Life Of Doug

A Song,Telemarketers and the Anthology

2008-03-24T05:23:00.000-07:00

Good morning!

Someone complained to me recently that I never update my blog any more. Tis true. Most of my writing time happens over at Fifteen Minutes Of Fiction. Speaking of which, Jonathan just created an account and posted some Passion Week monologues. I'm also doing a series of Passion Week Perspectives. I hope to add another one today.

Anyway, part of the reason for this blog entry is to post a link to a song I wrote recently, titled "Lift Up Your Eyes". It was written for a church's missions conference. Lift Up Your Eyes.

On the subject of telemarketers, take a look at this: Credit Card Fraud. I was inspired to follow this line of questioning with inbound cold calls, and it is very interesting. When you ask for their web address, they all do one of the following:

Ask, "Why do you need to know?"
Say, "We have a website, but it's only for members"
Say, "I don't have that information"
Hang up

And if you ask for a physical address they, without fail, hang up on you. That may gives you a good idea what percentage of telemarketing calls are actually scammers!

If you haven't heard, the FMOF site is putting out a Fifteen Minute Anthology - an anthology of the best pieces of writing on the site since its beginning. This is taking up quite a bit of my time these days, and I'm quite excited about it.

Okay, Beth, there ya go - I posted something here! Happy? ;)

Grief

2008-01-27T19:59:00.000-08:00

Don't watch Hallmark's "The Russell Girl" unless you're in the mood for a serious tearjerker. Seriously. I don't know when I've seen a movie that was as much of an emotional roller coaster as this.

On the other hand, like the movie We Are Marshall, which came out in 2006 (not too long after Tommy's death), "The Russell Girl" is an awfully good look at the kinds of things that grief does to people, and the turmoil it causes in their relationships with...well, with everyone.

But don't say you weren't warned.

My Christmas Story

2007-12-08T06:55:00.000-08:00

Good morning! For anyone who is interested, I've finished writing my Christmas Story over at Fifteen Minutes Of Fiction. It's a three part story titled "The Toyota And The Stable", and you can find the first part here: The Toyota.

What Do I Think Of Vista?

2007-11-28T18:03:00.001-08:00

Okay, every time I mention that I have a new computer, I get two questions:

"Does it have Vista?"

and...

"What do you think of Vista?"

The answer is, after spending a day and a half installing software, transferring files and such, I'm finally starting to figure out the ways that Vista makes life easier than XP. The problem is, most people don't use their computers enough to figure out those differences, and get impatient with not being able to do things the way the used to.

One example of this is the Windows explorer window which has some really slick features, but is enough different in its layout that it irritated me at first. In XP you have an "up one level" button, which I used all the time. But not in Vista. At first I thought this was a horrible oversight, until I finally realized that the window's address bar was made up of clickable folder names, which allows me to not just go up one level, but also up two levels or three levels, with just one click.

As a developer, I do have one frustration which most people will rarely face...

If I want to manually tweak an ini file or configuration file, I can't just open it in Notepad, edit it, and save it. I have to open notepad as Administrator ("Run as Administrator" is an option available by right clicking on notepad), then open the file from within Notepad, make my changes, then save it.

I've got most of my software installed (both Flash 8 and Visual Studio.net installed without major problems, which is a relief, since between them those two pieces of software cost more than the computer itself, and I didn't want to have to upgrade them)

I am going to have to upgrade a couple less expensive programs, but I can live with that.

And, my printer driver installed without a glitch (in fact, it was easier than installing it on XP).

And aside from all that, I'm loving having a computer with a screen so big that half the time I don't even bother maximizing my windows. :)

Dell's Random Fluctuations

2007-11-26T09:30:00.000-08:00

The order confirmation email from Dell after my purchase last week has a link to click to view product information and tracking information.

Only, based (apparently) purely on the luck of the draw, clicking the link displays one of two different items, both labeled as a computer. Each has its own tracking id, and one of them is shown as scheduled to arrive today, while the other is scheduled to arrive on Thursday.

Since they're both labeled as An Inspiron 1720, one could hope that I'm actually getting two computers for the price of one.

But probably they've mislabeled one of them, and it's actually a wireless mouse, or a carry case.

And knowing my luck, I'll get the carry case today, and nothing to put in it until the end of the week.

Or, knowing my luck, one is a mouse, one is a carrying case, and they forgot to send the computer. :D

3:47 PM: Package number one was a mouse AND a carrying case. So. Lucky me. At least I have something to put my mouse in. :)

Beowulf? You must be joking...

2007-11-17T19:09:00.000-08:00

Haven't been to the movies in awhile (other than taking Daniel to see BeeMovie, which he liked much more than I did). Tonight I decided I'd go see Beowulf.

What a disappointment that was. I knew going into it that it was a "motion capture animation" - they put the actors into the fancy high tech suits that track their movements, and use that as a framework to build CGI characters.

Even knowing that's what I was getting myself in for, it was still a big disappointment. All through the movie I kept thinking: Why? WHen you've got the likes of Anthony Hopkins and John Malkovitch, let us see THEM. Don't waste their talent by replacing their ever so expressive faces with animated caricatures of humanity that aren't even a tenth as expressive.

Not to mention the fact that I cringed every time I saw one of the CGI horses galloping. That was a sight to make any equestrian cry.

I just visited imdb to see what people there were saying about the movie. One statement caught my attention: I saw this movie today and every movie I've ever seen in the last 40 years now looks as quaint to me as the silent movies looked to me in my era.

You are kidding, right? I mean, granted, if you've seen nothing but Saturday Morning Cartoons, this is mighty impressive, but otherwise, if you've ever seen anything with a bit of humanity to it...

What makes it even worse is...I just went online and read a plot summary of Beowulf (the epic peom) and found that they seriously massacred the story.

I suppose that's no surprise, but it makes me wonder...why did they make this movie in the first place? :D

Mitt Romney, Vincent Price

2007-11-13T14:16:00.000-08:00

The picture below is one that Laura took while visiting Salem, Massachussetts. I swiped it from her facebook album. It shows a gravestone from someone in my family tree.

If you don't know who Rebecca Nurse is, you should go find out. :)

But anyway, if you're wondering why the post is titled "Mitt Romney, Vincent Price", it's because Mitt Romney and Vincent Price are both direct descendants of Rebecca Nurse. So yeah, if you go back far enough I'm related to both of them.

I wonder if that's a step up or down from being related to President Taft? :D

Another Childhood Illusion Dispelled

2007-11-04T19:36:00.000-08:00

For anyone who is interested, there's a new game at The Problem Site. The game is Picture Word. It's kind of a reverse hangman game. There are about 120 different pictures in the game. If anyone has interesting pictures from vacations, hiking trips, or anything like that, and you think they'd be nice additions to that game, feel free to send them on to me. :)

On another subject. When I was a kid, I always heard people talk about the Nobel Prize, as though it was the prize. The most prestigious award that could possibly be given to a person.

So, I just read recently that Al Gore was this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Yeah. So, I actually assumed that the website that I read that on was telling a joke, being facetious.

Until I went to the official Nobel site, and saw that, in fact, they did award the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore.

The thing that really gets me is that, when I win my Nobel prize, I'll now know that it really doesn't mean anything.

Okay. I'm out of here. :)

Corporate Sponsorship. Heh heh

2007-10-31T09:42:00.000-07:00

I decided it was time to do some restructuring on the Anti Spam Website at Virtu Software. That thing has been around almost as long as the VS site itself, and has never had any redesign work to improve the original layout.

So I rebuilt it from scratch yesterday.

And the title of this blog post is "Corporate Sponsorship. Heh heh", because of this silly piece of writing I added to the Spam site:

Corporate Sponsorship

Enjoy.

Good Will Ends At The Canadian Border

2007-10-30T08:34:00.000-07:00

So, I was up late last night (big surprise, right?) and happened to catch some political advertisements and discussions. You know me. There's not much I dislike more than politics. Well, I dislike spam more than politics, but that's about it. (And if you combine politics and spam don't even get me started on that!

Anyway. Back on topic. The topic under discussion was the Racino in Washington County.

Someone said: "Yes, slot machines will make two or three people rich. But it will steal the livelihood from so many moms and pops right here in Washington county."

Now, if I was trying to defend the Racino, I think I would have said something like: "There's no stealing involved! The moms and the pops choose to put their money down." Or maybe: "Stealing their livelihood? One quarter at a time? If they have enough time to lose their livelihood one quarter at a time, they obviously don't have jobs, which means they don't have much livelihood to lose!" Or, possibly: "Only someone as numb as a pounded thumb doesn't realize that in order to turn a profit, the odds have to be against them. So it's their own fault if they waste their money."

Those are the best I could come up with.

But the folks who really were trying to defend the Racino came up with something much better. Here it is: "Statistics show that it won't be the moms and pops here in Washington county who lose their livelihood. It'll be thousands of visitors from over the border in Canada."

So. There you have it. Let's care about the moms and pops right here in Maine, but all pretense of good will and concern ends at the border.

Canadians - fend for yourselves! :D

This message has been brought to you by the CFTPOPTOTSOTB: "Campaign For The Protection Of Pounded Thumbs On This Side Of The Border"

Norton 360: 360 Degrees of Nothing

2007-10-27T04:40:00.000-07:00

You may recall I spent an entire day installing Norton 360 (internet security software) on my computer. If you don't recall that, click here: Norton 360 fiasco.

I suppose I'm a bit of an optimist, because even after all that, I still hoped the software would work well.

HA HA HA HA!

Aside from the fact that my computer now runs as slowly as molasses going uphill in summer (note: people say "in winter", but I always figure, in summer its uphill velocity is even greater in the negative direction, so that's a better expression), Norton 360 has this nasty habit of - without warning - shutting itself off.

I'll be browsing the internet when all of a sudden a bright red message will appear at the top of my screen: Browsing not safe: Auto-Protect off. So from here one of two things happen:

1. I double click the Norton 360 icon in my system tray, and it says: "PC Security: Secured" And no matter what I do, Norton continues to give me two contradictory messages: "Your computer is secured" and "Your computer is not secured".

2. I double click the Norton 360 icon in my system tray, and it says: "PC Security: Not Secure" Of course, when it says that, there's a link to FIX the problem. So I click that. And nothing happens. And I click it again. And, once again, nothing happens.

In either case, there is only one solution to the problem.

Reboot the computer.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to reboot my computer. :P

Hiking Table Rock and Baldpate

2007-10-16T14:09:00.000-07:00

Well, in case you didn't know, Ben and Bobby and I hiked Table Rock, West Baldpate, and Baldpate yesterday. It was an unusual hike...lots of fun and a bit of excitement thrown in. In all, about seven hours of hiking between Rte 26 in Newry, and East B Hill Road in Andover. (although that wasn't the end of the hike, since Ben made the mistake of parking his truck at the Appalachian Trail, thinking it was a different trail head, about 2.5 miles away. Yeah, that's right...when we got to the "end" of our hike, we weren't anywhere near the vehicle!)

Anyway, there's something I wrote about the hike here: October Climb, and something else here: Hike Report: Table Rock, West Baldpate, Baldpate.

One very strange and eerie part of the day was standing near the peak of West Baldpate and seeing this:

What makes it so eerie is that fact that directly in front of me as I'm taking that picture there is a mountain peak. I know it's there, but all I can see is clouds, like a blanket of white all around me.

By the way, if you look at the pictures I posted with the hike report, you'll see quite an amazing difference in climate, between the peak and the waterfall...strange to think those two pictures were taken on the same day, less than three miles apart!

Television = The New Movies

2007-10-02T03:32:00.000-07:00

The movie industry is in serious trouble. It's gradually being replaced, and most people don't even realize it.

This summer I went to the movie theater pretty much every weekend. That's quite a bit of movie-going for me. I'd get home from a week of camp, and have a day before I needed to head out again, and I never really felt like doing much "social". Sitting in a half-empty movie theater watching a movie was about the level of social involvement I craved: none of the actors ever wanted anything from me.

None of the movies I watched this summer really knocked my socks off, and some were huge disappointments.

Take the movie Transformers, for example.

This movie was such a huge disaster that it gives an entirely new meaning to the phrase "distaster movie". When I got half-way through the movie, I suddenly realized, I cared so little about any of the characters that I really couldn't have cared less how the movie ended.

I kid you not. They could have blown up all the transformers, and all the main characters, and I would have thought it was a satisfactory ending.

Who do you blame that on? Do you blame it on the actors? The script writer? The director? Maybe a little bit of each of those.

Well, yesterday I stumbled on an interview with one of the visual effects guys - an interview in which he talked about the upcoming sequel NOOOOOO! And the interview made it quite apparent that they have no idea what made the first movie so very bad. Which means they're going to make all of his mistakes all over again...

He was bragging about how the next Transformers movie is going to be more "ambitious", and here are a couple things he said:

"they're going to raise the tight-wire walker a little bit higher next time"

Here's a clue for you...the problem with the first movie was not the special effects. In fact, it would be nice if you paid as much attention to creating believable, interesting characters as you paid to having high action, clever special effects. After watching a Transformer transform in a truck for the seventeen millionth time, some of us would like to see something that makes us care about those trucks.

And here's the other comment, that just raised the goosebumps on my arm: "And so they want to really keep the characters rich"

Did you catch that? They want to keep the characters rich. Implication being...they think the characters were rich in the first place. They think they succeeded in creating deep, believable, rich characters in the first movie. So they have no intention of doing anything different in the second movie.

In other words, they're all excited about cranking out another appallingly bad movie!

The title of this post is Television = The New Movies, and I started out by saying the movie industry is in serious trouble. Let me explain what I mean by that.

For the last couple years I've been making a prediction that eventually the movie industry is going to get replaced by high quality television shows.

Why? There are a few reasons for this...

High profile, talented actors are not afraid to settle into television shows any more. In the past, the well known actors wouldn't touch a television series. Now that seems to be changing; actors who are already known to us because of movies are willing to cross the great divide and join a TV show cast.

Television shows are now able to produce an acceptable quality of visual effects within their budgets. In addition, since television has always run on a tighter budget than movies, they've never had the luxury of falling into the "Transformers" trap of thinking that their show has to be about special effects. In a television show, the special effects, no matter how good or bad, are rarely the focus of the show.

It used to be that people said "you can do more in a movie, because you have more time to develop plot, character, etc." But somewhere along the line, someone realized, in fact, that is simply not true. Because while a single television show is limited to forty-five minutes, a season can have twenty to twenty-five episodes. And if you get a writer/writers talented enough to create a single, carefully planned plotline, then you can do far more with television than you can with a movie.

Which brings me to another key point about television: talented writers are joining the shift to television, along with the talented actors. Based on what I've seen in the last year, if you want quality, you need to stay in your living room, and not head out to the movie theaters.

Television is now producing shows which have enormous plotlines, complete with all the character development and exciting plots that movies used to have, but no longer do.

When you have shows like Lost, 24 and (to a lesser degree) Smallville, on nights those shows are on, people are far more likely to sit at home and watch a set of characters they've grown to love and care about, than to spend $10 to watch a bunch of special effects and a handful of characters they don't know, and who will be in and out of their lives in less than two hours.

These shows I've mentioned (particularly Lost and 24) are essentially one enormous movie. 24 is a series in which each season is essentially an 18 hour movie with one single, carefully planned plotline. Lost still maintains a bit of the episodic quality of older television shows, but it is clear that they have a single cohesive idea and goal that is going to play itself out over several seasons. Smallville is very definitely episodic in nature, but it is clear (even though I've only watched two seasons) that with Clark and Lex starting out as good friends, the writers have some sort of long range plan to "unresolve" this complex friendship. (I think the Clark-Lex friendship is one of the things that makes this show work as well as it does - far more than the silly teen romances. We start out with the knowledge that Clark and Lex end up as arch-enemies, and we come back week after week to find out how in the world they get from where they are to where we know they'll end up)

Of course, the fact that Television is becoming the New Movies, raises an interesting question...

Is this a good thing?

The upside is that now if I want to be entertained, I don't have to spend $10.00 to go out.

The downside is that now if I want to be entertained, I don't have to spend $10.00 to go out.

Heh heh...bet you didn't see that coming. :)

Unfortunately, it is far too easy to get "addicted" to one of these television shows. And if you get addicted to many of them, you're frittering away far too much of your life in front of a television.

If you like analogies, here's one for you:

Movie is to Television as Arcade game is to X-Box.

When I was growing up, most people who wanted to play computer games had to get together a sizeable stack of quarters and take a trip to the mall. Now you don't have to even leave the comfort of your own home to waste an entire day playing games.

The entertainment industry, is making it easier and easier all the time for us to waste our lives. And that's not a good thing.

A Strange Weekend

2007-09-30T11:17:00.000-07:00

Well, the weekend's not over yet, but it's been interesting so far. To read about my day yesterday, click here.

Hope you find that amusing.

This morning I woke up with a sore throat, which was not good, since I was doing ventriloquism, music and preaching in Peru this morning.

I left home at 7:00, so I could be in Peru by 8:00. Left myself plenty of time, which was a good thing, since I totally spaced out and drove right by route 219. I drove all the way to 232, and halfway to Rumford before I realized I was in the wrong place...by then I decided it would be quickest to continue on to Rumford and then come back to Peru. :P

So, it took a lot longer getting there than I expected. Not that it mattered, since the pastor didn't show up until about 15 minutes later.

And Ben arrived 15 minutes after that. So, we had less than a half hour to get ready for Sunday School.

And the monitor wasn't working again.

And the computer wouldn't read my CD with the pwer point presentation.

Yep. Very hectic. Fortunately, they had a guy there who was able to type up everything I needed for church, during Sunday School.

Despite everything, the services went well, and the pastor said the messsage hit exactly where the church was at, so that's good! :)

On a different subject, I've now added a Weekly Writing Prompt to Fifteen Minutes Of Fiction. go ahead and give it a try if you like!

Writing For Fun

2007-09-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

For those who didn't know, I've been away from home since Sunday. Went hiking with Jonathan and Melody on Monday (Mt Battie. And yes, I'll be writing up that hike soon). Then yesterday I was up in Kingfield working on Math Problems with Brian. I have all my problems written and proofread. Now I just need to organize them and send them off to Maryland! :)

Anyway, the post is titled "Writing For Fun", and writing math problems isn't exactly fun - not when you have a deadline to write 99 of them, and they have to have quite a few challenging ones!

But in case you've missed it, there is a new website that's all about writing for fun: Fifteen Minutes Of Fiction

Here are a couple interesting statistics about the site...

The most popular author on the site at the moment is: Rabbit Stu Yeah, that's right...the fictional alias I created on the site while testing some features, and which I use to write totally bizarre and nonsensical poetry, is the most read author so far. I'm not sure what it says that of the four most popular pages on the site, three of them are by the fictional poet Rabbit Stu. :P

Here is the most popular piece of writing on the site: Entranced By Beauty.

It is interesting to see that, even though the site is only a week old, it's already getting a fair amount of traffic. It doesn't have a lot of visitors yet, but it seems that the visitors stick around for quite awhile, reading different things on the site. There's already been over 1000 page views on the writing...not including the times that authors viewed their own writing.

Ping Pong - With A Twist!

2007-09-18T05:33:00.000-07:00

Last night I went over to Berea to hang out with Ben and Bobby. We played ping pong for about three and a half hours. Bobby only played for a few minutes - the rest of the time it was me and Ben.

Halfway through the evening Ben got some Mountain Dew, and I was dumb enough to drink some (which means I was up until 2:00 last night). :P

But we set our cans of dew on the corners of the table, and tried to hit them with the ping pong ball. Eventually we had drunk enough of the dew that we knew a hit would knock the can on the floor, so we stopped that!

But then we invented our own version of Ping Pong, which we had a lot of fun with. We took ten plastic cups and filled them half full of water. Then we evenly spaced them along the back edge of the table (5 on each side). And we played until someone knocked off all the cups.

The rules were simple: we played just like regular ping pong, except that serving was a little different. If you hit a cup (whether you knocked it off the table or not) you got to take the next serve. Also, if you won the volley, you got the next serve (just like killer pong).

The winner was the person who knocked off all his opponents cups.

I won the first game. Ben won the second.

We're still tweaking how the game is played. I think next time we should play with a point system...something like this:

1 point for each volley (scored just like regular ping pong)
3 points for striking a cup (but not knocking it completely off the table)
5 points for knocking a cup entirely off the table.

Of course, a game to 21 would be too short, we'd need to play to 40, or something like that! :)

Playing Tag With Daniel

2007-09-13T04:59:00.000-07:00

Sometimes at youth group on Wednesday nights, Daniel decides he wants to play tag with me. Of course, there's not much warning, no giving me a headstart - he just walks up to me and tags me, and that begins the game.

Of course, being a lot bigger than Daniel, I can outrun him. But not for long...even though I can outrun him, he can outlast me.

Anyway, I was pretty happy last night because not only am I feeling well enough recovered from my surgery to play tag without even thinking twice about whether it's going to hurt...

I outlasted Daniel. He was huffing and puffing long before I was. In fact...

I wasn't huffing and puffing at all. :)

So, yeah, I'm feeling pretty good.

Lesson Plans And Articles

2007-09-11T18:40:00.000-07:00

I've been dreading going back to Articles For Educators, because I haven't touched it in several months (since sometime back in the winter, I think). About a year ago a bunch of idiot spammers started submitting spammy articles to the site...you wouldn't believe some of the dumb stuff that people submitted to the site...

An advertisement for a trash can cleaning service
An advertisement for valentines day bouquets
An advertisement for a real estate firm
And much much more

Anyway, I hadn't been keeping up with the site, which meant there was a pile of articles to go through and edit, and either delete or post.

Of course, all the spammy articles got deleted (sorry, SaniCan!). But I also had to review the "real" articles to decide which ones were "good enough" to be posted on the site. There were a few articles that just didn't measure up to my standards for the site (mostly they were articles by people from India and Singapore and places like that - people whose first language is NOT English!)

Once I got rid of those, I had several reasonably decent articles:

ADHD Diagnosis
Geometric Shapes in the Preschool Classroom
Preschool lesson on emotions
A Lesson on Electricity
Learning to Use Division (Division Unit Rationale)
Division - Meaning, Manipulatives and Relationships
Relating Division And Subtraction Lesson Plan
Connecting Division And Multiplication
Division Unit: Writing A Number Sentence
Dividing By 2 and 5 (Two And Five)
Dividing By 3 and 4 (Three and Four) Lesson Plan
Dividing With 1 and 0 (One and Zero) Lesson Plan

Orrington

2007-09-08T03:34:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I head off to Orrington...will return tomorrow afternoon. I'll be taking Ben and Ellis with me. Ben will be running my sound system, Ellis will be handling the overheads for the sing-along part of the presentation. I've been working on getting everything I need printed up for this...I think the only things I need to do now is print off schedules for Ben & Ellis so THEY will know what I'm doing. :)

This will be the first time I do my new presentation Join The Chorus, so I'm both excited and a bit nervous about it. But the folks in Orrington are a real nice group of people, so I should be able to be fairly relaxed about the whole thing.

Tomorrow is Sept 9 - a year ago on Sept 9th I was in Orrington also. That was the date Tommy Boyd had his fatal ATV accident.

Fifteen Minutes

2007-09-06T04:43:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's not like I don't have enough blogs that I write in (not that I write in all of them faithfully!), but I've just added another one. I'm sure most of you won't be interested in keeping up with this one, because its posts are going to be pretty random.

The blog is titled "Fifteen Minutes". The basic premise of the blog is this...I enjoy writing (and I'm not talking about writing software documentation!) but I never find time to write stuff "just for fun"...but I figure I can spare FIFTEEN MINUTES here and there to write something short - a piece of descriptive writing, a poem, and nonsense story, etc.

So the rule for my new blog is, I write whatever I like, but I can't take more than FIFTEEN MINUTES to write it. Once my FIFTEEN MINUTES is up, I post what I've written.

Here's a more detailed description of the blog: FIFTEEN MINUTES: PREMISE.

I've invited a couple people to be contributing writers in this blog, one of whom has said she will try to post something from time to time.

Anyway, here is the blog address, and you will see that I've already posted a couple items...

Fifteen Minutes of Fictional Writing. What can you write in just a quarter of an hour?

Health Update

2007-09-04T09:40:00.000-07:00

If only all doctor's appointments could be like this one, I wouldn't hate doctors so much...

12:20: Arrive at Dr. Navarro's office

12:25: Assistant takes me to room and asks me: "Any pain?" "No" "Any bowel problems?" "No" "Do you need a back-to-work slip?" "I'm self employed, so I can give myself the slip" :D

12:28: Dr. Navarro comes in. "Feeling good?" "Yep" "Appetite good" "Yep" "Let me see the incisions." (I lift my shirt) "Good. Good. Good. Good. Okay, that's great. You're all set, thanks for coming in."

12:30: Ushers me out of his office.

How's that for a nice doctor's appointment? :D

Oh, and on the way out I mentioned that I was going hiking in a couple weeks, and that would be okay, right? He grinned and said, "You can do anything you like!"

Cheesesticks and Stuffed Crust Pepperoni Lover's Pizza...

2007-09-03T08:15:00.000-07:00

Yes, that's right, on Saturday Ben and Cody and I went to Pizza Hut. My first pizza since that fateful night when I spent the night in the emergency room in Farmington.

I don't remember if I've mentioned it here, but one of the common side effects of having your gallbladder removed is that if you eat a lot of fatty foods all at once, you're likely to have *ahem* diarrhea. :P

So, it's been almost two weeks since my surgery, and I haven't had a single problem that way, so I decided it was time to push the limits and see what happened.

I'm pleased to say that I had absolutely no side effects from my evening of fat-splurging!

On another subject, if you want to try out a new version of a game I created about ten years ago, visit this link: Zero Gravity Connect Four. You'll need someone to join you in playing this game, because it's a two player game!

Please drop a note here if you try it, and let me know whether it works well for you.

This weekend I'll be heading to Orrington, to speak at the Orrington Center Church. I always enjoy going up there; it's such a nice group of folks there at the church.

Another Task Finished!

2007-08-31T16:44:00.000-07:00

Well, I just finished up a series of fifteen new Brainfood Puzzles. This is enough to make it through the remainder of 2007.

The first of the new puzzles will appear tomorrow morning (Sept 1, 2007), and will appear at a rate of one-per-week, with a short break at Thanksgiving, and another short break at Christmas.

Feel free to stop in each week to try to solve the puzzles (and if you want, create a membership account and submit your solutions to be graded!)

Candid Camera Meets The Silent Movies...

2007-08-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

Someone told me recently that I should watch the TV show "Just For Laughs". After he described the show to me, I said, "So it's like Candid Camera?"

"Well, not exactly..." But he couldn't exactly explain why it was different from Candid Camera.

And the answer is...it's "Candid Camera" meets a Silent Movie.

Unlike Candid Camera, this show doesn't give a single word of explanation of any of the gags. You have to be paying attention closely enough to figure it out for yourself (not that it's difficult to figure out what's going on - it's just different to not have it spelled out for you).

Furthermore, there is no dialogue in any of the clips - the audio is just a sound track and laugh track. The result is that your full attention focuses on the facial expressions of the "victims".

I watched it for the first time last night, and almost regretted it, because a couple times it got me laughing, which made my side hurt.

My favorite stunt was the one where they had a postal truck being driven down the road with a dog in the driver's seat. The expressions on people's faces were hilarious. But then it got twice as funny, because the truck stopped (the dog apparently was lost, and needed directions) and one of their actors stepped up and started explaining to the dog where he needed to go. That was when the onlookers' facial expressions were through the roof funny!

Anyway, I'll probably watch this show again - and hopefully next time it's on it won't hurt my sides!

The Pain Scale

2007-08-27T06:39:00.000-07:00

So, when you're at the hospital, they do this odd thing where they have a zero-to-ten pain scale. Zero means you have no pain at all. Ten is the worst pain you can possibly imagine. And one through nine are anything in between.

And when they ask you what your pain level is, they expect you to answer with a number.

Seems kind of silly - is there some sort of unit of measurement I'm supposed to be using? And what sort of scale is it? Is it a linear scale? Quadratic? Exponential?

When I was in for my surgery, they added a third point to the scale...they asked me what number I would consider to be a "manageable" or "tolerable" level of pain.

Well, that seemed like a silly question, and seemed like whatever I chose was going to be pretty arbitrary, so I just said: "Five". Kind of "middle of the road", right?

It wasn't until after I was coming out of surgery that my foggy brain started to realize that this was actually a useful piece of information to have, because when they asked me what my pain level was, I didn't even need to consider for more than a second: I said "Six."

And my thought process was: Oh, please, let them give me some pain medication...hmmm...if I don't tell them a number higher than five, they probably won't!

So, it turned out to be useful to have that number. Even though the number itself was quite arbitrary, it's probably the most useful number on the entire scale.