Sheep Guarding Llama

Ok, so I wrote the update for Friday and then I forgot to post it before I headed back to Ithaca so it just sat on the computer in Maryland until today. Sorry gang.

Today was a pretty busy day. I started working at Lifestyles this morning and then I had to get an oil change and get all backed for my stint in Maryland and North Carolina (starting today and for the next three weeks minimum.) About 4:30 this afternoon I managed to hit he road and I arrived in Annapolis just after 10:00 pm. I watched some “Whose Line Is It Anyway” and I am about to head to bed now.

I won an auction last night for the final fifth Marantz MA-500 monoblock that I needed to complete the power supply for my home theatre system. It should arrive sometime this week (in NY, where I am not 🙁 ) And Loopy will have to set it up and check it out for me. Maybe this will be my last raving about the new stereo system for some time. But probably not. 🙂

Not much to report today. John and I will be moving from the condo to the new house in two days. This week will be pretty busy. I expect to be able to keep the site up to date though. Have a good week.

Tim and Becky tied the knot today in Syracuse. Congratulations guys.

Loopy, Dominica and I went and saw Austin Powers III today (Nate, Matt and Bob saw it yesterday.) The basic concensus is that the movie isn’t very good. There are a few really funny moments but overall, the story is really weak. If you were thinking about waiting for AP3 to come out on video, this is the one to wait for.

Ok, so you all remember the story about Anne contacting a different Scott Alan Miller thinking that it might be me and me once getting contacted by a girl looking for that same Scott Alan Miller and then he and I talking… (what kind of sentence was that?) Well, as luck should have it, another Scott Alan Miller stopped by to read our little site here and dropped me a line. So now there are three of us. I think we should start a club or something. I already own ScottAlanMiller.com so I should but a link there to a gathering point for SAM’s everywhere. Maybe that is a bit too idealistic.

I decided that since I am always talking about stereos and audiophiles on here, I might as well make a resource page on here as well so that everyone can go there and find out what I am talking about. I pretty much took the day off yesterday so I had a chance to get down to it. In addition, I will have a list of all the audiophile and mid-high end theatre systems that the Llamas have. So, check out our Llama Audiophile Guide. Hope you enjoy it.

I arrived in DC around 1:00 am and worked at Washington Hospital Center until 5:00 am or so and then I headed out to Annapolis to get some much needed sleep. The guy that I was supposed to be working with at 2:00 am didn’t call that he had gotten in to work until 11:15 am. Just a little bit late. But I think that I got the work done that I needed to. I don’t have to go into the hospital today so I get to relax some and get some stuff done around the condo. John brought me breakfast this morning from the deli and then took off to drive down to Columbia, South Carolina where he is speaking at the ASHES convention. So, I have the condo to myself until I head for home Friday or Saturday.

We actually have a new “Letter to the Editor” that I am very excited about. It has been forever since someone has written to us with a real opinion. I will try to get that up today as well.

The new Rotel Preamp/Processor arrived yesterday early enough that I was actually able to hook it up and watch a movie. The new system is amazing. Johanna came over and we watched a few minutes of Blackhawk Down in Dolby Digital AC-3 Surround and that was pretty awesome but then I popped in Rush Hour 2 in DTS and that just blew me away. I can’t believe what the system is able to do. DTS really bad that system shine. I can’t wait to get back home this weekend and watch some more movies. It is like I have a whole new movie collection to watch. A regular movie theatre has very little ability to compete with us now. Especially now that we moved the larger television upstairs and put all of the equipment together. I still need one more Marantz MA-500 monoblock to make the whole system match totally and we need some new wire to tie it all together. Those will be the first things and will have to hold us for a while. But soon, I will be getting the B+W ASW 300 subwoofer and then the system will make a dramatic leap forward again. But I think that everyone will be quite happy with the system as it is for a while. When we move out from the house that we are in currently, I will need to purchase another pair of B+W 303’s for the rear channel because Nate’s 302’s are being used there now but that is a ways off.

Leanne yelled at me for never being mentioned on the site so I will mention her now. In fact, she was the first one of our loyal readers to submit an entry for the “Name the Llama” contest. We have’t decided what the prize will be, maybe it will be a small Llama of your very own from Ten Thousand Villages in Ithaca. Leanne and her husband Scott have recently purchased a new home (it seems the thing to do recently, doesn’t it?) and apparently just started moving in. Scott and Leanne live back home in exciting Perry. I haven’t had a chance to see their new house yet, in fact, I haven’t managed to visit them for over a year! Maybe Leanne will write a “Letter to the Editor.”

So, on my way to DC yesterday I stopped (as I always do) at the book store and I picked up some books on making films. I got one book on film-making and one on screenwriting and one on Anime (not making it, just a commentary.) Loopy and I have been talking about making a movie for years so maybe we will actually get our butts into gear and actually do it. I’m sure we won’t but it would be cool. If we do it will probably just be short web films and we will post them on here for you:) Someday, hopefully.

You may have noticed that we removed the Opera button from our main page. This is because we are hoping to join Opera’s referal program so that SGL makes some money for people who purchase Opera. We don’t make money any other way so we thought that it would be a good idea. Not that anyone will buy it, but at least that way if someone does…

Eric is teaching himself HTML now. He is actually working on the Nicklin Associates corporate webpage which hopefully will be up soon. Maybe we can convince Eric to work on a section of SGL. It would be nice to have more than one person providing content on a regular basis. As it is, the site is getting to be a bit unwieldy for just me to manage. The new “Letter to the Editor” is posted, I actually did it earlier than the daily update so you may have seen it already. I am going through the seperate letters as well and updating them to match the rest of the site. Slowly the entire site is starting to look the same. The pages download a little bit faster too, when I update them, for those of you on dial up connections. It cuts 5-10% off of the download time normally.

So, did anyone else notice that Yahoo! changed their email page today for the first time ever. Wow does it surprise you!

Ok, I am calling it a day and updating a little bit early again. I will talk to everyone tomorrow.

I actually pulled myself out of bed around 5 am this morning but decided to hang out in bed till just after 6. Still, I am up pretty darn early for me. I know, I know, Eric gets up at 2am – whatever. This morning in my junk email I got some forwarded Lotus Totus thing. What the heck is this stuff? It says, this email has already been sent “around the world ten times.” First of all, what does that mean. It isn’t like it had to walk. I have a friend in Singapore, if she and I email each other with an attachment a few times, it would have “gone around the world ten times” and never have been read by anyone. Secondly, someone had to write that on that email. But who would know or have the authority to change it. Therefore it must be a lie because it was either added later by someone being smart, or more likely, it was part of the original email sent to the very first person who was probably only two people before me. I am still amazed that I haven’t gone out and started some weird chain email that makes everyone do a dance and visit Sheep Guarding Llama! Here is another one that I got this morning… “Send Your Resume to 50 Recruters in Your Area” – right. Maybe they don’t know what my area is. There aren’t 50 recruters in this area. There aren’t 20. Nice try though. I almost bought their product.

I just checked in with UPS and the new Rotel is in Ithaca and scheduled for delivery today as planned. I am very excited, can you tell? There are two Marantz MA-500 monoblocks on eBay as well. I only need one and the five channel home theatre is complete. It is very tempting to grab the first one that I can find.

I noticed that the second sequel (Broken Sword 3) is coming this year from Revolution. I hope that it is going to come out for the GBA as well as its other platforms. These are the best games that I have found yet for the GBA. Finally something to really sink into and get involved in. I did notice that the really, really old Amiga game Defender of the Crown is out for the GBA. There is a game that I thought was forgotten about in the annals of history. I forgot that that game ever existed by sometime in 1989.

The About page has been updated to reflect the change in the house roster that took place a few weeks ago.

The Hangar Theater crowd that is living in our attached house will be moving out on August 10th. They have made an interesting addition to the landscape here. We went for so long without neighbors that we forgot that it could even happen. The house that we face has gotten new tenents as well, a German professor with Cornell’s Vet School located just up the road.

I am definitely headed to DC today but I will be back on Saturday morning so that I can get to Tim and Becky’s wedding. Has everyone been shopping for a gift yet? They are registered at Sears and Kaufmans. I am starting to actually enjoy the drive down to DC because it gives me a chance to just hang out in the car and listen to some of my CDs. It isn’t very often that I get to do that so appreciate the opportunity. Maybe I will pick up another Sue Grafton murder mystery before I pull out. John has two books on tape that I need to remember to borrow, that will save me two purchases.

I watched Snow Dogs the other day. That movie was horrible. It wasn’t at all how I had thought it was going to be and the story was pathetic. I can’t believe that they are able to get crap like that in theatres. No wonder no one has any respect for anything that Disney does other than their cartoons and even those aren’t very reliable. A correction needs to be made to the “Most Watched” movie list, Army of Darkness is at 7 and accidentally didn’t make the list. Some movies get cheated because of weird multiple copy situations like Thumb Wars which has been watched no less than 15 times but there are four individual copoes and a house copy of the movie. The total collection now has only 41 never watched movies. I am working hard at getting that number down. Emily used to make fun of me when there were only like 5-10 unwatched movies.

Someone was asking me the other day about John Turturro and what movies he has appeared in that they would know. I don’t remember who was asking so I will post a short list here and hope that someone figures out who it was and lets them know. Mr. Deeds, O Brother Where Art Thou, The Big Lebowski, Rounders, Summer of Sam, He Got Game, Being Human, Brain Donors, Miller’s Crossing, Do the Right Thing, Color of Money, Gung Ho, Desperately Seeking Susan, The Flamingo Kid and Raging Bull. That is a pretty impressive list and is nowhere near all that he has done and the list that I got it from is not complete either since I own movies that he leads in that aren’t even on there. So he may have done a tone more than this.

Ok, well I am going to post pretty early today because I need to stop working on this and move on to everything that I need to do to get my butt outta this town. I will be around till mid afternoon if anyone needs to track me down. I might be out running errands during lunch so call the cell if you need me.