We haven’t tried the washing machine yet, but it has a nifty valve for both hot can cold water with a simple lever, and it’s all in a box in the wall instead of sticking out!
It took the plumber 8 hours to do everything and clean up. Part of that was because his back was sore but he kept the price the same as his initial bid.
Now we just need to patch up the wall.
Most of my books are packed up because we were getting the floors refinished. They remain packed up because there is still a lot of wall work to be done and it didn’t seem worth it to set up the book cases again only to move them. My books that I haven’t read are also hidden in boxes so when I needed a new book to read I figured I’d go through the boxes and find the new book box or the box with the Chronicals of Narnia, and I’d read whichever came first. It had been over 20 years since my last read of the Narnia books and since the movie will be coming out soon I wanted to refresh my memory.
I remember it being a short book, but it’s really short. Not much happens in it and yet it should make a nice 90 minute movie. There’s nothing to get complicated or difficult that would need to be changed story-wise. In a number of cases he goes into great detail in the book about how the computer graphics should look and if those directions aren’t followed I’ll be pretty disappointed. There isn’t much dialog so you have to throw more of that in there but that should translate fairly well from thoughts they are thinking.
How does it hold up as a book? It’s kind of shallow but it’s still entertaining enough. While I didn’t know the Christian connection the last time I read them, I can see it now, but I hardly think it’s the main focus and I don’t think that interferes. I’m going to continue with the others and see what I think of them.
Back when I worked at Agile, a co-worker went to Germany for vacation and brought a pen for everyone in the office. They were cheap pens that said Beer on them and have some logo. At first it just sat on my desk but one day I needed a pen and it was closest so I used it and found it to be a really good pen! It always wrote smoothly, never had a glop of ink, had a great shade of blue, and was comfortable in your hand, and it never dried up. Leave it to the Germans to make a freebie pen that is superior to any freebie and many pens you would buy here. Anyway, after 3.5-4 years the Beer pen ran out of ink…no more Beer pen. Bye Beer pen, thanks for your service!
Work intensified this week and promises to get worse next week. Our CEO wants a demo of our software running on his phone so he can play with it a few days. We aren’t running on any phones yet! Dan got it building for Palm this morning around 1:30AM though. Yay!
So last night after I finished the work I brough home I decided I wanted to rent “Eulogy” so I could finally see it. I got to the video store and it isn’t in. So I rented “Hitch” (1-day) and “Saw” (5-day), went to the store for paper towels and went home to watch a video.
When I got home I remembered that I needed to copy the file I was working on to my thumb drive but I couldn’t get it to show up in the explorer so 30 minutes later I finally finished copying my file. Then 20 minutes into the movie a co-worker calls with questions about the porting he’s doing to the Symbian platform. Since we’re trying to get any solution on a device by the end of next week it’s important so I answer his questions for 30 minutes (he doesn’t speak clearly and has a heavy accent so it takes longer).
I return to the movie for another 10 minutes, decide I don’t have time for it so I turn it off. At least Saw is a 5-day rental.
This is a summary of what to do when no matter what you do your computer resets back to PIO mode from DMA mode thus giving you unhappy computer times.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\Scsi. In the various Scsi Port X (where X is a number) folders, create a DMAEnable DWORD key and set it to 1.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} and under the various 000X nodes that contain keys that mention primary or secondary ide, add EnableUDMA100 DWORD values and set them to 1. Also remove any instance of either MasterIdDataChecksum or SlaveIdDataChecksum that you find. Finally, add the DWORD key ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess and set it to 1 in each of these nodes.
How many of you thought I was going to talk about computers?
So I got some more fujis because they were better looking and I had to give them another chance. Then I spotted some golden delicious that were actually golden. Usually they are a pale yellow or a light green and are pretty disappointing. Never have I seen such an attractive golden color on them. I got some and they are indeed good! Will they be this way again? Probably not for another 20 years or so.
Next time there aren’t good apples I’ll try the blueberries.
Before “Batman Begins” we saw a trailer for “The Legend of Zorro” and I was very excited because I quite liked “The Mask of Zorro.” Last night I sat down and watched TMoZ again and I liked it just as much as the first time. Everything is just right about this movie and I hope they can do it again in the sequel. Great sword-fighting and fight scenes in general, romance, witty dialog, fighting against oppression, and some history thrown in. What’s there not to like?
As usual, probably spoilers here…
I think I like this batman more than the previous ones. I liked his back story and how it was told and I would have even liked some more. I liked how his teacher became his enemy. I liked the look of Gotham and how it looked old and modern at the same time. I liked Christian Bale as batman and I think he’s ok as Bruce Wayne but in general his character isn’t very good at Bruce Wayne yet so that’s ok. I also like that they built a real batmobile that could do all its own stunts. No computer graphics or models!
If you like dark batman then see this movie.
I’ve watched the first 5 episodes of “30 Days,” the show brought to you by the man who made “Super-Size Me.” I think SSM made some good points but I also think that if anyone suddenly more than doubled their calorie intake their body would show similar signs of shock that his did with any kind of food. The people who do eat that way have bodies that have adjusted to it. Yeah, it’s still not healthy, but you would expect to see people falling over in the streets all over the place. Here’s a professor who did the 30-day McDonald’s diet but didn’t try to eat 5000 calories per day and didn’t stop exercising. He lost 17 pounds.
30 Days has people live in a way foreign to them for 30 days to see how it is in the other side of the fence. Unfortunately Spulock has his own spin on it and rather than just letting the viewer see what is happening throughout you get interjections of various factoids that tell you the conclusion well before the end.
Episode 1 – Minimum Wage. Morgan Spurlock and his fiancee move to Ohio for a month to live on minimum wage. It was a shock to them but they were actually doing fairly well especially since they had to start by finding a place and some jobs. Their downfall? They go to the emergency room at the drop of a hat. You can tell that they are used to seeing a doctor for any little thing that goes wrong. First she goes for a bladder infection. She was in a lot of pain so I could see that. Then he strained his wrist and it swelled up some. Instead of doing what many people (certainly most who are without medical insurance) would do which is to ice it and/or put an ace bandage on it, he goes to work and strains it some more so it swells more. Still he could have done the ice and bandage thing, but instead he goes to the emergency room where they give him an ace bandage. The emergency room fee was $500 which was rediculous, but it’s obviously there to stop people from going there with minor problems like his. People without medical insurance learn to deal with minor problems at home so they don’t have to spend $900 for two emergency room visits per month.
Episode 2 – A man goes to an aging doctor to get injected with steroids and starts working out to hope to get back to his college shape. This guy was given 40+ supplement pills to take per day and then everyone wonders why he has liver problems. This one was good for showing how easy it is to get prescription drugs in Mexico. Everyone talks about it but you never see it, well as an interlude Morgan SPurlock walks into several pharmacies and just asks for them. They have them over with no questions asked. Unfortunately this episode comes off as being down on all supplements, even vitamins. Really you just shouldn’t have them in the quantities this guy was taking.
Episode 3 – A christian man goes to live in a muslim household. It is interesting to see how differently he is treated when he dresses and observes their customs. He gets stopped at the airport for the first time and people give him weird looks. Aside from him trying to decide if it’s ok for him to pray like the muslims or even go through the motions (much of the show), the interesting part is a discussion about whether muslims should condemn the actions of the muslim terrorists. That part doesn’t go on long and it’s a shame. Maybe there was but it was cut?
Episode 4 – A mid-west military man goes to live with a gay man in San Francisco. Aside from learning that the gays settled in the catsro district in San Francisco during WWII which the navy dropped them off there and said thanks, but no thanks, there is nothing that really stands out. He learns that gay men are ok.
Episode 5 – Two resource hogs go live in an eco-village off the grid. What I don’t like about this episode is that it says that we have all these alternate energy sources that we should just switch to and life would get better. Yes, the solar is great, but they don’t mention that the making of solar panels is extremely toxic and environmentally expensive. They say we should be using bio-diesel and vegetable oil, but there isn’t enough vegetable matter produced every year to come close to what we use in energy. Even adding up every alternative energy source can’t equal what the world uses now. The best thing to do right now while trying to find alternate energy sources is to use less. About all they said about that though was that using compact fluorescent bulbs is good (definitely). I appreciate that these communities exist though. They are trying to find other ways that we can live with less impact; they are little ecological research laboratories. I just didn’t really care for the portrayal in the show with no mention that they are relying on outside society still for their cars and their solar panels, and probably medical care if it is necessary.
Episode 6 is supposed to be a mother going on a 30 day drinking binge to show her college-aged daughter how bad it is. I think I’m done with 30 days though.
MUMBLER!!
It’s been a long time since I’ve read the book. Longer than it has been since I saw the older version of this movie. There is more story in this one than the original movie at the very least because you only have oompa loompa songs (which are great). I loved the look, I loved the characters. I was wondering how they would modernize Mike Teavey and I think they did a great job of that too.
With all that though I felt like there was stuff that was cut out due to time constraints. It was pushing two hours and it’s not usually good to rely on kids staying still for that long, although they seemed to in the showing we saw. Anyway, I hope those extra bits are there for me to see on DVD.
I don’t recall everythign in the book to know how well it is true to that so someone else will have to fill me in on that or I’ll haev to read it again after I finish “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.”
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