Sheep Guarding Llama

Rain, rain, rain. I am convinced that the car wash that Nate, Bob and Zach are working at this morning raising money for the Boynton music department trip. It has been raining all morning and now it is raining really hard. The guys were totally soaked after they got back from the car wash.

Dominica is still laid up this morning. She is a little better but not much. She is watching movies again today. Yesterday she watched Drop Dead Gorgeous and Miss Congeniality. Today she watched Never Been Kissed and The Wedding Singer.

Min wanted a book from Borders so Loopy and I headed out there to get it for her. We had dinner at Friendlys (Bob and Zach snuck off and tried Chariot in Collegetown) and then went to Borders. We both bought some books (made cheaper by our really cool corporate discount program) and we also discovered a magazing – “Life in the Finger Lakes”, published right here in Ithaca. So, I had to get a copy of that as well. Nate and Craig had to move some cars around so they spent the evening back in Perry.

Loopy’s video game is really coming along. He got a lot of good work done on that today. It is looking like it is going to be pretty cool.

Ah, Friday. What a great day. I am still working in Ithaca today. Boy has it been a weird and busy week.

Tim came out to lunch with Dominica and I to the Little Thai House over on Triphammer next to the mall. We have been really happy with their food. They were really excited (the owners of the restaurants) about me little yellow Mazda and they were asking how much it was and what year it was, etc. That was pretty funny.

Shortly after lunch, Dominica threw her back out at work and had to leave early. We had been planning on going down to the Clemens Center in Elmira to see Rebecca St. James’ Concert. Dominica won’t be going anywhere for the next couple of days though. We had a busy weekend planned too. We were having lunch with my parents and grandparents, then going to my cousin’s birthday party then going to hang with Josh, Joanna, Phil, Kate and some other people at Josh’s new place. Then we were going to go to the Hemlock Sheep and Wool festival on Sunday before heading back down to Ithaca. We are hoping that Min’s back will be good enough by Sunday to still make the festival but that is very unlikely. She will likely not be able to go to work on Monday.

Loopy has been working on his own video game. He has some cool animations done already. I can’t wait to be able to see some of the game. It is going to be really funny.

I need to stop writing daily updates and then forgetting that I wrote them and not posting them. The September 18 update sat on my computer for two days before I got around to actually putting it up.

Loopy and I are both trying out a software package called AGS (Adventure Game Studio) to make video games in the style of the old King’s Quest games from Sierra in the 80’s. The studio is really easy to use and we are actually getting some things done. I will make the games downloadable from the site once we get them done. They will just be simple silly things since this is our first time trying to make games like this.

Loopy and I hooked up the Commodore 64C in the dining room to Zach old 13″ RCA television that has been sitting down there on the computer desk. It is really funny because it really looks just like it would have if you would have walked into someone’s house in 1985 and saw a Commie computer really hooked up. It is really cool.

Loopy and I ran up to Syracuse this afternoon so that he could pick up a part for his computer’s water cooling system. He has finally managed to get the system to work pretty well. It is a lot more quiet than it was before and it is a little bit cooler.

Dominica’s new friend Jessica from Advion came over after work this evening and we watched O, the modern version of Shakespeare’s Othello. It was pretty good. I really liked it. The DVD wasn’t in the best of condition, which sucks. But it played all of the way through so it wasn’t the end of the world or anything.

Well, Loopy got the water cooling system working. It doesn’t keep the computer any cooler than it did before. In fact, it is just a little bit warmer – which is really too bad. It is much more quiet than it was but it can’t run as fast anymore. He decided that the other fans were doing very little to keep the temperature down so he removed them and now only has the super silent pump and one pretty quiet fan in the back of the case running. A big difference from the machines that Dominica and I have. My machine runs too hot as it is so I would not be able to use this water cooling system in my machine 🙁 Min could use it in hers if she wanted to.

Last night we went to the mall and got the RF adapter so that we could hook up the Commodore 128 for Dominica to be able to play. While we were out we also found a nice adapter for using a Sony Playstation controller (the best joystick ever made, IMHO) with the computer. So I got one of those because the only joystick that I have for the computer isn’t very good. Loopy had an adapter for the same thing but it is big and bulky and wasn’t a nice USB unit.

Still more music being moved over today. This is a major project. It takes about five minutes to rip one of the CDs and then as much as an hour to encode it as an Ogg Vorbis file. So the process is pretty long. Then, after all of that is done, it must be moved onto the final machine and that takes another minute with me sitting there to babysit it.

I am still not in DC. They just aren’t going to get that line put in down there. I can’t believe how much it takes to get the hospital to do anything.

Eric came up today after working in Elmira and he, Min and I went out to lunch at the State Street Diner with Jessica who is the new assistant scientist at Advion with Dominica. It turns out that Jess is a vegetarian too! How cool. We are slowly getting to know a lot of vegetarians in the area.

Loopy’s water cooling system for his computer finally arrived today and he has been hard at work getting that installed in his computer. It is quite the excercise trying to get that done. There is a lot of work involved. Hopefully it won’t spring a leak and spray water all over the inside of his new computer. That would be bad.

Man do I get a lot of SPAM! Tonight, I went out to dinner and got 27 SPAM messages during the time that I was gone. How awful is that. They say that one of the writers at Network Magazine gets just over 100 a day but I think that I am up in that category. If I don’t check my mail for a day, my mail box is full of crap. My Sheep Guarding Llama account gets very little but there is still some. My Yahoo! account gets most of it and that account manages to catch most of it and send it to a spam folder so I never see the bulk of it. What a pain though. Someday these companies are going to learn that they just end up getting blocked by corporate email servers and then they won’t have a way to do business with their potential customers even if those customers wanted to contact them.