Tried some Dippin' Dots a couple of days ago. They are obviously an LDS-member owned company, as their slogan is "Many are cold, but few are frozen." Pretty clever, actually. Gene gave me a spare Sterling Student Slide Rule the other day right after I had schooled him in a few rounds of "It Came To Pass".   =)     Here's Rick at his recent birthday party:



Misti didn't believe me that men in some indigenous cultures wear penis sheaths. Silly me, I thought this was common knowledge... I guess I just know weird trivial tidbits that others may not have picked up. Misti just e-mailed me another interesting bit of trivia. Today's investor's word of the day is "full ratchet": In venture capital, an investor protection provision which specifies that options and convertible securities may be exercised relative to the lowest price at which securities were issued since the issuance of the option or convertible security. The full ratchet guarantee prevents dilution. I have no idea what that means, but it's pretty cool, no? Here's Becca in Winnemucca:



We procured some awesome G.E. Soft White 100 Longlife Plus Spiral compact fluorescent (CFL) light bulbs from 'Small-mart' a few days ago, and I'm really excited about them. They are equivalent to 'regular' 100-watt incandescent bulbs (both produce approximately 1,690 lumens of light), but only use 26 watts of power. Thus, theoretically, we could leave them four (4) times as long and only still pay the same amount of money. In addition, these new bulbs last roughly 6,000 hours, as opposed to the paltry 750 hours of a 'regular' bulb. The new bulbs have screw-in bases that fit into your standard A-Line sockets, unless (as in some torchiere lamps) the shade prohibits a slightly wider base or the lamp needs to attach directly to the bulb's surface. For most lamps with an 8" or taller harp and light fixtures with globes, however, it's a viable and strongly recommended replacement. For those that know how traditional fluorescents work, CFLs still need a ballast, but it is incorporated into the ceramic screw-in base of the bulb.

You know, I think toasters need to be improved upon. In a standard two-slot toaster, if you want to toast more than two slices of bread, the second run of toast doesn't come out as dark as the first set because the toaster is still hot from the previous toasting. This is less than acceptable because of the archaic shut off mechanism: a mechanical bi-layer metal strip. As the toaster heats up, the metal on one side of the strip expands more than the metal on the other side, thus bending the strip. After it reaches a certain temperature, the strip will have bent far enough to activate a switch, thus turning off the power to the toaster and popping up your toast. It's a great idea, but the flaw is that the metal strip is already pre-heated for the second run of toast, so your next pieces of toast don't cook long enough - thus they get popped up prematurely.

In order to improve this, the toaster needs to sense the temperature of the toast itself, not the toaster ambient temperature. Or perhaps an optical BRS ("Brownness Recognition System") could 'see' when the toast is done. In any case, toaster manufacturers should not be resting on their laurels - there is a lot of work yet to be done. Ooh, better yet: if your house was pre-wired with in-wall USB outlets, you could just plug in the toaster to the wall, and not only would the connector supply power to the toaster but provide feedback to a home automation system with the BRS data. The automation system would then tell the toaster when to deactivate, based upon a user-programmable profile (different family members could have different settings, based on how well they like their toast done). Thus, you would never have inferior toast again.   =)

Today we ate at the Subway in Winnemucca, and tried out their new Hot Buffalo Wings sandwich. I think it's pretty nasty, but Misti likes it. I found some fat-free frozen treats that are just awesome: Dreyer's Whole Fruit Fruit Ice Bars (Strawberry). Mmmmm. We wanted to get an authentic Basque lunch today, but all of the Basque restaurants in Winnemucca stop serving lunch promptly at 1:00 p.m., except for the Martin House, which serves until 2:00 p.m., but as luck would have it I got out of a meeting at 1:40 p.m., and we jumped in the car and went off in search of some grub but by the time we drove around to the other three first before getting to the Martin House, it was 2:08 p.m. (eight minutes after two) and we were out of luck. Thus the nasty Subway.

Brad is migrating all of us "Nuggers" away from the advertising-laden Yahoo Groups to a standalone website: http://www.thenug.net/. At this point, it's still in the construction phase, but feel free to check it out. By the way, "niggard" and "niggardly" are not bad words. The terms date back to the 14th century and 1571, respectfully, and simply mean "a stingy person" and "stingy". "Nigger", on the other hand, simply means "black" (the color) and only dates back to 1700, so it's obvious which ones came first. The good terms came from Middle English with a Scandanavian origin (related to similar Norse and Old English words), while the "N word" came from some of the so-called romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Latin) wherein, to this day, the words for "black" are obviously still in everyday usage: "noir", "negro", "nero", and "niger". Anyone confusing the two should spend 30 seconds in a dictionary before making such a stink about it.

I've been noticing some more problems with DVDs and DVD players recently. Having used 5 or 6 different brands and models of DVD players, I've now gotten a better sense of what's out there, and I'm still not impressed with DVDs as a video solution. Most recently, I've come across four (4) "new" phenomena ('new' meaning that I haven't already spoken about them here previously):

• The "Chinese movie" effect
• The "spontaneously switching aspect ratio" anomaly
• The "flickering white background while 3-D rendering" issue
• Random captions.

To see any of these with your own eyes, give me a call and I'll arrange a quick demonstration.   =)

After having been bombarded for weeks at Wal-Mart with the anticipation of "Monsters, Inc.", we followed the flock and bought a copy of the DVD and watched it last night. It's a great flick, and Becca even likes it.   =)

A goofy country song on the radio this morning got me thinking briefly on that whole "immovable object vs. irresistable force" question. I don't really think it's all that hard to solve. Simply put, there is no such thing as an immovable object. On a planetary scale, everything is moving, even the entire universe moves and expands. Thus, if everything is always moving, it's kind of hard to say that something "can't be moved". I think the whole concept of something that could not be moved is a rather small-minded idea based upon human observance of objects limited to our planet that seem really big to us, like a mountain or something. But obviously even mountains can be moved, if only by mere mortals. Thus, no matter how big of something you can think of, or no matter how well "rooted" is it, I think it can be moved. If you think of something that truly can not stopped from moving, like a comet or a black hole or the force of gravity or something, no little mountain or a mile high, mile wide, mile deep solid cube of concrete or steel or whatever you think might be fairly stationary can stop something that big and "irresistable" from moving along it's path. It's a nice theory, but the fact that there really is nothing truly "immovable" kind of solves the whole issue right off the bat, don't you think?

Misti and I played some more "It Came To Pass" last night with Brenda, Mike, Emilie, and Brad. The scores stand thus for the first match: Misti - 195, Brenda - 114, Mike - 333, Richard - 100, Brad - 270, and Emilie - 237. We played to 300, so I guess I won that round (the player with the least amount of points wins). In the second match, the scores stand thus: Misti - 13, Brenda - 64, Mike - 67, Richard - -11 (yes, that's a negative eleven), Brad - 145, and Emilie - 47. We played until Mike and Brenda needed to leave, so it was a short game, but I guess I won again. And in both cases, it looks like a male Carpenter lost. Hmmm, I think the male gender in a particular family needs some more practice...   =o

Click here to see the scores on paper.

Well, it's been sort of hard to keep up with online things recently as both of our computers have been hosed for the past month or so. That's why two of our webcams (the TV cam and the Desktop cam) haven't been on, and why if you've been sending us any e-mail it may as of yet have gone unanswered. This should change this weekend, however, as both computers should be back up and running (knock on wood, cross my fingers).

Last Saturday, we watched "Wit" with Emma Thompson and Christopher Lloyd. This has got to be the worst film ever. It's all about a terminal cancer patient and her ordeals with chemotherapy. You actually see her ralphing on screen. It's a great motivational piece. NOT! We also watched "Life is Beautiful", an Italian comedy film about the Holocaust. Yet another motivational film. Okay, so Saturday was pretty depressing. The funny thing is that I got both of them (from the library bus) because I thought they were 'chick flicks' and therefore that Misti might like them. As it turned out, neither one of us liked either of them. "Life is Beautiful" actually started out pretty funny, but when the guy dies at the end, it's a real bummer. I was really hoping that the whole family would make it through the ordeal alive, that's all. A funny movie about an unfunny subject... hmmmm.   =(

We had the most disgusting, horrible chicken wings ever at Red's Old 395 Grill in Carson City. The wings were served warm (some of the tips were still cold, but the insides were hot - sounds like they microwaved them), and the wings aren't just the one section that everyone is used to, it's all three sections of the chicken's wing, so it's way too big. Since the wings weren't really cooked well enough, they were squishy and stringy, not crisp. The sauce tasted nasty, too hot and yet served cold - a terrible combination, yuck! Two thumbs down, definitely. We visited Michelle, Kenzie, and Hayden briefly afterward at their home in Moundhouse. Before all that, we attended the Northern Nevada Computer Show, held at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center. It wasn't bad for the first one, especially in such a small city as Reno. I would expect next year's show to be bigger, however, or else it would have to be deemed a failure. I have since spoken to a couple of the vendors, and they both stated that they were told a couple of thousand people would show up, but the actual attendance was much less than this. We picked up a few good things, however, like some free teeshirts, some software for a buck, and some good information and contacts to take back to work with me.

We also babysat Bonny on Saturday night and watched yet another DVD, this time a good, funny one: "America's Sweethearts" with Catherine Zeta-Jones, Julia Roberts, John Cusack, Billy Crystal, and Seth Green (Scott from Austin Powers). It was so good that we have now seen it at least 5 or 6 times since. The DVD is good because one side is Pan and Scan (full screen), and the other side is widescreen, so no matter which you like best, you're covered with this one.

On Sunday, we celebrated Rick's birthday. Heather got him a Samsung DVD/VHS combo player, and Misti, Becca, and I got him a gift certificate to Bertha Miranda's and some Heinz 57 Sauce (which is his favorite steak sauce) - the latter as a joke, of course. By the way, does anyone have a list of the actual 57 different Heinz products? I visited their websites (there are several of them), and am now confused because they have way more products than that, 142 to be exact. The problem is that if you decide that they must mean only the sauces (a bottle of Heinz 57 Sauce states that there are 57 different varieties), then there aren't enough, as I was only about to count 10 sauces. When it boils down to it, Heinz is primarily in the baby food business. Check out my list of their products to see why.

We also played "It Came To Pass" again, and Rick was actually winning most of the game until we introduced some "draw 10" cards (house rules are the best) into the deck, and things went downhill from there for him. He ended up during one hand having to draw like 44 cards, and he ended up with something like 760 points just from one round. Poor guy (and at his own birthday party)!

I found some wonderful new yogurt at the store that I really like: Glen Oaks Drinkable Low-Fat Yogurt. It's really quite tasty.

DontLink.com is an awesome site that highlights the most ridiculous corporate website "policy" that I've ever heard of: prohibiting hyperlinking to webpages. That's the whole point of the web! What's so wrong with just letting people link to them (which brings them visitors anyway - the whole point of having a website), and then just having a good 404 redirect setup to deal with outdated links. Why is that so hard? Some companies are so stupid.

Well, a few interesting things happened this past Labor Day weekend that I should mention. I watched William Shakespeare's "Macbeth" (the 1978 Thames stage production rereleased by HBO Home Video) that I checked out from the library, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was an all star cast! The role of Macbeth was played by Ian McKellen ("Magneto" in X-Men), and the play also starred Ian McDiarmid ("Senator Palpatine" from Star Wars, Episode I), and Bob Peck (the game warden from Jurassic Park). It was pretty cool to see a classic play with today's popular actors. Another movie that we watched was "Kate & Leopold" starring Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman (also an X-Men actor - he played "Wolverine"). This is a hilarious movie - I highly recommend it. We also finally watched "Kung Pow! Enter The Fist" (which was the goofy Chinese farce that we weren't able to view the first time we rented it), and "A.I. - Artificial intelligence". I'm sorry to anyone who actually enjoyed either one of these films, but I just couldn't. Also watched a couple more documentaries from the library, the History Channel's "The Aztec Empire", and "Where Jesus Walked - A Video Journey through Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jericho, Capernaum, and Jerusalem".

We spent a few minutes down at the Rib Cookoff (getting some excellent lemonade and, of course, wonderful ribs from Desparados and Carson City BBQ Company) on Saturday. Monday night we tried out the new Tamarack Junction restaurant - I had a Peach BBQ sandwich. Sounds gross, but very tasty.   =)