October 11, 2002: Dan’s Wedding Rehearsal

I spent some time on the phone with Time-Warner again today and finally got them to agree to come out (and I made them promise to call this time to be sure that they couldn’t say that we weren’t home again) and so they scheduled a visit for tomorrow. Of course, I can’t be here tomorrow so Loopy is going to have to get up early to deal with them.

The guys (Nate, Bob and Zach) all took off today and I have no idea where they have gone. They all have Monday off (Columbus Day, the world’s dumbest holiday) and so have probably gone to visit people for the weekend. Nate is probably in Perry and Bob is probably in Long Island. Zach could be anywhere – but wherever he is, he doesn’t have his car. It is still here.

I had to drive out to Herkimer today to practice for Captain Dan (Waltermire)’s wedding. He is getting married tomorrow at the Reform Church in Herkimer and I am playing in the trombone choir for his wedding. Dan and I spent some time going to school at Roberts Wesleyan together back in ’95 – ’96 (along with Joe Howlett and Bob Crissman – aka Montana Bob.) We all played in the Roberts Concert Band together (that was the only class that I took there.) Bob isn’t playing at the wedding because he is in the wedding party. Josh can’t make it to the wedding because he has to run rehearsal for Bob’s marching band down in Binghamton.

October 10, 2002: No Internet Access Again

Time – Warner managed to mess up their network, again, and so we have no Internet access today. So I don’t know how long this will last. It has alread been a few hours now that I am writing this and will probably take a lot longer than that.

I have my good trombone out after a very long time (years) of having only played my cheap marching horn. It is nice to have a chance to play my good horn again. I haven’t had much call to pull it out since I left MCC back in 1998! It is possible that I haven’t had the horn out since that time but that might be stretching it a bit. I know that I didn’t play at all in 1998 or 1999 on it because of my appendix. So it is possible to have been that long. Wow, that is a long time. I used to play it everyday. It is like an old friend that I haven’t had an opportunity to visit in a really long time (ok, Leanne, I know, I know! 🙂

October 9, 2002

So Eric has been playing AoE2 as well and he has also managed to defeat the computer on hard. Now the race is on! Eric will be in Ithaca tomorrow as we have some paperwork to look at. After that, it will be time for an AoE2 Rematch (this will be our third game against each other.) Currently, Eric and I are tied at one win each with Eric having won the more recent game. So tomorrow will be a big day.

October 8, 2002

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.

October 7, 2002

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!