February 13, 2005

Okay, before I forget to remind everyone… tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day so don’t forget to get your dinner reservations and gifts and whatnot taken care of while you have the chance. I know that today is Sunday and I didn’t leave very much time for people to do things – especially since I write this update and post it at the end of the day so no one will actually read this until Monday – but at least I gave you a little bit of warning.

Min and I actually got up on time this morning which might be an all time first for a Sunday morning. We made it out to church on time – a little bit early in fact. Andy and Miranda were still asleep when we left just before 10:00. After church, Min and I went down to Perry with dad to have lunch at the Silver Lake Family restaurant as usual. Then we had to rush home so that Min could rush off to work. Our regular Sunday routing – just on time for once. Andy and Miranda had woken up at some point while we were gone and had, presumably, left the house to get some lunch as all of that sleeping must have made them awfully hungry.

Currently, the plan is not to have an AoE2 LAN party this coming weekend. We think that some friends are probably coming over to watch Lord of the Rings 3: The Return of the King – Director’s Cut which will take all evening. But we don’t have that scheduled for sure yet. My new Mac might arrive by then. We are very hopeful that AoE2 will work on it but there is very little chance of that. Okay, I just went out and did a little research on it and have discovered that multiplayer games on AoE2 for the Mac are not compatible with the Windows version! That really bites. Microsoft did some really stupid things with their DirectPlay software that integrates into so many titles that they release. They have a lot of problems with their own Windows XP SP 2 firewall working with any software that uses DirectPlay. I think that Linux users who get the game running on Linux are able to play multiplayer with Windows players but I am not sure. That is really tough for us since we have been counting on me to be able to play on the Mac instead of on the Windows laptop that I use. It wouldn’t be such an issue but the game is so buggy that it crashes the laptop all of the time.

It is a gorgeous, bright and sunny day today. What a weird winter we are having. We have had very little snow or cold days. Last week it was almost spring for three days. It is a still a bit cold today but not bad at all. I could take a whole winter of this.

I am starting work today on an introductory book to the KOffice Productivity Suite that the Castile school is going to be using. After doing some research, though, I did discover a manual for the office suite that is included with it in HTML format. I think that that will make a good reference but won’t really suffice as a teaching aid for Koffice.

Around 4:45 I went upstairs to see what was going on. With the new insulation it is a lot harder for me to hear the upstairs from the downstairs – which means that I am REALLY looking forward to getting the entire ceiling insulated if the little bit that we did made that much of a difference. Anyway, I figured that Andy and Miranda had left to go do something. But I was wrong, Miranda was playing her Simpsons video game and Andy was… are you ready for this… napping! LOL

I was originally planning on going up to the city this afternoon to do some shopping but decided against it when I discovered that the books that I was hoping to find didn’t really exist. So that made the trip less useful. I decided that I would go up in the morning and get Min from work, do breakfast and do my necessary shopping then hitting Walmart and Home Depot.

Some information about the upcoming Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is out. We now know who is going to be in it although it looks like Zooey Deschanel is going to be their biggest shot at star power and even she isn’t all that well known – Almost Famous, The New Kid, Elf, Mumford and Big Trouble are her major credits to date.

Some time ago I decided that it would be awesome that when doing a Google search on some of the llamas that it should actually be pictures of us that come up. There are so many millions of people out there and so many popular web sites that it isn’t easy to get to happen but you can check out me, Josh, Dominica (under Tocco), Dominica (under her married name), Eric – okay, that one didn’t work so well, Miranda and Andy – Andy got screwed, he is the only one that ended up not being on the first search page but is buried way back on the fifth page. But hey, better than nothing. Unfortunately, Google searched us when all of these were on the front page so the links aren’t quite right but since the images were hard linked, it still works more or less. It is still pretty cool though. I thought that it would be neat if people trying to find us would actually be able to. You know, like friends from high school who want to find us. If they know our names, they are likely to be able to find us. Especially those of us who are the only people to come up in the search. I didn’t do too badly, I am one of two. I will try to add some more of you from out there in Llama land so that you can see yourselves on a search too.

I played a game of AoE2 to relax for a little bit but it ended up in some serious butt whoopage and not in the direction that I prefer so that sucked. I went upstairs to find a snack and discovered that Andy and Miranda had disappeared again. I think that I have seen Miranda for a total of less than five minutes the entire time that she has been here this weekend.

I did some work on the Scott and Dominica web site tonight. It will take me a while to actually have anything decent on there… but at least I am getting started a little bit.

I did more the January updates out to the archives today. Boy was that bogging things down! Okay, it is late and I have to be up really early in the morning to go to breakfast and to do some shopping with Min up in the city. So I had better get some sleep.

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