Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Mike and Gwen are taking off this morning. Dominica and I will see them again in two days when we get back out to Ohio. Dominica’s physical therapist says that she travels more than anyone that he has ever met. That is pretty amazing considering how much less she travels than I do!

I am in the process of packing up all of the stereo equipment that I have and attempting to get it ready to sell to SoundWorks. I haven’t talked to them yet this week so I hope to be able to get a hold of them yet today. I made the mistake of mailing in a speeding ticket without filling it in (yes, yes, I know) so I most likely will have to drive out to Angelica this afternoon to take care of that. It isn’t a big deal but what a pain. How dumb am I. (Side note: I have since called the court and managed to talk to the judge and he took care of everything over the phone so I do not need to drive to Angelica now.)

I went out and picked up my new bicycle yesterday. It is really cool. Maybe I will even have a chance to ride it around a little bit today. It has been a long time since I have been on a bike. A long time since the days of Eric and I riding every day for 20-30 miles minimum. We sure aren’t in that kind of shape anymore.

This morning’s challenge involves finding the parts to the stereo that are missing. The boxes, we think, are hidden under the stairs. I am missing the remote to the SSi-720 Surround Sound Processor though and it has been so many years since we used it last that I couldn’t even venture a guess as to where it might be hiding at this point.

Loopy finally got up and got into work on time this morning just to sit there and wait all day to talk to someone. Now they don’t actually need him to be at work so he will be working form home for the rest of the week.

I went to take a shower this morning and found my towel to be crawling with spiders. That was disconcerting. Dominica was so grossed out that she almost wasn’t able to come over to the house for lunch.