Sheep Guarding Llama

A lot of driving to do today. Dominica and I are heading on down to Topsail Island, North Carolina to vacation with her family. We are estimating about 6 hours or more of drive time before we get there since the island is almost in South Carolina.

My last Marantz MA-500 monoblock is due in from Korea middle of this week. The big news in our home theatre saga is Loopy’s purchase, over the weekend, of a Sony $16,000 Triple CRT front projection unit. Capable of a 300″, 1500×1200 image (right in line with absolute top of the line HDTVs) the Sony will blow away anything that we have used before. We haven’t come up with a good way to set it up yet. But we will think of something. There are some serious cabling issues involed. And location of the equipment issues. Who knows where we are going to be able to put that massive projector. We are pretty excited though. We should have it is a week or two. Fun, fun, fun. The neighbor girls will be disappointed – the whole time they lived next door we had a wussie two channel stereo system and 27″ TV. Then in their last couple weeks we upgraded the whole system, added 150% more channels of sound, went to DTS and added a 32″ TV. Then, as soon as they leave we add a massive high end front projector! It is going to be like a drive in right in the house. In fact, Nate had the idea of hooking up the projector in the garage… then we could pull two cars in there and it would be just like a drive in. How funny would that be?

I bought my first SACD last night, Patricia Barber’s “Modern Cool”. SACD is the new format from Sony and Philips that is supposed to be much better than regular CD. You have to have a special player to play it but they are as cheap as $180. The nice thing about the SACDs is that many of them are called Hybrids and play as a regular CD in a regular CD player and as an SACD in an SACD player. Making them really nice for transitioning to the new system. So I bought this hybrid disc and it didn’t play in the only CD player I have to try it in. In fact, it won’t even recognize that it is a disc. So I am skeptical. And the disc cost me $33 at Tower Records. So it had better work. I hope to get 20-30 of these Hybrid SACD discs before going out and getting an SACD player (A Marantz, I hope) to play them on. So, I am not rushing out and getting one anytime soon. Most of the discs were in the $18-$22 range though. Just the one that I got was really expensive.

I am actually taking a camera along on this vacation. It has been forever since I really used a camera. In fact, I am taking two cameras with me to Topsail. I am taking my awesome Nikon 5005 35mm SLR and my Olympus digital (actually, the company’s.) Hopefully I will have some pictures for you soon (but we know how it is.) Speaking of pictures, Loopy found a can of used 35mm film in his pocket last week that has been in there since who knows when. He will get it developed and then we will see what the heck it is. We don’t even know who the film belongs to. We know that it isn’t Loopy’s. Hmmm… Quite the mystery.

Since Nate and I talked the other night about correct HTML and XHTML I decided to go through SGL and start removing the rest of the deprecated tags like bold and italics. I have already done this page and will be changing all of the other pages soon. One at a time as I do other work on them. Eventually I will also need to remove the horizontal rule tags but that will be a much larger project so I am saving that. I think that they are the last depricated tag in use on the site.

It is Friday. Dominica is coming down here today. I haven’t seen her for a week 🙁 She is all mad at me because she had to go buy a roof mount bike rack to put my new bicycle on the roof of her car to take it down to North Carolina. We are leaving for Topsail Island first thing in the morning. It will be nice to get away and have nothing to do but relax. No hospitals calling…etc. I will have my laptop with me so I will try to keep everyone updated as to how the vacation is going.

Dominica and Gibran (that she works with) have become addicted to Grand Theft Auto 3 on the Playstation 2. They even brought the PS2 over to hook to the awesome stereo system to be able to play on the 32″ Trinitron with surround sound. Anyway, the thing that makes the story funny is the fact that on the same day that Min and Gibran were playing GTA3 on the big system, Nicklin Associates (the company that I work for) hired the third top professional GTA player in the country. How funny is that?

Today is going to be a short update because I want to get it posted. I will work on getting July 31 off of the other computer before I take off but it isn’t very likely so you will probably just have to wait on that update for a week or so. By the time that I get back from NC we are supposed to have Verizon ADSL in the house and we will be setting up a wireless network. That will be really cool and I can write updates for you while sitting on the deck in the lawn chair looking out at Deep Creek flowing into the Magothy River.

I expect to be able to post tomorrow before we leave though, so expect to be able to check back.

Another day of shopping at Bed, Bath and Beyond. John bought $1000 of new bedding for house. It is nice to finally be into the house. The AC is able to keep up too. It is nice to finally be in a nice cool house. We moved in today. We actually slept here last night. The phone line got turned on today so I am finally able to work on the site again.

Nate called this evening. He and Bob are learning HTML in their grad class at Ithaca College so they decided to start working on a web site for Boynton Middle School’s Music Department. Hopefully we will have something to show you there very soon.

This is a place holder. I wrote today’s update and it is stuck on another computer. Sorry. Actually, I am pretty sure that this has been erased now from that computer. I will leave this here to serve as a reminder that I shouldn’t leave updates on different computers anymore.

It is another super hot day down here in Washington. John and I worked in at the hospital today. We had to interview new salespeople today. Dominica is having friends over from work to play Grand Theft Auto III on the surround sound system.

I have convinced Wilfort to go stereo shopping with me sometime this week. Oh is he in for it. Hee hee. Little does he know. He will be buying his own hifi system in a week or so.

In just a couple more weeks, I will have been eating vegetarian for a whole year now! It is hard to believe that it has been that long but I pretty much don’t even think about it anymore. And people have stopped pushing so much to only have meat available most of the time and now that Dominica has been a vegetarian for about six months, it has really gotten easy. Even Eric is pracitcally vegetarian now. I’m starting a trend.

Not much news to report from today so I am going to go ahead and post. I will be spending the evening working on my school work for the two online classes that I am taking.