Sheep Guarding Llama

We are into the final week of Oktoberfest. Make sure you get out and drink some beer before the 15th when it is all over.

I learned some new strategies for AoE2 today. I found a number of things that I was doing wrong and I have improved dramatically (I think, at least.) I am able to develope more powerfully now and not just quickly.

I think that I may have gotten more phone calls from John today than I have ever gotten in a single day before. He woke me up in the morning and has been calling every 30-60 minutes all day long. The contract that Eric and I have been waiting for in Rochester has finally been delivered which makes us very happy.

Loopy and I actually cooked dinner last night. It was a scary experience.

Loopy, Min and I went out to State Street for dinner and then Min and I went to the mall and picked up the latest expansion pack for the Sims, The Simes Unleashed. This is the fifth expansion pack that she has gotten (yes, that means that six total packages have been purchased!!) and the seventh pack is due out in just a couple of weeks (Sims Online.) There is also the unofficial face program for taking pictures of real people and adding them into the game. Whoever came up with the idea for the Sims really knew what he was doing. What an addictive game that just keeps you expanding and expanding. Each of the packs really adds a lot of functionality to the game. This newest pack (Unleashed) adds pets to the game plus adds tons of new items and just expands on the overall workings of the game. The Sims has been out for years and they just released a new boxed set of it that includes the first expansion pack. If you haven’t checked out the Sims, it might be worth taking a look. It is a really strange but involved video game.

Working on a web log like this really gives you a sense of time flying by. It seems like I just started this site and here we are at the two year mark. Wow how time does fly. When I started this page, the Llamas had just moved into the Lucente Property up on Sactuary Drive. We were so happy to be out of Nate’s cramped apartment at Gaslight Village (the apartment was fine but there were four of us in a tiny two bedroom place with one of the bedrooms being used for storage.) Loopy had just returned from Pittsburgh and was working at Gutchess Lumber as an Access / Visual Basic programmer (his first “real” job.) Bob had just moved to Ithaca to start teaching here instead of in Oneonta. Tim was still teaching near Utica. I was working in Washington, DC at OilNavigator.com and had been living in a hotel in Alexandria for six months and had just moved over to living in the condo in Arnold, MD! How time does fly.

My computer is continuing to work today. It is running very hot but not crashing or locking up on me. Right now I am running it with the case open and a regular fan blowing cold room air into the case to see how that affects the overall temperature of the system. I did manage to Ogg Vorbis encode a number of CDs and they all worked fine. So, I am looking good for the moment.

Loopy and I went out shopping this afternoon and we picked up a copy of Nancy Drew for the Game Boy Advance. I only had a chance to pop it in for a second today but the game looks really amazing. It definitely has the best graphics of any game that I have seen on the Nintendo GBA so far.

In addition to great graphics on the GBA, Bob and Loopy hooked Loop’s Nintendo Game Cube (with HDTV output) up to Loop’s projector down in the basement and hooked the sound to the Rotel surround processor. I have never seen a console look so good before. Those graphics were really amazing. They aren’t up to par with a lot of computer games but few computers have the chance to be hooked to such a system. It was really amazing.

Dominica got home from work and we immediately played she and Loopy versus me in Age of Empires 2. I am enjoying the chance to play again after having not played at all for so long. I managed to beat the two of them this time. It is nice to not have to end in a draw. I have been playing a little bit everyday for the last week or so, so I had improved considerably since they had played me last. It was a fun game though. They kept me wondering how I was doing for most of the game.

I reclocked Dominica’s computer back to where it normally is and she hasn’t had a crash all day. She is even playing the Sims which hasn’t been working in a while. My computer has made it all day even with the CDs being encoded and playing hours of video games. Normally it would have crashed at some point during the day. So, it is looking promising.

As some of you may know, Loopy recently sold his monitor that he had (the high refresh rate one) because it was starting to have some problems and Loop was worried that it was going to die. Well, the guy who bought it had it for one hour and loved it before the monitor completely bit the dust. Apparently it doesn’t even turn on anymore. Good thing that Loopy decided to get rid of it.

Bob got another collectable Star Wars toy from eBay today. It is a large speeder from Empire. It is in really good shape. All of the stickers are still on it. Bob has quite the Star Wars toy collection – mostly Legos. He got this latest one on accident, though, because he was trying to see how expensive it was going to be and accidentally was the highest bidder. But it wasn’t too expensive anyway.

Zach accidentally left his bass guitar at the Nines in June. They called today and Bob had to run out there to pick it up. That is a long time to be missing a guitar!

Happy 25th Birthday to Loopy!!

Dominica and I headed out to my parents this morning to go to church and visit for a while. We had a good time and we also went down to my grandmother’s house and visited there for a little while. We ended up heading north to Avon to get some dinner at Tom Wahl’s. I used to really hate Tom Wahl’s but since they have been bought out by Bill Gray’s, they have really turned around and the service and food there are a million times better than they used to be. We had a good time there.

After visiting people all day, Dominica and I then headed up to Josh and Joanna’s townhouse in Greece to get the new AMD Athlon XP 2000+ processor for my computer. Josh and I managed to get it installed without a hitch and I am testing it now. Today’s update is being written on the machine running the new processor while it is ripping CDs and converting them to Ogg Vorbis in the background. The previous processor had been unable to encode the Ogg Vorbis files without crashing so this is the big test, so far, so good. I have already encoded the most that I have ever been able to encode so this is a good sign. The new processor is still running quite hot, just like the old one did. I am just running it with the default fan and the default grease. I did open up my case but that has affected it very little. I am going to have to try some thermal grease that Loopy has tomorrow and see if that makes any difference. There is only so much that I can do with it without going through some major expense. The new processor fan that I have is much quieter than the old one so that is a huge improvement. I am very happy about that. Now if I could just keep the thing cool!

I didn’t get a chance to post the daily yesterday because the power went off at 11:30 and we had to spend the rest of the night without power. We lit some candles and we all sat around in the dark talking all night. Loopy and I finally went to bed around 4am after the lights had come back on.

Nate, Bob and Zach have been missing for days. We have no idea where they have gone off to but the house has been incredibly empty for a while. It is really quite here. It is so quite that I even forget that the bottom two levels of the house even exist.

Min and I played some AoE2 today. Josh and I tried to play against each other of the Internet but his computer crashed and it ended up being impossible to play.

Min and I are heading out to Perry and Rochester tomorrow. We are going to church out there then visiting with my parents for a little while. After that we are heading up to Rochester because I have to switch processors with Josh. I currently have an Athlon XP1900+ and I am trading it is for a 2000+. It isn’t much difference but every little bit helps.

This year is just flying by. I can’t believe that it is already into October! Autumn is here, the weather is getting colder, there is less sunlight, it is starting to rain again. I love Autumn. Fall is my favorite time of the year. I love it when the leaves change. There is enough wind today that the fan in my window is turning even when it is off.

Today is a relaxing day for me (at least compared to the last few days.) I am working from home and enjoying it. Dominica made me oatmeal for breakfast (she is only working a half day today – in the afternoon) and I have already been on the phone getting things done this morning.