Sheep Guarding Llama

My mother would have been 58 today.

My shift started at midnight. It remained warm even though it was supposed to drop into the 60’s outside. The rain that was predicted all day still did not come. I was hoping for it so that it might cool it down.

I finished watching Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express for which Ingrid Bergman won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1974. My movie got interupted by a conference call that I had to be on for forty minutes or so. They loves conference calls at work. I can’t figure out why. It is impossible to figure out what anyone is saying and there are so many people that you can never tell who is talking or to whom.

I set to tackling a stack of mail that needed to be dealt with. It adds up quickly. And more bills than I had realized earlier when I was doing the bills. What a pain. I automated some of them to make it easier in the future. Boy am I ever productive. 🙂

A little after two I started the Doris Day and James Garner classic The Thrill of It All. Dominica watched it recently and said that it was really good. One of my favourite actors of that era, Carl Reiner plays one of the stars of the show in the show.

One of my all time favourite pop duets, Boy Meets Girl, have opened (I have no idea how recently) their own website where you can buy any of their four albums directly from the artists. Just last year they remastered their deput album from 1985 for its twentieth anniversary and made it available again. And they rereleased their 1991 album “New Dream” that was selling as high as $700 on eBay recently.

At four in the morning it was still seventy degrees outside and the apartment was closer to eighty. The fresh air was good and the bedroom wasn’t too hot since that is where the air was entering the house but the rest of the house was pretty warm. This is about the coolest time of day and about the best temperature that I can hope for in here. With no air circulation at all in half of the house there just isn’t much that can be done to cool it down. I decided that it was time to switch over to air conditioning in the hopes that it would be able to keep up for the rest of the day although I am not getting my hopes up.

At five I put in If A Man Answers with Sandra Dee and Bobby Darrin. Dominica has watched this one all ready as well. I am way behind on my movie watching. I had forgotten that Dominica had told me that this movie had adorable Boston Terriers in it. Watching it makes me miss my puppy even more. Five days until I see him again. After seeing Bobby Darrin in State Fair it is impossible to see him as anything but a big loser. The dogs are so cute but the movie itself is pretty weak. The characters are dim witted, manipulative and annoying. One of those “romantic” movies where you would only be happy if the couple end up breaking up because the last thing that you want is for them to be happy because they are annoying. The movie wasn’t awful but it wasn’t good. Not exactly a classic. Although it is sad considering how few movies Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin did (separate or together) that so many of them are so bad.

I had some more time to kill during my shift while I did paperwork so I watched some of Maverick with one of my all time favourite actors: Alfred Molina. Molina was really awesome in Chocolat. Here is an interesting point that I wonder if they really considered for the movie. In the movie every poker player getting into the All Rivers Championship Poker Tournament had to bring $25,000 and the final winnings were $500,000. Now it sounds like a lot of money but I think that people watching the movie forget just how much that really is. We are talking about seriously rich people here. If you were to consider the movie to be taking place in 1890 then the minimum value of $25K would be over one half million dollars in 2006 dollars and a maximum value of almost three million dollars. So the Maverick character is actually significantly rich. They point to this a little when he states where his custom tailored clothing was made but other than that you feel that he is just a poor western wanderer. The winnings of the tournament in modern money could be as high as fifty seven million dollars! This is one serious tournament. Now that is if you consider the movie taking place in 1890. If you push the date back to 1870 which is plausible the figures actually drop slightly as post-war America had reverse inflation for a few decades but nontheless the numbers are staggering.

Today I wasn’t nearly so exhausted when the end of my shift rolled around. I have gotten good at adjusting to the shift quickly. The sun was out in force this morning. It is going to be another hot one. I didn’t end up heading to bed until after nine in the morning.

I didn’t need a lot of sleep last night, apparently, and was up by two thirty in the afternoon. I felt pretty good so I settled into the living room on the computer. It must not be quite as hot out today as the air conditioning is keeping up, more or less, with keeping the apartment at a reasonable temperature. Once every four hours or so it will turn off for about five minutes. The sun is pretty bright, though, and is keeping the living room much warmer than the rest of the apartment which is, of couse, where I sit all day. I did figure out that we don’t pay for our water and that I can set up a fan to blow air through the shower and the ground water is pretty cold. So I have a makeshift air conditioning augmentation system with built it air filtration set up that seems to help a little. I don’t run it all of the time but it keeps part of the house a little cooler and it adds some moisture to the air that is getting sucked out by running the air conditioning all of the time.

I renewed two more domain names today that were about to expire. It is nice to be able to register them for nine years at a shot now. I have eleven domain names that I own currently and the first one that I have to worry about again is dominicamiller.com that isn’t set to expire until 2008 and most of them are around 2015. That is handy. I have gotten used to having to renew all of them every year and that means that on average I would have to log in and deal with them every month. That got to be annoying.

I did very little this afternoon. Just relaxed. I put a few movie images into the movie database, surged the web, did a little work for the office, etc. At seven I decided that my pizza yesterday was so delicious that I needed to get another one. But this time I figured out that I did not need to get cheesesticks because the cheesesticks from Papa John’s just aren’t that good and the pizza is really cheesy so I don’t need the extra cheese. When I get Domino’s I get the thin crust which is like a cracker with barely anything on it (it is really good but not very filling) so the cheese sticks are important. So I am learning.

I decided that Dominica and I were never going to get a chance to watch a lot of our DVDs together so I put in Red Dwarf Series VIII. I saw most of the eighth season some years ago but I can’t place where. But it was nice to finally wrap up watching Red Dwarf that I started watching sometime around 1990.

“I am so gorgeous that there is a six month waiting list for birds to appear every time I am near.”

“The future’s the future and, like your underpants, there is little chance of changing it.”

I talked to dad and Dominica tonight. Dominica says that her dental work is going well. Two days down and just one left to go. Tomorrow night she is going to see “The Care Bears Live” in Utica. How exciting. I miss everything fun 😉

In general I am doing pretty well with dealing with mom being gone. Subconsciously I think that it affects me more than I realize. My trichotillomania or trich is awful today. Really, really bad. It is aggrevated by the weather and the lack of good air conditioning. If I am warm all of the time it gets bad but today is exceptionally bad. I almost ripped out my entire left eyebrow before I even realized that I was having an attack. I don’t normally talk about my trich, I have had it for twenty years or so, but this is one of the worst attacks that I can remember. It is a constant battle for me that has been improving in recent years, in general.

I did some work on the movie database system tonight. Now you can enter “views” into the system so it is easy to register when a film has been watched. Very handy.

I put in The Game – one of the best movies ever. This is the movie that really shows off Michael Douglas and Sean Penn. This is amazing stuff. This is right up there with Romancing the Stone for Douglas.

Midnight and time to get back to work. The overnight shift is a strange world to be in.

Today I am totally exhausted from having switched to the overnight last night. I worked midnight until eight in the morning. Sheep Guarding Llama was down over the weekend and the server came back online this morning around a quarter after eight. Dad had to run over to the server facility in Geneseo and restart the machine. It had become unresponsive. 🙁 Soon that won’t be an issue anymore. I can’t wait to get all of this stuff moved down to Scranton. What a relief that will be.

Mary had insomnia and got online around one in the morning and talked to me for a lot of the night and that helped keep me awake. By the end of the night I was in bad shape and really needed to get to bed. It was all that I could do to keep myself going to the end of my shift. I got my schedule changed this week and I am working the overnight all week. It is too bad that Dominica is in Frankfort this week because I am home all week. And I could have kept Oreo down here but we didn’t know that we could do that until after they had left. That is very sad. Oreo and I would have had a good time. I am all ready lonely.

During the night, around five in the morning, the air conditioner finally caught up and shut off for a few minutes. It was the first time that it had turned off since Dominica and I had walked into the apartment around noon yesterday. Josh and I had even gone outside with two gallons of water to clean off the air conditioning unit. We discovered that the unit was pressed up against another unit that was crammed up into a wall. So that wasn’t helping anything. The two units are totally competing for the same airflow and neither of them has enough room to breath anyway. My unit is in much better shape than the unit for the apartment above me. They have no free airflow at all. Two sides of their unit is against the building and one side is against my unit! No wonder they always just keep their windows open. We pulled my unit away from the other unit so that at least they weren’t touching each other. A tone of the fins on the radiator are smashed so it isn’t breathing properly at all. This thing is BAD. We poured water all over it hoping that the water might clean a little and help in some small way. That and the evaporation would help for a minute. I can’t believe how bad this thing is. And it is supposed to be in the nineties again tomorrow.

Josh and Amanda got up around six thirty. They had to pick someone up at the Newark Airport at eight and we had no idea how traffic was going to be since I have never driven up past the airport before. So they gave themselves an hour to make the trip. Josh is working in Jersey City all day today.

When eight rolled around I totally just crashed into bed. I was dead tired and was not about to attempt to stay awake any longer. Dad managed to get the SGL server back online just before I fell asleep and I was able to check it before passing out. So now everyone can read about our exciting weekend.

I slept pretty solidly until four thirty. Boy did that feel good. I am so glad that the air conditioning caught up during the night. There is no way that I could have slept in the hour yesterday at any point. But with it running solid and going through the night when it cooled down it did a bit to catch up and it isn’t doing too badly now although I am pretty sure that it never got a chance to shut off at any point during the day.

My first order of duty was to get the past two days updates posted onto SGL. Those are up and last night Josh and I verified that the video of the Empire Statesmen was posted on Ourmedia and working fine. So go to Saturday’s update and check out the show. The video is only about forty five seconds long or so but it is enough to give you a good idea of what the show was like. The audio is pretty bad but there wasn’t much that we could do about that. They were playing loud in an indoor convention center that was made completely of concrete so the entire place was one big echo chamber. It is nothing like that when they play on grass with no ceiling. I am always impressed with how well that camera manages to take videos of things, though. Thanks Kodak.

I had tons of emails to go through by the time that I was awake and bills to pay as well. Dad was able to get to the bank and deposit my paycheck today so I am able to pay everything now. Living between two states is tough. I finally managed to pay the rent bill today. That has been a major pain. They started by sending the bill to a mailbox that we don’t have so we didn’t get it for the longest time. Then when they finally sent the late payment bill to the address in New York where we actually get the mail they sent it without the important part of the bill that allows us to actually pay it so we had to wait for yet another bill to come so that we could actually pay them. So that was taken care of today.

I did some work trying to get the wireless working properly on the access point last night and the Vonage line started working again at the house. I haven’t quite figured out what it is that makes that work and not work. It is very sporadic. The Niagara line works all of the time without fail. I am happy that I was able to build an easy to use, more reliable phone system than Vonage did with all of their money. I have all of the same cool features that they have too.

For those who haven’t been following, the HD-DVD and BluRay players are out now and pretty readily available. The HD-DVD players are much cheaper, around $500, and are able to produce, so far, standard old HDTV signals (the highest being 768p or 1080i) which is not all that impressive. The discs are around $20. The BluRay players are currently at $1,000 and the disks are around $30 but they are able to play at 1080p which is a rather higher standard and very few monitors today are prepared to play that at full quality (dad’s is, however.) But the transition away from DVD has begun and it is time for people to start thinking about where they are putting their money. I am not saying that people should run out and grab the new players right away. I sure am not doing that until they get down to reasonable prices. But I am going to begin switching my buying habits. Sure some things will be fine on DVD going forward, especially the stuff that I get from the bargain bin at Walmart. But of new, top quality releases I will probably be waiting to buy them so that I can get them in HD or HD+ quality. No one knows which format is going to win. HD-DVD has a big lead and costs less and isn’t a Sony standard which means that it has a lot going for it. But the quality just isn’t up to what the high end crowd is expecting so we are going to have to wait and see. People like to think that VHS won the analogue era war but laserdisc outlived it and had a larger catalogue throughout its lifespan. I won’t be surprised if the same thing comes up again. People who are willing to pay to have the best often get it. People who used VHS were too eager to copy them or rent them and that kept them from having the best available to them. Money talks and quality demands the money. If someone other than Sony gets into BluRay and brings out a good player, like Samsung, then you could easily see me going that route (once they are less expensive.) But you won’t see Sony getting my money at any price.

I have been through the list of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies being listed as available or coming soon from Amazon and currently there isn’t a single one that I am that interested in. Everything that is currently available is stuff that any collector would all ready own if they wanted so that is going to make the transition tough. I think that people, for the most part, are much more interested in getting new movies in new formats and will convert their old collections later if they feel the need for a particular film to be in a higher quality. I don’t expect to be converting huge portions of my DVD collection. I would not have converted so much of the laserdiscs had I been able to keep a working player or played them on my computer(s). DVD won out of convenience and the survivability of the players (my first DVD player survived the entire DVD era, for example.) But I didn’t get into laserdiscs until they had been the dominant high end format for sixteen years and still I ended up going through about five or six players during that time from 1994 onward just to wind up by 2001 or so with no working player at all. Dad’s laserdisc player died some years ago as well. Dominica only ever got to watch any of my laserdiscs when we watched them on Nate’s player many, many years ago. At least, at this point, I don’t have too many movies left on laserdisc. I still need to figure out what to do with all of the ones that remain.

Dominica and I are pretty sure that we are selling the house in Geneseo. We will have to do it pretty quickly. What a pain that is. We were so happy that we weren’t going to be moving for a long time. It was a chance to finally unpack all of our stuff and set it up and have a place to call home. I lived in that house only for three years, actually a little less, and still it was the house that I lived in longer than any house but my parents’ house and by no small margin either. It is tough selling your first house, let me tell you. You get attached. You start thinking of it as “your” house and pretty soon it isn’t something that you want to give up. It becomes an important extension of you. When we first bought the house we thought that we would keep it indefinitely. It was such a good location and size for us. And it wasn’t so expensive. We knew that we would be working in other cities from time to time but the plan had been to always keep it as a form of long term storage and a base to operate out of. But that was when the company was using it as a datacenter as well and when we thought that we would be back more often. But we have all ready discovered that we would only have been in the house about half of the time as it was. If I would have lived with Dominica in Ithaca for that summer in 1994 we wouldn’t have needed the house then for sure. But now we plan to live in “the city” or thereabouts for the long term and keeping the empty house as an expensive storage unit seems silly. If the servers were staying there it would be different. If we could rent it it would be different. But with both of those options unavailable to us there are much better ways to do the same thing. So right now dad is looking into putting in a storage unit at his place that is large enough to hold all of our stuff so that we have a place to keep it all. It sounds silly, I know, to have a storage unit for stuff that you will never see, but it does make sense. There are a lot of nostalgic items that need to be stored that you should cart around with you all throughout your life and, in this day and age of intellectual property, I have a ton of items that need to be stored for legal purposes that I don’t need to have ready access to on a day to day basis. That takes up a lot of space. Obviously we are still hopeful that someone will be able to live in the house for a while and that we won’t have to sell it but we don’t think that the chances are too good for that.

At eight o’clock tonight I realized that I had gone for over twenty four hours without having any food. It is funny how that works once you get busy. Time flies and food is a low priority. Dominica was right, I really don’t eat very much when she isn’t around.

Dad said my new HP DL380 server arrived today. He was able to fire it up and test it out. Its six 10,000 rpm drives sounded like a jet taking off, he said. I am excited to get to test that one out.

By eight it was cool enough outside that I was able to open up the windows and get some fresh air in the house. The air conditioning had ran like crazy all day without stopping once since I went to bed this morning and it wasn’t even hot enough out to warrant using it. This is going to be one hot, annoying summer. But it is only for four more months. Just for the summer months. Ugh. But not for long. We can bare it for that long. Then, hopefully, we can move on up to Jersey City or Hoboken.

Once the windows were open I figured that I could turn on another computer and watch some DVDs. I had been avoiding having a second computer on and definitely avoiding the super hot Athlon XP machine while the air conditioning was running. I had to do everything that I could to keep the heat under control. It is warmer and more humid with the windows open but the air conditioner was going to burn up, along with my electric bill, if I did switch it off for a while. The rest of the week is not expected to be so hot.

I was hungry and lazy so, as you probably guessed, I ordered delivery. I love delivery. I am so totally addicted to getting food delivered. You can tell that this is one of those things that I was deprived of as a child. Dominica thinks that it is funny all of the things that I love to do that are caused by not having access to them when I was young. Things like pizza delivery and ice cream trucks and walking to the store or walking anywhere at all and just looking out the window and seeing people instead of grass. I will, most likely, spend my entire life living in places with tons of people around because I never had other people around when I was a kid. I ordered from Papa Johns because they left a thing on the door and I haven’t had their pizza in a long time. I am tired of Domino’s so it seemed like a good idea.

I popped in the DVD of Major League. That movie is awesome. It has to be the best baseball movie ever. And it is a movie about Cleveland. There aren’t enough movies about America’s great, smaller, industrial cities like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Milwaukie, etc. I am always happy after watching Major League which is funny because I don’t like sports at all but I appreciate sports movies.

I did some bill paying. There are always bills to be paid, aren’t there. While I was sending out checks for CDs that had been ordered accidentally from BMG I used several “free CD” vouchers that I had. I got some Gary Allan rounding out my Gary Allan collection, some Etta James and some Tony Bennett. Oh yeah, good stuff.

The rain never ended up coming. When the pizza arrived there was the little sprinkling but not enough to know that it was raining if you weren’t standing in it for a few minutes. It ended up staying way too warm all night but at least I didn’t have to run the air conditioner although I wasn’t exactly comfortable.

While I am home alone with lots of time to myself I am taking the opportunity to work my way through all of the movies that are here that I have not had a chance to view yet. After Major League I started watching the 1974 classic film Agatha Christia’s Murder on the Orient Express. Not too many movies left here to go through. Hopefully I will have a chance to swap out the watched ones and get more from home that haven’t been viewed yet. Albert Finney’s portrayal of Hercule Poirot as a rude, loud, hunched man is curious compared to the ultimate performance of David Suchet who has set the bar for the character. Finney didn’t even appear to bother attempt a French accent.

Before my shift started I took the opportunity to shave and shower. Then it was time to begin my night.

I was awake at 6:00 this morning and just lay in bed for a while not wanting to wake Dominica or Oreo up. By 7:00 I couldn’t stay in bed any longer so I got up and went for a little walk outside. It was a beautiful morning with a great view of Atlantic City with the sun coming up behind it. I took the camera out and took some pictures from the hotel. I got back to the room and Oreo decided that he wanted me to take him for a walk. He couldn’t resist the sound of the door opening.

I got showered and ready to go. Dominica didn’t wake up until 8:45. While she was getting ready to go I took Oreo for another walk and discovered that it had gotten very, very hot outside. The sunlight was really beating down today.

We left the hotel a little before 10:00 and stopped quickly at McDonalds to get some breakfast before we left town. We would have just eaten at the hotel but there is never anything with protein in the continental breakfast and it makes for a tough day to have nothing but carbs. The drive home went quickly and we were back by 11:30. We are pretty sure that it only takes a little over an hour and a half to go from our apartment to Atlantic City now that we know the way to go.

We stopped at Walmart real quickly on the way to the apartment to pick up a new air mattress because our old one died last weekend and we need to have space for people to sleep in the apartment. We also grabbed the DVD of The Pink Panther with Jean Reno, Kevin Klein, Steve Martin and Beyonce Knowles. That is the tenth Pink Panther film but is actually the prequel to the original movie.

The apartment was pretty warm when we got there. We had turned up the air conditioning while we were gone and the apartment was in the mid-70’s. The sunlight was brutal. I turned the thermostat down to 70 and the air conditioning ended up running continuously trying to cool the apartment down.

Dominica set to packing quickly as soon as we got in and within half an hour she was on the road to Frankfort with Oreo. I had to work at 1:00 so it worked out well that she was able to leave right away and I was able to settle right in to working. Work didn’t take too long, about two hours. Nothing too strenuous. My schedule was changed at the last minute last week and I am working the overnight tonight from midnight to eight in the morning (technically the Monday morning shift.)

After wrapping up my work for the afternoon I had some time to myself so I popped in The Pink Panther and watched that. It wasn’t bad. In fact, it might be the best of the Pink Panther movies, which isn’t saying a lot but it is something. There were a couple of good ones in there. But mostly the Pink Panther movies were pretty bad. But I just can’t resist them for some reason.

Josh and Amanda arrived down at the apartment around 7:00. None of us had eaten lunch so we went over to the Omega to get some lunch/dinner. Like last night we had all kinds of service issues that we never have at the Omega. The wrong food was brought out a few times and some of us got food and other didn’t. But the food was good and we were starving.

We came back to the apartment and set up the air mattress and popped in Eurotrip and then The Dukes of Hazzard. At midnight I had to start my shift so I set up my laptop stand in the bedroom and moved into there. The wireless is still having issues, though, and that made it really tough to work all night. My connection would drop on a regular basis. This is the first time that I have actually used my new laptop desk. It isn’t perfect but it is pretty good. It is a really good idea. I am glad that we bought it.

I have to fall back to my old system of doing the dailies of writing the post to a text editor and then uploading it later because the server that hosts SGL is currently down. I don’t know how long that it has been down because it was up when I left North Brunswick to go to Atlantic City this morning but it was down when I went to write this (which is actually being written on Sunday afternoon because I haven’t seen a computer since I left) so this might be a recent outage or maybe it has been going on for two days. Sorry, I just don’t know. Hopefully we will have this situation fixed shortly. If you are reading this then, it has been.

Dominica and I both slept in a bit this morning. We knew that it was going to be a long weekend so we wanted to be well rested before it started. There is a lot of driving to be done today. Dominica’s car would normally be the car that we would take but her tires are a little soft so we are taking mine which means that I am doing all of the driving because it is a manual and she can’t drive it (or at least that is what she says so that she never has to drive but she drove manual for a long time when she lived in Texas.) We didn’t get up until around 11:00. We got ready and packed quickly and got out the door in time to be able to go over to the Omega Diner and Cafe and get a late breakfast before leaving town.

It was around 1:30 when we finally left North Brunswick. Google Maps had predicted that it would take a little over two hours to get down to Atlantic City where we have reservations at the Ramada Limited in West Atlantic City just on the mainland side of the intercoastal. The trip down was uneventful. Traffic was sluggish through East Brunswick on NJ18 but once we got past the Brunswicks it picked up and we were able to make good time the whole way.

When we arrived in Atlantic City Google’s directions really failed us. We should have done nothing more than gone to exit 38 off of the Garden State Parkway and driven east and we would have found the hotel right there on our right but instead Google sent us to a different exit and told us to take little road after little road which would have been fine if those roads would have existed but most of them didn’t. We ended up just driving around and coming across the hotel. It was super easy to find as long as you didn’t use directions from the Internet. 🙁 It was 3:30 when we checked into the hotel. So it took us just two hours including getting lost to get to the hotel.

We had been worried about getting a room at a Ramada because they can be really unpredictable but this one was quite nice and had a nice view of Atlantic City across the intercoastal. In fact, the Ramada Limited sat directly on the intercoastal so we were technically waterfront. We didn’t have long to spend at the hotel, however, because we still had to drive another hour down to Wildwood down on Cape May at the southern tip of New Jersey. We stopped just long enough to make sure that the hotel was all taken car of and we dropped off all of our stuff so that it wouldn’t be sitting in the car. Then it was back onto the road.

It took a little less than an hour to go from Atlantic City to Wildwood and the drive was really easy. We got to Wildwood and were totally unimpressed by what a crappy, shabby little place it is. It was awful. Everything was dirty and nasty and the people were so trashy. It was gross just being there. I thought that Wildwood was supposed to be some cool travel destination but that is the last thing that it is. Even if you like going to the beach and doing absolutely nothing with your summer this is not the place that I would ever want to go. We didn’t see a single nice hotel or restaurant the entire time that we were there. It almost seems like a resort town in a third world country that does not cater to the richer first world set. Like a local resort town in Honduras. Image what that would be like. I almost felt like there should be little kids begging or picking pockets on every corner. No wonder we didn’t find any hotels near here. No respectable hotel would build in this area. Ick.

We had to pay $15 to park at the Wildwood Convention Center. That wasn’t very impressive. We were a bit early so we took Oreo out so that he wouldn’t be stuck in the car for so long and we walked a little ways up and got some ice cream at a local place called Sea Shells. It was really warm out and the car would be unbearable for Oreo. The air was warm but the sunlight was intense. Oreo had a great time walking with us and smelling everything everywhere that we went.

We got him back to the car and waited with him for a little bit with the car doors wide open to keep the car cool before we had to lock him in and head to the convention center for the drum and bugle corp competition. We thought that we would be able to go right in but there was actually quite a line of people trying to buy tickets to get in. We probably had to wait in line over twenty minutes to get tickets. That was pretty surprising.

I managed to record about forty seconds of the opening number from the Rochester Empire Statesmen’s 2006 “Catching Some Rays” Performance at the Wildwood Convention Centery in Wildwood, New Jersey and you can watch it on Ourmedia. The movie is 9.2MB. I think that it turned out pretty well. I wasn’t able to listen to it when I was writing this so I have no idea what the audio is like. I just know that the video turned out okay. I should get a chance to listen to it soon.

After the show Dominica and I took Oreo for a long walk to get him some fresh air after being in the warm car. He had a great time. The car wasn’t all that hot and it had cooled off a bit since we had dropped him off. He was only alone for two hours. He had just the best time exploring Wildwood. We, on the other hand, continued to be grossed out by the entire place. I can’t believe that people voluntarily drive here from other, nicer, places and spend their time getting drunk. There is nothing else to do here and the entire town echoes with the sounds of the drunks on the rooftops and balconies. It is a like a Mecca for trashy Americans. I know that all beach towns on the east coast get pretty nasty but I have never seen one like this.

We dropped Oreo back off at the car and went to explore the boardwalk. A sign on the boardwalk proclaimed it to be America’s original boardwalk but I find this hard to believe. According to Wikipedia the Atlantic City Boardwalk, which opened in 1870 and is by far the most famous boardwalk in the world followed by Coney Island in New York, was the first boardwalk anywhere, ever. The Wildwood Boardwalk often makes the claim of having more rides than Disney World but I cannot find any number to substantiate this claim and even Wikipedia states the same thing and notes that it cannot find references to back this claim up.

The boardwalk was nothing more than a beachfront little town amusement park. It was silly and not hardly something that I would denote as an “attraction”. In fact I would not hesitate to say that it totally detracted from what seemed like it probably would have been a nice beach if the boardwalk had not been there. The boardwalk is gigantic, loud, and is full of flashing lights like a 1960’s state fair would have had. It has all of those “attractiction” like throwing rings over bowling pins or shooting water into a clown’s mouth to win junk that you wouldn’t want if someone just stood around handing it out for free. The kind of “attractions” that really make you desire to be elsewhere. There were all of the usual suspects at this kind of place: salk water taffy, pizza, ice cream, fried dough and funnel cakes, t-shirt shops, sunglass shops, etc, etc. ad nauseum. Exactly all of the things that you never want to run across but can’t seem to avoid. And to add insult to injury the prices were outrageous and no one who worked there could speak English so you couldn’t ask anyone for help. Shopping was practically impossible.

We did go into a fudge shop because Min wanted some fudge and the prices were good and the fudge was really good and although the girls that worked there were really struggling with their English they were very friendly and helpful. That was the end of the highlights. One nice fudge shop. Ouch.

After everything wrapped up with the drum and bugle corp competition Josh and Amanda who plays the mellophone with the Statesmen met us on the boardwalk in front of the convention center and we went down to a restaurant on the boardwalk (because there isn’t anything not no the boardwalk for the most part) and got some dinner. We decided to just get a pizza and some appetizers to split between the four of us. It took probably close to forty five minutes to get our appetizers and it was at least an hour before our cheese pizza arrived. People that Josh knew that had arrived and ordered after us were done eating before our food arrived. It was ridiculous. And the quatities of everything were horrible and we didn’t even get free refills on our small sodas. A meal of a single, late, cheese pizza with no toppings at all and a few appetizers came to $50! We were not impressed.

Bottom line: I will never return to Wildwood, New Jersey.

Dominica and I really couldn’t hang out down in Wildwood because we had to get Oreo back to our hotel room in Atlantic City. So we said goodbye and hit the road north. It wook less than an hour for us to get up to Atlantic City with the roads being as empty as they were. I had never been to downtown Atlantic City before and Dominica had never even seen it (not being one for the scenery she had also missed the view of the AC skyline from our hotel when we had checked in earlier today) so we decided to go past the hotel and right into the city to see what it was like. We just drove down on Albany and then made a loop down Atlantic and back on Ocean. AC really is a lot like Vegas. It was pretty cool to get to see but being as late as it was and having Oreo in the car with us we didn’t want to stop anywhere so we just drove through and then went back to the hotel to get some sleep.

Ah Fridays. It has been a long time since I had Fridays to look forward to. I am beginning to remember what the “weekend” is all about. Of course every weekend is chock full o’ stuff to do but at least it isn’t sitting in the office.

Here is some exciting news: there has been an update on the AGD Interactive website. They haven’t release “Quest for Glory II” but they have at least posted another note talking about it which is, I guess, better than nothing. They went for five months without even posting a blog note to say that they were still alive so most of us just assumed that they had cancelled any work going on on the project. This is one that I have really been waiting for. The first two games that they remade are King’s Quest I and King’s Quest II, both of which I have played and completed several times before they did remakes of them so I didn’t get the full experience of playing them because I all ready knew most of what there was to do in the games. And another studio is doing a remake of King’s Quest III which, as you have guessed, I have also completed. But Quest for Glory II is from the Hero’s Quest/Quest for Glory series of which I have never played a single game so I am really excited to finally get to start playing them. Of course, the game that I want remade the most is King’s Quest IV which is the game that I have played least from the entire series and it is supposed to be a really good one. KQII is basically just a little extension of KQ1 and is really easy and KQIII is by far the worst of the series being just plain weird for the first half of the game making it really hard to get into. But I think that the remake that is being made might be a bit different than the original because everyone knows how bad it was.

I arrived home from work right at 7:00 and only had half an hour before I had to be online and working again. A system administrator’s day is never done. Dominica discovered this morning that a big chunk of work had to be done for her database class final by Sunday and since we are traveling all weekend it really needed to be completed today. So she worked on that most of the day. She even came up to Warren to meet me for lunch so that we could go over some of her assignment at lunch. We tried getting Italian at Fiorino’s in Warren. The food was good and we were able to sit outside. It was surprisingly affordable. Unfortunately things got busy at the office and I had to rush back so we didn’t get much done and didn’t get a chance to spend much time together.

Dominica spent the evening working on her database and watching newly available episodes of Scarecrow and Mrs. King (although I think that she spent a lot more time watching than working.) I have been listening to a new Boy Meets Girl CD that I got. You may not remember Boy Meets Girl but they did the song “Waiting For A Star To Fall” from 1989. I just recently got the CD that they made to follow that one. Really good stuff. I have been a huge fan of Boy Meets Girl and their album “Reel Life” from 1989 is one of my all time favourite albums – every song on it is just amazing.

Over the past few weeks I have discovered that I am becoming lactose intollerant in my old age. I am not quite 100% sure that this is true but I am pretty sure. I am not super intollerant but enough that it is noticable. I figure that the overall lack of dairy consumption over the past several years has contributed to it. I used to drink milk all of the time and eats lots of dairy but over the last few years I have switched to soy milk because I prefer it and because it is healthier and the only dairy that I get on a regular basis is cheese. I get plenty of that but not, I don’t think, in the quantities that I used to.

Since Dominica has been putting in so much time working on Access I decided to take some time and build my very first Access database to see how it would go. I built a small eight table system using Access 2007 Beta. It took me about an hour to do the design and to get it all put into the system. I managed to enter some data and to build my first query using the Access Query Wizard. That was pretty easy but I can see why people get stumped with it. It is pretty important to have a good, fundamental understanding of databases or a lot of that stuff would be pretty confusing. It is handy that Access does a lot of the work for you but there is a lot that requires you to know what is going on underneath or else you will be completely lost. Funny enough I am in good shape with the technical parts of Access – the database design and the query design – but the form and report stuff is really hard for someone like me to get started with. So I haven’t done either of those yet. Maybe I will get to that later in the weekend.

I worked, office work not home work, for about two hours tonight. Min and I were pretty tired and decided to hit the hay a little after midnight. Some light traveling tomorrow as we go to Wildwood. Hopefully we will remember the camera and might actually get some new pictures. I know that everyone is tired of seeing my car off to the left.