Doug's Sounding Board

m&m/Mars should make a cheap USB printer that will let you print your own design and colors on m&m’s. They could give you further discounts on stuff by turning in wrappers or something. The technology is there with current ink-jet printers and mass-produces electronics.

I probably should have invented that instead of writing it here.

I finally watched this last night while I was taking apart ball-clock motors to figure out why they weren’t working. The movie seemed to flow back and forth between great and disappointing. You would be watching and realize that you had drifted into something not so good and then you would find yourself back into great. There’s no one thing that stands out as great or not so great since it feels like a continuous function. A lot of the time I felt like I was watching a lower budget independent movie which I thought was great. Other times I felt like I was watching every cliche ever put into film.

Do you like drum & bugle corps music? Do you wish you had a CD of music performed by a very good one? After watching the summer DCI competition in Santa Clara I went looking on-line for more about drum & bugle corps and I stumbled across “The Commandant’s Own” – The U.S. Marine Drum and Bugle Corps. If you click a link on the left they will send you a free CD of their latest season’s work (while supplies last, but if they run out they’ll put you on the list for next year).

Saqw this last night with Terry and Gerald. I think we were the only ones in the theater. It had some spooky stuff but not too much. I didn’t like either one of the actors as lawyers, neither one seemed to carry off the lawyer character very when while they were in the court room. Luckily a large part fo the movie is flashbacks to what was happening instead of watching a court room. I liked the story though and that more than made up for the parts I didn’t like.

I also saw the Wedding Crashers again and I still think it’s the funniest movie of the year.

We have an area in the front of our house where we put stuff that still has some life in it but it isn’t worth the time it would take to sell it. When stuff goes out there I also have to put up a sign indicating it is free or it will sit there for over a week while people wait to see if it really is free.

Monday morning while I was taking my scooter out of the backyard I saw an old guy on his electric cart by the pile and heading back to the sidewalk. When I left for work a few minutes later I saw a bowl was gone and a cane was added to the pile. I looked up and down the street but there was no sign of him.

My favorite theory about why he left it is that he took the cane of someone that irritated him and that was the easiest way to dispose of it.

The allergist prescribed to be an air-flow meter (you really need a prescription to get one) so figure out how bad my exercise induced asthma gets. I haven’t started tracking anything like that yet, but it my few times using it I’ve learned that when everything feels free and clear I can exhale at a rate of 750-780 liters/minute (good for my age and height is 650). When I start feeling slightly asthmatic that drops down to 500-550 liters/minute which is a reduction of 1/3!

I bought this game because it was in the bargain bin and the novelty of driving around a real model of LA sounded fun. You play a copy who doesn’t play by the rules so you can drive over anything and take other people’s cars when yours gets too beat up. This game has a lot going for it:

• It really is a model of LA (not including outlying areas like the valley)
• The voice acting is pretty good
• The story seems pretty good
• The freedom to chase down any crime is nice.
• The way it takes you through the story is fairly interesting with small blocks to do between cut-scenes
• Running over large trees, utility poles, traffic signals, etc. is pretty funny

Unfortunately that doesn’t make up for what’s wrong with the game:

• The graphics are very ugly
• The controls aren’t very responsive which makes for irritating and frustrating gameplay.
• It’s just not very fun overall.
• If this is LA, where are all the cars and people?

For sale it goes on half.com

Honking at people sitting at a red light. There was a lot of impatience out there.

One month since I last reported and my body fat % is down 1% to 25%, my weight is down from 214 to 209.4 which works out to 5.7 pounds of fat lost and 1.3 pounds of muscle gained. That’s pretty good considering I’m only getting 1-2 days of exercise per week in and not completely avoiding sugar and other bad things.