Sheep Guarding Llama

Boy did I sleep in today. I must be fighting off the flew or something, I managed to actually stay asleep until almost 11:30 this morning. I can’t remember the last time that I slept that long. I even went to bed a little bit early last night. This morning, I managed to come across four more pictures from the New Year’s Eve party. Of course, now I don’t have my awesome StarOffice 5.2 picture cropper so I need to find another way to cut them down to a reasonable size to put on the site. I will try to get that done today. They aren’t anything exciting, just some pictures taken from the balcony before the party got started. I am still looking for more pictures from all of you that were there and had a camera that night. No one ever sends us any pictures to add to the site!

For those who are interested (I know that Loopy, Dominica and Eric are…) Broken Sword on the GBA is awesome. The graphics are the best that I have seen yet and the game play seems to be very similar to King’s Quest and Monkey Island. It looks like it will prove to be a lot of fun. The animations are really exceptional. It is really amazing how much different the GBA is from the older Game Boy Color.

I am doing all of the laundry today that I have been pushing off doing for forever. I mention this because I don’t want Eric to feel like he is the only person who ever has to do laundry. Although he is still the person who does the most laundry. I am expecting that the new Preamp / Processor for my stereo and home theatre system will be arriving tomorrow. It is supposed to be arriving tomorrow by UPS but the tracking number that I have is invalid so I am trying to find out what is going on now. It would be really nice if it would arrive before I have to leave for Maryland because I would like to have at least a little bit of a chance to play with it. I spent some time yesterday listening and measuring as much as I could trying to get the speakers into the right places. I think that I have them pretty good now. They seem to be sounding really good and they are all symmetrical. We have the center channel mounted underneath the television like they do in a lot of pro setups but it is so low that we had to use some rubber cushioning to tilt it upwards. I think that we have it pretty good now.

For those of you who hang around much at the house, you are aware that I have an awfully extensive laserdisc and DVD collection (much of the LD collection is now available for purchase for anyone who is interested – a player can be found on eBay for as little as $10 – $15. What a great way to start a serious movie collection!) And in addition, I also track how many times each movie is watched allowing me to determine which movies have been the best purchases and how much money I am spending for each time we watch a movie. So, since all of this work is being done, I decided to share with you the “Most Watched” list generated by the movie database.

Movie Title Times Viewed Format

Raiders of the Sun 11 LD
Bulletproof 10 LD
Alladin 9 LD
Happy Gilmore 9 LD
My Blue Heaven 9 DVD
Chasing Amy 8 LD
Jurassic Park 7 LD
Liar, Liar 7 LD
Muppet Treasure Island 7 LD
The Truman Show 7 DVD
Coyote Ugly 6 DVD
Dragon Fire 6 LD
The Game 6 LD
Mallrats 6 LD
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh 6 LD
Shooting Elizabeth 6 LD
Tenchi Muyo OVA Episode 1 6 LD

I know that you are all so excited to see this list. It really shows, though, how much we used to watch laserdiscs. I have had an LD player since late 1994 and some of those discs have been around a long time. Raiders of the Sun (which is terrible) has been around since 1995 and is just so funny to watch how bad it is that it manages to keep finding its way into the player. It is our first What! movie and is totally a classic. Nate and I first discovered it so long ago! My Blue Heaven and Coyote Ugly are the only recent additions to be on the top 17 list. There are a ton of recent DVDs that have been watched 5 times. The big jump seems to come at 6 times. This will eventually increase as the discs are watched more and more. Effecting things a lot is that Dominica watches a lot of movies but is not willing to use the LDs and so she only adds to the DVD counts. As many of the LDs get replaces by DVDs you will see the DVDs taking over as well. I am going to miss those LDs when they are gone. They have become like friends to me. They get watched so little now that I forget many of the ones that I own. There are many duplicates as well. Those I will be weeding out shortly. Some to sell, some to trade, some to give away. I want to have as few LDs as possible before moving again because there are so many that they are way too heavy to deal with. Moving them three times in the last three years was torture enough. If anyone is interested in taking over a large portion of the collection, just let me know.

Here are the movies that I know are available right now, Army of Darkness, Chungking Express, Anne of Green Gable and LA Confidential. Those are all duplicates that I don’t want to be storing. They area all in excellent condition. Let me know.

More movies! I picked up K-Pax, Life as a House and Zoolander today and Dominica got Harry Potter 1. We watched Zoolander tonight (it was awful) and The Big Lebowski which Dominica had never seen. I watched Notting Hill this afternoon. That is one of my all time favorite romantic movies. Goodnight everyone. I leave for Maryland tomorrow so the updates might be a little belated but I will keep working on the site.

Craig arrived late last night. He is crashing here for the day to make sure that all of his furniture and stuff gets delivered and then he is going to Perry to work from there until his and Emily’s house in Spencer is ready for them (in about a month.)

In addition to some new CD’s that I picked up to go with my new stereo, I also picked up my first Game Boy Advance game since I got the system. There aren’t a ton of interesting looking games for the GBA yet but “Broken Sword” has been on my to get list for a long time. It was once rated as one of the best adventure games ever so I have been looking for it on one platform or another for a long time. Having it on the GBA (it was an ancient PC game) is a really handy format to play with it on. I will let you know how it is. I am down to just a couple more games that I want to have – the top one being the Nancy Drew game. Maybe I will find it on eBay. You can get some amazing deals there. There are a couple of new copies on there now that I might have to grab. Other than that, Golden Sun is the other big game that I am interested in.

I really hope that some classic adventure games like King’s Quest, Space Quest, Monkey Island, The Faery Tale Adventure and the like get ported over to the GBA. Those games had so much thought go into them and would work perfectly on the GBA – they wouldn’t push it for graphics or sound – and would be so much more fun than many of the silly games that get made today. I think that the GBA is the perfect “retro” platform to play many of the great ’80’s games on since it is more powerful than any computer that I ever used in the 1980’s.

I finally got a copy of Evil Dead over the weekend. I have had ED2 and ED3 for a long time but not the original movie. So I looked around and managed to track down what would appear to be the ultimate copy of the movie complete with a 7.1 Digital soundtrack and two audio commentaries. Now I have the entire series from Raimi.

Due to some things not being ready for me in DC, I may be staying in Ithaca for another two days. I have to be in DC later this week because on Friday was are moving to our new office and we will be moving all of our servers as well (like this one) so we will be down for a little bit on Friday. Hopefully not more than half an hour or so.

Don’t forget that Tim and Becky’s wedding is on this Saturday. Eric was busy this past weekend being Best Man at Mark’s wedding. These last two years have really been the beginning of the big wedding boom. I guess we are getting to be that age now.

After putting this new stereo together, I have decided that I am now able to put together a good high end system for under $1000. Nothing outrageous but a good, clean, simple high end stereo complete with everything from amps to CD source, wires and stands for the speakers, etc.

I am working around the house this morning. I actually managed to get a paper done that needed to be taken care of. I have a ton of work for school that I need to do that I haven’t gotten to yet. That really sucks. I did archive May and June today. This Daily page was getting out of control. The 2002 archive page has now grown so large that it is now larger than the 2001 archive page 40K. So, by the end of the year, the 2002 archive will likely by three times the size of 2001. I may have to start breaking the page into seasons or something because of how long it takes to download.

For those of you who have been following the MyMiranda.net website (the link is right over there on the left,) you will be happy to know that Loopy has finally updated the site so you can go back and check it out again.

I have done a ton of random updates to the site so be sure to poke around and look for stuff that has been updated. Just little things here and there but I am always striving to make the site a better place than it was before and to keep everyone coming back all of the time. Be sure to tell all of your friends about this cool web site.

I watched Bruce Campbell’s commentary on the Evil Dead today. He is hilarious. It is hard to believe that he made that movie 24 years ago. There are so many funny things that you don’t pick out of movies that you only find out if you watch commentaries. For example, Bruce mentions that a towel in the movie has the name of the summer camp on it that Sam Raimi (the director also of Spiderman fame) used to go to. I recognized the name of the camp from the movie Indian Summer which is a movie about that camp and Sam Raimi plays the boat dock guy in that movie. (He is also in Spies Like Us but I will let Nate figure out where.)

Dominica is addicted to high end stereo now. Loopy and I spent hours last night hooking up the new system in the living room. It is a huge improvement over the old one. Bigger sound, better everything. There is a ton more speaker and power now. There just wasn’t enough there to drive that room before.

I had to run to Rochester today to deliver the speaker that Josh bought off of me. While I was on the road, Loopy ran out and got some more speaker wire to hook up the rear speakers because we didn’t have enough before. He and the gang also move the big 32″ Sony Trinitron upstairs and moved the TV stand into the middle of the room so the room is set up much better now than it was before, in addition to all the new equipment.

The electric starting acting eratically yesterday so after writing the update and working on the site, I wasn’t able to upload any of it. So everything is there now. Dominica and I partied down with Josh, Phil, Kate and Joanna last night up at Josh’s place in Rochester.

I took Dominica to Soundworks in Fairport today and she got her first two hour lesson in audiophilia from Jim, my stereo consultant. She was very excited. While we were there, I picked up a pair of B+W 303 speakers and a matching center channel. I can’t wait to hook them up.

TGIF, again. Josh decided to buy my speakers off of me in trade for some of his amps that match mine. Shortly, we will both have complete digital surround systems. We have been waiting a long time for this. Finally. Maybe soon Loopy will be buying the projector that he has been talking about. That would be really awesome. I haven’t had a front projection TV since Josh and I lived in Irondequoit in 1997. It was so much fun. And we had a big stereo then too, full analogue surround.

I was shopping at Ten Thousand Villages down on the Commons the other day and I managed to pick up a small stuffed Llama. This new Llama is going to be our Sheep Guarding Llama mascot! But, first we need a name. So we are going to have a “Name the Llama” contest to name our new mascot. So, everyone email in your submissions.

Our new neighbors moved in yesterday. They are straight in from Germany. He is a professor at Cornell’s Vet School. So this must be a prime location for him, just up the road from the school. They only just moved in last night and we happened to be heading out to go to a movie when we saw them pulling in. So we had a chance to say “Hi” but that was about all.

Loopy, Dominica and I went out ot see “Reign of Fire” last night. It left a little to be desired. Nothing very special. It was ok. Plot was terrible. Christian Bale was good. I won’t buy it on disc when it comes out. We were very excited, though, that the trailer for “The Two Towers” is finally out. LotR2 comes to theatres on December 18!

In addition to writing all kinds of nonsense here in the Daily Update, I have even gotten around to adding some more content to the Funnies. There are three new pages there at least. There might be more since I last mentioned it. How long has it been since that last happened? I will slowly be updating the Funny Stuff to match the rest of the site. It will probably take a while so bare with me.