November 17, 2006: Playstation 3 Day

Here is a bit of trivia for you. Just like the United States is full of old laws that everyone has forgotten and are rarely enforced (but wind up keeping almost every citizen in a state of potential arrest and imprisonment for laws that could never be fully researched) – it is a mortal sin for Roman Catholics to enter a movie theatre anywhere in the archdiocese of Philadelphia! This ruling was put into affect in 1934 and is still official unlike many other rules that are now gone such as fish on Fridays. Given the fact that the ruling for “movie theatre” in 1934 would include most home theatres today it means that it is a mortal sin for Catholics to even go home in many cases! (This means that it is a mortal sin to watch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, even though it is a Catholic film, in almost all of Pennsylvania since almost all the state is within the archdioses including Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Scranton.)

I discovered a quirky animated/comic bear names Bueno that you should check out.

Dominica found this great article about a mischievous bonobo at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa. This ape must have a personality like Oreo’s.

No word this morning as to how the Sony PS3 sales went. We know that lots of people were waiting in lines last night but no one is reporting that all of the units are sold out so we are thinking that there are still many still available yet today. New shipments are supposed to be arriving daily as well. So I am thinking that I might try to find one today if Dominica doesn’t manage to come up with one.

I had to get up and get out the door right after Dominica this morning so that I could get the PR5 into the shop. It is the headlights as always. What a pain that is. But the car is due for an oil change so the timing isn’t all that bad. Headlights, oil change and they are going to look into the sound that we are getting from the shifter. The car has 85,000 miles on it these days so it is due for some maintenance items. I caught the shuttle from Crystal Auto Mall up to Warren for work. It is really handy working in an area where you can get a shuttle to and from the dealership. I have never been able to take advantage of a service like that before.

No luck on the PS3. The NYC area has too high of incomes for the price tag to have been a deterrent like it will be in most of the country. But I tried calling back to Geneseo and the only place selling them in Livingston County, the Walmart right beside our house, sold out last night. They are a twenty-four hour store so they would have had people going there all night even if they hadn’t sold out immediately.

I found out today that the telephone comment line that we have maintained for the SGL Podcast is no longer working. Eric on Long Island discovered this today when he tried to leave a comment. Apparently that is now a modem or fax line! (Do people really use that stuff anymore?) So I will investigate this over the weekend and see if I can get this sorted out. In the mean time everyone should just record MP3’s or Ogg Vorbis files on their computers or portable digital devices and email them to me and I will put in audio comments that way.

I have decided that I need some video editing software so that I can actually do some editing of my videos. Currently I am limited to the almost worthless QuickTime Pro (which crashes constantly as well as does almost nothing) or Windows Movie Maker which is far better but still extremely limited. So I am thinking that I am going to download Pinnacle Studio tonight for the thirty day free trial. It isn’t too expensive and dad swear by it. They are up to version 10.6 now. I am looking for something that will do decent editing, let me add in titles and stuff, overdub and, most importantly, output to a variety of formats including WMV, MOV (QuickTime) and DivX/Xvid. Pinnacle Studio should do all of that so I will give it a shot.

Some of the guys at work wanted to go out for lunch today and they grabbed me as I was heading down to the cafeteria and we all went out to Houlihan’s for lunch. I have never been there before but the food was really good and I will be going back there sometime. I especially liked their stuffed mushrooms and fish tacos. It was a nice change of pace to get to go out with everyone for lunch.

Crystal Mazda’s shuttle picked me up at three thirty to take me back to get my car. Fortunately the repairs were quite inexpensive and were done by the time that the shuttle was done running so my day was very simple and easy. I rode down and picked up my car and drove back to work. I parked in the garage and as I parked I noticed that the other headlight was out! I called Crystal and they had me go right back down there so that they could fix it right away. I grabbed everything that I needed from work so that I wouldn’t have to come back again and I headed down to Crystal Mazda on Route 22 in Dunellen, NJ.

The car only took fifteen or twenty minutes to get repaired. It was just a loose wire and took very little time. I took off and did okay for attempting to beat rush hour traffic. There was a bit but it wasn’t too heavy. I got home way before Dominica did and got a little chance to just talk to dad on the phone.

Dominica got home at her usual time and I met her outside and we headed right out for West Orange so that we could get some huge burritos from the Desert Moon Cafe and then some dessert from Cold Stone Creamery. That was delicious. I have finally learned that even though when I get ice cream anywhere else I need to get something huge to satisfy me that I can get the smallest size at Cold Stone and I am very happy. So even though their ice cream is probably very full of cream compared to normal ice cream I need so much less of it that I am pretty sure that it is better for me to get it there. We are thinking of starting to by our regular “tubs” of ice cream there. We didn’t realize before tonight that they sold them just like in a grocery store.

We checked the AMC movie theatre while we were there to see if we could make it to see Casino Royale – the new James Bond film. It didn’t fit our schedule tonight but we are thinking about going to see it tomorrow. We have heard great things about it and are really interested to see the new Bond and to see the series start over again. For those out of the James Bond loop – Casino Royale is the first Bond film to be remade and is chronologically the very first Bond movie in the series. The James Bond character originated from the book “Casino Royale”. Most Bond afficionatos do not consider the original Casino Royale movie to be canon with the other Bond films and it was definitely in a completely different flavour and was one of the films used as much of the basis for the Austin Powers movies.

We came home and watched Haley Mills in Summer Magic which neither of us have ever seen. It wasn’t very good and there is a reason that Disney never really talks about it. But it was okay. After the movie it was time to hit the gym! This is eight days in a row for me. We just did a short half hour workout tonight. I am counting tonight as my “night off” for my body to relax but I didn’t want to totally take the night off or the routine would be lost and that is the beginning of the end.

I downloaded the trial version of Pinnacle Studio tonight so that I can play with that this weekend. I also got the video camera out and ran down the battery so that I can get it charging. Dominica and I are hoping to do a video tour of Newark tomorrow and we want the battery to be ready to go. This is one of our rare weekends with nothing scheduled at all and we are really looking forward to it. Now hopefully I will discover that I have all of the cables that I need to be able to do video transfers or else we will need to make an emergency shopping trip for that as well.

For die hard video game console fans, don’t forget that the Nintendo Wii is releasing on Sunday.

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