Doug's Sounding Board

Possible spoilers ahead.

I wanted to see this because I like Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn and I wasn’t disappointed. It starts out at a frantic pace and most of the wedding crashing happens in the first 15 minutes, after which they get tangled up in one family with really funny results. Not every joke works, but most do and they come fast enough that you forget about the ones that don’t. It often went in directions I wasn’t expecting and I recommend it.

You know those mailers with unsolicited CDs you get if you sign up for a music club? Well I’ve missed the cut-off a few times to tell them not to send it. No problem they allow you to return it within 30 days if you didn’t like it, or you can return it unopened. Di dyou know that if it isn’t opened you can just write Refused on it and they’ll send it back at no charge? You did? Well I didn’t, but I’m glad because I really didn’t want to pay for shipping both of those back.

This year started off as a great year for apples. I’m a fuji fan so this is mostly targetted at that variety but it hasn’t looked much better in the other piles. The early part of the year has very tasty crispy apples and then they suddenly vanished to be repalced by the enormous, un-ripe, bad-tasting apples. What happened? Where did they go? I don’t remember anything in the news about any apple problems like you do with the citrus crop. Bring back the good apples!

…or somebody like him. I woke up at 3 this morning so I could go to work so I could come home at 7:30 to feed the dogs and wait for the plumber to arrive between 8:30 and 9. It’s almost 8:30 and I’m ready. Waiting, waiting, waiting…

Hopefully the plumber will be able to fix it the way I want.

The plumber I picked (not knowing any) was T’s Plumbing. My reason was we used to live next door to the owner on Bianchi Lane and he struck me as a good and honest man. When Peter from T’s Plumbing arrived he mentioned I lived a block from the owner and I sadi I used to live next to him. He then asked if I knew what happened to him and I told him I didn’t. Apparently cancer cropped up and he died last year. Very very sad.

Peter examined everything and thinks what I want is reasonable and will be back on Wednesday to do it.

Last night I needed to find the USB floppy drive so I could fix my computer. Since there is a lot of stuff still piled in the tv room from the office flood I needed to look there. I decided to put on a movie while I searched and after finding the floppy drive, instead of going to work on my computer I got stuck watching the movie.

That’s a pretty good sign. Yeah, I like movies a lot, but I was doing something else and it pulled me in. The acting was good, the characters were good, and it wasn’t just a light fluffy movie. I wish 3 of the 4 deleted scenes had been left in because it would have made the secondary stories stronger, they were probably cut for time because tehy definitely weren’t weak scenes. The male lead, Derek, played by Sean Patrick Thomass was great and I hope to see him in more things. I see that he will be playing Louis Armstrong later this year in St. Louis Blues!

Not the high school flick I thought. Check it out!

At work I worked on changinging some code to work in a more proper but more complicated way. At the end of the day I realized that I did it wrong so I get to do it again today.

On the way home I turned on to my street and remembered I wanted to go to the store to get apples. No problem, I’ll just loop through the parking lot and get back on Capitola Road. I decided to go around the speed bump which meant I had to ride on the patch or dirt on one side. Next thing I know I’m on my hands and knees on the ground. Looking at the patch if dirt I see that it’s actually very fine, soft, and not the thing I should have been riding on. Jeans show no signs of damage, knees are a little scraped up. Scooter is a little scraped on the side it fell but no problem otherwise.

When I got home I decided to work on my computer writing DVDs slowly. I learned that there was a bug in WindowsXP where if there was 6 timeouts in talking to a storage device it would downgrade the speed. I added the registry entries it wanted, and figured new drivers would be a good idea too. After I install the drivers and reboot it won’t boot. It gets to a certain file and tells me it can’t go on.

I decided to go watch Eulogy in the tv room. It’s pretty funny, at least until the part where my DVD player froze. I stopped it and tried to start again but it wouldn’t even start playing the DVD. I went and finished reading the Discover magazine.

You’re a Jellyfish!
It seems that no matter how hard you try to conceal yourself and
your thoughts, everything is still in plain view for others to see. Nonetheless,
you have a knack for keeping people from exploiting this advantage by using your
sharp wit and disorienting charm. You have long limbs and you know how to use
them. While you frequently seem drawn to the beach, you should avoid it at all
costs.

Take the Animal Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

It’s been known for a few years that cro-magnon and neanderthals lived in the same areas at the same time. They still don’t really know why neanderthals went away. But now there is evidence that they may have had offspring together. They found some cro-magnon bones that have distinctly neanderthal features. Maybe when you think someone looks like a cave-man they really do have some neanderthan gene’s in there?

Why is it going so slow?! It detects the media as 4X and says it’s writing at 4X, but the speed is more like 1X. On the bright side it is writing reliably, but I want the higher speed!

We saw the trailer for the new King Kong movie from Peter Jackson coming this December. I didn’t know anything about it other than it was happening and I was excited to see that it is set in the 30s like the original. In fact, it seems like it will be a better made (effects-wise at least) version of the original. I’m very glad they decided to set it in the past instead of trying to cram it in to the present. Satellites seeing every place on the planet make it hard to believe there is islands we don’t know about.

Anyway, Nicole hadn’t seen the original and that made me want to see it again so we rented it. It’s still good and holds up well for a movie 72 years old! Nicole wasn’t crazy about how the level of violence in the film which is fairly high, and the ending made her sad. It is violent and sad, but she liked the movie anyway.

Oh yeah. I had a Blockbuster gift card that I tried to use to rent this, but it turns out that Blockbuster’s system for determining inventory is to dump anything that hasn’t been rented in a month. So you will never be able to rent an old movie there. There isn’t even a classics section to try and have any interest in it. Family, Comedy, Action, Drama. Those are the only categories you get.