Doug's Sounding Board

It’s been awhile since we’ve had updates, but it’s also been awhile since work has been done while we decide on the next parts to do. I also included some pictures of the house from the driveway that can be compared to the before pictures I think.

Work mostly. Wake up at 5 or 6 and start working. Go to work and work some more. Come home, work into midnight or 1. That’s been my week and I’m feeling kinda tired, but it’s over now. Yay! After all that work to get things ready for a demo they decided that the client and the server had too many problems to show after all. It’s a minor disappointment, but the work was not useless at all. Everything is in a much better state than when I started. I also respect that my boss decided not to go ahead with it which is going to make him catch hell from the people who wanted to do the demo.

I also got referer rules in place to stop the referer spam in my logs. It ended up not being that difficult and it’s seriously reduced that traffic. It was getting to the point where my connection was being bogged down with it and the load on the machine would exceed 25. I think I might hate referer spam more than regular spam now for the bandwidth reason.

I also made the icb client echo back to the user which /flirt and /confuse was sent to someone else. It was a simple change but one that will make like 5 people happy.

Tomorrow we go to LA, returning Tuesday, to visit my parents and sister. Yay for time away!

Yesterday I was on Pacific Avenue waiting for Nicole outside of the cosmetics shopand thumbing through a book. After a few minutes of that I notice a bee is trying to land on me. I quickly move about 10 feet away, which usually gets bees to go about their business. This bee found me again and started another landing attempt. I moved another 30 feet away and still the bee followed me. I moved again and this time it stayed away.

Today I was waiting for Nicole out side of Red Poppy and reading a book on number theory when I look down and see two bees attempting to land on me. I dodged a few times before giving up and going inside. The smells inside the store confused it and it stopped at the doorway.

Was my soap secretly replaced with pollen?

We have plants and stuff now. Not all of them, but it’s coming together. We opted for smaller plants that can grow into their places. Sorry I haven’t updated in awhile. I’ve been getting to work while it’s still too dark to go taking pictures, and coming home late to similar lighting conditions.

I was cleaning up more stuff in the tv room so I put this on. Christina Applegate, Cameron Diaz, and Selma Blair are women who like to go out and score with men. But then Christina (Cameron Diaz) meets a guy she actually likes and fails to follow through. So the rest of the movie is her chasing him down with funny mishaps happening along the way. I wasn’t surprised to find out it was written by a woman and I’m glad it wasn’t a ‘chick flick’, because comedy was more my mood. I found myself stopping to watch a and laughing a lot for this movie.

Did you know there was a “Jersey Girl” before Kevin Smith’s “Jersey Girl”? I didn’t, and neither did Tami when she got it for me (on-line). Anyway, I gave it a go on Saturday while I was goign through stuff piled in the tv room. It starts out with characters that are pretty irritating, but about 1/3 of the way though they start feeling more real and fun. It ended up being not such a bad movie, but I have to say that I like Kevin Smith’s version a more.

We went to the school for the normal game of frisbee with the dogs and after awhile I noticed that there was a hula hoop laying in the grass. After a few more minutes I picked it up and tried to get the dogs to go through it but they weren’t having any of that. Then I rolled it away and they thought that was totally great! They ran after it and stopped it with their mouths. You could hear it spin some in their mouths when they took hold of it. Then Grover figure out he would just run it over to stop it. Then they would pick it up and bring it back, well sometimes. Being as large as it was it wasn’t always easy to coordinate how to carry it but mostly it worked.

Try of hula hoop with your dog!

Last night we watched Bride & Prejudice and I enjoyed it overall. There was a montage that made no sense at all and I think might be the worst one I’ve ever seen. It’s like they gave up on trying to make it make sense. Anyway, the songs and the dance numbers were fun and the story was well adapted to India. I’d watch it again.

So now the hard-scaping is basically done. Paths, irrigation lines, big rocks, etc. The next phase is to get some plants in there. I think that starts next week, though it might start this week. Right now they are removing the excess dirt they did not use.

Last night we watched The Aquatic Life. I didn’t really have any expectations going into it except that it seemed Jacques Cousteau inspired and it might be funny. The first half mostly just reminded me of watch Cousteau shows in the 70s and then it started to get more and more rediculous (in a good way) to the point of feeling lik eyou are watching a parallel universe. I have great fondness for this movie.