

What I want:
1. A root certificate from which to create a signing certificate
2. A signing certificate
3. A certificate to put on a device to validate code signed with the signing certificate
4. To be able to do all this with openssl or the Java keytool

With the Java keytool I can make a self signed certificate and sign with that, and export the necessary component for verification, but some devices soom to want a root that the signing certificate is based on. It has no distinct root cert.

With openssl I can make the root cert and then the signing cert, but I’m not sure how to make the verifying cert.

Before reading Joseph Ellis’ “His Excellency George Washington” I think the most I knew was that he was the first president (two terms), he was the general in the revolutionary war, he had a wife named Martha, and he had false teeth. American history classes never talk about his except to acknowledge he was there before going back to the constitutional talk. Joseph Ellis’ previous book, “Founding Brothers” made me think there was more there and this book provides. It covers from George Washington’s childhood through his death and shows the influences that led to the decisions he made throughout his life. Like “Founding Brothers” it gives a feel for the time and the people, and makes it feel close rather than like history. If you ever wanted to know more about the man whose name and face is everywhere in this country I recommend this book.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift – I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen so many cheesy cliches strung together. This movie was fantastic and is easily the best of the three Fast and Furious movies. More racing and less half-assed cop story to get in the way.

Elizabethtown – It started off slow and a little awkward and I didn’t much care what was going on. After a little while though I felt myself sucked in by the characters and they held me there until the very end.

Vanilla Sky – I wasn’t trying for a Cameron Crowe fest but I’m not complaining. Again, great characters, and a fun story for them to run around in. The imdb lists 4 theories about what is going on and I think I have to go with the basic explanation that the movie presents out front.

The Greatest Game Ever Played – Why do I like golf movies when I don’t like golf? I don’t know but this is another golf movie that I really like. One thing I have to say though is that the CG ladybug is just wrong! I think it’s one of the worst examples of bad gratuitous CG ever. The CG ball and flying effects didn’t distract from the movie and helped make the game seem more action oriented. Oh yeah, based on a true story.

I haven’t posted and house updates in awhile because I haven’t really known what to post. Mostly we’re waiting for some last few things. In the bathroom I painted the trim behind the “floating cabinets” and the bathroom pocket door. Now we just await the glass that will allow us to shower without spraying the bathroom.

In the kitchen the garbage cabinet has been fixed to be a one-piece pull-out instead of two doors that had to be opened all the way before you could pull out the cans. We’re still waiting for under cabinet lighting and the installation of the blower unit for the down draft.

What’s left aside from that? Painting the office and the other bedroom. Then finally things will be able to be moved into their places. One of the problems of remodelling something is that you decide to do other things while everything is messed up.

For us, that meant re-texturing the living room and the master bedroom and a wall in the “tv” room. We also have an electrical panel switched from the projection wall in the “tv” room to a wall in the laundry room. The water heater has been replaced with an on-demand heater (I can see it has cut gas usage by 1/3). The old water heater took up a corner of the office room so there’s 10 more square feet in there now that the heater is on the outside wall. Since the kitchen floor was being put in we had them re-coat the rest of the floors with more of urethane. We removed the shelf in the laundry room and shortened the interior window that looks into it so that needed a wall build-up. Also since we needed new windows in the kitchen and bathroom we decided to get new windows throughout the house. Re-texturing, windows, and all that means that when we’re done we’ll have painted pretty much the entire house.

Morning dose of fun

As of this morning I weigh 220.8 pounds.
According to a website that uses the Navy’s method of calculating body fat I’m at 27%.
Time to turn that around.

I’ve read that the Navy’s method is at least and generally more accurate than other body fat measurement techniques that can be easily done.