March 13, 2004

Today was “Drive six hours to get the puppy” day. I had to be ready to head out the door the moment Min got home from the hotel so that we could drive to Frankfort to pick up Dexter. Min’s parents and her brother are flying down to Houston this morning to visit Francesca and family so we are puppy sitting for the week. I miss the puppy, so this will be fun. We hit the road about 9:30 and got home about 3:00. That is a long morning of nothing but driving. Longer than the trip to Pittsburgh. We got breakfast at McDonalds on West Henrietta on the way out of town.

I did some work this afternoon. I am in the process of moving all of Niagara’s web sites over to IIS 6 on Windows Server 2003 from Windows NT 4 with IIS 4. We will see how it goes. The new server not only supports ASP like we have been using for some of our online applications but also PHP and ASP.NET. I am hoping to be using PHP very soon to dynamically generate a lot of this site. That will give us the opportunity to have all of the pages have the exact same, up to date navigation on the left and we can change all of the formatting all at once without it being some insane undertaking.

Min and I borrowed some movies from her dad while we were in Frankfort. This afternoon we tried watching The Hulk. This movie earns my “Worst Movie I Have Seen So Far This Year” title. I couldn’t handle watching it and worked on my laptop while it was on. Min sat on the couch trying to stay awake for it. It is just so boring and full of pathetic actors and the directing is incredibly juvenile. The movie is so bad that I didn’t even make a link to buy it like I normally do. I don’t want to accidentally have anyone buy it, what a tragedy that would be. Jennifer Connelly is in the movie but even she can’t save it at all. The movie looks like it was made by a seven year old. An uncreative seven year old at that. In fact, the people making the computer effects for the movie thought so little of the movie and knew that the director was so dumb that they didn’t even bother adding any physics to the animated character – instead of having him jump, they would make him fly (he doesn’t slow after leaving the ground, he sometimes actually accellerates in mid air.) It really looks like the entire crew thought that this movie was a total joke and didn’t put any effort into it at all. On top of being a pathetic plot and directoral effort, I also give this movie the award for the worst effects that I have seen in years.

Pastor Jim Storey is staying with my father for a couple of days and he arrived late this afternoon. They both came over at 6:00 and we all went over to the Omega Grill for some dinner. Pastor Storey is speaking at church tomorrow.

After dinner we came back home to spend the evening with the dog. We watched DVDs and I worked continued working on moving the CD collection to Ogg Vorbis. I am getting down to the last bit of the collection. Every so often I discover that there is another box of CDs hiding somewhere and I start converting those. I think we have now located the last box and they are going quickly. Min’s new computer with the super fast Athlon XP processor and the amazing memory architecture just gobbles up the discs in no time. It really shows how much difference the memory system makes for this type of thing. You don’t normally think about it all that much but it really makes a big difference. Memory is a major component of system speed.

Andy left for Canada today. He is going to be up there until week after next. So he is going to miss the game this coming Friday. Art is going to miss it too. But that means that there is a slot open for Chris for sure. Min is home this Friday night so we are looking to have seven already. Maybe we will be lucky and Bob will be able to make it. Bob hasn’t made it for one of the big games yet and he has no idea what he is missing. In fact, I am emailing him now to see if he can make it.

I have quite a few days of updates to post but I am holding off because I am waiting for the site to move over to the new server before I do anything. So that is why the updates are taking so incredibly long.

Later in the evening, Min and I watched a really strange Jackie Chan movie that we bought recently, City Hunter. It is from 1990 from Golden Harvest. It is one of Jackie’s Second Period films but one of the really low budget ones. It is really strange. If you want to see the movie, check you local Target for it in the bargain section. I am not sure it is worth it for anyone short of a really hardcore Jackie Chan fanatic. It doesn’t really have any good fight scenes or anything and the plot is so week that even the funny element of it is pretty weak.

I was working on the CDs and decided to place an order with Columbia House this month. They have a good sale so I got a dozen discs. I haven’t gotten anything new in quite a while and with the new Ogg Vorbis system, we are really utilizing them like never before so I think it would be nice to have more music to listen to. I got all of the Alabama and Sarah McLaughlin discs that I didn’t have. I still have some free CD certificates around the house that I need to use, I forget them all of the time. I have had them for years. I need to use them soon. It is getting harder to order CDs now because I really want SACD and DVD-Audio and the CD clubs are lucky if they handle one or two of those types of discs. Hopefully they will start switching over soon and I will be able to get my discs from there again.

Leave a comment