Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

I actually got some excercise and walked down to Lifestyle Properties today. It was a nice day so I decided that it would be good for me. I had to send a fax out and they have the nearest fax machine. On my way back I made a sad discovery. On the side of the road I spotted a faded picture of Kevin Spacey from the movie LA Confidential. It was leaning against an abandoned house. Then I noticed that there was a laserdisc sitting with it. Then I realized what I was looking at. It was my three laserdiscs that blew off my car a month ago. They were all leaning up against this old abandoned house with a No Trespassing sign in front of them. They had obviously been run over by a car at some point and then sat on the side of the road in the wind and sun and rain. Now, they are barely recognizable. If they hadn’t been driven over, the discs probably would have been fine. But they are worthless now. It was really sad.

Dominica wants me to hook up the Commodore 64c that I have so that she can play some old school video games on it. Loopy and I hooked it up in the old house at one point but that was a long time ago. Loopy is all excited about programming for it now. It is a nostalgic thing for programmers to have made software for the C64. I don’t have all of the hook-ups for the old Commodore anymore though. So, at some point I am going to need to run down to Radio Shack and get some parts to do that.

More Ogg Vorbis encoding today. That is my project for the weekend. The computer are hard at work moving the files over. I have gone through so many CDs already. I am finding so much music that I forgot that I had. This really is a great way to get use out of all those CDs that you tend to forget about.

Loopy did lunch at the State Street Diner. Other than that, it was a pretty slow day. I did make one discovery today (Loopy says that he showed this to me before but I never get excited about things until I discover them for myself.) I discovered a group of developers called Tierra making remakes of some of the classic Sierra On-Line adventure games like King’s Quest I and II and Quest for Glory II. Those were awesome games back in the early and mid 1980’s. King’s Quest I: Quest for the Crown was one of the games that got my excited about video games in the first place. Before that game, all there was to me was silly Atari action games. But KQ1 made me see that games could go in a whole other direction. I own all of Sierra’s King’s Quest games, there were eight of them, plus a remake of the original with better graphics. Well, Tierra is taking that remake and remaking it with much better graphics, some enhanced game play, new sound and even voice actors. Quite a change from the eight color, beeping, 1984 original. And it is free as well! And here is the link so that you can download it straight from Tierra Games. They are also on the verge (on the cusp) of releasing the remake of King’s Quest II and soon after that, Quest for Glory II (I don’t know why they are starting with the second installment in that series.) This is really exciting because the original games from these series are not available anymore. Lots of people want them but Sierra no longer makes them available, even for download. Also, many of the original games don’t work properly with Windows 95 and later. And some might not work at all. I played KQ1 and The Black Cauldron on my old Amiga 1000, long, long ago. I still have the original boxes.

Loopy downloaded the MAME engine and Forgotten Worlds and has been playing the classic arcade game. In fact, he managed to beat it within an hour or two of having downloaded it. It is neat to be able to go back and play the old games that have disappeared for so long. Those old arcade games where a real part of many of our childhoods. It is very nostalgic.

Today, Dominica and I went to her parent’s house in Frankfort and spent the day there. The washing machine here is leaking badly and we had a lot of laundry that needed washed so we did quite a few loads while we were there.

I have been hard at work making my in house network radio station work. Currently I am still in the process of encoding the compact discs into Ogg Vorbis files. To do this I have set up a factory system of one computer (in my closet) that is ripping the CDs into .WAV files. These files are then stored on a shared directory. My computer on my desk and Nate’s computer in his room then connect to this shared directory and process the .WAV files into .OGG files. This process takes some time so I am glad that I have two machines working at it. Then Dominica’s computer takes the finished .OGG files and moves them off of the shared directory to make space for more .WAVs to be ripped there. The whole process is very complex but it has been running very smoothly and I have a ton of discs moved over already. Now I just have to figure out how to set up and run an IceCast server to send out the music to the rest of the house.

Friday the Thirteenth. Sorry that there haven’t been a lot of updates this week. It has been a really rough week. We spent a day and a half without any Internet access at all and I have been trying to get service reinstated on my cell phone as well.

The weather has been so awesome this past week. I can’t believe how nice it has been. We have had the windows open all week. I am really happy to have fresh air to breathe again. It is nice to be able to sleep in a cool room as well. It has been a while.

Eric and I are scheduled to be returning to Pittsburgh on October 2. We haven’t been there in a while so it will be nice to be able to get back.

Faster than I can even write about it, new versions of Mozilla keep coming down the pipe. Mozilla 1.2 alpha (just for us bleeding edge types) is out today and ready for you to give it a spin. I just went to Mozilla 1.1 but I will probably upgrade anyway because I am like that. I will let you know how it is working. [Tech note: Not only do Mozilla, commonly packaged as Netscape, and Opera allow you to download webpages faster than with Internet Explorer, but they also are able to block pop-up windows and Mozilla has an add on that can filter out many banner ads as well. Not only is all that advertising annoying, but is slows down your connection and your computer.]

I went down and spent a little time with my mentor at Empire State today. My evaluations are not back yet from my summer semester. So I am unable to enroll for classes this fall. I still have two classes from summer semester that I need to finish anyway.