Sheep Guarding Llama

Once again, I am a few days behind. It has been a crazy week.

Everyone needs a great web site to go to to start the day off right so check out Stuff On My Cat for lots of feline hilarity.

I was awake at 3:30 this morning and couldn’t really get back to sleep at all. I tend to have this problem whenever I know that I really need to get up for something. I wake up terribly early and can’t sleep. This is why I hate alarm clocks.

I had to leave the house at 8:00 this morning to get down to Dansville for a 9:00 meeting. It was a short meeting but went well. I was home just a little while after Dominica left to go to work so Oreo was barely alone today. He was still snuggled in our bed when I got home.

Dad came over at 12:30 and we got lunch. He didn’t sleep all night so we were both pretty tired.

Dominica had to get up and go to work early this morning because she is getting some special training and they shifted her schedule by an hour. So she will be coming home at 9:00 tonight instead of at 10:00.

I decided to go out for “Boy’s Night” tonight. I left the house a little after 6:00. I tried to get out earlier than that but everytime I attempt to leave the house Oreo ends up needing my attention for half an hour at least. I finally made it out the door and drove up to the South Wedge to meet the guys. The Wedge is one of my favourite parts of the city. It has the most “city” feel of any part of Rochester, I think. It is really close to downtown but not quite close enough that you figure out how small downtown is and it isn’t a slum. There are lots of restaurants and shops but traffic isn’t so horrible. Easy access to lots of stuff.

We had a good time. Went to two spots in the Wedge and ended up at Beale St. getting a fish fry. I left just after 9:00 so Min and I should get home at almost exactly the same time.

I pulled into the garage before Min even had a chance to leave the front hall. We were both really tired today and decided that we were just going to go to bed. We were in bed before 10:00! Boy this being thirty thing is tough!

No, your calendar isn’t wrong but this is the only way to wish Eric a happy 30th. Mu ha ha.

I had to get up early with Dominica today so that I could drive her over to dad’s. Dad is driving the two of them down to Castile to teach today. I got her over to his house at 8:30, right on time, and then drove back to Geneseo so that I could drop off Oreo at the house (he did, of course, ride along for as long as he could) and take Dominica’s car over to the shop up the street to get it inspected, oil changed and all that stuff.

I dropped off the car and they said that it would be at least forty-five minutes before it would be done and I know that that often means that it will be longer so I decided that I should hoof it back to the house so that Oreo wouldn’t be alone for too long. I needed exercise anyway so it wasn’t too big of a deal to do a little walking. I stepped out of the shop and the weather was fine. The sun was out and it was calm and cold but not too cold. Well, that didn’t last long. Apparently the shop is in the lee and as soon as I got down the driveway the wind came whipping through and I was chilled to the bone the entire walk back. It was very painful and my left ankle (the one that I broke in 1986) was absolutely killing me the entire way. I was limping by the time I got back to the house.

Of course it took me so long to walk back to the house that Oreo had an accident on the carpet while I was trying to get back to him. I just can’t win. I got his mess cleaned up and then settled in to work. I ended up having an awfully productive day and got a lot of calls about jobs all over the place (I never get any real offers but I get a lot of calls.) I got a lot done and managed to stay on task all day long.

Dominica got home close to 4:00. Dad dropped her off at the house. I didn’t eat lunch so that we could eat together so she cooked her fake chicken, pasta and cheese dish and we decided to relax for the evening and watch some movies. I had a huge haul come in from Amazon today – mostly movies that are replacing laserdiscs that I currently own but no longer have a player to watch them on. But a lot of them are updated to widescreen and are new digital transfers so they look a lot better than the laserdiscs did. In addition to replacing old movies I also managed to get the last four films to complete my Pink Panther collection. I now have all nine of the original films up to and including the 1993 release of Son of the Pink Panther. All of the movies are horrible, of course, but there is something nostalgic about them and they are a little funny.

Dominica and I first watched Betsy’s Wedding which is the last of the Brat Pack movies and one that she was not familiar with which is weird because she is fanatical about those movies. It is one of the replaced LDs. It isn’t a great movie but it isn’t bad. A little weird but enjoyable. Good enough that I was willing to replace my LD so that I could keep watching it.

After Betsy’s Wedding I introduced Dominica to Brassed Off which is a really excellent British film from the early 90’s that deals with the incredible hardships caused by the closing of the collieries (coal mines) in Britain as the country began switching to cleaner and more cost effective means of power production. It is one of the earlier Ewan McGreggor films and also features Pete Postlethwaite (whose ending monologue was made famous by being played as the introduction to the song Tubthumping by Chumbawumba) and Stephen Tompkinson whom most people know as the star of the popular show Ballykissangel and who, in that role, made guest appearances on Father Ted and the Vicar of Dibley. Brassed Off is very sad but a great movie and well worth watching.

I didn’t feel like working tonight so I convinced Dominica to watch The Trail of the Pink Panther from 1982 which is the first Pink Panther movie to be made after its star, Peter Sellers, had died. Of course, that didn’t stop Blake Edwards from putting him intot he movie. So the movie’s star is only ever shown in clips from earlier films and outtakes. It is really poor. Not that the other Pink Panther movies are anything special. But this one is really bad because they had so little to work with. Peter Sellers would have killed them all if he would have known what they were going to do.

We ended up not even making it halfway through the movie before we were both really tired and decided to just go to bed. It wasn’t even 10:00 pm yet! Boy, this being over thirty thing is really tough.

I have to be up early tomorrow because I am heading down to Dansville to meet with the hospital there.

Back to the grind. Weekends are so short – especially when you work during them.

Merrill Lynch is estimating that the new Sony Playstation 3 is going to cost Sony approximately $900 to produce at launch, according to this report from Engadget. Engadget says that ML got the addition wrong when they stated $900 and that their totals actually only come to $800 but they have no price listed for the 2.5″ hard drive and if you do some online shopping for the kind of hardware that they are looking at for that particular component then you will easily see where the other $100 comes from. Now, it is unlikely that any consumers will actually have to spend $900 to pick up one of these babies but it does mean that they are not likely to be coming very cheaply. This breakdown really shows why it is so difficult for gaming consoles to compete with computer systems. You could easily buy a regular computer, with far more functionality, for far less money. Sure, the PS3 has some features that are currently unavailable for the PC platform but the reality is that these features are useless on the PS3 for some time (like the Blu-Ray drive, for example which will be used primarily to play DVDs for a long time) and could be added for far less total expenditure to your computer when the time is right. For $700 you can easily have a 64 bit AMD Athlon 64 based commercial HP machine with 512MB of memory, an 80GB SATA hard drive and a GeForce 6 series graphics PCIE card with every single component outperforming the Playstation 3 and blowing everyone away with a three year warranty. Contrary to popular belief, the real money in computers is in buying the warranties. Pay closer attention to how long companies are willing to guarantee their hardware – this is one of the best indicators of a manufacturer’s faith in their own machines as well as their assessment of their customer’s intelligent. And the IBM Cell processor? I am sure it is nice and will do well down the road. But really it is just a rework of the Power PC which hasn’t done that well for video game machines in the past and cost a fortune to produce right now AND no developers are experienced on. Compare that to the super high performance AMD 64 bit family at very low cost and you will have a really hard time justifying the Cell. This isn’t to say that there isn’t value in video game consoles but the value is created artificially by limiting the release of popular gaming titles to only existing on the consoles even when they would perform better, cost less to make and be more useful on the general purpose computer. Once consumers realize this fact and decide to stop paying for consoles the video game makers will realize that everyone loses when consumers have to spend a significant portion of their video game budgets buying unimpressive hardware for every few games that they want to play.

Dominica’s car has to go into the shop tomorrow for its inspection. What a pain NY inspections are. They seem to be way too frequent to me. At least on newer vehicles. What do they think is going to be wrong with them that an inspection is actually going to catch?

Dominica got up a little after ten this morning and we went out to the Omega for some breakfast. It was a little on the late side so we ended up actually getting lunch. We took along some of her A+ study material and did some studying while we were waiting for the food.

Rocketboom fans will be happy to know that today is the shows first official webcast in widescreen. It isn’t quite HD. Actually, HD doesn’t mean anything. But it isn’t in a format equivalent to HD TV. But it still looks a lot better than it did before.

Andy sent me this awesome link to illiterate Kanye West using a relief effort video as a platform to, well, show everyone he is so handicapped that he cannot even talk. I mean this might actually be the dumbest person ever allowed to be on television. Can you believe that people actually pay money to go to concerts to listen to the sound of this guy drooling on himself?

Dad picked us up at 6:00 and we went over to the Omega to grab some quick dinner before going to the Geneseo Cinema to watch Disney’s new film Eight Below. The movie was decently done but it was incredibly sad. It is a really tough movies for children to sit through. Even sadder, however, is the fact that the movie is based upon real life events that happened to a group of Japanese researchers in Antarctica in 1958. In 1958 the Japanese team was forced to leave fifteen dogs behind and returned to find only two left alive.

Apple has finally released the Intel version of the Mac Mini. Personally I think that the Mac Mini is the coolest of all of the Apple products. It’s cost/performance isn’t all that bad, it is really tiny, quiet and attractive. For light computing duties in a space that has serious asthetic requirements this is a very nice unit.